V 'T.J -Vl't ' ^•' i AV-^ •''^^i *■■■ :b?^i=.V-^l ii, tir sl'V 1'.' -;''. V -';.4 '( \-^L^^ i\.4,(f-}yf^ I .>«'»,•;■ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PJ*64.M94A3 1898a Auld lang syne. 3 1924 026 805 071 OLIN LIBRARY - CIRCULATION DATE DUE Agi^ BilJllll»l«"*f 5pp»**^- OAVLORO PRINTED IN U.S.A. ?3 \ m& WORKS BY The Right Hon. F. MAX MULLER. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY. 2 vols. 8vo, 32s. THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF RELIGION, as illustrated by the. Religions of India. Hibbert Lectures. Crown 8vo, 7s. (>d. NATURAL RELIGION. The Gifford Lectures, delivered before the Uni- versity of Glasgow in 1888. Crown 8vo, los. 6d. PHYSICAL RELIGION. The Gifford Lectures, delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1890. Crown 8vo, los. 6d. ANTHROPOLOGICAL RELIGION. The Gifford Lectures, delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1891. Crown 8vo, los. dd. THEOSOPHY OR PSYCHOLOGICAL RELIGION. The Gifford Lectures, delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1892. Crown 8vo, los. td. THREE LECTURES ON THE VEDANTA PHILOSOPJHY, delivered at the Royal Institution in March, 1894. 8vo, 5s. THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. Founded on Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1861 and 1863. 2 vols. Crown 8vo, 21s. THREE LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE AND ITS place in General Education. Crown 8vo, 3s. net. INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION ; Four Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution ; with Notes and Illustrations on Vedic Literature, Polynesian Mythology, the Sacred Books of the East, etc. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. INDIA, WHAT CAN IT TEACH US ? A Course of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge. Crown 8vo, 3s. td. ON THE STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE: Rede Lecture, de- livered at Cambridge in 1868. 8vo, 2S. 6d. THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT. 8vo, 21s. THREE INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF Thought. 8vo, 2S. td. net. BIOGRAPHIES OF WORDS, AND THE HOME OF THE ARYAS. Crown 8vo, 7s. 6d. CHIPS FROM A GERMAN WORKSHOP. New Edition, in Four Volumes. Vol. I. Recent Essays and Addresses. Crown 8vo, 6s. 6d. net. Vol. II. Biographical Essays. Crown 8vo, 6s. 6d. net. Vol. HI. Essays on Language and Literature. Crown 8vo, 6s. dd. net. Vol. IV. Essays on Mythology and Folk-Lore. Crown 8vo, 8s. 6d. net. HANDBOOKS FOR THE STUDY OF SANSKRIT. THE SANSKRIT TEXT OF THE FIRST BOOK OF THE HITO- padesa. 3s. 6d. THE SECOND, THIRD AND FOURTH BOOKS OF THE HITO- padesa; containing the Sanskrit Text, with Interlinear Translation. 7s. 6d. A SANSKRIT GRAMMAR FOR BEGINNERS. New and Abridged Edition. By A. A. Macdonell. Crown 8vo, 6s. LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., London, New York, and Bombay. WORKS BY THE RIGHT HON. F. MAX MULLER. THE GERMAN CLASSICS, FROM THE FOURTH TO THE NINE- teenth Century. With Biographical Notices, Translations into Modern German, and Notes. By F. MaxMuller, M.A. A New Edition, Revised, Enlarged, and Adapted to Wilhelm Scherer's " History of German Literature," by F. Lichtenstein. 2 vols. Crown 8vo, 2is. A HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE BY WILHELM SCHERER. Translated from the Third German Edition by Mrs. F. C. Conybeare. Edited by F. Max Muller. 2 vols. 8vo, 2is. Or, separately, los. 6d. each volume. A HISTORY OF GERMAN LITERATURE, FROM THE ACCESSION of Frederick the Great to the Death of Goethe. By the same. Crown 8vo, 5s. ANECDOTA OXONIENSIA. III. ARYAN SERIES. I. BUDDHIST TEXTS FROM JAPAN, x. Vagrakkhedika. Edited by F. Max MSller. 3s. 6d. II. BUDDHIST TEXTS FROM JAPAN. ^. Sukhavati Vyiiha. Edited by F. Max Muller, M.A., and Bunyiu Nanjio. ys. 6d. III. BUDDHIST TEXTS FROM JAPAN. 3. The Ancient Palm-Leaves containing the Prag'Ka-P&ramita-Hr/daya-Siitra and the Ush«isha- Vigaya-Dharani. Edited by F. Max Muller, M.A., and Bunyiu Nanjio, M.A. With an Appendix by G. Buhler. ios. V. THE DHARMA SAMGRAHA. Edited by Kenjiu Kasawara, F. Max MiJLLER and H. Wenzel. ys. 6d. THE SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. Translated by various Oriental Scholars, and edited by F. Max Muller. First Series, Vols. I.-XXIV. 8vo. Second Series, Vols. XXV.-XLIX. Svo. *j(L* Complete Lists sent on Application. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press. Under the Patronage of His Majesty the King of Siam. SACRED BOOKS OF THE BUDDHISTS. Edited by F. Max Muller. Vol. I, The Gatakamala, or Birth-Stories of Buddha, translated by Prof Speyer. ios. 6d. Under the Patronage of H. H. the late Mahdrdjah of Vizianagram. THE RIG-VEDA-SANHITA, with Siyana's Commentary. Edited by F. Max Muller. Second Edition. 4 vols. 4to, 8Z. 8s. net. London : Henry Frowde. RIG-VEDA-SANHITA, the Sacred Hymns of the Brahmins. Translated and Explained. Vol. I. Hymns to the Mariits or the Storm-Gods. I2S. 6d. THE HYMNS OF THE RIG-VEDA IN THE SANHITA AND PADA TEXTS. Second Edition. Reprinted from the Editio Princeps, with the two Texts on parallel pages. 2 vols. i6s. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Limited, London. AULD LANG SYNE "^M^K 1yLu£^ The original of tiiis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026805071 NG SY/NE ' The Right Hon. Professor F. MAX MULLER AUTHOR OF "THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE," ETC. WITH A PORTRAIT SECOND EDITION LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON AND BOMBAY 1898 ^559-/^^ PREFACE. What are you to do when. you are sent away by your doctor for three or four weeks of perfect rest ? You are made to promise that you will lie perfectly fallow, take no books and allow no proofsheets to jreach you. A very eminent German professor, the late Dr. Neander, the famous Church historian, .•solved the difificulty in his own way. He had faithfully promised his physician that he would take no books with him to Karlsbad, but had at last, as a great favour, obtained permission to take at least .one work with him on his journey. On the morning of his departure the doctor wished to say good-bye to his patient, and calling at his door saw a cart laden with heavy folios. " But, dear professor," he said, with considerable surprise and displeasure, ■"you had promised me to take no books with you." " Yes, doctor," the professor replied, " but you ;allowed me one work, so I thought I might take the Fathers with me to Karlsbad." I might have done the same, if I had taken the " Rig Veda" only, or the Sacred Books of the East with me, but my conscience would not allow it, so that I found my- self in small lodgings at an English watering place with nothing to do all day long but to answer a number of accumulated letters and to read The vi PREFACE. Times, which always follows me. What was I to. do ? Doctors ought to know that to a man accus- tomed to work enforced rest is quite as irritating, and depressing as travaux forcds. In self-defence I at last hit on a very simple expedient. I begaa to write what could be written without a single book, and taking paper, pen and ink — these I had never forsworn — I jotted down some recollections, of former years. The fancy took me, and I said with Goethe : — Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten — and after a day or two I was so absorbed in my work, if work it could be called, that I said againi with Goethe : — Ihr drangt euch zu ! Nun gut, so mogt ihr walten. . . . Of course I had to leave many a gap in my sketch of Auld Lang Syne. Dates, even names, would now and then leave me in the lurch, and as I had no means of verifying anything, I had to wait till I was settled again among my books and letters, and papers at home. But though I corrected some glaring anachronisms and some mistaken names, I could leave my MS. very much as it had been writteni down in my temporary exile, and 1 can therefore vouch for its truth so far that it is an exact copy of the negative developed by long exposure in my memory.. Whether it is accurate, who can tell ? I know fronru sad experience that my memory is no longer what it was. All I can say is that the positive copy here- published is as true and as exact as the rays ©f the PREFACE. vii evening sun of life, falling on the negative in my memory, could make it. Though I have suppressed whatever could possibly have given offence to any sensible person, however sensitive, I have not re- touched the pictures of my friends or acquaintances, nor have I tried, as is now so much the fashion, to take out all the lines and wrinkles so that nothing remains but the washed-out faces of angels. What I give here is but a small portion of the panorama of life that has passed before my eyes. Of myself there is but little, for the spectator or interpreter in a panorama should remain unseen and in the dark. It is a pleasure to him, though often a sad pleasure, to see once more what he has seen before, to live the old time over again, to look once more at dear faces, once so full of love and life, to feel the touch of a vanished hand, and hear a voice that is still. As we grow old it is our fate to lose our friends ; but the friends we have lost are often nearer to us than those who remain. Will they never be quite near to us again ? Stars meet stars after thousands of years, and are we not of more value than many a star ? F. MAX MiJLLER. CONTENTS. PAGE Musical Recollections i Literary Recollections — 1 34 " 74 in 104 IV. . 143 Recollections of Royalties — 1 179 " 314 Beqqars 352 Index 281 AULD LANG SYNE. MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. The man that has no music in himself. Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils : The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Thus wrote Shakespeare ; but with all due respect for the immortal bard, he was wrong for once. Did not my dear friend, Arthur Stanley, hate music, and was he not to be trusted ? Were his affections dark as Erebus } True it is, music gives us a new life, and to be without that life is the same loss as to be blind, and not to know the infinite blue of the sky, the varied verdure of the trees, or the silver sparkle of the sea. Music is the language of the soul, but it defies inter- pretation. It means something, but that something belongs not to this world of sense and logic, but to another world, quite real, though beyond all defini- tion. How different music is from all other arts ! They all have something to imitate which is brought to us by the senses. But what does music imitate ? Not the notes of the lark, nor the roar of the sea ; they cannot be imitated, and if they are, it is but a - ■» 2 AULD LANG SYNE. caricature. The melodies of Schubert were chosen, not from the Prater, but from another world. For educational purposes music is invaluable. It softens the young barbarian, it makes him use his fingers deftly, it lifts him up, it brings him messages from another world, it makes him feel the charm of harmony and beauty. There is no doubt an eternal harmony • that pervades every kind of music, and there are the endless varieties of music, some so strange that they seem hardly to deserve to be called a gift of the Muses. There is in music something immortal and something mortal. There is even habit in music ; for the music that delights us sounds often hideous to uneducated ears. Indian music is thoroughly scientific, based on mathematics, and handed down to the present age after many centuries of growth. But when we hear it for the first time, it seems mere noise, without melody, without harmony, without rhythm. The Maoris have their own music too, but send a New Zealander to hear a long symphony of Beethoven, and, if he can, he will certainly run away long before the finale. In a lesser degree it is the same with us. Beet- hoven's compositions were at first considered wild j and lawless. Those who admired Mozart and i Haydn could not endure him. Afterwards the ' world was educated up to his Ninth Symphony, but some of his later sonatas for pianoforte and violin were played by Mendelssohn and David In my hearing, and they both shrugged their shoulders, and , thought that the old man had been no longer quite MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 3 himself when he wrote them. We have grown into them, or up to them, and now many a young man is able to enjoy them, and to enjoy them honestly. I remember the time when Schumann's songs were published at Leipzig, and the very same songs which now delight us were then by the best judges called curious, strange, interesting, promising, but no more. Yes, there is habit in music, and we are constantly passing through a musical education ; nay, the time comes when our education seems finished, and we can learn and take in no more. I have passed through a long school. / I began with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, lived ( on with Mendelssohn, rose to Schumann, and reached even Brahms ; but I could never get beyond, I could never learn to enjoy Wagner except now and then in one of his lucid intervals. No doubt this is my fault and my loss, but surely the vulgus profanum also has its rights and may protest against being tired instead of being refreshed and invigorated by music. Would Mendelsshon have admired Wag- ner ? Would Beethoven have listend to his music, would Bach have tolerated it ? Yet these were musicians too, though perhaps not sufficiently educated. To be honest, a great deal of Wagner's music seems tiresome to me, and I do not see why it should ever end. My musical education began very early, so early that I cannot remember ever passing through any drudgery. As long as I remember I could play, and I was destined to become a musician, till I went 4 AULD LANG SYNE. to the University, and Mendelssohn advised me to keep to Greek and Latin. I was born and brought up in Dessau, a small German town in an oasis of oak- trees where the Elbe and the Mulde meet, a town then overflowing with music. Such towns exist no longer. When I went to school at Dessau, this small cap- ital of the small Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau counted, I believe, not more than ten or twelve thousand inhabitants. Everybody knew everybody. As a boy I knew not only the notables of Dessau, I knew the shops and the shopmen, the servants, the day-labourers {Tagelohner) who sawed and split wood in the street, every old woman that sold apples, every beggar that asked for a Pfennig — mark, not a penny, but the tenth part of a penny. It was a curious town, with one long street run- ning through it, the Cavalierstrasse, very broad, with pavements on each side. But the street had to be weeded from time to time, there being too little traffic to prevent the grass from growing up be- tween the chinks of the stones. The houses had generally one storey only ; those of two or three storeys were mostly buildings erected by the Duke for his friends and his higher officials. Many houses were mere cottages, consisting of a ground floor and a high roof. Almost every house had a small mysterious looking-glass fastened outside the window in which the dwellers within could watch and discuss an ap- proaching visitor long before he or she came w^ithin speaking distance. It was the fashion not only to white-wash the plastered walls of houses, but to MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 5 green-wash, or to blue-wash, or to pink-wash them. All this is changed now ; few people remember the old streets, with distant lamps swinging across to make darkness more visible at night, and with long waterspouts frowning down on the pavement like real gurgoyles, and not frowning only, but during a thunderstorm pouring down buckets of water on the large red and green umbrellas of the passers-by. Dessau was then a very poor town, but a Iceta paupertas reigned in it ; everybody knew how much everybody else possessed or earned, and no one was expected to spend more than was justified by his position. We can hardly understand now with how little people then managed, not only to live, but thoroughly to enjOy the highest pleasures of life. My grandfather, who was the Duke's Prime Min- ister, received, I believe, no more than two thousand thalers (.1^300) salary, though there may have been additional allowances for rent, carriages and horses. But there was a curious mixture of simplicity of life and enjoyments of the highest kind. I remember in my grandfather's house delightful social gather- ings, musical and literary performances. I remem- ber Mozart's "Don Juan," Beethoven's "Fidelio" being performed there, the latest works of Goethe and Jean Paul being read and appreciated with a cup of tea or a glass of wine. A more select circle enjoyed their Shakespeare, their Dante, their Cal- deron in English, Italian, and Spanish. I remem- ber my grandfather (the son of Basedow, the re- former of national education in Germany) in his 6 AULD LANG SYNE. Court uniform, driving to Court in his carriage and pair, servants in full livery, everybody making room for him and bowing deep on each side, hat in hand. And when he came back from Court, was it not a real holiday for his grandchildren to turn the pockets of his uniform inside out — the pockets were lined on purpose with soft leather — to see what bonbons and cakes he had brought home for us from Tafel — i.e., dinner at Court ? Almost my first recollections come from my grandfather's house. My mother, after the very early death of my father, who died before I was four years old, had gone back to live at her father's house. This was a very common arrange- ment then. Two or three generations often lived together in the same house, and among the better families the house was looked upon as a common home, descending from father to son and grandson. There was a large garden stretching out behind the house, which was our playground. Our neigh- bours' gardens were separated on each side from our own by a low hedge only. Next door to us was the house of a soap and candlemaker, and I still remember the disagreeable smells on the day when soap was boiled and candles were drawn. People talked across the garden hedge to their neighbours, and all the affairs of the town were discussed there. Our neighbour on the right side took lodgers, and one of them was a young man who had come to Dessau to study music under F. Schneider, and at the same time to give music lessons. He had been a theological student, but had umgesattelt (changed MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 7 saddles), and now tried to support himself as best he could at Dessau. He often talked to me across the garden hedge (I was only five years old). One day he lifted me across into his own garden, and asked whether I would like to learn the pianoforte. I, of course, said yes, and he then bade me promise to come to him every day for half an hour, but not to say a word to my mother or to anybody else. The bargain was struck ; I kept my music quite secret, till, after about half a year or so, I sat down at my grandfather's pianoforte, and to the amaze- ment of everybody played some easy pieces of Mozart or Diabelli. Of course the young theolog- ical student — his name was Kahle — was engaged at once to be my music-master. He charged five Groschen (sixpence) for a lesson, and I made very rapid progress. My mother was very musical ; she had a splendid alto voice, and was often in- vited to sing the solos at the great musical festivals in Germany. My aunts, too, sang very well, and as a little boy I could sing all the songs which they sang, and well remember being put on a table to sing Handel's great arias, " Schnell wie des Blitzes Strahl," etc. Dessau at that time was steepedin music. The reigning Duke kept a first-rate orchestra, and at the head of it was Friedrich Schneider, a well- known composer of the old school, a cantor, like Bach, but also Ducal Capellmeister, and the head of what was then called a musical school, now a conservatorium. This school was frequented by students from all parts of Germany, and it has 8 AULD LANG SYNE. produced some excellent musicians and well-known composers. There were public concerts given regularly every fortnight at a very low charge, and there were rehearsals twice a week, at which a few people only were allowed to be present. I was one of the few, and every Tuesday and Friday after school I sat there for an hour or two hearing the vefy best music excellently performed, and be- ing deeply impressed, nay, awed by old Schneider, who stormed at the players when a single note went wrong, and used language which I was not allowed to repeat. He was a character. A small, square man, with greyish hair flowing down to his shoulders, his black eyes full of fire, and sometimes of fury. He was very fond of his glass of wine, which had given to his whole face, and particularly to his nose, a glowing ruddy complexion. He brooked no opposition from anybody, and he was the terror of all the young musicians who showed themselves at Dessau. His orchestra had such a reputation at that time that some of the greatest celebrities considered it an honour either to have their compositions performed or to be allowed to sing or play at his concerts. I remember Paganini, Sonntag, Spohr, Mendelssohn (then quite a young- man), and many more passing through their ordeal at Dessau. Mendelssohn's visit left a deep im- pression on my mind. I was still a mere child, he a very young man, and, as I thought, with the head of an angel. Mendelssohn's was always a handsome face, but later in life the sharpness of MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. his features betrayed his Jewish blood. He ex- celled as an organ player, and while at Dessau he played on the organ in the Grosse Kirche, chiefly j extempore. I was standing by him, when he took me on his knees and asked me to play a choral while he played the pedal. I see it all now as if it had been yesterday, and I felt convinced at that time that I too (anch' to) would be a musician. Was not Weber, Karl Maria von Weber, my god- father, and had he not given me my surname of Max ? , My father and mother had been staying with Weber at Dresden, and my father had undertaken to write the text for a new opera, which was never finished. Weber was then writing his " Freischiitz," and my mother has often described to me how he would walk about the whole day in his room composing, not before the pianoforte, but with a small guitar, and how she heard every melody gradually emerg- ing from the twang of his little instrument. Both his wife and my mother were expecting their con- finement, and it was arranged that if the children should be boys, they should be called Max, if girls, Agathe. We were both boys, and Weber's son. Max Maria von Weber, became a distinguished traveller, a most charming writer, and at last an influential financier in the Austrian service. He stayed with me several times at Oxford, and we exchanged notes about our respective fathers. He published a life of his father, which has, I believe, been translated into English. Old Schneider was kind to young Mendelssohn, lO AULD LANG SYNE. whenever he came to Dessau ; they were both ardent admirers of Handel and Bach, but the more modern and romantic compositions of the young composer did not quite meet the approval of the severe Maestro. Schneider was terribly outspoken, and apt to lose his temper and become violent. He once had a most painful scene with Madame Sonn- tag, or rather with Countess Something, as she was then. First of all, he thought very little of any composer whose name ended in ini or ante, and he would but seldom yield to the Duke and Duchess when they wished now and then to have some of Rossini's or Mercadante's music performed by their own orchestra. But when the Italian Countess ventured to speak to his orchestra and to ask them for a ritardando of her own, he flourished his baton and broke out: "Madame," he said, "you may sing as you like, but I look after of my orchestra," and there was an end of it. Life went on, and what time I could spare from school work, perhaps too much, was given to music. There was not an air or a symphony of Beethoven's which at that time I could not have hummed from beginning to end, and even now I often detect myself humming, " Ich bin's, du bist's, O himmlisches Entziicken ! " Who does not know that duet be- tween Fidelio and Florestan ? Much of that hum- ming repertorio has remained with me for life, though I cannot always tell now where an Allegro or Adagio comes from. It comes without being- called, I cannot drive it away when I want to be MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. II •quiet. I hum the bass, I whistle the piccolo, I >draw out the notes from the violoncello, I blow the .trumpet, in fact I often feel like Queen Bess, " And rshe shall have music wherever she goes ". When I was about eleven or twelve, old Schneider .allowed me to play with accompaniment of the full •orchestra some concertos of Mozart, etc. This was ia.great event in my quiet life, and everything looked as if music was to be my profession. When after- wards I went to the Nicolai School at Leipzig, the scho6l at which Leibniz (not Leibnitz) had been ■educated, I lived again in the musical house of Professor Carus. His wife sang sweetly ; his son, imy old friend, Professor V. Carus, was an excellent violin player, a pupil of David. I myself began to play the violoncello, but without much success, and I joined a chorus under Mendelssohn, who was -then director of the famous Gewandhaus concerts at Leipzig. We often had to sing anything he had "Composed and wished to hear before performing it iin public. As a friend of my father and my mother, Mendelssohn was always most charming to me, but iie did not encourage my idea of a musical career. The fact was I had not time to serve two masters. I could not practise and study music as it ought to be practised and studied without neglecting Greek and Latin, and, as life became more serious, my anind was more and more drawn to the thoughts of antiquity, to Homer and Cicero, and away from the ■delights of music. I heard excellent music at the house •of Professor Carus. I still have an old slip of paper 12 AULD LANG SYNE. on which Mendelssohn, Liszt, David, Kalliwoda and Hiller wrote their names for me one evening after they had been playing quartettes at Professor Carus' house. I even ventured while at Leipzig to play some- times at public concerts in the neighbourhood. But: when I began to look forward to what I should make of my life, and how I should carve out for myself a useful career, I saw that music was out of the question. There was another consideration! which determined my choice. There was muchi deafness in my family. My mother became deaf when she was still quite young, my grandmother,, several of my uncles and cousins, all had lost their- hearing, and this induced me, young as I was, tO' choose a profession which would be possible even, if I should share the same misfortune. I could not think of medicine, or law, or the Church — so I said MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 1 3 to myself, keep to Greek and Latin, try to be a scholar. A professorship was my highest ambition, but I thought that even if that should fail, I might lind a quiet Benedictine cell somewhere, and support myself by my pen. So music had to step into the background, not altogether, but so as not to interfere •with more serious work. No, music, though some- what slighted, has remained a true and faithful friend to me through life. I have enjoyed music until very late in life when I began to feel satisfied, and would much rather hum a symphony to myself than hear it played, often not half so well as I remembered it at Dessau, at the Gewandhaus concerts at Leipzig, and at the marvellous Conservatoire concerts in Paris. These were the perfection of instrumental music. Never has any other performance come near them. It was difficult to get a ticket. People used to form queue and stand the whole night in order to secure the next morning an abonnement for the season. To buy a ticket was beyond my means, for when I was at Paris I had entirely to support myself. But a friend of mine took me to the Conservatoire, and I often sat in the corri- dor without seeing the orchestra, listening as if to organ music. It was perfect. Every instrument of the orchestra was first-rate — the players had mostly passed through the same school, the conductor was an old man with a German name which I forget. Was it Habeneck .? He reminded me of Schneider, and certainly his orchestra marched like a regiment di .soldiers. 14 AULD LANG SYNE. And besides being a constant source of the. highest enjoyment to me, music has often helped me in my pilgrimage through life. Both in Pans, and later on in London, many a house was open to^ me which would have remained closed to a mere- scholar. Musicians also always took an interest in the son of the poet, Wilhelm Miiller, whose songs, had been set to music, not only by Schubert, but by many other popular composers. I well re- member, when telling Jenny Lind whose son I was, how she held up her hands and said : " What.'' the son of the poet of the ' Mullerlieder ' ! Now sit down," she said, "and let me sing you the ' Schone Miillerin '. " And she began to sing, and sang all the principal songs of that sad idyll, just moving her head and hands a little, but really acting the whole story as no actress on the stage could have acted it. It was a perfect tragedy, and it has. remained with me for life. Stockhausen also (who, as I saw too late, has just been celebrating his seventieth, birthday) once sang the " Winterreise " to me in the: same way, but as I had to accompany him I had only half the pleasure, though even that was great. How many memories crowd in upon me ! I heard Liszt when I was still at school at Leipzig. It was his first entry into Germany, and he came like a triumphator. He was young, theatrical, and terribly attractive, as ladies, young and old, used to say. His style of playing was then something quite new — now every player lets off the same fireworks. . The musical critics who then ruled supreme at MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. IS Leipzig were somewhat coy and reserved, and I remember taking; a criticism to the editor of the Leipziger Tageblatt which the writer did not wish to sign with his own name. Mendelssohn only, with his well-tempered heart, received him with open arms. He gave a matinee musicale at his house, all the best-known musicians of the place being present. I remember, though vaguely, David, Kalliwoda, Hiller ; I doubt whether Schumann and Clara Wieck were present. Well, Liszt appeared in his Hungarian costume, wild and magnificent. He told Mendelssohn that he had written something special for him. He sat down, and swaying right and left on his music-stool, played first a Hungarian melody, and then three or four variations, one more incredible than the other. We stood amazed, and after everybody had paid his compliments to the hero of the day, some of Mendelssohn's friends gathered round him, and said: "Ah, Felix, now we can pack up ('jetzt konnen wir einpacken '). No one can do that ; it is over with us ! " Mendelssohn smiled ; and when Liszt came up to him asking him to play something in turn, he laughed and said that he never played now ; and this, to a certain extent, was true. He did not give much time to practising then, but worked chiefly at composing and directing his concerts. However, Liszt would take no re- fusal, and so at last little Mendelssohn, with his own charming playfulness, said: "Well, I'll play, but you must promise me not to be angry ". And what did he play ? He sat down and played first l6 AULD LANG SYNE. of all Liszt's Hungarian melody, and then one variation after another, so that no one but Liszt himself could have told the difference. We all trembled lest Liszt should be offended, for Mendels- sohn could not keep himself from slightly imitating Liszt's movements and raptures. However, Men- delssohn managed never to offend man, woman, or child. Liszt laughed and applauded, and ad- mitted that no one, not he himself, could have performed such a bravura. Many years after I saw Liszt once more, at the last visit he paid to London. He came to the Lyceum to see Irving and Ellen Terry act in " Faust ". The whole theatre rose when the old, bent Maestro appeared in the dress circle. When the play was over, I received an invitation from Mr., now Sir Henry, Irving to join a supper party in honour of Liszt. I could not resist, though I was staying with friends in London and had no latch-key. It was a brilliant affair. Rooms had been fitted up on purpose with old armour, splendid pictures, gorgeous curtains. We sat down, about thirty people ; I knew hardly anybody, though they were all known to fame, and not to know them was to profess oneself unknown. However, I was placed next to Liszt, and I re- minded him of those early Leipzig days. He was not in good spirits ; he would not speak English, though Ellen Terry sat on his right side, and, as she would not speak German or French, I had to interpret as well as I could, and it was not always easy. At last Miss Ellen Terry turned to me and said : " Tell Liszt that I can speak German," and MUSICAL RECOLLECBIONS. 17 when he turned to Hsten, she said in her girUsh, bell-like voice : " Lieber Liszt, ich Hebe Dich". I hope I am not betraying secrets ; anyhow, as I have been indiscreet once, I may as well say what happened to me afterwards. It was nearly 3 a.m. when I reached my friend's house. With great difficulty I was able to rouse a servant to let me in, and when the next morning I was asked where I had been, great was the dismay when I said that I had had supper at the Lyceum. Liszt had promised to come to stay with me at Oxford, but the day when I expected him, the following note arrived from Amsterdam, probably one of the last he ever wrote : — ■&» ^Ct/^e^/fCcy 1 8 AULD LANG SYNE. A few weeks after, I saw his death announced in the papers. And thus Liszt left the stage. I saw his entrance' and his exit, and when I asked myself, What has he left behind ? I could only think of the new school of brilliant executionists of which he may truly be called the founder and life-long apostle. I confess that, though I feel dazzled' at the impossibilities which he and his pupils perform with their ten fingers, I often sigh for an Allegro or an Andante by Haydn and Mozart as they were played in my young days with simplicity and purity on very imperfect instruments. Players now seem to think of themselves only, not of the musical poets whose works they are to render. Mendelssohn, Clara Wieck (Madame Schumann), even Moscheles and Hummel acted as faithful interpreters. On listening to them, exquisite as their execution was, one thought far more of what they played than how they played. That time is gone, and no one has now, or will ever have again, the courage to bring it back. If one wants to enjoy a sonata of Haydn one has to play it oneself or hum it, because the old fingers will not do their work any longer. And Mendelssohn also, whom I had known as a young man, said good-bye to me for the last time in London. It was after the first performance of his " Elijah" in 1847. He too said he would come again next year, and then came the news of his sudden death. I saw him last at Bunsen's house, where he played at a matinie musicale, always ready MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 19 to please and oblige his friends, always amiable and charming, even under great provocation. Only once I remember seeing him almost beside himself with anger, and well he might be. He possessed a most valuable album, with letters, poems, pictures, compositions of the most illustrious men of the age, such as Goethe and others. The binding had somewhat suffered, so it was sent to be mended, and I was present when it came back. It was at his sister's house, Fanny Hensel's, at Berlin. Mendelssohn opened the album, jumped up and screamed. The binder had cut off the blue skies and tree-tops of all the Italian sketches, and the signatures of most of the poems and letters. This was too much for Felix, he was for once infelix. Still, happy and serene as his life certainly was, for he had everything a man of his talents could desire, there were bitter drops in it of which the world knew little, and need not know anything now. There are things we know, important things which the world would be glad to know. But we bury them ; they are to be as if they had never been, like letters that are reduced to ashes and can never be produced again by friends or enemies. He was devoted to his sister Fanny, who was married to Hensel the painter, an intimate friend of my father. When I was a student at Berlin, I was much in their house in the Leipziger Strasse, and heard many a private concert given in the large room looking out on the garden. Mendelssohn played almost every instrument in the orchestra, and had 20 AULD LANG SYNE. generally to play the instrument which he was sup- posed to play worst. When he played the pianoforte, he was handicapped by being made to play with his arms crossed. All the celebrities of Berlin (and Berlin was then rich in celebrities) were present at those musical gatherings, and Mendelssohn was the life of the whole. He was never quiet for a moment, moving from chair to chair and conversing with everybody. Boeckh, the great Greek scholar, lived in the same house, and Mendelssohn had received so good a classical education that he could hold his own when discussing with the old master the choruses of the Antigone. Mendelssohn was, in fact, a man teres et rotundus. He was at home in classical litera- ture, he spoke French and English, he was an ex- quisite draughtsman, and had seen the greatest works of the greatest painters, ancient and modern. His father, a rich banker in Berlin, had done all he could for the education of his children. He was the son of ' Mendelssohn the philosopher, and when his son Felix had become known to fame, he used to say with his slightly Jewish accent : " When I was young I was j called the son of the great Mendelssohn ; now that I am old I am called the father of the great Mendels- sohn ; then, what am I ? " Well, he found the where- withal that enabled his son, and his other children too, to become what they were, all worthy of their great grandfather, all worthy of the name of Mendelssohn. Felix was attached to both his sisters, Fanny and Rebekah (Dirichlet), but he was more particialarly devoted to Fanny (Hensel). They had been edu- MUSICAL RECOLLEcrtONS. 21 cated together. She knew Greek and Latin like her brother, she played perfectly, and composed so well that her brother published several of her com- positions under his own name. They were one spirit and one soul, and at that time ladies still shrank from publicity. Everybody knew which songs were hers (I remember, for instance, " Schoner und Schoner schmlickt sich die Flur "), and it was only later in life that she began to publish under her own name. I give the beginning of a song which she wrote for my mother. The words are my father's, the little vignette was drawn by her hus- band, who was an eminent artist at Berlin. VJ!l^ « t^yi^/Pt^,^ y ^/j^, 1-Vv< ■ T^ p.^-^ ^r^iLr -l^Jl^ -J fj'-f''^'-^ g prrfH.^^l^ i^-^-j- "-:i>^' 22 AULD LANG SYNE. The struggles which many, if not most men of genius, more particularly musicians, have had to pass through were unknown to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Some people go so far as to say that they miss the traces of those struggles in his char- acter and in his music. And yet those who knew him best know that his soul, too, knew its own bitterness. His happiest years were no doubt spent at Leipzig, where I saw much of him while I was at school and at the University. He was loved and admired by everybody ; he was undisputed master in the realm of music. He was at first unmarried, and many were the rumours as to who should be his bride. News had reached his friends that his heart had been won by a young lady at Frankfurt ; but nobody, not even his most intimate friends, knew for certain. However, one evening he had just returned from Frankfurt, and had to conduct one of the Gewandhaus Concerts. The last piece was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I had sung in the chorus, and found myself on the orchestra when the concert was over, the room nearly empty, except his personal friends, who surrounded him and teased him about his approaching engagement. His beam- ing face betrayed him, but he would say nothing to anybody, till at last he sat down and extemporised on the pianoforte. And what was the theme of his fantasy ? It was the passage of the chorus, " Wer ein holdes Weib errungen, mische seinen Jubel ein ". That was his confession to his friends, and then we all knew. And she was indeed "ein holdes MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 23 Weib" when she arrived at Leipzig. One thing only she lacked — she could not express all she felt. She was soon called the " Goddess of Silence " by the side of her devoted husband, who never could be silent, but was always bubbling over like cham- pagne in a small glass. They were a devoted couple, not' a whisper was ever heard about either of them, though Mendelssohn had many friends, the greatest of all being his sister Fanny. With her he could speak and exchange whatever was uppermost or deepest in his heart. I have heard them extem- porise together on the pianoforte, one holding with his little finger the little finger of the other. Her death was the heaviest loss he ever suffered in life. He was so unaccustomed to suffering and distress that he could never recover from this unexpected blow. Nor did he survive her long. She died on the 14th of May, 1847 ; he followed her on the 4th of November of the same year. During most of the time when Mendelssohn celebrated his triumphs as director of the Gewand- haus Concerts, young Robert Schumann was at Leipzig, but he was little seen. Mendelssohn, so bright and happy himself, wished to see the whole world around him bright and happy, and was kind to everybody. The idea of jealousy was impossible at that time in Mendelssohn's heart. Neither could Schumann, as a young and rising musician, have thought himself then to be in any sense an equal or rival of Mendelssohn. But there are natures which like to be left alone, or with a very few intimate 24 AULD LANG SYNE. friends only, and which shrink from the too demon- strative happiness of others. It is not envy, it often is modesty ; but in any case it is not pleasant. Schumann was conscious of his own strength, but he was still struggling for recognition, and he was also struggling against that adversity of fortune which seems to decree poverty to be the lot of genius. There was another struggle going on, a struggle which is generally fought out in private, but which in his case was carried on before the eyes of the world, at least the musical world of Leipzig. He was devoted to a young pianoforte player, Clara Wieck. But her father, a great teacher of music, would not allow the marriage. He had devoted years of his life to the musical education of his daughter, and then, as she was just beginning to earn applause for herself and her master, as well as the pecuniary reward for their combined labours, a young musician, poor, and not yet recognised, wished to carry her off. Parents have flinty hearts, and the father said " No ". Many a time have I watched young Schumann walking alone in the neighbourhood of Leipzig, being unexpectedly met by a young lady, both looking not so happy as I thought that under the circumstances they ought. This went on for some time, till at last, as usual, the severe or flinty-hearted father had to give way, and allow a marriage which certainly for many years was the realisation of the most perfect happiness, till it ended in a terrible tragedy. There was the seed of madness in the MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 2$ ■genius of Schumann as in that of so many really- great men, and in an access of mania he sought and found rest where Ophelia sought and found it. I did not see much of Schumann, nor of Madame Schumann, in later life, though in concerts in London I often admired her exquisite rendering of her hus- band's compositions. I only recollect Schumann as a young man sitting generally in a corner of the orchestra, and listening to one of his works being performed under Mendelssohn's direction. I re- member his very large head, his drooping eyes ; I hardly ever remember a smile on his face. And yet the man must have been satisfied, if not happy, who could write such music as his, who could write, ■" Wohlauf noch getrunken den funklenden Wein ! " and he lived to see his own creations admired more «ven than those of Mendelssohn. He lived to see his critics turned into admirers ; in fact he educated his public, and gained a place for that thoughtful, wistful, fairy-like music which is peculiarly his own. Many celebrated musicians stayed at Leipzig •during Mendelssohn's reign. I remember Moscheles, Thalberg, Sterndale Bennett, Clara Novello, young and fascinating, and many more. Another friend of Mendelssohn who stayed some time at Leipzig was Ferdinand Hiller. We heard several of his compositions, symphonies and all the rest, performed at the Gewandhaus Concerts under Mendelssohn's ■direction. In his life there was, perhaps, too little of the dtra necessitas that has given birth to so many of the masterpieces of genius. He might, no doubt. 26 AULD LANG SYNE. have produced much more than he did ; but that he was striving to the very end of his life was proved to me by an interesting letter I received from him about a year before his death. His idea was to- write a great oratorio, and he wanted me to supply him with a text. It was a colossal plan, and I con- fess it seemed to me beyond the power of any musician, nay, of any poet. It was to be a historical drama, representing first of all the great religions of the world, each by itself. We were to have the hymns of the Veda, the Githas of the Avesta, the Psalms of the Old Testament, the Sermons and Dialogues of Buddha, the trumpet calls of Mo- hammed, and, lastly, the Sermon on the Mount, all of them together forming one mighty symphony in which no theme was lost, yet all became in the end an accompanirnent of one sweet song of love domi- nating the full chorus of the ancient religions of the world. It was a grand idea, but was it possible to- realise it ? I was ready to help, but before a year was over I received the news of Hiller's death, and who is the musician to take his place, always sup- posing that he could have achieved such a World Oratorio ? It was in the last year of his life that Mendelssohru paid his last visit to England to conduct his last oratorio, the " Elijah". It had to be performed at Exeter Hall, then the best place for sacred music. Most of the musicians, however, were not pro- fessionals, and they had only bound themselves to attend a certain number of rehearsals. Excellent as. MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 27 they were in such oratorios as the " Messiah," which they knew by heart, a new oratorio, such as the " Elijah," was too much for them ; and I well remember Mendelssohn, in the afternoon before the performance, declaring he would not conduct. " Oh, these tailors and shoemakers," he said, " they cannot do it, and they will not practise ! I shall not go." However, a message arrived that the Queen and Prince Albert were to be present, so nothing remained but to go. I was present, the place was crowded. Mendelssohn conducted, and now and then made a face, but no one else detected what was wrong. It was a great success and a great triumph for Mendelssohn. If he could have heard it performed as it was performed at Exeter Hall in later years, when his tailors and shoemakers knew it by heart, he would not have made a face. It was at Bunsen's house, at a matinee musicale, that I saw him last. He took the liveliest interest in my work, the edition of the Rig Veda, the Sacred Hymns of the Brahmans. A great friend of his, Friedrich Rosen, had begun the same work, but had died before the first volume was finished. He was a brother of the wife of Mendelssohn's great friend, Klingemann, then Hanoverian Charg6 d'Afifaires in London, a poet many of whose poems were set to music by Mendelssohn. So Mendelssohn knew all about the Sacred Hymns of the Brihmans, and talked very intelligently about the Veda. He was, however, subjected to a very severe trial of patience soon after. The room was crowded with what is 28 AULD LANG SYNE. ealled the best society of London, and Mendelssohn being asked to play, never refused. He played several things, and at last Beethoven's so-called " Moonlight Sonata''. All was silence and delight ; no one moved, no one breathed aloud. Suddenly in the middle of the Adagio, a stately dowager sitting in the front row was so carried away by the rhythm, rather than by anything else, of Beethoven's music, that she began to play with her fan, and ac- companied the music by letting it open and shut with each bar. Everybody stared at her, but it took time before she perceived her atrocity, and at last allowed her fan to collapse. Mendelssohn in the meantime kept perfectly quiet, and played on ; but, when he could stand it no longer, he simply repeated the last bar in arpeggios again and again, following the movements of her fan ; and when at last the fan stopped, he went on playing as if nothing had happened. I dare say that when the old dowager thanked him for the great treat he had given her, he bowed without moving a muscle of his inspired face. How different from another player who, when disturbed by some noise in the audience, got up in a rage and declared that either she or the talker must leave the room. And yet I have no doubt the old lady enjoyed the music in her own way, for there are many ways of enjoying music. I have known people who could not play a single instrument, who could not sing " God save the Queen " to save their life, in eloquent raptures about Mendelssohn, nay, about Beethoven MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 29 and Bach. I believe they are perfectly honest in their admiration, though how it is done I cannot tell. I began by saying that people who have no music in them need not be traitors, and I alluded to my dear friend Stanley. He actually suffered from listening to music, and whenever he could, he walked out of the room where there was music. He never disguised his weakness, he never professed any love or admiration for music, and yet Jenny Lind once told me he paid her the highest compliment she had ever received. Stanley was very fond of Jenny Lind, but when she stayed at his father's palace at 1 Norwich he always left the room when she sang. One evening Jenny Lind had been singing Handel's \ " I know that my Redeemer liveth ". Stanley, as usual, had left the room, but he came back after the I music was over, and went shyly up to Jenny Lind. " You know," he said, " I dislike music ; I don't know what people mean by admiring it. I am very ' stupid, tone-deaf, as others are colour-blind. But," ^ he said with some warmth, " to-night, when from a ' distance I heard you singing that song, I had an inkling of what people mean by music. Something came over me which I had never felt before ; or, yes, I had felt it once before in my life." Jenny Lind was all attention. " Some years ago," he con- tinued, " I was at Vienna, and one evening there was a tattoo before the palace performed by four hundred drummers. I felt shaken, and to-night while listening to your singing, the same feeling came over me ; I felt deeply moved." " Dear man," 30 AULD LANG SYNE. I she added, " I know he meant it, and a more honest 'compliment I never received in all my life." However, unmusical as Stanley's house was, Jenny Lind, or Mrs. Goldschmidt as she was then, often came to stay there. " It is so nice," she said ; " no one talks music, there is not even a pianoforte in the house." This did not last long however. A few days after she said to me : "I hear you have a pianoforte in your rooms at All Souls'. Would you mind my practising a little ? " And practise she did, and delightful it was. She even came to dine in College, and after dinner she said in the most charming way : " Do you think your friends would like me to sing ? " Of course, I could not have asked her to sing, but there was no necessity for asking my friends. In fact, not only my friends listened with delight to her singing, but the whole quadrangle of All Souls' was black with uninvited listeners, and the applause after each song was immense, both inside and outside the walls of the College. Stanley's feeling about music reminds me of another music-hater at Oxford, the late Dr. Gaisford, the famous Dean of Christ Church. It was he who put my name on the books of " The House," a very great honour to an unknown German scholar on whom the University, at his suggestion, had just conferred the degree of M.A. What the Dean's idea of music was may best be judged from his con- stantly appointing old scouts or servants who were too old ,to do their work any longer as bedmakers to MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 3 1 be singing men in the Cathedral choir. The Dean's stall was under the organ, and one day in every month, when "The voice of Thy thunder was heard round' about, and the lightnings shone upon the ground, and the earth was moved and shook "withal," a certain key in the organ made the seat on which the Dean sat vibrate under him. On that •day, before he left the Cathedral, he invariably thanked the organist, Dr. Corfe, for the nice tune he had played. Music, in fact, was at a very low ebb at Oxford Tvhen I arrived there. The young men would have ■considered it almost infra dignitatem to play any instrument ; the utmost they would do was now and then to sing a song. Yet there was much love of music, and many of my young and old friends were delighted when I would play to them. There was only one other person at Oxford then who was .a real musician and who played well. Professor Donkin, a great mathematician, and altogether a man sui generis. He was a great invalid ; in fact, he was dying all the years I knew him, and was fully aware of it. It seemed to be quite admissible, therefore, that he, being an invalid, and I,. being a German, should " make music " at evening parties ; but to ask a head of a house or a professor, or even a senior tutor, to play would have been considered almost an insult. And yet I feel certain there is more love, more honest enjoyment of music in England than anywhere else. And how has the musical tide risen at Oxford 32 AULD LANG SYNE. since those days! Some of the young men now come up to college as very good performers on the pianoforte and other instruments. I never know- how they learn it, considering the superior claims which cricket, football, the river, nay, the classics, and mathematics also have on their time at school. There are musical clubs now at Oxford where the very best classical music may be heard performed by undergraduates with the assistance of some professional players from London. All this is due to the influence of Sir F. Ouseley, and still more of Sir John Stainer, both professors of Music at Oxford. They have made music not only respect- able, but really admired and loved among the undergraduates. Sir John Stainer has been inde- fatigable, and the lectures which he gives both on the science and history of music are crowded by- young and old. They are real concerts, in which he is able to illustrate all he has to say with the help of a well-trained choir of Oxford amateurs. As to myself, I have long become a mere listener. One learns the lesson, whether one likes it or not, that there is a time for everything. Old fingers grow stiff and will no longer obey, and if one knows how a sonata of Beethoven ought to be played, it is most painful to play it badly. So at last I said i "Farewell!" The sun has set, though the clouds are roseate still with reflected rays. It may be that I have given too much time to music, but what would life have been without it ? I do not like to. exaggerate, or say anything that is not quite true. MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS. 33 Musical ears grow sensitive to anything false, whether sharp or flat. But let us be quite honest, quite plain. Is there not in music, and in music alone of all the arts, something that is not en- tirely of this earth ? Harmony and rhythm may be under settled laws ; and in that sense mathe- maticians may be right when they call mathe- matics silent music. But whence comes melody ? Surely not from what we hear in the street, or in the woods, or on the sea shore, not from any- thing that we h^ar with our outward ears, and are able to imitate, to improve, or to sublimise. Neither history nor evolution will help us to account for Schubert's " Trockne Blumen ". Here, if any- where, we see the golden stairs on which angels descend from heaven to earth, and whisper sweet sounds into the ears of those who have ears to hear. Words cannot be so inspired, for words, we know, are of the earth earthy. Melodies, however, are not of this earth, and the greatest of musical poets has truly said : — Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. 34 LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. I. I AM the son of a poet, and I have tried very hard all my life not to be a poet myself, if poet means a man who tries to make his thoughts dance grace- fully in the chains of metre and rhyme. In my own very prosaic work 1 have had to suffer all my life from suppressed poetry, as one suffers from suppressed gout. Poets will, no doubt, protest most emphatically against so low a view of their art. They assure us that they never feel their chains, and that they are perfectly free in giving expression to their thoughts in rhyme and metre. Some of the more honest among them have even gone so far as to confess that their best thoughts had often been suggested to them by the rhyme. Platen may be quite right when he says : — Was stets und aller Orten sich ewig jung erweist 1st in gebundenen Worten ein ungebundener Geist. (What proves itself eternal in every place and time Is an unfettered spirit, free in the chains of rhyme.) True, very true. You may get that now and then, but in our modern languages it is but seldom that thought soars up quite free on the wings of rhyme. Many and many a thought sinks down because of the LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 35 weight of the rhyme, many and many a thought re- mains altogether unspoken because it will not sub- mit to the strait jacket of the rhyme ; many and many a poor thought is due entirely to an irrepres- sible rhyme ; and if some brilliant thoughts have really been suggested by the rhyme, would it not be better if they had been suggested by something else, whether you call it mind or soul ? The greatest masters of rhyme, such as Browning in English or Ruckert in German, and even H. Heine, often fall victims to their own mastery. They spoil their poems in order to show that they can find a rhyme for anything and everything, however grotesque the rhyme may be. I remember once being bold enough to ask Tennyson what was the use or excuse of rhyme. He was not offended, but was quite ready with his answer : " Rhyme helps the memory," he said — and that answer was as honest as it was true. But what is useful for one purpose, for the purpose of recollecting, may be anything but useful for other purposes, it may be even hurtful, and in our case it has certainly proved hurtful again and again to the natural flow and expression of thought and feeling. Nor should I venture to say a word against Platens gebundene Worte. It was only the very necessity of finding a word to answer to time which led me to speak of chains of rhyme. Gebundene Worte are not necessarily rhymed words, they are measured words, and these are no doubt quite natural and quite right for poetry. Metre is mea- sure, and metrical utterance, in that sense, was not 36 AULD LANG SYNE. only more natural for the expression of the highest thoughts, but was probably everywhere more ancient also than prose. In every literature, as far as we know, poetry came first, prose second. Inspired utterance requires, nay produces, rhythmic move- ments not only of the voice (song and prosodia), but of the body also (dance). In Greek, chorus means dance, measured movement, and the Greek choruses were originally dances ; nay, it can be proved that these dancing movements formed really the first metres of true poetry. Hence, it was quite natural that David should have danced before the Lord with all his might. Language itself bears witness to the fact that the oldest metres were the steps and movements of dancers. As the old dances consisted of steps, the ancient metres consisted of feet. Even we ourselves still speak of feet, not because we understand what it means, but simply because the Greeks and Romans spoke of feet, and they said so because originally the feet really marked the metre. The ancient poets of the Veda also speak of feet, and they seem to have been quite aware why they spoke of metrical feet, for in the names of some of their metres we still find clear traces of the steps of the dances which accompanied their poems. Trishtubh, one of their ancient metres, meant three- step ; Anushtubh, the later Sloka, meant by-step * or Reigen. The last syllables or steps of each line were called the Vritta, or the turn, originally the *See M. M., " Vedic Hymns," S.B.E., vol. xxxii., p. 96. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 37 turn of the dancers, who seem to have been allowed to move more freely till they came to the end of one movement. Then, before they turned, or while they turned, they marked the steps more sharply and audibly, either as iambic or as trochaic, and afterwards marched back again with greater free- dom. Hence in ancient Sanskrit the end or turn of each line was under stricter rules as to long and short steps, or long and short syllables, whereas greater freedom was allowed for the rest of a line. Thus Sanskrit Vritta, the turn, came to mean the metre of the whole line, just as in Latin we have the same word versus, literally the turn, then verse, and this turn became the name for verse, and re- mained so to the present day. There is no break in our history, and language is the chain that holds it together. A strophe also was originally a turning, to be followed by the antistrophe or the return, all ideas derived from dancing. The ancient Sanskrit name for metre and metrical or measured speed was Mandas. The verb y^^and would correspond phonetically to Latin scandere, in the sense of marching, as in a-scendere, to march upward, to mount, and de-scendere, to march downward, all expressing the same idea of measured movement, but not of rhyme or jingle. These movements were free and natural in the beginning ; they became artificial when they became traditional, and we find in such works as the Sanskrit Vrz'tta-ratnikara, " the treasury of verse," every kind of monstrosity which was perpetrated by Hindu poets of the Re-. 38 AULD LANG SYNE. naissance period, and perpetrated, it must be con- fessed, with wonderful adroitness. But I must not tire my friends with these metrical mysteries. What I want them to know is that in the mosi; ancient Aryan poetry which we possess there is no trace of rhyme, except here and there by accident, and that everywhere in the history of the poetry of the Aryas, rhyme, as essential to poetry, is a very late invention. It is the same in Semitic languages, though in Semitic as well as in Aryan speech, in fact, wherever grammatical forms are expressed chiefly by means of terminations, rhyme even in prose is almost inevitable. And this was no doubt the origin of rhyme. In languages where terminations of declension and conjugation and most derivative suffixes have retained a full- bodied and sonorous form, it was difficult to avoid the jingle of rhyme. In Latin, which abounds in such constantly recurring endings as orum, arum, thus, amus, atis, amini, tatem, tatibus, inibus, etc., good prose writers had actually to be warned against allowing their sentences to rhyme, while poets found it very easy to add these ornamental tails to their measured lines. There can be little doubt that it was the rhymed Latin poetry, as used in the services of the Roman Catholic Church, which suggested to the German converts the idea of rhymed verses. The pagan poetry of the Teutonic races had no rhymes. It was what is called alliterative. In the German dialects the accent remained mostly on the radical LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 39 syllable of wordg, and thus served to shorten the terminations. Hence we find fewer full-bodied terminations in Gothic than in Latin, while in later Teutonic dialects, in English as well as in German, these terminations dwindled away more and more. Thus, we say Dichter when the Romans would have dictator, Prediger for prcedicdtor, chancel for caned lla. In order to bind their poetical lines together the German poets had recourse to initial letters, which had to be the same in certain places of each verse, and which, if pronounced with strong stress or strain, left the impression of the words being knitted together and belonging together. Here is a specimen which will show that the rules of alliteration were very strictly observed by the old German poets, far more strictly than by their modern imitators. The old rule was that in a line of eight arses there should be two words in the first and one in the second half beginning with the same letter, consonant or vowel, and always in syllables that had the accent. Here is a line from the old " Song of Hildebrand," dating from the eighth cen- tury : — Hiltibraht joh Hadhubrant Hiltibraht and Hadhubrant Untar harjum tuStn, etc. Between hosts twain, etc. Riickert has imitated this alliterating poetry in his poem of " Roland " : — Roland der Ries Im Rathhaus zu Bremen Steht er im Standbild Standhaft und wacht. 40 AULD LANG SYNE. Kingsley has attempted something like it in his " Longbeard's Saga," but with much greater free- dom, not to say licence : — Scaring the wolf cub, Scaring the horn-owl, Shaliing the snow-wreaths Down from the pine boughs. But to return to our modern poetry and to the poets whom I have known, and of whom I have something to tell, does it not show the power of tradition if we see them everywhere forcing their feet into the same small slippers of rhyme ? And who would deny that they have achieved, and still are achieving, wonderful feats ? — lours de force, it is true, but so cleverly performed that one hardly sees a trace of the force employed. No doubt much is lost in this process of beating, and hammering, and welding words together {a poet is called a Reime- schmied, a smith of rhymes, in German) ; much has to be thrown away because it will not rhyme at all {silver has been very badly treated in English poetry, because it rhymes with nothing, at present not even with gold), but what remains is often very beautiful, and, as Tennyson said, it sticks to the memory. . One wishes one could add that the diffi- culty of rhyme serves to reduce the number of unnecessary poets that spring up every year. But rhyme does not strangle these numerous children of the Muses, and it is left to our ill-paid critics to per- form every day, or every week, this murder of the innocents. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 4 1 It may not seem very filial for the son of a poet thus to blaspheme against poetry, or rather, against rhyme. Well, I can admire rhymed poetry, just as I can admire champagne, though if the wine is really good I think it is a pity to make it mousseux. H. Heine, who certainly was never at a loss for a rhyme, writes, at the end of one of his maddest poems, "Die Liebe": "O Phoebus Apollo, if these verses are bad, I know thou wilt forgive me, for thou art an all-knowing god, and knowest quite well why for years I could not trouble myself any longer with measuring and rhyming words ! " And he adds : " I might, of course, have said all this very well in good prose". He ought to know, but there will not be many of his admirers to agree with him.* I hardly remember having ever seen my father, and I came to know him chiefly through his poetry. He belonged to the post-Goethe period, though Goethe (died 1832) survived him. He was born in 1794, and died in 1827, and yet in that short time he established a lasting reputation not only as a scholar, but as a most popular poet. His best known poems are the " Griechenlieder," the Greek songs which he wrote during the Greek war of in- dependence. Alas ! in those days battles were won by bravery and the sword, now by discipline and repeating guns. These Greek songs, in which his love of the ancient Greeks is mingled with his admi- ration for heroes such as Kanaris, Mark Bozzaris, * "Autobiographic," p. 224. 42 AULD LANG SYNE. and others who helped to shake off the Turkish yoke, produced a deep impression all over Germany, per- haps because they breathed the spirit of freedom and patriotism, which was then systematically repressed in Germany itself The Greeks never forgot the services rendered by him in Germany, as by Lord Byron in England, in rousing a feeling of indigna- tion against the Turk, and as the marble for Lord Byron's monument in London was sent by some Greek admirers of the great poet, the Greek Parliament voted a shipload of Pentelican marble for the national monument erected to my father in Dessau. My father's lyrical poems also are well known all over Germany, particularly the cycles of the "Schone Mlillerin " and the " Winterreise," both so marvel- lously set to music by Schubert and others. He certainly had caught the true tone of the poetry of the German people, and many of his poems have become national property, being sung by thousands who do not even know whose poems they are sing- ing. As a specimen showing the highest point reached by his poetry, I like to quote his poem on " Vineta," the old town overwhelmed by the sea on the Baltic coast. The English translation was made for me by my old, now departed, friend, J. A. Froude : — LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 43 VINETA. Aus des Meeres tiefem, tiefem Grunde Klingen Abendglocken dumpf und matt, lUns zu geben wunderbare Kunde "Von der schonen alien Wun- derstadt. II. In der Fluthen Schoss hinab- gesunken ■Blieben unten ihre Trummer stehn, Ihre Zinnen lassen goldne Funken Wiederscheinend auf dem Spie- gel sehn. III. TJnd der Schiffer, der den Zau- berschimmer Einmal sah im hellen Abend- roth, Uach derselben Stelle schifft er immer, •Ob auch rings umher die Klippe droht. IV. Aus des Herzens tiefem, tiefem Grunde Klingt es mir, wie Glocken, dumpf und matt : Ach ! sie geben wunderbare Kunde Von der Liebe, die geliebt es hat. From the sea's deep hollow faintly pealing. Far-off evening bells come sad and slow ; Faintly rise, the wondrous tale revealing Of the old enchanted town be- low. II. On the bosom of the flood re- clining Ruined arch and wall and broken spire, Down beneath the watery mir- ror shining Gleam and flash in flakes of golden fire. III. And the boatman who at twi- light hour Once that magic vision shall have seen, Heedless how the crags may round him lour. Evermore will haunt the charmfed scene. IV. From the heart's deep hollow faintly pealing. Far I hear them, bell-notes sad and slow, Ah ! a wild and wondrous tale revealing Of the drownbd wreck of love below. 44 AULD LANG SYNE. V. Eine schone Welt is da ver- sunken, Ihre Triimmer blieben unten stehn, Lassen sich als goldne Him- melsfunken Oft im Spiegel meiner Traume sehn V. There a world in loveliness de- caying, Lingers yet in beauty ere it die; Phantom forms across my senses playing, Flash like golden fire-flakes from the sky. VL Und dann mocht' ich tauchen in die Tiefen, Michversenkenin den Wieder- schein, Und mir ist als ob mich Engel riefen In die alte Wunderstadt her- ein. VL Lights are gleaming, fairy bells are ringing. And I long to plunge and wan- der free Where I hear those angel- voices singing In those ancient towers below the sea. That the' poet did not consider rhyme an essential element of poetry, he has shown in some of his assonantic poems, such as : — AUe Winde schlafen Auf dem Spiegel der Flut ; Kuhle Schatten des Abends Decken die Miiden zu. Luna hangt sich Schleier Ueber ihr Gesicht, Schwebt in dammernden Traumen Ueber die Wasser hin. Alles, alles stille Auf dem weiten Meer, — Nur mein Herz will nimmer Mit zur Ruhe gehn. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 45 In der Liebe Fluten Treibt es her und bin, Wo die Stiirme nicht ruhen, Bis der Nachen sinkt. Though my father was a great admirer of Goethe, he seems to have incurred his displeasure and to have been brought into personal collision with the grand old poet. Goethe had translated some modern Greek songs ; it may be, as my father thought, without having fully mastered the difficulties of the spoken Greek language. My father published a complete translation of Fauriel's collection of Greek popular poetry,* and Goethe did not like compari- sons between his work and that of anybody else, least of all of quite a young poet. " Die schone Miillerin " also may have seemed to Goethe an encroachment on a domain peculiarly his own. In fact, when my father, with my mother, went to "Weimar to pay their respects to Goethe, his Excel- lency was somewhat stiff and cold. My mother, also, had evidently not been sufficiently careful and respectful. She was the granddaughter of the famous pedagogue Basedow, the reformer of national education all over Germany, who had been a friend of Goethe in his youth. Goethe speaks of him in his poem, " Prophete rechts (Basedow), Prophete links (Lavater), das Welt- kind (Goethe) in der Mitten". And he also complains bitterly of Basedow in his " Dichtung und Wahrheit," as being never without a pipe in his * " Neugriechische Volkslieder," gesammelt von C. Fauriel, .ubersetzt von Wilhelm Miiller, Leipzig, 1825. 46 AULD LANG SYNE. mouth, and as lighting his pipe with most offensive: tinder — Stinkschwamm, as Goethe calls it. My mother, when asked by Goethe, "Was fur eine geborene " she was (What had been her maiden name ?), could not resist the temptation, and replied laughing : " Your Excellency ought to scent it ; I I am the granddaughter of Basedow". Happily my I mother was very beautiful, and was pardoned the liberty she had taken. Still, the relations between my father and Goethe always remained rather strained, and all that I find in his album is a me- dallion por,trait of Goethe with the following lines,, dated 7th November, 1825 : — Meinen feyerlich Bewegten Mache Dank und Freude kund ; Das Gefiihl das Sie erregten Schliesst dem Dichter selbst den Mund. He was on much warmer terms with the poets of the Swabian school, Uhland, Schwab, Justinus Ker- ner, etc. In the year before his death, 1827, he. spent some time with them in Wiirtemberg, and in many respects he may be reckoned as belonging ta their school. The verses which Uhland wrote in my father's album have often been quoted as a curious prophecy of his early death. It seems that some conversations which he had with the Seherin of Prevorst* when staying in Justinus Kerner's house near Weinsberg, had filled him and his friends with misgivings. Uhland's lines were : — * See J. Kerner, " Die Seherin von Prevorst," 1829. LITERARV RECOLLECTIONS. 47 Wohl bliihet jedem Jahre Sein Friihling, suss und licht, Auch jener grosse, klare — Getrost, er fehlt dir nicht ; Er ist dir noch beschieden Am Ziele deiner Bahn, Du ahnest ihn hienieden Und droben bricht er an. Zu freundlicher Erinnerung an. L. Uhland. Stuttgart, den 13 Sept., 1827. Justinus Kerner himself also wrote some lines in which he alludes to the apparition of spirits. His rooms, as my mother assured me, were always full of them, and they all seemed on the most familiar terms with the other inmates. Nicht wie Geister, nein ! wie Sterne Kamt ihr freundlich in der Nacht, Ja, so ernst und mild wie Sterne, Hat uns euer Bild gelacht. Oft wenn schweigt der Welt Getiimmel Wird's so treten in den Himmel Den die Lieb uns angefacht. Justinus Kerner und seine Hausfrau, Friedericke. Weinsberg, 7, 15, '27. am Tage euerer nachtlichen Erscheinung. I once came myself in personal contact with Uh- land, the head of the Swabian school of poetry, when he was already an old man. He came to Leipzig when I was a student there, and stayed at the house of Professor Haupt, the famous Latin and German scholar. Uhland was a very shy and retiring man, and had declined every kind of public reception. 48 AULD LANG SYNE. However, the young students would not be gain- sayed, and after assembling in the afternoon to con- sider what should be done to show their respect to the German poet and the liberal German poli- tician, they marched off, some 600 or 800 of them, drew up in front of the house where they knew Uhland was staying, and sang some of Uhland's songs. At last Uhland, a little, old, wrinkled man, appeared at the window, and expected evidently that some one should address him. But no arrange- ments had been made, and no one ventured to speak, fearing that at the same time two or three others might step forward to address the old poet. After waiting a considerable time, the position became so trying that I could bear it no longer ; I stepped forward, and in a few words told Uhland how he was loved by us as a poet, as a scholar, and as a fearless defender of the rights of the people, and how proud we were to have him amongst us. We then waited to hear him speak, but he could not over- come his shyness, and sent a message to ask some of us to come into his room to shake hands with him. Even then he could say but very little, but when he knew that I was the son of his old friend, Wilhelm Muller, he was pleased. To me it was like a vision of a bygone age when I looked the old poet in the eyes, and whenever I hear his song, " Es zogen drei Burschen wohl iiber den Rhein," or when I read his beautiful ballads, I see the silent poet look- ing at me with his kind eyes, unable to use meaning- less words, but simply saying " Thank you ". LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 49 Another poet who was a friend and admirer of my father, and whom I saw likewise like a vision only passing before me, was Heinrich Heine. He was younger than my father (1799- 1856), and evi- dently looked up to him as his master. " I love no lyric poet," he wrote, " excepting Goethe, so much as Wilhelm Miiller." I found a letter of his which deserves to be preserved. Alas ! the whole of my father's library and correspondence was destroyed by fire, and this letter escaped only because my mother, a great admirer of Heine's poems, had preserved it among her own books. Here is the letter, or at least parts of it. The original was sent about the years 1841-43, when I was a student at Leipzig, to Brockhaus' Blatter fur Litterarische Unterhaltung, but the original was never returned to me. It has often been quoted in histories of German literature, and I give the extracts here from Gustav Karpeles' " Heinrich Heine's Auto- biographic," Berlin, 1888, pp. 149, 150: — Hamburg, 7th June, 1826. I am great enough to confess to you openly that my Small Intermezzo metre * possesses not merely accidental similarity with your own accustomed metre, but probably owes its most secret rhythm to your songs — those dear Miiller-songs which I came to know at the very time when I wrote the Intermezzo. At a very *The metre used in his volume of " Tragodien nebst einem lyrischen Intermezzo," Berlin, 1823. I possess a copy of it with Heine's dedication : " Als ein Zeichen seiner Achtung und mit dem besonderen Wunsche, dass der Waldhornist das lyrische Inter- mezzo seiner Aufmerksamkeit wiirdige, tiberreicht dieses Buch der Verfasser ". 4 50 AULD LANG SYNE. early time I let German folk-song exercise its influence upon me. Later on, when I studied at Bonn, August Schlegel opened many metrical secrets to me ; but I believe it was in your songs that I found what I looked for — pure tone and true simplicity. How pure and clear your songs are, and they are all true folk- songs. In my poems, on the contrary, the form only is to a cer- tain extent popular, the thoughts belong to our conventional society. Yes, I am great enough to repeat it distincdy, and you will sooner or later find it proclaimed publicly, that through the study of your seventy-seven poems it became clear to me for the first time how from the forms of our old still existing folk-songs new forms may be deduced which are quite as popular, though one need not imitate the unevennesses and awkwardnesses of the old language. In the second volume of your poems the form seemed to me even purer and more transparently clear. But why say so much about the form ? What I yearn to tell you is that, with the exception of Goethe, there is no lyric poet whom I love as much as you. Another fragment of the same letter occurs on page 195 (951)- Here Heine, referring to his North Sea poems, writes : — The "North Sea" belongs to my last poems, and you can see there what new keys I touch, and on what new lines I move along. Prose receives me in her wide arms, and in the next volume of my " Reisebilder " you will find in prose much that is mad, bitter, offensive, angry, and very polemical. Times are really too bad (1826), and whoever has strength, freedom, and boldness has also- the duty seriously to begin the fight against all that is bad and puffed up, against all that is mediocre, and yet spreads itself out so broad, so intolerably broad. I beg you, keep well disposed to- wards me, never doubt me, and let us grow old together in common striving. I am conceited enough to believe that when we are both gone my name will be named together with yours. Let us therefore hold together in love in this life also. I never came to know Heine. I knew he was in Paris when I was there in 1 846, but he was already in such a state of physical collapse that a friend of LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 51 mine who knew him well, and saw him from time to time, advised me not to go and see him. However, one afternoon as I and my friend were sitting on the Boulevard, near the Rue Richelieu, sipping a cup of coffee, " Look there," he said, " there comes Heine ! " I jumped up to see, my friend stopped him, and told him who I was. It was a sad sight. He was bent down, and dragged himself slowly along, his spare greyish hair was hanging round his emaciated face, there was no light in his eyes. He lifted one of his paralysed eyelids with his hand and looked at me. For a time, like the blue sky breaking from behind grey October clouds, there passed a friendly expres- sion across his face, as if he thought of days long gone by. Then he moved on, mumbling a line from Goethe, in a deep, broken, and yet clear voice, as if appealing for sympathy : - " Das Maulthier sucht im Dustern seinen Weg ". Thus vanished Heine, the most brilliant, spark- ling, witty poet of Germany. I have seen him, that is all I can say, as Saul saw Samuel, and wished he had not seen him. However, we travel far to see the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of Nineveh and Memphis, and the ruins of a mind such as Heine's are certainly as sad and as grand as the crumbling pillars and ruined temples shrouded under the lava of Vesuvius. " Eine schone Welt ist da versunken," I said to myself, and I went home and read in Heine's " Buch der Lieder". " Du bist wie eine Blume," " Ich habe im Traum geweinet," "Ein Tannenbaum steht einsam." "Yes," I said, "snow- 52 AULD LANG SYNE. white lilies spring from muddy ponds, and small mushrooms are said to grow on fresh-fallen snow." Few poets in Germany have been or are still so admired and loved as Heine, but few poets also have been so viciously maligned as Heine. Society, no doubt, had a right to frown on him, but against such calumnies as were heaped on him by envy, hatred, and malice, it is well .to remember some of his last lines : — Hab' eine Jungfrau nie verfiihret Mit Liebeswort, mit Schmeichelei, Ich hab' auch nie ein Weib beriihret, Wusst' ich, dass sie vermahlet sei. Wahrhaftig, wenn es anders ware, Mein Name, er verdiente nicht Zu strahlen in dem Buch der Ehre, Man diirft' mir spucken in's Gesicht. That is strong language and evidently meant as an answer to his spies and enemies. But why will people always spy into the most uninteresting part of a poet's life ? Why are they bent on knowing on what terms Dante stood to Beatrice, Petrarch to Laura, Goethe to Frau von Stein, Heine to George Sand. Volumes have been written on their intimate relations, and yet whom does it concern, and what can it teach us ? Let the dead bury their dead. Whilst at Leipzig as a young student I still imagined myself a poet, and from time to time some of my poems appeared, to my great joy, in the local papers. I even belonged to a poetical society, and I remember at least two of us who in later times became very popular writers in Germany. One was LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 53 a Jew of the name of Wolfsohn, whose play, " Only a Soul," giving the tragedy of a Russian peasant girl, proved a great success all over Germany, and is still acted from time to time. He died young. Another, Theodor Fontane, is alive, and one of the best known and best loved novel-writers of the day. He was a charming character, a man of great gifts, full of high spirits and inexhaustible good humour. He began life in a chemist's shop, and had a very hard struggle in his youth, which may have pre- vented his growing to his full height and strength. He might have been another Heine, but the many years of hard work and hopeless drudgery kept him from soaring as high as his young wings would have carried him. I remember but little of his poetry now, there remains but the sense of pleasure which I derived from it at the time. Now and then, as it happens to all of us, a few long-forgotten lines rise to the surface. In a political poem of his, I remember a young Liberal being warned with the following words : — Sonst spatzierst du nach Siberien In die langen Winterferien, Die zugleich Hundstage sind ! And I have never forgotten the last lines of his beautiful poem, " Die schone Rosamunde," where he says of the King : — Ihn traf des Lebens grosster Schmerz : Der Schmerz urn dieses Leben ! All young poets in Germany were then liberal 54 AULD LANG SYNE. and more than liberal, all dreamt and sang of a united Germany. But being thirty years ahead of Bismarck, they were unmercifully sent to prison, and often their whole career was ruined for life. Living much in that society, I too, a harmless boy i of eighteen, was sent to prison as a person highly dangerous to the peace of Europe. The confine- ment in the academic career was not very severe, however, except in one respect. From time to time one was allowed to go out, provided one kept on good terms with the attendants. But the serious thing was that as one became a popular character all one's friends came to visit one, and they expected of course to be hospitably entertained. The consumption of beer and tobacco was consider- able, and so was the bill at the end of my political incarceration. More of that perhaps by-and-by. Nearly all the political poetry of that time, much as it then stirred the people, is now forgotten ; even the names of the poets are known to but few, though they have found their way into the various histories of German literature. I remember as one of the best, Herwegh, who came to Leipzig when I was a student, and who, of course, was feted by the Burschenschaft at a brilliant supper. Much beer was drunk, much tobacco was smoked, many speeches were made. The police were present, and the names of all who had taken part were entered in the Black Book, mine among the rest. Herwegh was a real poet, unfortunately he spent nearly all his poetical genius on political invective. How well LITERARY RECOLLE(?TIONS. 55 I remember his poem in which every verse ended with the words : — Wir haben lang genug geliebt, Wir wollen endlich hassen ! But there were some poems of his which well deserved a longer life. One began with the words : " Ich mochte hingehen wie das Abendroth ". Very- beautiful, but my memory does not serve me further, and my copy of his poems has vanished from my library like many other volumes which I lent to my friends.* * As many of my unknown friends have come to my assistance and sent me Herwegh's poem I feel bound to give it here in its entirety : — STROPHEN AUS UER FREMDE. Ich mochte hingeh'n wie das Abendroth, Und wie der Tag mit seinen letzten Gluthen — • O ! leichter, sanfter ungefuhlter Tod ! — Mich in den Schoosz des Ewigen verbluten. Ich mochte hingeh'n wie der heitre Stern, In voUstem Glanz in ungeschwachtem Bhnken ; So stille und so schmerzlos mochte gem Ich in des Himmels blaue Tiefen sinken. Ich mochte hingeh'n wie der Blume Duft, Der freudig sich dem schonen Kelch entringet Und auf dem Fittig bliithenschwangrer Luft Als Weichrauch auf des Herrn Altar sich schwinget. Ich mochte hingeh'n wie der Thau im Thai, Wenn durstig ihm des Morgens Feuer winken ; O woUte Gott, wie ihn der Sonnenstrahl, Auch meine lebensmiide Seele trinken ! 56 AULD LANG SYNE. I well remember the pleasure which Herwegh's poems gave me, but the words themselves are gone. It is the same with so many of our recollections. I can still feel the intense delight, the hushed rever- ence with which I looked the first time at Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto, and looked at it again and again whenever I passed through Dresden. But whether the colour of the Virgin's dress is red or blue I cannot tell. I dare say it is all there, in the treasure-house of my memory. Nay, sometimes it suddenly appears, only never when I call for it. What is forgotten, however, does not seem to be entirely forfeited ; it can be gotten again, and it probably forms, though unknown, the fertile soil for new harvests : that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. Another famous political poet whose acquaintance I made when he was an old man was Moritz Arndt. His poetry was not very great, but the effect which he produced by his " Was ist des Deutschen Vater- Ich mochte hingeh'n wie der bange Ton, Der aus den Saiten einer Harfe dringet ; Und, kaum dem irdischen Metall entfloh'n, Ein Wohllaut, in des Schopfers Briist verklinget. Du wirst nicht hingeh'n wie das Abendroth, Du wirst nicht stiHe, wie der Stern, versinken, Du stirbst nicht einer Blume leichten Tod, Kein Morgenstrahl wird deine Seele trinken. Wohl wirst du hingeh'n, hingeh'n ohne Spur, Doch wird das Elend deine kraft erst schwachen, Sanft stirbt es einzig sich in der Natur, Das arme Menschenherz muss stiickweis brechen. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 57 land " has been, and is still, perfectly marvellous. If Bismarck finished the unity of Germany, Arndt laid the foundation of it, and in the grateful memory of the people his song will probably be remembered long after Bismarck's diplomatic triumphs have been forgotten. I shall never forget old Arndt, for, old as he was, he gave me such a grip of the hand that I thought the blood would squirt from my nails. Lesser poets and writers whom I knew at that time, while I was a student at Leipzig, were Karl Beck, of Hungarian extraction, Robert Blum {fusilld at Vienna by Windischgratz, 9th November, 1848), Herlossohn, Kiihne, Laube, and several more whose names I could find in Histories of German Litera- ture, or the Conversations- Lexicon, but no longer in the camera obscura of my memory. And yet some of their poems were really beautiful, full of high thoughts and deep feeling. But the world does not recognise a poet of one poem, or even of ten or twenty. In order to be a poet a man must , produce hundreds of poems, volume after volume, good, bad, and indifferent. Nor is there here any- thing like the survival of the fittest. Although ever so many of Schiller's or Goethe's poems have become old and antiquated-^few will deny this — yet no one is satisfied with a selection of the best, few people would ever agree as to which are the best. We must take them all or none. In that respect the ancient poets are certainly much better off. What is left of Tyrtaeos or Sappho, or of Horace and 58 AULD LANG SYNE. Catullus, can be carried in our waistcoat pocket, nay, in the folds of our brains ; and though even here sifting might increase enjoyment, yet we can take in whatever there is without sinking under the burden. But who can remember Goethe or Words- worth or Victor Hugo, aye, who has time even to read all their verses, so as to mark, learn, and in- wardly digest them ? In towns like Paris' and London, if a poet once succeeds in attracting attention, and gathering some male and female admirers around him, the very atmosphere which he breathes, the wide survey of humanity which he commands, strengthen and in- spire him. No one becomes an Alpine climber who has no Alps to climb, and many a poetical soul languishes and withers if confined within the walls of a small provincial town. I have known very ordinary mortals who when they came to write for a great and influential newspaper became inspired like the prophetess on the Delphic tripod, and wrote well, while their ordinary writings remain feeble. I have known poets in small provincial towns who became changed after they had changed their provincial public for the public of a large capital. I remember a dear cousin of mine at Dessau, Adolf von Basedow, who was my playfellow when we were children, and remained my true friend all through life. He had a quite exceptional gift for occasional poetry, and later in life he wrote many things without ever being able to find a proper publisher. Some of his plays were acted and proved successful on neighbouring stages. LITERARY RECOLLKCTIONS. 59 'ibut he never received that response which inspires :and nerves a poet for higher efforts. He was very modest, nay, almost shy, and in these days humihty, Ihowever charming in the man, is not Hkely to open the road to success. Now that he is gone, there are .all his poetical productions laid aside and soon to •be forgotten, while some of the poetry we are' asked ;to admire in these days is far inferior to those fallen "leaves. He was an officer and went through the whole of the Franco-German war, having, like so many others, to leave his wife and children at home. He returned home safe, but his health had suffered, and he never was himself again. I have seldom known a more high-minded and truly chivalrous ■character, content with the small surroundings in which he had to move, but never making the .smallest concession to expediency or meanness. He was proud of his name, and whatever we may think | •of the small nobility in Germany, their manly pride keeps up a standard of honour without which the I •country would not be what it is. We may laugh at their courts of honour and their duels, arising often , from very trifling causes, but in our age of self- :seeking and pushing we want some true knights as ( the salt of the earth. While I was at the University at Leipzig I well iremember meeting Robert Blum in literary circles. He certainly was not a poet, but when required he •could speak very powerfully and wield his pen with great effect. Never shall I forget the horror I felt ■when I heard of his execution at Vienna. No doubt 60 AULD LANG SYNE. there was danger when the mob broke into the Kaiserburg, shouting and yelling, and when Prince Metternich said to the Emperor, who had asked him what this hideous noise could mean, " Sire, c'estque Messieurs les ddmocrates appellent la voix de Dieu ". But for all that, to shoot a member of the German Parliament then sitting at Frankfurt was an outrage for which Austria has had to pay dearly. Still more cruel was the execution at the same time of a little helpless Jew, Jellineck, whom I had known as belonging to a small class reading Arabic with Professor Fleischer at Leipzig. Robert Blum may have been a dangerous man in the then state of German political excitement, but Jellineck was nothing but a perfectly harmless scholar, and if he was found guilty by a court-martial, it could only have been because he could never express himself intelligibly. If he had been killed in the streets of Vienna like many others, all one could have said would have been, " Qu'allait-il faire dans cette galere?" but to shoot a harmless student after a short court-martial was no better than lynching.. There has been a Nemesis for all that, as Austria- knows too well, and what would the world be without that invisible Nemesis ? With every year my own work became more and more prosaic, and yet more and more absorbing. Neither at Berlin nor afterwards at Paris, had I time or inclination to make new friends or cultivate literary society. Berlin never was rich in poets or- poetry ; Paris also, when I was there in 1844, and LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 6 1 again in 1847 and 1848, had no names to attract me. Lamartine had some fascination for me, and I man- aged to see him and hear much about him from a common friend, Baron von Eckstein. This German Baron was a well-known character in Paris between 1840 and 1850, a German settled there for many years, a Roman Catholic, much mixed up, I believe, in small political transactions, and a constant con- tributor to the Augsburger Zeitung, at that time the Times of Germany. He was a man of wide interests, a student of Sanskrit, chiefly attracted by the mystic philosophy of the Upanishads and the Vedinta. When he heard of my having come to Paris to attend Burnoufs lectures and to prepare the first edition of the " Rig-veda," he toiled up to my rooms, though they were au cinquieme and he was an old man and a martyr to gout. He was full of enthusiasm, and full of kindness for a poor student. I was very poor , ihen ; I hardly know now how I managed to keep myself afloat, yet I never borrowed and never owed a penny to anybody. I disliked giving lessons, but J worked like a horse for others, copying and col- lating manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Royale. I lived, like a Hindu Sannyasin, but, as Heine said, Und ich hab' es doch ertragen — Aber fragt mich nur nicht wie. Baron Eckstein's eyes were too weak to allow .him to copy and collate Sanskrit manuscripts, and I gladly did it for him. I recollect copying for him, among other texts, the whole of the Aitareya Bx:^h.ma.na. in Latin letters. I still possess a copy of 62 AULD LANG SYNE. it. He paid me liberally, and he often invited me tc lunch with him at his cap, which was welcome to a young man of good appetite, who had to be satis- fied with wretched dinners at the Palais Royal, but not at Vdfour's or the Trois Freres Proven^aux. Being the Paris correspondent of the leading German paper, the Baron was on friendly terms with many of the political and literary celebrities of the time. I believe he was in receipt of a literary pension from the French Government, but I do not know it for certain. He offered to introduce me to George Sand, to Lamennais, to the Comtesse d'Agout (Daniel Stern), to Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others. But I shut my eyes and shook my head ; I had no time then for anything but the Veda, and getting ready for the great battle of life that was before me. I am sorry for it now, but, without self-denial, we can never do anything. When the February revolution came, Baron d'Eckstein was very active. His friend Lamartine was then in the ascendant, and through hini he knew all that was going on. No revolution, I be- '. lieve, was ever made with so little preparation. There was no conspiracy of any kind. A night or two before the contemplated banquet to Ledru Rollin, Lamartine was asked by his friends, Eck- stein being present, whether he would accept office under the Duchesse d'Orl^ans, provided she was proclaimed Regent in the Chamber. He laughed as if it were an idle dream, outside the sphere of practical politics, as we now say, but he accepted. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 63 The Duchesse and her friends counted on him, and his prestige at that time was so great that he might have carried anything. But no one knows his own prestige, and when the moment came, when the Duchesse d'Orldans was present in the Chamber and Lamartine was expected to speak, there was confusion and fright ; some shots had been fired in the Assembly, the name of the Republic had been shouted, the Deputies broke up, and the Duchesse had to fly. Never was kingdom lost with so little excuse. I saw the whole so-called revolution from my windows at the corner of the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de la Madeleine. I may have to describe what I saw at some other time. At present I am thinking of the poet-statesman only, of Lamartine and his brilliant speech from the balcony of the H6tel de Ville. Whatever Lamartine was, a poet, a dreamer, an aristocrat, he had the spirit of noblesse in him, and that spirit prevailed at the time. It was due to him, I believe, that capital ' punishment was then abolished once for all for political offences. Sinister elements cameto the surface, but they had soon to hide again. 1 remember another speaker at the Hdtel de Ville, speaking after Lamartine in support of the abolition of every kind of title and privilege, and, before all, for the abolition of the nobility. He was eloquent, he was furious, and after he had summed up all the crimes committed by the French nobility and laughed at those who had grown rich and powerful by the misdeeds of their noble ancestors, 64 AULD LANG SYNE. he finished up in a loud voice, " Soyons ancetres nous-memes," a sentiment loudly applauded by the unwashed multitudes who aspired to take the place of the ancetres whom they had just heard exe- crated from the balcony of their terrible H6tel de Ville. All the walls in the streets where I lived were then chalked with the mysterious words, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Not far from my house there was a tobacconist's shop, called Aux trois blagues, with three tobacco pouches painted over the window. My friend, the tobacconist, was an aristo, so he left the trois blagues and simply wrote underneath, Liberti, Egalite, Fraternity. But I must not forget another poet, the greatest German poet I have ever known, and of whom I saw a great deal at Berlin before I migrated to Paris, I mean Riickert. It is strange how little his poems are known in England and France. He has never had an apostle, nor would a mere herald do him much service. He was a poet somewhat like Wordsworth, who must be laid siege to, not till he surrenders, but till we surrender to him. If he is known at all in England, it is through his lyric poems, which have been set to music, as they de- served to be, by Schumann. Who has not heard " Du, meine Seele, du, mein Herz," one of the grandest songs of our age ? But, alas ! either the words are murdered in a translation which would break the heart both of the poet and the composer, or the German words are often pronounced so badly LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 65 that no one can tell whether they are English or German or Sanskrit. Riickert was one of the richest poets. There is hardly a branch of poetry which he has not cultivated. I say cultivated on purpose, for his poetry was always a work of art, sometimes almost of artifice. He was not equally successful in all his poetical compositions : particularly towards the end of his life he disappointed many of his admirers by his dramatic attempts. He is like Wordsworth in this respect also, that one cannot enjoy all he writes, yet in the end one comes to enjoy much that has been put aside at first, because it comes from him. I may be prejudiced, yet a poet whose verses Goethe repeated on his deathbed is not likely to be overrated by me. These are the verses which, we are told, Goethe murmured before he exclaimed, " More light, more light !" and passed away : — UM MITTERNACHT. Um Mitternacht Hab' ich gewacht Und aufgeblickt zum Himmel, Kein Stern am Sterngewimmel Hat mir gelacht Um Mitternacht. Um Mitternacht Hab' ich gedacht Hinaus in dunkle Schranken ; Es hat kein Lichtgedanken Mir Trost gebracht Um Mitternacht. 5 66 AULD LANG SYNE. Um Mitternacht Nahm ich in Acht Die Schlage meines Herzens ; Ein einz'ger Puis des Schmerzens War angefacht Um Mitternacht. Um Mitternacht Kampft' ich die Schlacht O Menschheit, deiner Leiden ; Nicht konnt' ich sie entscheiden Mit meiner Macht Um Mitternacht. Um Mitternacht Hab' ich die Macht In deine Hand gegeben : Herr uber Tod und Leben, Du haltst die Wacht Um Mitternacht. If I had a strong personal liking for Riickert it might be excused. He was really an Eastern poet, rich in colour, but equally rich in thought. The first poems of his I knew in my youth were his " Oestliche Rosen ". My father reviewed them Vermischte Schriften, vol. v., p. 290). He declared he might have judged them by one letter, the letter K, which in Roman times meant condemnation, but which in Riickert's case would give to his " Oest- liche Rosen " their right title of " K-ostliche Rosen ". One of Riickert's greatest works, a real treasury of meditative thought and mature wisdom, was his " Weisheit des Brahmanen," and this also appealed, no doubt, strongly to my own personal tastes. His translations of Oriental poetry, Sanskrit, Persian, LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 67 Arabic, are perfect masterpieces. They often take away one's breath by the extraordinary faithfulness and marvellous reproduction in German of plays on words and jingle of rhymes that seemed to be pos- sible once, and once only, whether in Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit. I may have been influenced by all this, and still more by my personal regard for the poet, but for all that I should strongly advise all who care for poetry, and for German poetry, to judge for themselves, and not to be disheartened if they do not strike gold on the first pages they open. To know Riickert personally was a treat. I had heard much about him before I made his acquaint- ance, when I was a student at Berlin. The Duchess of Anhalt-Dessau, my own peculiar duchess, had in her youth been much admired by the Crown Prince of Prussia, afterwards Frederick William IV- She was herself a Prussian princess, a daughter of Prince Frederick Ludwig Karl of Prussia, who died 1796, and of a Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who after the death of her husband married the Duke of Cumberland, and became Queen of Hanover. This princess, a lady of great natural gifts, highly cultivated and well read, was personally acquainted with some of the most distinguished men in Germany. Even in the narrow sphere in which she had learnt to move and act in Dessau, she did much good in trying to discover young men 01 talent, and assisting them in their studies. She had always been very gracious to me, and even as a boy I was often invited to play with her a quatre 68 AULD LANG SYNE. mains at the Castle. I saw her for the last time after I had begun my Oriental studies at Leipzig, and before I went to Berlin. She told me then that she herself had known a little Sanskrit, that she and the young Crown Prince of Prussia had learnt the Sanskrit alphabet, and had corresponded in it, to the great annoyance of people who opened or read all letters that were not meant for them. " When you go to Berlin," she said, " you must see Riickert, but do not be frightened. I was myself most anxious to see him. The King invited him to dinner, together with a number of his illustrious , mdnagerie. I asked the King where Riickert was sitting, the poet of ' Frauenliebe ' and ' Liebesfriih- ling '. ' Look there,' the King said. ' That broad- shouldered boor with his elbows on the table, eating a hunk of bread, that is your poet ! ' And a ddsil- lusionnement it was," she said. " Still, I was proud to have seen him and to have talked to him." So ' I was prepared. Frederick William IV. had tried hard to attract a number of the most eminent men in Germany to Berlin. Berlin by itself is not attractive, and it seemed as if the men who were then best known in Germany had chosen the South, rather than the North, for their residence. The Brothers Grimm, Schelling, Cornelius and many more were tempted to Berlin by large salaries, and among them was Riickert also, not so much the Oriental scholar as the poet. He went to Berlin, after long hesitation and misgivings, and announced lectures on Arabic, LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 6g Persian, and other Oriental languages. But he could not brook the restraints of ofificial life. He had a little Landgut, Neusess, near Coburg, and thither he felt so strongly drawn during the summer that he soon appealed to the Minister of Public Instruction for leave of absence during each sum- mer. This was most graciously granted by the King, but soon after followed a petition for leave of absence during a particularly severe winter. This too was granted, though the Minister ventured to say : " But, my dear Professor, if you are always absent during the summer semester, and now ask for leave of absence during the winter semester also, when do you mean to lecture ? " Nor was this all. When I called on the Professor to enter my name for his lectures on the " Gulistan," a Persian poem, he received me very coldly. He was indeed the broad-shouldered giant whom the Duchess had described to me. He wore a long dressing-gown, and his hair, parted in the middle, was hanging wildly about his temples. " Why do you want to learn Persian ? " he said. I humbly explained my reason. " It is no use your learning Persian," he continued, " if you do not know Arabic." To this I was able to reply that I had studied Arabic for a year under Professor Fleischer at Leipzig. However, the Professor was not to be foiled. He wanted to get away to Neusess, but at the same time to be able to satisfy the Minister that he had done his duty in offering to lecture. " You know," he said, " tres faciunt collegium. I cannot 70 AULD LANG SYNE. lecture for one." This was unanswerable, according to German academical etiquette. So I bowed, and went into the highways and hedges to secure the help of two commilitones. Accompanied by them, I invaded the Professor once more in his den. All three of us told him that we were most anxious to learn Persian. One of them actually did wish to learn Persian, and became afterwards a very distinguished scholar. He was then called Paul Botticher, but he is best known by his later name, Paul de Lagarde, a man of extraordinary power of work and an enormous accumulation of knowledge. When Riickert saw there was no escape, he yielded, at first not with a very good grace ; but he soon became most delightful. We were really working together, and when he found out that I was the son of his old friend Wilhelm Miiller, nothing could exceed his kindness to me. At first he often confessed to his pupils that he had forgotten his Persian, but with every week it seemed to come back to him. Nothing more was said about Neusess, and the fields and meadows and woods that he had to desert for our sakes. Whatever may have been said about Riickert as a professor, he was more useful in his informal teaching than many learned professors who year after year read their lectures to large admiring audiences. " I cannot teach you Persian," he used to say, " I can only tell you and show you how to learn it. I learnt everything I know by myself, and so can you. We will work together, but that is all I can do." It LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 7 1 was astounding to see how this giant had worked, all by himself. No one at that time thought, for in- stance, of studying Tamil. He showed me a copy of a complete Tamil, or was it Telugu, dictionary in folio, which he had copied and largely added to. He had studied Chinese too. He was far advanced in Sanskrit and Zend, and in Arabic and Persian he had probably read more, though in his own way, than many a learned professor. Such an honest student as Ruckert was could do more good to his pupils in one hour than others by a whole semester of lectur- ing. And this, is the secret of the success of German professors. They take their pupils into their work- shops, they do not keep them standing and gaping at the show window. Thus the immense advantage which English universities enjoy in being able to combine professorial with tutorial teaching, is made up for to a certain extent by the devotion of the German professors, who give up their time in their seminaries and so-called societies for the benefit of students who want to learn how to work, and do not wish to be simply crammed for examinations. They make friends of their pupils, their pupils are proud to do much of the drudgery work for them, while they remain for life their grateful pupils and afterwards their loyal colleagues. After term was over, there was, ,of course, no holding Ruckert in Berlin, but he invited me to see him at Neusess, which a few years afterwards I did. There I found the old man working in his farm- yard like a real peasant, pitchforking manure into 72 AULD LANG SYNE. his cart, and carting it off to the fields. He was delighted to see me, and when he had washed his hands he came into his study to shake hands, and to talk about the work on which I was then engaged. Riickert was a scholar with whom one could discuss any question quite freely. Even if one had to differ from him, he was never offended by contradiction. When we could not agree he used to say : " We will leave this for the present, and discuss it another time". He told me, among other things, how my father had saved his life. The two young men were travelling together on foot in Italy. Italy was at that time, in the begin- ning of the century, the cynosure of every German student, and of every German poet. Goethe had described it, and they all wanted to folloV in Goethe's footsteps, and pass their " Wanderjahre " in the " Land wo die Citronen bliihn ! " How they did it with a few thalers in their pockets we can hardly understand, but it was done. Riickert and my father were travelling on foot, and they had often to sleep in the poorest osterias. In these wretched hovels they got more than they had bargained for, and one fine morning, after getting out into the fresh air, they saw a lake, and my father jumped in to have a bath. Riickert could not resist, and followed. But he could not swim, the lake was deeper than he had thought, and he was on the point of drowning when my father swam towards him and rescued him. " I wrote my first epic poem then, in the style of Camoens," LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. "Jl said Riickert, with a loud chuckle, " and I called it the 'Lousiade,' but it has never been published." After this visit I lost sight of Riickert, as of many of my German friends. But I still possess the tnanuscript of a metrical and rhymed version of the Sanskrit poem the " Meghaduta, the Cloud Mes- senger," which I made and afterwards published (in 1847), and which contains a number of corrections and suggestions made by Riickert in pencil. " I translated it myself," he said to me, " but I shall not publish my translation now." During my stay in Paris, as I remarked, there was no time for poets or poetry. I had to sit up night after night to copy and collate Sanskrit MSS., and I shall never forget how often I screwed down my green-shaded lamp in the morning and saw the sun slowly rising over the Boulevard, and lighting up the arch of the Porte St. Martin. I lived au ^inquume in a corner house of the Boulevard de la Madeleine, in a house which exists no longer, or at all events has been very much changed, so that on my last visit I could not find my windows again. 74 LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. II. When I had settled in England in 1847, my literary acquaintances began afresh. I have had the good fortune of being on more or less intimate terms with such poets as Kingsley, Clough, Matthew- Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, and with poets in prose such as Froude, Ruskin, Carlyle, and I may^ add, in spite of the Atlantic, Emerson, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I knew other writers, such as Macaulay, Arthur Helps, Arthur Stanley,. Frederick Maurice, Dr. Martineau ; I may add even, the names of Faraday, Lyall, Sedgwick, Thirlwall,. Grote, Whewell, Richard Owen, Darwin, Huxley,, among my personal acquaintances or friends. Kingsley was married to one of my wife's aunts. She was one of six most remarkable sisters, all. married except the eldest and, I believe, the most gifted, who had devoted her life to the educatioa of her younger sisters. Besides Charles Kingsley, the husbands of the other sisters were Froude, the historian ; Lord Wolverton, of high standing in the-, financial world as the head of the house of Glyn, and the valued adviser of Mr. Gladstone in his. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 75 earlier financial reforms ; R. Mertyns Bird, an il- lustrious name in the history of India as the organiser of the North-Western Provinces ; and " S. G. O.". How soon popularity vanishes ! There was a time when everybody knew and spoke of " S. G. O.". He was Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an influential writer on political and social subjects, a frequent contributor to 'i e Times during the Crimean War, a man of great force and independ- ence of character. He was a giant in stature, and extremely attractive by his varied knowledge in different branches of physical science. He was a well-known microscopist, and when it was wanted, a doctor, a nurse, a surgeon, a dentist. However, he was not a poet, like his two brothers-in-law. He was an active clergyman, a sanitary reformer, a ready helper wherever poor people were ready to be helped. These five men, the husbands of five remarkable sisters — of whom one, Mrs. Bird, is still living at the age of ninety-six (she died this year), and not only living, but alive to all that is interesting in the world, and full of good works — represented a power in England. " S. G. O." moved in a sphere of his own, and seldom came to Oxford. But Kingsley and Froude soon became my intimate friends. If I call Froude a poet it is because, as I explained before, I do not consider rhyme as essential to poetry. But for really poetical power, for power of description, of making the facts of history alive, of laying bare the deepest thoughts of men and the most mysterious feelings of women, there was no 76 AULD LANG SYNE. poet or historian of our age who came near him. I knew him through all his phases. I knew him first when he was still a fellow of Exeter College. I was at that time often with him in his rooms in High Street, opposite to St. Mary's Church, when he was busy writing novels, and I well remember passing an evening with him and trying to find the right name for a novel which afterwards appeared under the tide of " Nemesis of Faith ". I saw him almost daily while his persecution at Oxford was going on, gaining strength every day. He had to give up his fellowship, on which he chiefly depended. I will not repeat the old story that his novel was publicly burnt in the quadrangle of Exeter College. The story is interesting as showing how quickly a myth can spring up even in our own life-time, if only there is some likelihood in it, and something that pleases the popular taste. What really happened was, as I was informed at the time by Froude himself, no more than that one of the tutors (Dr. Sewell) spoke about the book at the end of one of his College Lectures. He warned the young men against the book, and asked whether anybody had read it. One of the undergraduates produced a copy which belonged to him. Dr. Sewell continued his sermonette, and warming with his subject, he finished by throwing the book, which did not belong to him, into the fire, at the same time stirring the coals to make them burn. Of what followed there are two versions. Dr. Sewell, when he had finished, asked his class, " Now, what have I done ? ", " You have burned LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. "JJ my copy," the owner of the book said in a sad voice, " and I shall have to buy a new one." The other version of the reply was, " You have stirred the fire, sir ". And so it was. A book which at present would call forth no remark, no controversy, was discussed in all the newspapers, and raised a storm all over England. Bishops shook their heads, nay even their fists, at the young heretic, and even those among his contemporaries at Oxford who ought to have sympathised with him, and were in fact quite as unorthodox as he was, did not dare to stand up for him or lend him a helping hand. Stanley alone never said an unkind word of him. The worst was that Froude not only lost his fellowship, but when he had accepted the Headmastership of a college far away in Tasmania, his antagonists did not rest till his appointment had been cancelled. Froude unfortunately was poor, and his father, a venerable and well-to-do Archdeacon, was so displeased with his son that he stopped the allowance which he had formerly made him. It seems almost as if the poverty of a victim gave increased zest and enjoy- ment to his pursuers. Froude had to sell his books one by one, and was trying hard to support himself by his pen. This was then not so easy a matter as it is now. At that very time, however, I received a cheque for ;^200 from an unknown hand, with a request that I would hand it to Froude to show him that he had friends and sympathisers who would not forsake him. It was not till many years later that 78 AULD LANG SYNE. I discovered the donor, and Froude was then able to return him the money which at the time had saved him from drowning. I should Hke to mention the name, but that kind friend in need is no longer among the living, and I have a feeling that even now he would wish his name to remain unknown. This is by no means the only instance of true English generosity which I have witnessed. But at the time I confess that I was surprised, for I did not yet know how much of secret goodness, how much of secret strength there is in England, how much of that real , public spirit, of that chivalrous readiness to do good and to resist evil without lifting the vizor. Froude had a hard struggle before him, and, being a very sensitive man, he suffered very keenly. Several times I remember when I was walking with him and friends or acquaintances of his were passing by without noticing him, he turned to me and said : " That was another cut ". I hardly understood then what he meant, but I felt that he meant not only that he had been dropped by his friends, but that he felt cut to the quick. Persecution, however, did not dishearten him ; on the contrary, it called forth his energies, and the numerous essays from his pen, now collected under the title " Short Studies on Great Subjects," show how he worked, how he thought, how he followed the course that seemed right to him without looking either right or left. Bunsen, who was at the time the Prussian Minister in London, and had heard from me about Froude, took a deep interest in him, and after consulting LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 79 with Archdeacon Hare and Frederick Maurice, suggested that he should spend a few years at a German university. I was asked to bring my young friend to Carlton Terrace, where Bunsen received him with the truest kindness. What he tried to impress on him was that the questions which dis- turbed him required first of all a historical treatment, .and that before we attempt to solve difficulties we should always try to learn how they arose. Froude was on the point of going to Germany with the assistance of some of Bunsen's friends when other prospects opened to him in England. But frequently in later life he referred to his interview with Bunsen and said, " I never knew before what it meant that a man could drive out devils ". I confess I was somewhat surprised when Froude suddenly told me of his plan of writing a History of England, beginning with Henry VOL My idea ■of a historian was that of a professor who had read and amassed materials during half his life, and at ithe end produced a ponderous book, half text, half notes. But, hazardous as the idea of writing a History of England seemed to me for so young a man, I soon perceived that Froude had a*i object in •writing, and he certainly set to work with wonderful perseverance. Few of his critics havegiven him credit for what he did at Simancas and at the Record Office in., London. I have seen him at work, morning and •evening, among piles of notes and extracts. I know how the pages which are such pleasant light reading were written again and again till he was satisfied. 8o AULD LANG SYNE. Often I had to confess to him that I never copied what I had once written, and he was outspoken enough to tell me, "But you ought ; and you will never write good English if you don't ". He learnt Spanish, French, and German, so as to be able to read new and old books in these languages. He always kept up his classical reading, and translated, as far as I remember, several Greek texts from beginning to end. To these he afterwards referred, and quoted from them, without always, as he ought, going back again to the original Greek. It is not for me to say that he did not make mistakes, and that he was not weak in some branches of historical knowledge. I cannot deny that in his translations also there are mistakes, arising from haste rather than from ignorance. But who has ever examined any translation from any language, without finding signs of what seems carelessness or ignorance? Four eyes see more than two. We have translations of Plato and Aristotle in Latin and in almost every language of Europe. The text has been critically examined for hundreds of years, and every difficult passage has been explained again and again. But is there any one translation which could be called immaculate ? Was not even the last translation of Plato which is so deservedly popular, characterised by the late Rector of Lincoln, in the well-known words of a French writer, as tres- belle, mais pen fide le ? Now, while the true scholar, when examining a new translation, rejoices over every new happy rendering, the ill-natured critic,, LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. gl particularly if he wants to display his own superior knowledge, can easily pick out a number of passages where a mistake has been made, or where he thinks that a mistake has been made, and then proceed to show that the very best Greek scholar of the day does not know "what every schoolboy ought to know," etc. There are many passages in Greek and other authors that admit of more than one trans- lation. If the translator adopts one and rejects another, the game of the critic is easy enough : he has only to adopt the rejected rendering, and his triumph is secured. If that is so in Greek, how much more is it the case in translating passages from faded documents written in antiquated Spanish, nay, even letters of Erasmus written in his peculiar Latin, or statutes in Norman-French. Translation is a difficult art, and scholars, particu- larly those who know the language from which, or the language into which, they translate as well as their own, consider a good translation almost im- possible. I have had some experience in translat- ing, and I know something of the treatment which translators may expect from conceited critics. The Sacred Books of the East, translated by myself and a number of friends, the best scholars I could find, have not escaped that kind of pedantic criticism. Impartial and honest critics have recognised the difficulties under which scholars labour in translating, often for the first time, ancient texts, whether Greek or Sanskrit. It is easy enough to translate a text, after it has once been translated ; it is easy even to 82 AULD LANG SYNE. improve in a few places on the translations of the first pioneers. But to translate for the first time an ancient text, badly edited or not yet edited at all, is a totally different thing, and those who undertake it have a right not only to the indulgence, but to the gratitude of all who come after them. No one in our sphere of studies would call himself a scholar who has not edited a text never edited before, or at least translated a text that never was translated before. There are some critics who think they have done their duty if they can discover a few flaws in a translation, though they cannot even appreciate the labours and the brilliant though silent dis- coveries of a first translator. The work that has to be done by a first translator of an ancient text is often the work of a real decipherer. He has to grope his way through Egyptian darkness like the first interpreter of an Egyptian or Babylonian inscription. He cannot help making mistakes. But though we know now how often even a ChampoUion (died 1832) was mistaken, do we not feel ashamed if we read what another most eminent Egyptologist and Coptic scholar, Amadeo Peyron (died 1870), the head of the Egyptian Museum at Turin, said of ChampoUion ? " I have known ChampoUion," he said, " the so-called decipherer of hieroglyphics, very well, from his first visits to our Museum. I took him for an ordinary swindler, and his publications have after- wards confirmed me in my views. His philological labours have remained to me unsolved riddles."* * See Brugsch, " Mein Leben," p. 104. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 83 I have lately had another experience. I had to revise my translation of Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason," and I was surprised to see how many passages there were which I had to alter, not because I did not know either German or English but because in many places a translation can only be approximately faithful ; and it is only a happy thought that enables us now and then to approach nearer to the German original, though in that case often at the expense of the English idiom. In the case of Froude, we must remember that, whatever he wrote, he had to meet not a single critic only, but a whole army. As far as one could see, a kind of association had been formed for the suppression of his " History ". Those who were be- hind the scenes, know how certain of his rivals and enemies actually banded themselves together, as if against a common enemy. Now, I remember seeing in Fraset^s Magazine, then edited by Froude, a review of Green's " History of the English People," with pages and pages of mistakes in names, in dates, in facts. Yet, the same writers who delighted in picking holes in Froude's " History" from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, kept up a constant chorus of applause for Green's " History of the English People" — no doubt rightly so ; but why not mete the same measure to others also ? One of his reviewers openly confessed that if he took the trouble of reading a book carefully, he could not afford to review it in one paper only. 84 AULD LANG SYNE. he had to write at least five or six articles to make it pay. This ^pov8oovia, as it was called, went on year after year, but, strange to say, Froude's work was not killed by it ; on the contrary, it became more and more popular. In fact, together with his other works, it enabled him to live independently and even comfortably by his pen. Things have come to such a pass that, if we may trust the experience of publishers, nothing sells so well as a well-abused book, while laudatory notices seem to produce little or no effect. The public, it seems, has grown too wise. Even such powerful adjectives as epoch-making i^Epoche-machend), monumental and ev&n. pyramidal, fall flat. Epoche-machend has too often been found out to mean no more than Poche-machend [Pocke in German means claque), and monumental has once or twice proved a misprint for momental or momen- tary. Few scholars would agree with M. Le Bon that "works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination, as fanciful accounts of ill- observed facts ". This is a French exaggeration. But neither are books of history meant to be mere chronicles. History is surely meant to teach not only facts, but lessons also ; and, though historians may say that facts ought to speak for themselves, they will not speak without a vates sacer. I am the last man to stand up for an unscholarlike treatment of history, or of anything else. But as I do not call a man a scholar who simply copies and collates MSS., makes indices or collects errata, I doubt whether mere Quellenstudium will make a historian. Quellen- LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 85 studium is a sine qud non, but it is not everything ; f and whereas the number of those who can ransack archives and Hbraries is large, the world has not been rich in real historians whom it is a delight to . listen to, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and i Tacitus, Montesquieu, Gibbon, and, may we not add, Macaulay and Froude ? None of these historians, not even Gibbon, has escaped criticism, but how poor should we be without them ! Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was writing his " History of the World" in the Tower of London, overheard two boys quarrelling over the facts of an incident that had happened the day before ; and he said to himself: "If these two boys cannot agree on an event which occurred almost before their own eyes, how can any one be profited by the narration which I am writing, of events which occurred in ages long past ? " The answer which the critical historian would give to Raleigh would probably be : " Go and examine the two boys ; find out their home, their relations, their circumstances, particu- larly the opportunities they had of seeing what they profess to have seen ; and try to discover whether there was any bias in their minds that could have made them incline towards one side rather than the other. Give all that evidence, and then you are a real historian." But is that true, and were any of the great historians satisfied with that ? Was not their heart in their work, and is the heart ever far from what we call bias } Did not Herodotus, in describing the conflict between Greece and Asia, 86 AULD LANG SYNE. clearly espouse the cause of Greece ? I know he has been called the father of lies rather than of history ; but he has survived for all that. Did not Thucydides throughout his history write as the loyal son of Athens ? Was Tacitus very anxious to find out all that could be said in favour of Tiberius } Was even Gibbon, in his " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," quite impartial ? Ranke's " History of the Popes " may be very accurate, but for thou- sands who read Macaulay and Froude is there one who reads Ranke, except the historian by profession } History is not written for historians only. Mac- aulay wrote the history of the English Restoration as a partisan, and Froude made no secret on which side he would have fought, if he had lived through the storms of the English Reformation. If Mac- aulay had been one of the two boys of Sir Walter Raleigh, he would probably not have discovered some of the dark shadows on the face of William HI. which struck the other boy ; while some critics might possibly say of Froude that in drawing the picture of Henry VHI. he may have followed now and then the example of Nelson in the use of his telescope. Still, in describing such recent periods as the reign of Henry VHI., historians cannot, at all events, go very far wrong in dates or names. Froude may have been wrong in embracing the cause of Henry VIII. and accepting all the excuses or explanations which could be given for his violent acts. But Froude is, at all events, honest, in so far that no one can fail to see where his sympathies LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 87 lie, SO that he really leaves us free to decide what side we ourselves should take. When the historian has to analyse prominent characters, and bring them again full of life on the stage of history, is it not the artist, nay the poet, who has to do the chief work, and not the mere chronicler ? In Froude's case the difficulty was very great. The contemporary estimates of Henry's character were most conflicting, and without taking a line of his own, without claiming in fact the same privilege which Henry's contemporaries claimed, whether friends or foes, it would have been im- possible for him to create a character that should be consistent and intelligible. There was nothing too fiendish to be told of the English king by the Papal party, and yet we cannot help asking how such a caitiff, as he is represented to have been by Roman Catholic agents, could have retained the love of the English people and secured the services of some of the best among the noblemen and gentle- men of his time ? If we take upon ourselves to reject all reports of Royal Commissioners in Henry's reign as corrupt and mendacious, would it be worth while to write any history of the English people at all ? It is, no doubt, an ungrateful task to white- wash a historical character that has been besmirched for years by a resolute party. Yet it has to be done from time to time, from a sense of justice, and not from a mere spirit of opposition. Carlyle's heroes were nearly all the best-abused men in Christendom : Frederick the Great, Cromwell, and 88 AULD LANG SYNE. Goethe. Every one of these characters was lying, as Carlyle said himself, under infinite dung ; yet every one of them is now admired by thousands, because they trust in Carlyle. It was the same Carlyle who encouraged Froude in his work of rehabilitating Bluff King Hal, and we ought, at all events, to be grateful to him for having enabled us to know all that can be said by the king's advocates. If Froude wrote as a partisan, he wrote, at the same time, as a patriot, and if a patriot sees but one side of the truth, some one else will see the other. Can we imagine any history of our own times written from the pole star, and not from amid the turmoil of contending parties ? Would a history of the reign of Queen Victoria, written by Gladstone, be very like a history written by Disraeli ? How- ever, these squabbles of reviewers about the histories of Macaulay and Froude are now almost entirely forgotten, while the historical dramas which Macaulay and Froude have left us, remain, and Englishmen are proud of possessing two such splendid monu- ments of the most important periods of their history. Macaulay's account of William III. remained un- finished, and it is characteristic of Froude that, if I understood him rightly, he gave up the idea of finishing the reign of Queen Elizabeth, because, as an Englishman, he was disappointed in her character towards the end of her reign. I saw much of Froude again during the last years of his life, when he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History, having been appointed by LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 89 l^ord Salisbury. " It is the first public recognition I have received," he used to say. He rejoiced in Jit, and he certainly did credit to Lord Salisbury's courageous choice. His lectures were brilliant, and the room was crowded to the end. His private lectures also were largely attended, and he was on the most friendly and intimate terms with some of his pupils. There is no place so trying for a professor as Oxford. Froude's immediate predecessors, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs, and Freeman, were some of the best men that Oxford has produced. Their lectures were excellent in every respect. Yet every one of them had to complain of the miserable scantiness ■of their audiences at Oxford. The present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Stubbs, in his " Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediaeval and Modern History" '(1886), states what may sound almost incredible, that he had sometimes to deliver his lectures "to two or three listless men ". The same may be said of some of the best lectures delivered in the University. The young men are encouraged in •each college to attend the lectures delivered by the tutors, and are given to understand that profes- sorial lectures " do not pay " in' the examinations. These examinations are chiefly in the hands of ■college tutors. Professor Stubbs was not given to ■complain about anythijig that might seem to concern himself, yet he confesses that " sometimes he felt hurt that in the combined lecture list he found the junior assistant tutor advertising a course on the j 90 AULD LANG SYNE. same subject, or at the same hours, as his own ". ' Nay, he goes so far in his modesty as to say : " It may be better that there should be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away with large classes,, when I have only a few stray men," but the real friends of the University would hardly think so. As things are at present, it has been said, and, I believe, truly said, that nearly all professorial lec- tures might be abolished, and the studies of the undergraduates would go on just the same. Oxford suffers in this respect from a real embarras de richesse. The University is rich enough, though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as many tutors. Many of the tutors are quite equal to the professors, nay, it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose lectures, when ia college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or three listless men as soon as he has been, raised to the professoriate. Froude's lectures formed an exception, but even this was quoted against him. Froude was not only the most fascinating lecturer^ but the most charming companion and friend. His conversation was like his writings. It never tired one, it never made one feel his superiority. His store of anecdotes was inexhaustible, and though ia his old age they were sometimes repeated, they were always pleasant to listen to. He enjoyed thenn LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 9I SO thoroughly himself, he chuckled over them, he covered his eyes as if half ashamed of telling them. They are all gone now, and a pity it is, for most of them referred to what he had actually seen, not only to what he had heard, and he had seen and heard a good deal, both in Church and State. He knew the little failings of great men, he knew even the peccadillos of saints, better than anybody. He was never ill-natured in his judgments, he knew the world too well for that, and it is well, perhaps, that many things which he knew should be forgotten. He himself insisted on all letters being destroyed that had been addressed to him, and from a high sense of duty, left orders that his own letters, ad- dressed to his friends, should not be divulged after his death. Though he left an unfinished autobi- ography, extremely interesting to the few friends who were allowed to read it, those who decided that it should not be published have acted, no doubt, wisely and entirely in his spirit. My friend Charles Kingsley was a very different man. He was a strong man, while Froude had some feminine weaknesses, but also some of the best feminine excellencies. His life and his char- acter are well known from that excellent biography published by his gifted widow, not much more than a year after his death. This Life of hers really gave a new life to him, and secured a new popularity and influence to his writings. In him, too, what I ad- mired besides his delightful character was his poetical power, his brilliant yet minute and accurate de- 92 AULD LANG SYNE. scriptions of nature, and the characters he created in his novels. With all the biographies that are now published, how little do people know after all of the man they are asked to love or hate ! In order to judge of a man, we ought to know in what quarry the marble of which he was made was carved, what sunshine there was to call forth the first germs of his mind, nay, even whether he was rich or poor, whether he had what we rightly call an inde- pendence, and whether from his youth he was and felt himself a free man. There is something in the character of a man like Stanley, for instance, which we have no right to expect in a man who had to struggle in life like Kingsley. The struggle for life may bring out many fine qualities, but it cannot but leave traces of the struggle, a certain amount of self-assertion, a love of warfare, and a more or less pronounced satisfaction at having carried the day against all rivals and opponents. These are the temptations of a poor man which do not exist for a man of independent means. It is no use shutting our eyes to this. Every fight entails blows, and wounds, and scars, and some of them remain for life. Kingsley seems to have had no anxieties as a young man at school or at the University, but when he had left the University and become a curate, and, more particularly, when he had married on his small curacy and there were children, his struggles began in good earnest. He had often to write against time ; he had to get up subject after subject in order to be able to write an article, simply LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 93 that he might be able to satisfy the most trouble- some tradesmen. He always wrote at very high pressure ; fortunately his physical frame was of iron, and his determination like that of a runaway horse. People may say that he had the usual income of a country clergyman, but why will they forget that a man in Kingsley's position had not only to give his children an expensive education, but had to keep open house for his numerous friends and admirers ? There was no display in his quiet rectory at Evers- ley, but even the simplest hospitality entails rnore expense than a small living can bear, and his friends and visitors ranged from the lowest to the highest — from poor workmen to English and foreign royalties. As long as he could wield his pen he could procure the necessary supplies, but it had to be done with a very great strain on the brain. " It must be done, and it shall be done," he said ; yes, but though most of his work was done, and well done, it was like the work of an athlete who breaks down at the end of the day when his victory is won. People did not see it and did not know it, for he never would yield, and never would show signs of yielding. When, towards the end of his life, a canonry was offered him, first at Chester, then at Westminster, he felt truly grateful. "After all," he said tome, "these stalls are good for old horses." His professorship at Cambridge was really too much for him. He was not prepared for it. Personally he did much good among the young men, and was certainly most popular. At Cambridge as a professor he did his 94 AULD LANG SYNE. best, but he had hardly calculated Quid valeant humeri, quidferre recuseni. Anyhow, the work soon became too much even for his iron constitution, and he was glad to be relieved. The fact is that Kingsley was all his life, in everything he thought and in everything he did, a poet, a man of high ideals, and likewise of unswerving honesty. No one knew Kingsley, such as he really was, who had not seen him at Eversley, and among his poor people. He visited every cottage, he knew every old man and old woman, and was perfectly at home among them. His "Village Sermons "gave them just the food they wanted, though it was curious to see every Sunday a large sprinkling of young officers from Sandhurst and Aldershot sitting quietly among the smock-frocked congregation, and anxious to have some serious conversation with the preacher afterwards. Kingsley was a great martyr to stammer- ing, it often was torture to him in a lively conversa- tion to keep us all waiting till his thoughts could break through again. In church, however, whether he was reading or speaking extempore, there was no sign of stammering ; apparently there was no effort to overcome it. But when we walked home from church he would say : " Oh, let me stammer now, you won't mind it ". He was not a learned theologian, his one idea of Christianity was practical Christianity, honesty, purity, love. He was always most courteous, most willing to bow before higher authority or greater learning ; but when he thought there was anything LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 95 wrong, or mean, or cowardly, anything with which he, as an honest man, could not agree, he was as firm as a rock. His favourite pursuits lay in natural science. He knew every flower, every bird, every fish, and every insect in his neighbourhood, and he had imbibed a belief in the laws of nature, which represented to him indirectly the thoughts of God. When, therefore, after a long continuance of drought, the bishop of his diocese ordered him to have a special prayer for rain, he respectfully and firmly declined. He would pray for the good gifts of heaven, offer thanks to God for all that He was pleased to send in His wisdom, but he would not enter into particulars with Him, he would not put his own small human wisdom against the Divine wisdom ; he would not preach on what he thought was good for us, for God knew best. He had no difficulty in persuading his farmers and labourers that if they had any trust in God, and any reverence for the Divine wisdom that rules the world, they would place all their troubles and cares before Him in prayer, but they would not beg for anything which, in His wisdom. He with- held from them. " Thy will be done," that was his prayer for rain. There was great commotion in ecclesiastical dove-cotes, most of all in episcopal palaces. All sorts of punishments were threatened, but Kingsley remained throughout perfectly quiet, yet most determined. He would not degrade his .sacred office to that of a rain-maker or medicine- jnan, and he carried his point. "In America we g6 AULD LANG SYNE. manage these things better ! " said an Americani friend of Kingsley. " A clergyman in a village on the frontier between two of our States prayed for rain. The rain came, and it soaked the ground to- such an extent that the young lambs in the neigh- bouring State caught cold and died. An action was. brought against the clergyman for the mischief he had done, and he and his parishioners were con- demned to pay damages to the sheep farmers. They never prayed for rain again after that." Kingsley incurred great displeasure by the sup- port he gave to what was called Christian Socialism. His novel, "Alton Locke," contained some very outspoken sentiments as to the terrible sufferings of the poor and the duties of the rich. Kingsley, Frederick Maurice, and their friends, did not only plead, but they acted ; they formed societies to assist poor tailors, and for a time the clothes they wore showed but too clearly that they had been cut in Whitechapel, not in Regent Street. Poor Kingsley suffered not only in his wardrobe, but in his purse also, owing to his having been too sanguine in his support of tailoring by co-operation. However, his books, both in prose and poetry, became more and more popular, and this meant that his income became larger and larger. Publishers say that novels and sermons have the largest market in England and the colonies, and Kingsley provided both. All went on well v even his being stopped once in the middle of a sermon by a clergyman who had invited him to preach in his LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 97 church in London, but did not approve of his sermon, did not hurt him. He had many influential friends ; both the Queen and the Prince of Wales had shown by special marks of favour how much they appreci- ated him, and he had a right to look forward to ecclesiastical preferment and to a greater amount of leisure and freedom. One unexpected cloud, how- ever, came to darken his bright and happy life. Some people will say that he brought it upon him- self but there are certain clouds which no honest man can help bringing upon himself He, no doubt, began the painful controversy with Newman. Having seen how much misery had been caused among some of his own dearest friends by the Romanising teaching under the auspices of Newman and Pusey, he made the mistake of fastening the charge of dishonesty, half-heartedness, and untruthfulness on Newman personally, instead of on the whole Roman i Y Catholic propaganda in England from the time of' Henry VIH.'s apostasy from the Roman Church to j j that of Newman's apostasy from the Church of I England. I shall not enter into this controversy again. I have done so once, and have been well punished for having ventured to declare my honest conviction that throughout this painful duel Kingsley was in the right. But Kingsley was clumsy and Newman most skilful. Besides, Newman was evi- dently a man of many friends, and of many able friends who knew how to wield their pens in many a newspaper. In spite of having taken a most unpopular step 7 98 AULD LANG SYNE. in leaving the national Church, Newman always retained the popularity which he had so well earned as a member of that church. I have myself been one of his true admirers, partly from having known many of his intimate friends at Oxford, partly from having studied his earlier works when I first came to England. I read them more for their style than for their contents. If Newman had left behind him no more than his exquisite University sermons and his sweet hymns he would always have stood high among the glories of Eng- land. But Kingsley also was loved by the people and surrounded by numerous and powerful friends. It inust be due to my ignorance of the national character, but I have certainly never been able to explain why public sympathy went so entirely with Newman and against Kingsley ; why Kingsley was supposed to have acted unchivalrously and Newman was looked upon as a martyr to his convictions, and as the victim of an illiberal and narrow-minded An- glican clique. Certain it is that in the opinion of the majority Kingsley had failed, and failed igno- miniously, while Newman's popularity revived and became greater than ever. Kingsley felt his defeat most deeply ; he was like a man that stammered, and could not utter at the right time the right word that was in his mind. I What is still more surprising was the sudden collapse I of the sale of Kingsley's most popular books. I saw him after he had been with his publishers to make arrangements for the sale of his copyrights. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 99 He wanted the money to start his sons, and he had a right to expect a substantial sum. The sum offered him seemed almost an insult, and yet he assured me that he had seen the books of his publishers, and that the sale of his books during the last years did not justify a larger offer. He was miserable about it, as well he might be. He felt not only the pecuniary loss, but, as he imagined, the loss of that influence which he had gained by years of hard labour. However, he was mistaken in his idea that he had laboured in vain. Immediately after his death there came the most extraordinary reaction. His books sold again in hundreds of thousands, and his family received in one year a great deal more from his royalties than had been offered him for the whole copyright of all his books. People are more i willing now to admit that though Newman may have been right in his " Apologia pro Vita Sua," Kingsley was not wrong in pointing out the weak points in Newman's character and in the moral and political doctrines of the Roman Catholic system, more particularly of the Jesuits, and the dangers that threatened his beloved England from those who seemed halting between the two Churches, the one national, the other foreign, the one reformed, the other unreformed. There was another occasion when Newman's and Kingsley 's friends had a sharp conflict at Oxford. When the Prince of Wales was invited to Oxford to receive his honorary degree of D.C.L., he had, lOO AULD LANG SYNE. as was the custom, sent to the Chancellor a list of names of his friends on whom he wished that the same degree should be conferred at the same time. One of them was Kingsley, then one of his chaplains. When his name was proposed a strong protest was made by Dr. Pusey and his friends, no one could understand why. Dr. Pusey declared distinctly that he did not mean to contest Kingsley's orthodoxy, but when asked at last to give his reasons, he declared that Kingsley's " Hypatia " was an immoral book. This was too much for Dr. Stanley, who challenged Pusey to produce one single passage in " Hypatia" which could be called immoral. On such conditions Shakespeare could never have re- ceived an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. I still possess the copy of " Hypatia " which Stanley examined, marking every passage that could possibly be called immoral. It need hardly be said that there was none. Still Dr. Pusey threatened to veto the degree in Convocation and to summon his friends from the country to support him. And what could have been done to prevent an unseemly scandal on such an occasion as a royal visit to Oxford ? Dr. Stanley and his friends yielded, and Kingsley's name was struck out from the Prince's list, and, what was still worse, it was never placed again on the list of honorary doctors such as might really have reflected honour on the University. If ever the secret history of the degrees conferred honoris causa by the University of Oxford on truly eminent persons, not members of LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. lOI the University, comes to be written, the rejection of Kingsley's name will not be one of the least interesting chapters. Kingsley's death was a severe blow to his country, and his friends knew that his life might have been prolonged. It was a sad time I spent with him at Eversley, while his wife lay sick and the doctors gave no hope of her recovery. He himself also was very ill at the time, but a doctor whom the Queen had sent to Eversley told him that with proper care there was no danger for him, that he had the lungs of a horse, but that he required great care. In spite of that warning he would get up and go into the sick-room of his wife, which had to be kept at an icy temperature. He caught cold and died, being fully convinced that his wife had gone before him. And what a funeral it was ! But with all the honour that was paid to him, all who walked back to the empty rectory felt that life henceforth was poorer, and that the sun of England would never be so bright or so cheerful again, now that he was gone. 'JThough I admired — as who did not ? — his poetical power, his brilliant yet most minute and accurate descriptions of nature, and the lifelike characters he had created in his novels, what we loved most in him was his presence, his delightful stammer, his downright honesty, and the perfect transparency of his moral nature. He was not a child, he was a man, but unspoiled by the struggles of his youth, unspoiled by the ex- periences of his later years. He was an English 102 AULD LANG SYNE. gentleman, a perfect specimen of noble English manhood. Having been particularly attached to his young niece, my wife, he had at once allowed me a share in his affections, and when other members of her family shook their heads, he stood by me and bade me be of good cheer till the day was won, and she became my wife. That was in 1859. Here are some verses he had addressed to his two nieces, to my wife and to her sister, afterwards Mrs. Theodore Walrond (died 1872): — TO G * * *. A hasty jest I once let fall — As jests are wont to be, untrae — As if the sum of joy to you Were hunt and picnic, rout and ball. Your eyes met mine : I did not blame You saw it : but I touched too near Some noble nerve ; a silent tear Spoke soft reproach and lofty shame. I do not wish those words unsaid. Unspoilt by praise or pleasure, you In that one look to woman grew. While with a child, I thought, I played. Next to mine own beloved so long ! I have not spent my heart in vain. I watched the blade ; I see the grain ; A woman's soul, most soft, yet strong. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. IO3 A FAREWELL. My fairest child, I have no song to give you ; No lark could pipe to skies so dull and grey : Yet, ere we part, one lesson I can leave you For every day. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever. \ Do noble things, not dream them, all day long : And so make life, death, and that vast for ever 1 One grand sweet song. In the original, as written down in her album there is a third verse between the two : — I'll tell you how to sing a clearer carol Than lark who hails the dawn on breezy down. To earn yourself a purer poet's laurel Than Shakespeare's crown. I04 LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. III. Knowing both Kingsley and Froude very inti- mately, I soon came to know many of their friends, though my residence at Oxford kept me clear from the vortex of literary society in London. In some respects I regretted it, but in others I found it a great blessing. It requires not only mental, but considerable physical strength to stand the wear and tear of London life, and I confess I never could understand how some of my friends, Browning, Tyndall, Huxley, M. Arnold, and others, could manage to do any serious work, and at the same time serve the Moloch of Society to whom so many men and women in London offer themselves and their children as willing sacrifices year after year. They had not only to dine out and lose their even- ings, but wherever they went they had to shine, they had often to make speeches, long speeches, at public dinners, they came home tired and slept badly, and in the morning they were interrupted again by letters, by newspapers, by calls, then by meetings and committees, by the inevitable leaving of cards, and, lastly, there was with many of them LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 105 their official work. Society is a voracious animal, and has deprived the world of much that can only be the outcome of quiet hours, of continuous thought, and of uninterrupted labour. These men must have had not only the brain, but the physical constitution also of giants, to survive this constant social worry. A quiet dinner with a few friends is pleasant enough, and a certain amount of social friction may even be useful in keeping us from rusting ; nay, a casual collision with a kindred spirit may sometimes call forth sparks which can be turned into light and heat. But to dress, to drive a few miles, then to be set down, possibly, between two strangers who have little to say and much to ask, and who, if ill-luck will have it, may not even be beautiful or charming, is a torture to which men like Browning and M. Arnold ought never to have submitted. An after- noon tea is a far more rational amusement, because people are not kept chained for two hours to one chair and two neighbours, but can move about and pick out some of their friends whom they really wish to talk to. Even a luncheon is more bearable, for it does not last so long, and one may find a chance of talking to one's friends. But dinners are tortures, survivals of the dark ages for which there is no longer any excuse, and I believe that more ' people, and good people too, have fallen victims to dinners, public or private, than have broken their necks in the hunting field. I had hoped at one time that the aesthetic phase through which English society was passing, would I06 AULD LANG SVNE. have put an end to, or would at least have modified, these social gobblings. Surely it is a most unbeau- tiful sight to see a number of people, young and old, with or without teeth, filling their mouths with mutton or beef, chewing, denticating, masticating their morsels, and then washing them down with wine or water. No doubt it can be done inoffen- sively, or even daintily, but is it ? Eastern ladies know how to throw small morsels of food into their open mouths with their fingers, and Eastern poets describe this performance with rapture. Chinese poets become eloquent even over chop-sticks as handled by their fair ones. But for all that, the Hindus seem to me to show their good taste by retiring while they feed, and reappearing only after they have washed their hands and face. Why should we be so anxious to perform this no doubt necessary function before the eyes of our friends ? How often have I seen a beautiful face distorted by the action of the jaw-bones, the temples forced out, and the cheeks distended by obstinate morsels. Could not at least the grosser part of feeding be performed in private, and the social gathering begin at the dessert, or, with men, at the wine, so as to have a real Symposion, not a Symphagion ? But I am on dangerous ground, and shall broach no further heresies. Life at Oxford has many advantages. Of course our London friends tell us that we are mere pro- vincials, but that is a relative expression, and, any- how, we enjoy life in peace. It is true we have not LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. I07 shaken off the regular society dinners altogether, but •no one is offended if his friends tell him that they are too busy to dine out. And we still have our pleasant small dinners or luncheons of four, six, at the utmost eight people, when you can really see and •enjoy your friends, and not only roast beef and port. In former years, when I first came to Oxford, it was different, but then the evil was chiefly confined to heads of colleges and halls, and there were even then exceptions, where you dined to meet a few friends, and not simply to lay in food. One of my earliest dinners I remember at Ox- ford was to meet Thackeray. Thackeray was then writing " Esmond," and a Mr. Stoddard — a fellow of St. John's College — asked me to meet him at ■dinner. We were only four, and we were all very much awed by Thackeray's presence, particularly I, not being able as yet to express myself freely in English. We sat silent for some time, no one ventured to make the first remark, the soup was ■over, and there was a fine John Dore on the table waiting to be splayed. We were hoping for some brilliant sally from Thackeray, but nothing came. At last Thackeray suddenly turned his large spec- tacled eyes on me and said: "Are you going to •eat your own ancestor } " I stared, everybody else ;stared. At last we gave it up, and Thackeray, look- ing very grave and learned, said : " Surely you are the son of the Dorian Miiller — the Miiller who wrote that awfully learned book on the Dorians ; and was mot John Dor^ the ancestor of all the Dorians.''" Io8 AULD LANG SYNE. There was a general " Oh, oh ! " but the ice was. broken, and no one after this horrible pun was afraid of saying anything. All I could tell Thack- eray was that I was not the son of Otfried Miiller, who wrote on the Dorians, but of Wilhelm Miiller,. the poet, who wrote " Die Homerische Vorschule," and " Die Schone Mullerin," and as to John Dor6 being our ancestor, how could that be ? The ori- ginal John Dor6, so I had been told, was il Janitor e, that is, St. Peter, and had no wife, as some people will have it, or at least never acknowledged her in public, though he was kind to his mother-in-law. All this did not promise well, yet the rest of our little dinner party was very successful ; it became noisy and even brilliant. Thackeray from his treasures of wit and sarcasm poured out anecdote after anecdote ; he used plenty of vinegar and cayenne pepper, but there was always, a flavour of kindliness and good-nature, even in his most cutting remarks. I saw more of him when he came to Oxford to lecture on the Four Georges,, and when he stood for Parliament and was defeated by Cardwell and Charles Neate. After one of his- lectures, when I expressed my delight with his brilliant success, " Wait, wait," he said, " the time will come when you will lecture at Oxford". At that time my English was still very crumbly ; there was no idea of my staying on in England, still less, of my ever becoming a professor at Oxford. Thackeray's novels were a great delight to me then, and some have remained so for life. StilL LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. IO9 there is a fashion in all things, in literature quite as much as in music, and when lately reading "The Newcomes " I was surprised at the meagreness of the dialogue, the very dialogues for which we felt so impatient from month to month when the book first came out in numbers. Still one always recog- nises in Thackeray the powerful artist, who, like a Japanese painter, will with a few lines place a living man or woman before you, never to be forgotten. I am sorry I missed seeing and knowing more of Charles Dickens. I met him in my very early days with a friend of mine at some tavern- in the Strand, but did not see him again till quite at the ■end of his career, when he was giving readings from his novels, and knew how to make his audiences -either weep or laugh. Still I am glad to have seen him in the flesh, both as a young and as an old man. However wide apart our interests in life might be, no one who had read his novels could look on Dickens as a stranger. He knew the heart •of man to the very core, and could draw a picture of human suffering with a more loving hand than any other English writer. He also possessed now and then the grand style, and even in his pictures of still life the hand of the master can always be perceived. He must have shed many a tear over the deathbed of poor Joe ; he must have chuckled and shouted over Mr. Winkle and Mr. Tupman ■going out partridge shooting. Perhaps to our taste, as it now is, some of his characters are too senti- mental and simpering, but there are few writers now no AULD LANG SYNE. who could create his child-wife. It always seemed to me very strange that my friend Stanley, though he received Dickens among the great ones of West- minster Abbey, could not, as he confessed to me, take any pleasure in his works. But though I could not spend much time in London and cultivate my literary acquaintances there, Oxford itself was not without interesting poets. After all, whatever talent England possesses is filtered generally either through Oxford or Cam- bridge, and those who have eyes to see may often watch some of the most important chapters in the growth of poetical genius among the young under- graduates. I watched Clough before the world knew him, I knew Matthew Arnold during many years of his early life, and having had the honour of examining Swinburne I was not surprised at his marvellous performances in later years. He was even then a true artist, a commander of legions of words, who might become an imperator at any time. Clough was a most fascinating character, thoroughly genuine, but so oppressed with the problems of life that it was difficult ever to get a smile out of him ; and if one did, his round ruddy face with the deep heavy eyes seemed really to suffer from the contor- tions of laughter. He took life very seriously, and made greater sacrifices to his convictions than the world ever suspected. He was poor, but from con- scientious scruples gave up his fellowship, and was driven at last to go to America to make himself in- dependent without giving up the independence of LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. Ill his mind. With a little more sunshine above him and around him he might have grown to a very considerable height, but there was always a heavy weight on him, that seemed to render every utter- ance and every poem a struggle. His poems are better known and loved in America, I believe, than in England, but in England also they still have their friends, and in the history of the religious or rather theological struggles of 1840-50 Clough's figure will always be recognised as one of the most characteristic and the most pleasing. I had once the misfortune to give him great pain. I saw him at Oxford with a young lady, and I was told that he was engaged to her. Delighted as I was at this prospect of a happy issue out of all his troubles, I wrote to him to congratulate him, when a most miserable answer came, telling me that it all was hopeless, and that I ought not to have noticed what was going on. However, it came right in the end, only there were some years of patient struggle to be gone through first ; and who is not grateful in the end for such years passed on Pisgah, if only Jordan is crossed at last ? Another poet whom I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams afld schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford ; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very 112 AULD LANG SYNE. sound of his voice and the wave of his arm were Jovelike. He grappled with the same problems as Clough, but they never got the better of him, or rather he never got the worse of them. Goethe helped him to soar where others toiled and sighed and were sinking under their self-imposed burdens. Even though his later life was enough to dishearten a poet, he laughed at his being Pegasus im Joche. Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, he would groan over the drudgery he had to go through every day of his life in examining dirty schoolboys and schoolgirls. But he saw the fun of it, and laughed. What a pity it was that his friends, and he had many, could find no better place for him. Most of his contempo- raries, many of them far inferior to him, rose to high positions in Church and State, he remained to the end an examiner of elementary schools. Of course it may be said that, like so many of his literary friends, he might have written novels and thus eked out a living by pot-boilers, as they are called, of various kinds. But there was something noble and refined in him which restrained his pen from such work. Whatever he gave to the world was to be perfect, as perfect as he could make it, and he did not think that he possessed a talent for novels. His saying " No Arnold can ever write a novel " is well known, but it has been splendidly falsified of late by his own niece. He had to go to America on a lecturing tour to earn some money he stood in need LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. II 3 of, though he felt it as a dira necessitas, nay, as a dire indignity. It is true he had good precedents, but evidently his showman was not the best he could have chosen, nor was Arnold himself very strong as a lecturer. England has not got from him all that she had a right to expect, but whatever he has left has a finish that will long keep it safe from the cor- rosive wear and tear of time. When later in life Arnold took to theological studies, he showed, no doubt, a very clear insight and a perfect independence of judgment, but he had only a few spare hours for work which in order to be properly done would have required a lifetime. Yet what he wrote produced an effect, in England at least, more lasting than many a learned volume, and he was allowed to say things that would have given deep offence if coming from other lips. His famous saying about the three Lord Shaftesburys has been judged very differently by different writers. As a mere matter of taste it may seem that Arnold's illustration of what he took to be the common con- ception of the Trinity among his Philistine friends was objectionable. Let us hope that it was not even true. But Arnold's intention was clear enough. He argued chiefly against those who had called the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Mass " a degrading superstition ". He tells them they ought to discover in it what the historian alone, or what Arnold means by a man of culture, can discover ; namely, the original intention of the faithful in thus interpreting IT4 AULD LANG SYNE. the words of Christ (St. John, vii., 53) : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you ". It was in protesting against this narrow- ness that he reminded his Protestant friends of the weak joints in their own armour, particularly their too literal acceptation of the doctrine of the Trinity.* And I doubt whether he was altogether wrong when he charged them with speaking of the Father as a mere individual, or, as he expressed it, a sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord Shaftesbury with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his. natural goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice would not allow it. And is it not true that many who speak of Christ as the Son of God take " son " in its common literal sense, or, as Arnold expressed it, imagine " a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale of his father and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if he liked, but who preferred to leave his home to go and live among the race of offenders, and to be put to an ignominious death, on the condition that his merits should be counted against their demerits, and that his father's goodness should be restrained no longer from taking effect, but any offender should be admitted to the benefit of it, simply on pleading the satisfaction made by the son " ? Finally, when he points out the extremely vague conception of the Holy Ghost as a person and as an individual, does he really exaggerate so very much when he says that * " Literature and Dogma," 1873, PP- 305. ^^i- LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. II 5 He is with many no more than "a third Lord Shaftes- bury, still on the same high scale, who keeps very much in the background and works in a very occult manner, but very eiificaciously nevertheless, and who is busy in applying everywhere the benefits of the son's satisfaction and the father's goodness " ? Nay, even when he goes on to say that this is precisely the Protestant story of justification, what he wants to impress on his Protestant readers is surely no more than this, that from his point of view there is nothing actually degrading in their very narrow view, as little as in the common Roman Catholic view of the Mass. What he means is no more than that both views as held by the many are grotesquely literal and unintelligent. People who hold such views would be ready to tell you, he says, " the exact hangings in the Trinity's council chamber ". But, with all that he is anxious to show that not only was the original intention both of Roman and English Catholics good, but that even in its mistaken application it may help towards righteousness.. In trying to impress this view both on Protestants and Roman Catholics, Arnold certainly used language which must have pained particularly those who felt that the picture was not altogether untrue. However, his friends, and among them many high ecclesiastics, forgave him. Stanley, I know, admired his theological writings very much. Many of his critics fully agreed with what Arnold said, only they would have said it in a different way. There is a kind of cocaine style which is used by Il6 AULD LANG SYNE. many able critics and reformers. It cuts deep into the flesh, and yet the patient remains insensible to pain. "You can say anything in English," Arthur Helps once said to me, " only you must know how to say it." Arnold, like Carlyle and others, preferred the old style of surgery. They thought that pain was good in certain operations, and helped to ac- celerate a healthy reaction. The only fault that one may find with Arnold is that he did not himself try to restore the original and true conception of the Trinity to that clear and intelligible form which he as an historian and a man of culture could have brought out better than any one else. The original intention of the Lord's Supper, or the Mass, can easily be learnt, as Arnold has shown, from the very words of the Bible (St. Luke, xxii., 20) : "The cup is the new testament in my blood ". But the doctrine of the Trinity requires a far more searching historical study. As the very name of Trinity is a later invention, and absent from the New Testament, it requires a thorough study of Greek, more particularly of Alexandrian philosophy, to understand its origin, for it is from Greek philo- sophy that the idea of the Word, the Logos, was taken by some of the early Fathers of the Church. As the Messiah was a Semitic thought which the Jewish disciples of Christ saw realised in the Son of Man, the Word was an Aryan thought which the Greek disciples saw fulfilled in the Son of God. The history of the divine Dyas which preceded the Trias is clear enough, if only we are acquainted with the LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. II7 antecedents of Greek philosophy. Without that background it is a mere phantasm, and no wonder that in the minds of uneducated people it should have become what Arnold describes it,* father, son, and grandson, living together in the same house, or possibly in the clouds. To make people shrink back from such a conception is worth something, and Arnold has certainly achieved this, if only he has caused hundreds and thousands to say to them- selves : "We never were so foolish or so narrow minded as to believe in three Lord Shaftesburys ". For some reason or other, however, the "three Lord Shaftesburys " have disappeared in the last edition of " Literature and Dogma" and have been replaced by " a Supernatural Man ". Froude, who was an intimate friend both of Arnold and of Sir James Stephen, told me that the latter had warned Arnold that the three Lord Shaftesburys were really actionable, and if Arnold hated anything it was a fracas. In the fifth edition they still remain, so that the change must have been made later on, when he prepared the cheap edition of his book. Anyhow, they are gone ! Arnold was a delightful man to argue with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronising way he would generally end by : " Yes, yes ! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one ! " This went so far * " Literature and Dogma," p. 143. Il8 AULD LANG SYNE. that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression on him. He had fallen in love with Emile Burnoufs attractive but not very scholar-like and trustworthy " Science de la Religion". I believe that at first he had mistaken Emile for Eugene Burnouf, a mistake which has been committed by other people besides him. But, afterwards, when he had perceived the difference between the two, he was not at all abashed. Nay, he was betrayed into a new mistake, and spoke of Emile as the son of Eugene. I told him that Eugene, the great Oriental scholar — one of the greatest that France has ever produced, and that is saying a great deal — had no son at all, and that he ought to correct his misstatement. " Yes, yes," he said, in his most good-humoured way, " but you know how they manage these things in France. Emile was really a natural son of the great scholar, and they call that a nephew." This I stoutly denied, for never was a more irreproachable pere de famille than my friend and master, Eugene Burnouf. But in spite of all remonstrances, Emile remained with Arnold the son of Eugene; "For, you see, my good fellow, I know the French, and that is my view of the matter ! " If that happened in the green wood, what would happen in the dry ! We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me the difference between poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, \ and vice versd, and I often quoted Goethe's saying LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. II9 that the best test of poetry was whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language. To all that, even to Goethe's words, Arnold de- murred. Poetry to him was a thing by itself, " not an art like other arts," but, as he grandly called it, " genius ". He once had a great triumph over me. An American gentleman, who brought out a " Collection of the Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men," divided them into eight classes, and the first class was assigned to poetry, the second to art, the third to religion, the fourth to philosophy, the fifth to history, the sixth to science, the seventh to politics, the eighth to industry. Arnold was asked to write the introduction to the first volume, H. Taine to the second, myself and Renan to the third, Noah Porter to the fourth, Dean Stanley to the fifth, Helmholtz to the sixth, Froude to the seventh, John Fiske to the eighth. I do not know whether Arnold had anything to do with suggesting this division of Omne Scibile into eight classes ; anyhow, he did not allow the opportunity to pass to assert the superiority of poetry over every other branch of man's intellectual activity. " The men," he began, " who are the flower and glory of our race are to pass here before us, the highest manifestations, whether on this line or that, of the force which stirs in every one of us — the chief poets, religious founders, philosophers, historians, scholars, orators, warriors, statesmen, voyagers, leaders in mechanical invention and in- I20 AULD LANG SYNE. dustry, who have appeared among mankind. And the poets are to pass first. Why ? Because, of the various modes of manifestation through which the human spirit pours its force, theirs is the most ade- quate and happy." This is the well-known ore rotunda and spiritu pro/undo style of Arnold. But might we not ask, Adequate to what ? Happy in what ? Arnold him- self answers a little farther on : "No man can fully draw out the reasons why the human spirit feels it- self able to attain to a more adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its modes of activity ". Yet he continues to call this a pri- mordial and incontestable fact ; and how could we poor mortals venture to contest a primordial and incon- testable fact.-" And then, limiting the question "to us for to-day," he says, " Surely it is its solidity that accounts to us for the superiority of poetry ". How he would have railed if any of his Philistines had ventured to recognise the true superiority of poetry in its solidity ! Prose may be solid, it may be dense, massive, lumpish, concrete, and all the rest, but poetry is generally prized for its being subtle, light, ideal, air- drawn, fairy-like, or made of such stuff as dreams are made of However, let that pass. Let poetry be solid, for who knows what sense Arnold may have assigned to solid? He next falls back on his great master Goethe, and quotes a passage which I have not been able to find, but the bearing of which must depend very much on the context in LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 121 which it occurs. Goethe, we are told, said in one of his many moods : " I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius." Who would venture to differ from Goethe when he defines what poetry is ? But does he define it ? He simply says that it is not art or science. In this one may agree, if only art and science are defined first. No one I think has ever maintained that poetry was science, but no one would deny that poetry was a product of art, if only in the sense of the Ars poetica of Horace, or the Dichtkunst of Goethe. But if we ask what can be meant by saying that poetry is genius, Goethe would probably say that what he meant was that poetry was the product of genius, the German Genie. Goethe, therefore, meant no more than that poetry requires, in the poet, originality and spontaneity of thought ; and this, though it would require some limitation, no one surely would feel inclined to deny, though even the authority of Goethe would hardly suffice to deprive the decipherer of an inscription, the painter of the " Last Supper," or the discoverer of the bacilli of a claim to that divine light which we call genius. Arnold then goes on to say that poetry gives the idea, but it gives it touched with beauty, heightened by emotion. Would not Arnold have allowed that the language of Isaiah, and even sorrie of the dia- logues of Plato, were touched with beauty and heightened by emotion though they are in prose ? I think he himself speaks somewhere of a poetic 122 AULD LANG SYNE. prose. Where, then, is the true difference between the creations of Isaiah and of Browning, between the eloquence of Plato and of Wordsworth ? Arnold has one more trump card to play in order to win for poetry that superiority over all the other manifestations of the forces of the human spirit which he claims again and again. I have always been a sincere admirer of Arnold's poetry, still I think there is more massive force in some of his prose than in many of his poems ; nay, I believe he has left a much deeper and more lasting im- pression on what he likes to call the Zeitgeist throug'h his essays than through his tragedies. What then is his last card, his last proof of the superiority of poetry ? Poetry, he argues, has more stability than anything else, and mankind finds in it a surer stay than in art, in philosophy, or religion. " Compare," he says, "the stability of Shakespeare with that of the Thirty-nine Articles." Poor Thirty-nine Articles ! Did they ever claim to contain poetry, or even religion ? Were they ever meant to be more than a dry abstract of theological dogmas .'' Surely they never challenged comparison with Shakespeare. They are an index, a table of contents, they were a business-like agree- ment, if you like, between different parties in the Church of England. But to ask whether they will stand longer than Shakespeare is very much like asking whether the Treaty of Paris will last longer than Victor Hugo. There is stay in poetry pro- vided that the prose which underlies it is lasting, or LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 23 ■everlasting ; there is no stay in it if it is mere froth .and rhyme. Arnold always liked to fall back on •Goethe. " What a series of philosophic systems has Germany seen since the birth of Goethe," he says, "and what sort of stay is any one of them •compared with the poetry of Germany's one great poet?" Is Goethe's poetry really so sure a stay as the philosophies of Germany ; nay, would there be any stay in it at all without the support of that philosophy which Goethe drank in, whether from the vintage of Spinoza or from the more recent £rues of Kant and Fichte .'' Goethe's name, no doubt, is always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of Goethe's " Collected Works " in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay, but is pass4, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian. Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much pleasure "we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end it is thought in its ever-changing life that forms the real stay, and it matters little ■whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music, in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. Poetry in itself is no protection against folly and feebleness. There is in the world a small amount of good, and an immense amount of bad poetry. The former, we may hope, will last, and will serve as a stay to all who care for the music of thought and the harmony of language ; the twaddle, ;sometimes much admired in its time (and there is plenty of it in Goethe also), will, we hope, fade away 124 AULD LANG SYNE. from the memory of man, and serve as a lesson to poets who imagine that they may safely say in rhythm and rhyme what they would be thoroughly ashamed to say in simple prose. Nor is the so- called stay or immortality of poetry of much con- sequence. To have benefited millions of his own age, ought surely to satisfy any poet, even if no one reads his poems, or translations of them, a thousand years hence. Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug Gethan, der hat gelebt fiir alle Zeiten.* It is strange to go over the old ground when he with whom one travelled over it in former times is. no more present to answer and to hold his own view against the world. There certainly was a great charm in Arnold, even though he could be very patronising. But there was in all he said a kind of understood though seldom expressed sadness, as if to say, "It will soon be all over, don't let us get angry ; we are all very good fellows," etc. He knew for years that though he was strong and looked very young for his age, the thread of his life might snap at any moment. And so it di\d—felix opportunitate mortis. Not long before his death he met Browning on the steps of the Athenaeum. He: felt ill, and in taking leave of Browning he hinted that they might never meet again. Browning was. profuse in his protestations, and Arnold, on turning away, said in his airy way : " Now, one promise,. Browning : please, not more than ten lines ". * Schiller's " Wallenstein," Prolog, vv. 48, 49. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 125 Browning understood, and went away with a solemn smile. Arnold was most brilliant as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, from 1857 to 1867. He took great pains in writing and delivering his lectures. He looked well and spoke well. Some of his lectures were masterpieces, and he set a good example which was followed by Sir Francis Doyle, 1867-77, well known by his happy occasional poems, then by John Shairp from 1877 to his death, and lastly by Francis Pal- grave from 1885-95. The best of Arnold's lectures were published as essays ; Shairp's lectures appeared after his death, and have retained their popularity, particularly in America. Palgrave's lectures, we may hope, will soon appear. They were full of most valuable information, and would prove very useful to many as a book of reference. I have known no one better informed on English poetry than my friend Palgrave. His "Golden Treasury" bears evidence of his wide reading, and his ripe judgment in selecting the best specimens of English lyric poetry. One had but to touch on any subject in the history of English literature, or to ask him a question, and there was always an abundance of most valuable information to be got from him. I owe him a great deal, particularly in my early Oxford days. For it was he who revised my first attempts at writing in English, and gave me good advice for the rest of my journey, more particularly as to what to avoid. He is now one of the very few friends left who remember my first appearance in Oxford 126 AULD LANG SYNE. in 1846, and who were chiefly instrumental in re- taining my services for a University which has- proved a true Alma Mater to me during all my life- Grant (Sir Alexander), Sellar, Froude, Sandars, Morier, Neate, Johnson (Manuel), Church, Jowett,, — all are gone before me. Here are some old verses of his which I find in my album : — An English welcome to an English shore Such as we could, some four years since we gave thee, Not knowing what the Fates reserved in store Or that our land among our sons would have thee ; But now thou art endenizen'd awhile Almost we fear our welcome to renew : * Lest what we seemed to promise, should beguile. When all we are is open to thy view. But yet if ought of what we fondly boast — True-hearted warmth of Friendship, frank and free, Survive yet in this island-circling coast, We need not fear again to welcome thee : — So may we, blessing thee, ourselves be blest, And prove not all unworthy of our guest. What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne. How patient they all were with, their German guest when he first tried in his brokea English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations. Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make more ac- quaintances among their friends who lived at Ox- ford, or who from time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others. *This was written in 1851, and herein 1897 that Welcome has never ceased to be a blessing to me. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 12/ Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and uncompromising and severe as he coL.ld be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speak- ing with authority, even on his own special sub- jects, as he might well have done. It seemed to bej his pen that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest labour, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel onslaughts. Grote's style may not be the very best for an historian, but in his Quellenstudium he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is what Ruskin wrote of him : " There is probably no commercial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have written a better History of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it ". Of Gibbon's classical work he spoke with even greater contempt. " Gibbon's is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid." I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten. He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where 128 AULD LANG SYNE. no one else could see it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I remember him as dififident as a young girl, full of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning, and his language simply per- fect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteaux, bags, rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar con- versation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art. Later in life that even temperament may have become somewhat changed. He had suffered much, and one saw that his wounds had not quite healed. His public lectures as Professor of Fine Art were most attractive, and extremely popular at first. But they were evidendy too much for him, and on the advice of his medical friends he had at last to cease from lecturing altogether. Several times his brain had been a very serious trouble to him. People forget that, as we want good eyes for seeing, and good ears for hearing, we want a strong, sound brain for lecturing. I have seen much of such brain troubles among my friends, and who can account for them ? It is not the brain that thinks, nor do we think by means of our brain ; but we cannot think without our brain, and the slightest lesion of our brain in any one of its wonderful convolutions is as bad as a shot in the eye. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 29 If ever there was an active, powerful brain, it was Ruskin's. No doubt he worked very hard, but I doubt whether hard work by itself can ever upset a healthy brain. I believe it rather strengthens than weakens it, as exercise strengthens the muscles of our body. His was, no doubt, a very sensitive nature, and an overwrought sensitiveness is much more likely to cause mischief than steady intellectual effort. And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything unbeautiful ; and anything low or ignoble in men, revolted him and made him thoroughly unhappy. I remember t once taking Emerson to lunch with him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. . But some quite indifferent subject turned up, a heated ' discussion ensued, and Ruskin was so upset that he I had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson was most unhappy, and did all he could to make I peace, but he had to leave without a reconciliation. It is very difficult to make allowance for these I gradual failures of brain power. Again and again I have seen such cases at Oxford, where men were clearly no longer themselves, and yet had to be treated as if they were ; nay, continued to exercise their old influence till at last the crash came, and one began to ifnderstand what had seemed so strange, and more than strange, in their behaviour. I believe there are as many degrees of insanity as there are of shortsightedness and deafness, and the 9 130 AULD LANG SYNE. line that divides sanity from insanity is often very small. I have had to watch the waverings of this line in several cases, and it is enough to upset one's own equilibrium to have to deal with a friend who to-day is quite like himself and quite like Ourselves, and the next day a raving lunatic. My predecessor at Oxford, Dr. Trithen, half Russian, half Swiss by birth, and a man of extraordinary gifts and wonder- fully attractive, went slowly out of his mind and had at last to be sent to an asylum. But even then he wrote the most reasonable and touching letters to me on all sorts of subjects, though when I went to see him he was quite unapproachable. Fortunately he died soon after from brain disease, but who could say what was the cause of it? Nothing remains of him but the edition of a Sanskrit play, the Vira- charitra. But his knowledge of Sanskrit and all sorts of languages, his peculiar power of mimicry in imitating the exact pronunciation of different dialects, and his knack of copying Oriental MSS. so that one could hardly tell the difference between the original and the copy were quite amazing. He might have grown to be another Mezzofanti if the fates had not been against him. He was the very type of a fascinating Russian, full of kindness and courtesy, sparkling in conversation, always ready to help others and most careless about himself; biit there always was an expression in his coruscating eyes which spoke of danger, and foreboded the tragedy which finished his young and promising life. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 131 Painful as these intellectual breakdowns are, they are not half so painful as when we see in our friends what is at first called mere wrongheadedness, but is apt to lead to a complete deterioration of moral fibre, and in the end to an apparent inability to distinguish between right and wrong, between truth and false- hood. In the former case we know that a slight lesion in one of the ganglion cells or nerve fibres of the brain is sufficient to account for any disturbance in the intellectual clock-work. The man himself remains the same, though at times hidden from us, as it were, by a veil, and we feel towards him the same sorrowful sympathy which we feel towards a man who has lost the use of his eyes or his legs, who cannot see or cannot walk. We know that the instruments are at fault, not the operator. But it is very difficult to make the same allowance in cases of moral deterioration. Here instruments and operator seem to be the same, though, for all we know, here too the brain may be more at fault than the heart. A well-known oculist maintained that the peculiarities, or what he called the distortions, in Turner's latest pictures were due to a malforma- tion in the muscles of his eyes. He actually invented some spectacles by which everything that seemed ill-proportioned in Turner's latest productions came right if looked at through these corrective lenses. May not what we call shortsightedness, conceit, vanity, envy, hatred and malice — all, as it seems, without rhyme or reason — be due in the beginning to some weakness or dimness of sight that might 132 AULD LANG SYNE. have been corrected, if treated in time, by those who are nearest and dearest to the sufferer ? This may seem a dangerous view of moral responsibiHty ; but, if so, it can be dangerous to the sufferer only, not to those who ought to sympathise, i.e. to feel and suffer, with him. To me it has proved a solu- tion of many difficulties during a long and varied intercourse with men and women ; the only difficulty is how to make these invalids harmless to themselves. Ruskin's influence among the undergraduates at Oxford was most extraordinary. He could persuade the young Christ Church men to take spade and wheelbarrow and help him to make a road which he thought would prove useful to a village near Oxford. No other professor could have achieved that. The road was made, but was also soon washed away, and, of course, Ruskin was laughed at, though the labour undergone by his pupils did them no doubt a great deal of good, even though it did not benefit the inhabitants of the village for any length of time. It was sad to see Ruskin leave Oxford estranged from many of his friends, dissatisfied with his work, which nevertheless was most valuable and highly appreciated by young and old, perhaps by the young even more than by the old. His spirit still dwells in the body, and if any one may look back with pride and satisfaction upon the work which he has achieved, it is surely Ruskin. Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 33 High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o'clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our honoured guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out when he found the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased, how- ever, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cut- lets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation : " Mutton, chops! the staple of every bad inn in England ". However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance at the time in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Im- mortals. He was simply delightful, and full of in- quiries about the East, more particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe it was then that I told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems 134 AULD LANG SYNE. to have been when asked the same question. The old bear would probably have answered my question by, " You are a great fool, sir ; use your own judgment," while Tennyson gave the very sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory. It is difficult to define the difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge man ; but if Ruskin was decidedly a representative of Oxford, Tennyson was a true son of the sister University. I had been taught to admire Tennyson by my young friends at Oxford, many of whom were enthusiastic worshippers of the poet. My friends often forgot that I had been brought up on German poetry, and that though I knew Heine, Ruckert, Eichendorff, Chamisso, and Geibel, to say nothing of Goethe, Schiller, Burger, and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, nay, to Shelley and Keats, often fell by the wayside and were entirely lost on me. However, I soon learnt to enjoy Tennyson's poetry, its finish, its delicacy, its moderation — I mean, the absence of all ex:travagance ; yet there is but one of his books which has remained with me a treasure for life, his " In Memoriam ". To have expressed such deep, true, and original thought as is contained in each of these short poems in such perfect language, to say nothing of rhyme, was indeed a triumph. Tennyson was very kind to me, and took a warm interest in my work, particularly in my mythological studies. I well remember his being struck by a metaphor in my first Essay on Comparative Mythology, published in 1856, and his LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. ,135 telling me so. I had said that the sun in his daily passage across the sky had ploughed a golden furrow through the human brain, whence sprang in ancient times the first germs of mythology, and afterwards the rich harvest of religious thought. " I don't know," he said, ," whether the simile is quite correct, but I like it." I was of course very proud that the great poet should have pondered on any sentence of mine, and still more that he should have approved of my theory of seeing in mythology a poetical interpretation of the great phenomena of nature. But it was difficult to have a long discus- sion with him. He was fond of uttering short and decisive sentences : his yes was yes indeed, and his no was no indeed. It was generally after dinner, when smoking his pipe and sipping his whisky and water, that Tenny- son began to thaw, and to take a more active part in conversation. People who have not known him then, have hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an active part in the conversation of his friends. His pipe was almost indispensable to him, and I remember one time when I and several friends were staying at his house, the question of tobacco turned up. I confessed that for years I had been a perfect slave to tobacco, so that I could neither read nor write a line without smoking, but that at last I had rebelled against this slavery, and had entirely given up tobacco. Some of his friends taunted Tennyson 136 AULD LANG SYNE. that he could never give up tobacco. " Anybody can do that," he said, " if he chooses to do it." When his friends still continued to doubt and to tease him, " Well," he said, " I shall give up smoking from to-night ". The very same evening I was told that he threw his pipes and his tobacco out of the window of his bedroom. The next day he was most charming, though somewhat self-righteous. The second day he became very moody and captious, the third day no one knew what to do with him. But after a disturbed night I was told that he got out of bed in the morning, went quietly into the garden, picked up one of his broken pipes, stuffed it with the remains of the tobacco scattered about, and then, having had a few puffs, came to breakfast, all right again. Nothing was said any more about giving up tobacco. He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight ; " But mind," he said, " you will be watched from morning till evening ". This was in fact his great grievance, that he could not go out with- out being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the downs behind his house, he sud- denly started, left us, and ran home, simply because he had descried two strangers coming towards us. I was told that he once complained to the Queen, and said that he could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came to stare at him. The Queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson, not seeing what she meant, replied : LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 37 "'No, madam, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be troubled either ". It must be confessed that people were very in- considerate. Rows of tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for his appearance. The guides were actually paid by sight-seers, particularly by those from America, for showing them the great poet. Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson, and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, | the tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask | him: "Now, are you the real Tennyson ? " This, | no doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord Tennyson was driven to pay a large sum for some ■useless downs near his house, simply in order to ■escape from the attentions of admiring travellers. Why should not people be satisfied with the best that a poet is and can give them, namely his poetry ? Why should they wish to stare at him .-* Few poets are greater than their poetry, and Tennyson was not one of them. Like all really great men, Tennyson •disliked the worship that was paid him by many who came to stare at him and to pour out the usual phrases of admiration before him. Tennyson fre- quently took flight from his intending Boswells, and iie was the very last man to appreciate the "II park " by which in Paris all conversation was hushed -whenever Victor Hugo was present at a dinner and spoke to his neighbour, possibly only to ask him for the menu. People have learnt after his death what a posses- 138 AULD LANG SYNE. sion they had in Tennyson. He may not rank among the greatest poets of England, but there was something high and noble in him which reacted on the nation at large, even though that influence was not perhaps consciously realised. Anyhow, after his death, it was widely felt that there was nobody worthy to fill his place ; and why was it not left empty, as in the Greek army, where, we are told, a place of honour was reserved for a great hero who' was supposed to be present during the heat of the batde, and to inspire those who stood near his place to great deeds of valour ? Browning was neither of Cambridge nor of Oxford, but his genius was much more akin to Oxford than to Cambridge, and towards the end of his life, particularly after his son had entered at Balliol College, he was very often seen amongst us. Though he was not what we call a scholar, his mind was saturated with classical lore, and his apprecia- tion of Greek poetry, Greek mythology, and Greek sculpture was very keen. He could not quote Greek verses, but he was steeped in the Greek tragedians- and lyric poets. Of course this classical sympathy- was but one side of his poetry. Browning was fuB of sympathy, nay, of worship, for anything noble and true in literature, ancient or modern. And what was most delightful in him was his ready response, his generosity in pouring out his own thoughts- before anybody who shared his sympathies. For real and substantial conversation there was no one his equal, and even in the lighter after-dinner talk LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 39 he was admirable. His health seemed good, and he was able to sacrifice much of his time to society. He had one great advantage, he never consented to spoil his dinner by making, or, what is still worse, : by having to make, a speech. I once felt greatly aggrieved, sitting opposite Browning at one of the Royal Academy dinners. I had to return thanks for literature and scholarship, and was of course rehearsing my speech during the whole of dinner- time, while he eajoyed himself talking to his friends. When I told him that it was a shame that I should be made a martyr of while he was enjoying his dinner in peace, he laughed, and said that he had said No once for all, and that he had never in his life made a public speech. I believe, as a rule, poets are not good speakers. They are too careful about what they wish to say. As dinner ad- vanced I became more and more convinced of the etymological identity of honor and onus. At last my turn came. Having to face the brilliant society which is always priesent at this dinner, in- cluding the Prince of Wales, the Ministers of both parties, the most eminent artists, scientists, authors and critics, I had of course learnt my speech by heart, and was getting on very well, when suddenly I saw the Prince of Wales laughing and saying something to his neighbour. At once the thread of my speech was broken. I began to think whether I could have said anything that made the Prince laugh, and what it could have been, and while I was thinking in every direction, I suddenly stood speech- 140 AULD LANG SYNE. less. I thought it was an eternity, and I was afraid I should have to collapse and make the greatest fool of myself that ever was. I looked at Browning and he gave me a friendly nod, and at that moment my grapple-irons caught the lost cable and I was able to finish my speech. When it was over I turned to Browning and said: "Was it not fearful, that pause ? " " Far from it," he said, " it was excellent. It gave life to your speech. Everybody saw you were collecting your thoughts, and that you were not simply delivering what you had learnt by heart. Besides, it did not last half a minute." To me it had seemed at least five or ten minutes. But after Browning's good-natured words I felt relieved, and enjoyed at least what was left of a most enjoyable dinner, the only enjoyable public dinner I know. The best place to see Browning was Venice, and I think it was there that I saw him for the last time. He was staying in one of the smaller palaces with a friend, and he was easily persuaded to read some of his poems. I asked him for his poem on Andrea del Sarto, and his delivery was most simple and yet most telling. He was a far better reader than Tennyson. His voice was natural, sonorous, and full of delicate shades ; while Tennyson read in so deep a tone, that it was like the rumbling and rolling sound of the sea rather than like a human voice. His admirers, both gentlemen and ladies, who thought that everything he did must be per- fect, encouraged him in that kind of delivery ; and LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. I4I while to me it seemed that he had smothered and murdered some of the poems I liked best, they sighed and groaned and poured out strange inter- jections, meant to be indicative of rapture. There is a definiteness in Tennyson's poetry which makes it easy to recite and even to declaim his poems, while many of Browning's compositions do not lend themselves at all to viva voce repetition. There is always a superabundarice of thought and feeling in them, and his mastery of rhyme and rhythm proved a temptation which he could not always resist. One often wished that some of Browning's poems could have passed through the Tennysonian sieve, to take away all that is unneces- sary in them, and to moderate his exuberant revel- ling in language. Still his friends know what they possess in his poetry. When they are sad, he makes them joyful ; when they exult, he tones them down ; when they are hungry, he feeds them ; when they are poor, he makes them rich ; and, like a true prophet, he knows how to bring fresh water out of the rocks, out of the commonest events in our journey through the desert of life. It is a pity that his poetry does not lend itself to translation. Perhaps he is too thoroughly English, perhaps his sentences are too labyrinthine even for German readers. Anyhow, Browning is known abroad much less than Tennyson, and if translatableness is a test of true poetry, his poetry would not stand that test well. To have known such men as Tennyson and Browning is indeed a rare fortune. It helps us in 142 AULD LANG SYNE. two ways. We are preserved from extravagant admiration, which is always stupid ; and, on the other hand, we can enjoy even insignificant verses of theirs, as coming from our friends and lighting up some corner of their character. There are cases where personal acquaintance with the poets actually ? spoils our taste for their poetry, which we might otherwise have enjoyed ; and to imagine that one knows a poet better because one has once shaken hands with him, is a fatal mistake. It would be far better to go at once to Westminster Abbey, and I spend a few thoughtful moments at the tombs of such poets as Tennyson or Browning, for there, at ' all events, there would be no disappointment. 143 LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. IV. Authors complain, and in many cases complain justly, of the large number of letters and visits which they receive from unknown friends and distant ad- mirers. I myself, though the subjects on which I write are not exactly popular, have been sitting at the receipt of such custom for many years. It is ■difficult to know what to do. To answer all the letters, even to acknowledge all the books that are sent to me from India, Australia, New Zealand, from every new sphere of influence in Africa, from America, North and South, and from the principal countries of Europe, would be physically impossible. A simple knowledge of arithmetic would teach my friends that if I were only to glance at a book in ■order to give an opinion, or say something pleasant about it, one hour at least of my time in the morning would certainly be consumed by every single book. Every writer imagines that he is the only one who ■writes a letter, asks a question, or sends a book ; but he forgets that in this respect everybody has as much right as everybody else, and claims it too, unmindful of the rights of others, and quite uncon- 144 AULD LANG SYNE. scious that the sum total of such interruptions would swallow up the whole of a man's working day. And there is this further danger : however guarded one may be in expressing one's gratitude or one's opinion of the merits of a book, one's letter is apt ta appear in advertisements, if only far away in India or the Colonies ; nay, we often find that the copy of a book was not even sent us by the author himself, but with the author's compliments, that is by an enterprising publisher. However, there is a compensation in all things, and I gladly confess that I have occasionally derived great advantage from the letters of my unknown friends. They have sent me valuable corrections and useful remarks for my books, they have made me presents of MSS. and local publications difficult to get even at the Bodleian and the British Museum, and I feel sure that they have not been offended even though I could not enter into a long corre- spondence with every one of my epistolary friends on the origin of language or the home of the Aryan race. My worst friends are those who send me their own writings and wish me to give an opinion, or to find a publisher for them. Had I attempted to comply with one half of these requests, I could have done nothing else in life. What would become of me if everybody who cannot find a publisher were to write to me ! The introduction of postcards has proved, no doubt, a great blessing to all who are supposed to be oracles, but even an oracular response takes time. Speaking for myself, I may LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 45 truly say that I often feel tempted to write to a man who is an authority on a special subject on which I want information. I know he could answer my question in five minutes, and yet I hardly ever venture to make the appeal, but go to a library, where I have to waste hours and hours in finding the right book, and afterwards the right passage in it. Why should not others do the same ? And what applies to letters applies to personal visits also, I do sometimes get impatient when perfect strangers call on me without any kind of introduction, sometimes even without a visiting card, and then sit down to propound some theory of their own. Still, taking all in all, I must not complain of my visitors. They do not come in shoals like letters and books, and very often they are interest- ing and even delightful. Many of them come from America, and the mere fact that they want to see me is a compliment which I appreciate. They have read my books, that is another compliment which I always value ; and they often speak to me of things that years ago I have said in some article of mine, and which I myself have often quite forgotten. It strikes me that Americans possess in a very high degree the gift of sight-seeing. They possess what at school was called pace. They travel over England in a fortnight, but at the end they seem to have seen all that is, and all who are, worth seeing. We wonder how they can enjoy anything. But they do enjoy what they see, and they carry away a great many photographs, not only in their albums 10 146 AULD LANG SYNE. but in their memory also. The fact is that they generally come well prepared, and know beforehand what they want to see ; and, after all, there are limits to everything. If we have only a quarter of an hour to look at the Madonna di San Sisto, may not that short exposure give us an excellent negative in our memory, if only our brain is sensitive, and the lens of our eyes clear and strong ? The Americans, knowing that their time is limited, make certainly an excellent use of it, and seem to carry away more than many travellers who stand for hours with open mouths before a Raphael, and in the end know no more of the picture than of the frame. It requires sharp eyes and a strong will to see much in a short time. Some portrait painters, for instance, catch a likeness in a few minutes ; others sit and sit, and stare and stare, and alter and alter, and never perceive the real characteristic points in a face. It is the same with the American interviewer. I do not like him, and I think he ought at all events to tell us that we are being interviewed. Even ancient statues are protected now against snap-shots in the museums of antiquities. But with all that I cannot help admiring him. His skill, in the cases where I have been under his scalpel or before his brush, has certainly been extraordinary, and several of them seem to have seen in my house, in my garden, in my library, and in my face, what I my- self had never detected there, and all that in about half an hour. J remember one visit, however, which was rather humiliating. An American gentleman LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 147 (I did not know that he was interviewing me) had been sitting with me for a long time, asking all sorts of questions and making evidently a trigonometrical survey of myself and my surroundings. At last I had to tell him that I was sorry I had to go, as I had to deliver a lecture. As he seemed so interested in my work I naturally expected he would ask me to allow him to hear my lecture. Nothing of the kind ! " I am sorry," he said, " but you don't mind my sitting here in your library till you come back ? " And, true enough, there I found him when I came home after an hour, and he was delighted to see me again. Some months after I had my reward in a most charming account of an interview with Professor Max Miiller, published in an American journal. This power of observation which these interviewers, and to a certain, extent most American travellers, seem to possess, is highly valuable, and as most of us cannot hope to have more than a few hours to see such monuments as St. Peter or Santa Sophia, or such giants as Tennyson or Browning, we ought to take a leaf out of the book of our American friends, and try to acquire some of their pace and go. And then, America does not send us interviewers only, but nearly all their most eminent men and their most charming women pay us the compliment of coming over to the old country. They generally cannot give us more than a few days, or it may be a few hours only ; and in that short space we also have to learn how to measure them, how to appreci- 148 AULD LANG SYNE. ate and love them. It has to be done quickly, or not at all. Living at Oxford, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wen- dell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely at home they feel in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens are possessions for ever. Emerson, I am grieved to say, when during his last visit to England he spent some days with us, accompanied and watched over by his devoted daughter, was already on the brink of that misfor- tune which overtook him in his old age. His memory often failed him, but as through a mist the bright and warm sun of his mind was always shining, and many of his questions and answers have remained engraved in my memory, weak and shaky as that too begins to be. I had forgotten that Emerson had ceased to be an active preacher, and I told him that I rather envied him the opportunity of speaking now and then to his friends and neighbours on sub- jects on which we can seldom speak except in church. He then told me not only what he had told others, that " he had had enough of it," but he referred to an epi- LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 49 sode in his life, or rather in that of his brother, which struck me as very significant at the time. " There was an ecclesiastical leaven in our family," he said. ■' My brother and I were both meant for the ministry in the Unitarian community. My brother was sent by my father to Germany (I believe to Gottingen), and after a thorough study of theology was returning to America. On the voyage home the ship was caught in a violent gale, and all hope of saving the ship and the lives of the passengers was given up. At that time my brother said his prayers, and made a vow that if his life should be spared he would never preach again, but give up theology altogether and earn an honest living in some other way. The ship weathered the storm, my brother's life was saved, and, in spite of all entreaties, he kept his vow. Something of the same kind may have in- fluenced me," he added : " anyhow, I felt that there was better work for me to do than to preach from the pulpit." And so, no doubt, there was for this wonderfully gifted man, particularly at the time and in the place where he lived. A few years' study at Gottingen might have been useful to the younger Emerson by showing him the track followed by other explorers of the unknown seas of religion and philosophy, but he felt in himself the force to grapple with the great problems of the world without going first to school to learn how others before him had grappled with them. And this was perhaps the best for him and for us. His freshness and his courage remained undamped by the failures of others, ISO AULD LANG SYNE. and the directness of his judgment and poetical intuition had freer scope in his rhapsodies than it would have had in learned treatises. I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had at first nothing to say to his essays because they did not seem to advance their favourite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned dis- quisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loy- alty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please. , Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life again in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times. What Emerson's personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime. A friend of his who had watched Emerson and his work and his ever- increasing influence, declares without hesitation that " the American nation is more indebted to his teaching than to any other person who has spoken or written on his themes during the last twenty years". He calls his genius "the measure and present expansion of the American mind ". And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 151 Still remember the time when even experienced literary judges spoke of his essays as mere de- clamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other. After a time some more searching critics were amazed at sentences which spoke volumes, and showed that Emerson, though he had never written a systematic treatise on philosophy, stood on a firm foundation of the accumulated philosophic thought of centuries. Let us take such a sentence as ^^Generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind — hence the thrill that attends ". To the ordinary reader such a sentence can convey very little ; it might seem, in fact, a mere exag- geration. But to those who know the long history of thought connected with the question of the origin of conceptual thought as the result of ceaseless generalisation, Emerson's words convey the outcome of profound thought. They show that he had recognised in general ideas, which are to us merely the result of a never-ceasing synthesis, the original thoughts or logoi underlying the immense variety of created things ; that he had traced them back to their only possible source, the Divine Mind, and that he saw how the human mind, by rising from 152 AULD LANG SYNE. particulars to the general, was in reality approaching- the source of those divine thoughts, and thus becom- ing conscious, as it were, of the influx of divinity. Other philosophers have expressed similar thoughts by saying that induction is the light that leads us up, deduction the light that leads us down. Mill thought that generalisation is a mere process of mother-wit, of the shrewd and untaught intelligence ; efrid that, from one narrow point of view, it is so, has been fully proved since by an analysis of language. Every word is a generalisation, and contains in itself a general idea, the so-called root. These first general- isations are, no doubt, at first the work of mother- wit and untaught intelligence only, and hence the necessity of constantly correcting them, whether by experience or by philosophy. But these words are nevertheless the foundation of all later thought, and if they have not reached as yet the fulness of the Divine Logoi, they represent at least the advancing steps by which alone the human mind could reach, and will reach at last, the ideas of the Divine Mind. Thus one pregnant sentence of Emerson's shows, when we examine it more closely, that he had seen deeper into the mysteries of nature, and of the human mind, than thousands of philosophers, call them evolutionists (realists) or nominalists. Evolu- tionists imagine that they have explained everything that requires explanation in nature if they have shown a more or less continuous development from the moneres to man, from the thrills of the moneres to the thoughts of man. Nominalists again think LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 53 that by ascending from the single to the general, and by comprehending the single under a general name, they have solved all the questions involved in nature, that is, in our comprehension of nature. They never seem to remember that there was a time when all that we call either single or general, but particularly all that is general, had for the first time to be conceived or created. Before there was a single tree, some one must have thought the tree or treehood. Before there was a single ape, or a single man, some one must have thought that apehood or that manhood which we see realised in every ape and in every man, unless we can bring ourselves to believe in a thoughtless world. If that first thought was the concept of a mere moneres, still in that thought there must have been the distant perspective of ape or man, and it is that first thought alone which to the present day keeps the ape an ape, and a man a man. Divine is hardly a name good enough for that first Thinker of Thoughts. Still, it is that Divinity which Emerson meant when he said that generalisation is always a new influx of divinity into the mind because it reveals to the mind the first thoughts, the Divine Logoi, of the universe. The thrill of which he speaks is the thrill arising from the nearness of the Divine, the sense of the presence of those Divine Logoi, or that Divine Logos, which in the beginning was with God, and without which not anything was made that was made. Evolution can never be more than the second act ; the first act is the Volition or the Thought of the 154 AULD LANG SYNE. universe, unless we hold that there can be an effect without a cause, or a Kosmos without a Logos. Such utterances, lost almost in the exuberance of Emerson's thoughts, mark the distinction between a thoughtful and a shallow writer, between a scarred veteran and a smooth recruit. They will give permanence to Emerson's influence both at home and abroad, and place him in the ranks of those who have not lived or thought in vain. When he left my house, I knew, of course, that we should never meet again in this life, but I felt that 1 had gained something that could never be taken from me. Another eminent American who often honoured my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a time United States Minister in England. He was a Professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays entitled " Among my Books ". His " Bigelow Papers," which made him one of the leading men in the United States, appeal naturally to American rather than to Cosmopolitan readers. But in society he was at home in England as much as in America, in Spain as well as in Holland. I came to know him first as a sparkling corre- spondent, and then as a delightful friend. Here is the letter which began our intimacy : — LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 55 LeGACION DE LOS ESTADOS Unidos DE America en Espana, iSth Jan., 1880. I read with great satisfaction what you wrote ?i!oo\xtjade* One ■is tempted to cry out with Marlowe's Tamburlaine, " How now, ye pampered jades of Asia ! " One thing in the discussion has ■struck me a good deal, and that is, the crude notion which intel- ligent men have of the migration of tribes. I think most men's con- ■ception of distance is very much a creature of maps — which make Grim Tartary and England not more than a foot apart, so that the feat of the old rhyme — " to dance out of Ireland into France," looks easy. They seem to think that the shifting of habitation was accomplished like a modern journey by rail, and that the •emigrants wouldn't need tools by the way or would buy them at the nearest shop after their arrival. There is nothing the ignorant and the poor cling to so tenaciously as their familiar household utensils. Incredible things are brought every day to America in the luggage of emigrants — things often most cumbrous to carry .and utterly useless in the new home. Families that went from our seaboard to the West a century ago, through an almost im- penetrable wilderness, carried with them all their domestic pots .and pans — even those, I should be willing to wager, that needed the tinker. I remember very well the starting of an expedition from my native town of Cambridge in 1831, for Oregon, under the lead of a captain of great energy and resource. They started in waggons ingeniously contrived so as to be taken to pieces, the body forming a boat for crossing rivers. They carried everything they could think of with them, and got safely to the other side of the continent, as hard a job, I fancy, as our Aryan ancestors had to do. There is hardly a family of English descent in New England that doesn't cherish as an heirloom something brought •over by the first ancestors two hundred and fifty years ago. And -beside the motive of utility there is that also of sentiment — (Particularly strong in the case of an old tool. Faithfully yours, J. R. Lowell. * I had written some articles in The Times to show that when -we meet with jade tools in countries far removed from the few IS6 AULD LANG SYNE. Lowell's conversation was inexhaustible, his in- formation astonishing. Pleasant as he was, even as- an antagonist, he would occasionally lose his temper and use very emphatic language. I was once sitting next to him when I heard him stagger his. neighbour, a young lady, by bursting out with : " But, madam, I do not accept your major premiss ! " Poor thing, she evidently was not accustomed to such language, and not acquainted with that terrible term. She collapsed, evidently quite at a loss as- to what gift on her part Mr. Lowell declined to- accept. Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from, him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representa- tives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and. humble living. His cleverness and readiness in writing occasional verses have become proverbial, and I am glad to be able to add two more to the many jeux despj-it of this brilliant and amiable-, guest. mines in which jade is found, we must admit that they were carried, along as precious heirlooms by the earliest emigrants from Asia to Europe, by the same people who carried the tools of their mind, that is the words of their language, from their original! homes to the shores of the Mediterranean, to Iceland, to Ireland,, and in the end to America. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 57 Had I all tongues Max Miiller knows, I could not with them altogether Tell half the debt a stranger owes Who Oxford sees in pleasant weather. The halls, the gardens, and the quads, There's nought can match them on this planet. Smiled on by all the partial gods Since Alfred (if 'twas he) began it ; But more than all the welcomes warm, Thrown thick as lavish hands could toss 'em, Why, they'd have wooed in winter-storm One's very umbrella-stick to blossom ! Bring me a cup of All Souls' ale, Better than e'er was bought with siller, To drink (O may the vow prevail) The health of Max * and Mrs. Miiller ! * (" Professor " I would fain have said, But the pinched line would not admit it, And where the nail submits its head, There must the hasty hammer hit it !) Abundant as was his wit in the true sense of that word, his kindness was equally so. After he had written the above verses for my wife, my young daughter Beatrice (now Mrs. Colyer Fergusson) asked him, as young ladies are wont to do, for a few lines for herself He at once resumed his pen and wrote : — O'er the wet sands an insect crept Ages ere man on earth was known — And patient Time, while Nature slept, The slender tracing turned to stone. 158 AULD LANG SYNE. 'Twas the first autograph : and ours ? Prithee, how much of prose or song, In league with the Creative powers, Shall scape Obhvion's broom so long ? In great haste. Faithfully yours, J. R. Lowell. 2/^thJune, 1886. I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Long- fellow during his stay in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most pro- fessors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to our university, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my father's poems. I was more fortunate with Dr. Wendell Holmes. His arrival in England had been proclaimed before- hand, and one naturally remained at home in order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to engage a secretary to answer this deluge of letters. And though he was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man. There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar to the Autocrat at the Break- LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 59 fast Table. His thoughts and his words were ready, and one felt that it was not for the first time that the subject had been carefully thought out and talked out by him. That he should have been able to stand all the fatigue of his journey and the constant claims on his ready wit seemed to me marvellous. I had the pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford. He seemed to know them all, and had something to ask and to say about every one. When we came to Magdalen College, he wanted to see and to measure the elms. He was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms in Magdalen College, and when he found that it was larger than his American giant, he stood before it admiring it, without a single word of envy or dis- appointment. I had, however, a great fright while he was staying at our house. He had evidently done too much, and after our first dinner party he had feverish shivering fits, and the doctor whom I sent for declared at once that he must keep perfectly quiet in bed, and attend no more parties of any kind. This was a great disappointment to myself and to many of my friends. But at his time of life the doctor's warning could not be disregarded, and I had, at all events, the satisfaction of sending him off to Cambridge safe and sound. I had him several l6o AULD LANG SYNE. days quite to myself, and there were few subjects which we did not discuss. We mostly agreed, but even where we did not, it was a real pleasure to differ from him. We discussed the greatest and the smallest questions, and on every one he had some wise and telling remarks to pour out. I re- rnember one long conversation while we were sitting in an old wainscoted room at All Souls', ornamented with the arms of former fellows. It had been at first the library of the college, then one of the fellows' rooms, and lastly a lecture-room. We were deep in the old question of the true relation between the Divine and the Human in man, and here again, as on all other questions, everything seemed to be clear and evident to his mind. Perhaps I ought not to repeat what he said to me when we parted : " I have' had much talk with people in England ; with you I have had a real conversation ". We understood each other, and wondered how it was that men so often misunderstood one another. I told him that it was the badness of our language, he thought it was the badness of our tempers. Perhaps we were both right. With him again good-bye was good-bye for life, and at such moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the Wisdom LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. l6l that pervades and overshadows the whole Universe, we need not know. Were I to write down my more or less casual meetings with men of literary eminence, I should have much more to say, much that was of deep interest and value to myself, but would hardly be of interest to others. I felt greatly flattered, for instance, when years ago Macaulay invited me to see him at the Albany, and to discuss with him the new regulations for the Indian Civil Service. This must have been in about 1854. I was quite a young and unknown man at the time, but I had already made his acquaintance at Bunsen's house, where he had been asked to meet Herr von Radowitz, for a short time Prime Minister in Prussia, and the most famous talker in Germany. It was indeed a tourna- ment to watch, but as it was in English, which Radowitz spoke well, yet not well enough for such a contest, Macaulay carried the day, though Rado- witz excelled in repartee, in anecdotes, and in a certain elegance more telling in French than in English. I went to call on Macaulay in London, well pro- vided as I thought with facts and arguments in support of the necessity of Oriental studies, which I knew he had always discouraged, in the preparation and examination of candidates for the Indian Civil Service. He began by telling me that he knew nothing of Indian languages and literature, and that he wanted to know all I had to say on the real ad- vantages to be derived by young civilians from a study of Sanskrit. I had already published several II l62 AULD LANG SYNE. letters in The Times on the subject, and had carried on a long controversy with Sir Charles Trevelyan, afterwards published in a pamphlet, entitled " Cor- respondence relating to the Establishment of an Oriental College in London ". Macaulay, after sitting down, asked me a number of questions, but before I had time to answer any one of them, he began to relate his own experiences in India, dilating on the difference between a scholar and a man of business, giving a full account of his controversy, while in India, with men like Professor Wilson and others, who maintained that English would never become the language of India, ex- pressing his own strong conviction to the contrary, and relating a number of anecdotes, showing that the natives learnt English far more easily than the English could ever learn Hindustani or Sanskrit. Then he branched off into some disparaging remarks about Sanskrit literature, particularly about their legal literature, entering minutely into the question of what authority could be assigned to the Laws of Manu, and of what possible use they could be in determining lawsuits between natives, ending up with the usual diatribes about the untruthfulness of the natives of India, and their untrustworthiness as witnesses in a court of law. This went on for nealy an hour and was very pleasant to listen to, but most disappointing to a young man who had come well primed with facts to meet all these arguments, and who tried in vain to find a chance to put in a single word. At the LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 63 end of this so-called conversation Macaulay thanked me for the useful information I had given him, and I went back to Oxford a sadder and I hope a wiser man. What I had chiefly wished to impress on ' him was that Haileybury should not be suppressed, but should be improved, should not be ended, but mended. But it was easier and more popular to suppress it, and suppressed it was, so that in Eng- land, which has the largest Oriental Empire in the world, there is now not a single school or seminary for the teaching of Oriental languages, whereas France, Italy, Prussia, Austria and Russia have all found it expedient to have such establishments and to support them by liberal grants. Everybody now begins to see that these governments are reaping their rewards, but in England the old argument remains the same : " We can always find interpreters;, if we pay them well, and if we only speak loudii. enough the natives never fail to understand what , we mean ". This is no doubt much the same as what Mr. Layard meant when he explained to me how he-: managed to keep his diggers in order : " I speaks English to them ; if they do not understand I shout- at them," he said; "if they won't obey, I knock them down ; and if they show fight, I shoot them down ". No doubt this was an exaggeration, butj it certainly does not prove the uselessness of a thorough knowledge of Oriental languages for those: who are sent to the East to govern millions, and not to shout at them, or to knock them down. l64 AULD LANG SYNE. Another true friend of mine was Arthur Helps, the author of " Friends in Council," and for a long time clerk to the Privy Council. He often paid us a visit on his way to or from Blenheim, where he used to stay with the then Duke of Marlborough. He had a very high opinion of the Duke's ability as Presi- dent of the Council, and considered his personal influence most important. " At the time of a change of Ministry, you should see the members of the Cabinet," he said. " People imagine they are miser- able and disheartened. The fact is they are like a pack of schoolboys going home for their holidays, and scrambling out of the Council Chamber as fast as ever they can." Once when he came to stay with us on his return from Blenheim, he told me how the Duke had left the day before for London, and that on that very day the emu had laid an egg. The Duke had taken the greatest interest in his emus and had long looked forward to this event. A telegram was sent to the Duke, which, when shown to Mr. Helps, ran as follows : "The emu has laid an egg, and, in the absence of your Grace, we have taken the largest goose we could find to hatch it ". Helps was a most sensible and thoroughly honest man ; yet the last years of his life were dreadfully embittered by some ill-advised speculations of his which brought severe losses not only on himself, but, what he felt far more keenly, on several of his friends whom he had induced to share in his undertaking. I missed the pleasure of knowing Lord Lytton. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 1 65 But this illustrious writer, Lord Lytton, or in earlier days, Sir Lytton Bulwer Lytton, whose " Last Days of Pompeii " had been the delight of my youth, paid me a great and quite undeserved compliment by dedicating to me one of his last, if not his very last work, "The Coming Race," 1871. The book was published anonymously, and as it was dedicated to me, I tried very hard to discover the author of it, but in vain. It was only after his death that Lord. Lytton's authorship became known. The book itselC could hardly be called a novel, nor was there any- thing very striking or sensational in it. Yet, to the honour of the English public be it said, it was dis- covered at once that it could not be the work of an ordinary writer. It went through edition after edition, and, to the great delight of the anonymous author, was received with universal applause. Vril was the name given by the author to the fluid which in the hands of a Vrilya was raised into the mightiest agency over all forms of matter, animate or inanimate. It destroyed like the flash of light- ning, yet, differently applied, it replenished or in- vigorated life. With it a way could be rent through the most solid substances, and from it a light was extracted, steadier, softer, and healthier than from all other inflammable materials. The fire lodged in the hollow of a reed, and directed by the hand of a child, could shatter the strongest fortress, or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. All this reads almost like a prophecy of the electric fluid in its application to l66 AULD LANG SYNE. engines of war and engines of peace, but its name now survives chiefly in the powerful and invigor- ating fluid extracted from beef, and advertised on every wall as Bo-vril — unless I am quite mistaken in my etymology. There are many more of the most eminent men in England from whom I have received kindness, and with whom, even as a young man, I had some interesting intercourse. But I become more and more doubtful whether I can trust my memory, and whether, in writing down my recollections, I am doing my friends full justice. When I gave my first lectures at the Royal Institution (in 1861), I came into frequent contact with Faraday. He was then what I thought an old man, and though it was quite beyond my power to estimate his greatness, he was one of those men who at once gave one the impression that they are really great. There was dignity and composure in his conversation, and at the same time a kindly welcome in his dark bright eyes which made one feel at home with him from the very first meeting. Though the subject I had to lecture on was quite new to him, he took the liveliest interest in my lectures. I told him how disappointed his assistant had been — I believe his name was Anderson or Robertson — when he offered me his services for my lectures, and I had to tell him that I wanted nothing, no gas, no light, no magnets, that there would be no experiments, not even diagrams to pull up and down. " O yes," said Faraday, " I know how he tells his friends that LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 167 he does all the hard work at my lectures, all the experiments, but that he lets me do the talking." He seemed much amused when I told him that I had had just the same experience, and that one of my compositors was fully convinced that he was really responsible for my books, and told his fellow- compositors that I could not have brought out a single book without him. Faraday sat patiently through most, if not all of my lectures, and it was a pleasure to look at his face beaming with intelligence. When I lectured for .the first time on the Science of Language, I had in the beginning to clear the ground of many preju- l dices, and amongst the rest, to dispose of what was then almost an article of faith — namely, that all the languages of the world were derived from Hebrew. I gave a whole lecture to this question, and when it was over, an imposing old lady came up to shake I hands with me and to thank me for the beautiful \ lecture I had delivered. " How delightful it is to know," she continued, "that Adam and Eve spoke I Hebrew in Paradise, and that all the other lan- guages of the world, English not excepted, have j come out of Hebrew and out of Paradise." I really felt very much humiliated, and when Faraday came up I told him what had happened. " Oh, you must not be discouraged," he said, " I hardly ever lecture | on chemistry without an old dowager coming up to \ me with an incredulous smile and saying : ' Now, Mr. Faraday, you don't really mean to say that the | water I drink is nothing but what you call oxygen l68 AULD LANG SYNE. and hydrogen?' Go on," he said, "something will always stick." I certainly had splendid audiences ; all the best men of the town were there. But brilliant as my audiences were — they included A. P. Stanley, Fredk. Maurice, Dean Milman, Bishop Thirlwall, Mill, Lady Stanley, even royalty honoured me several times — the old habitues of the Royal Institution were not easy to please. The front row was generally oc- cupied by old men with hearing- trumpets, old In- dians, old generals, old clergymen, etc. A num- ber of ladies came in with their newspaper and unfolded it before the lecture began, and seemed to read it with their eyes while their ears were supposed to follow my arguments. One's self- conceit is sometimes very much tried. After one of my lectures I saw one of the old East Indians led out by his son or nephew, who shouted in a loud voice into his father's ear, " That was a splendid lecture, was it not?" "Yes," said the old man in a still louder voice, " very interesting — very; didn't understand a single word of it." Such is reputation. On another occasion the same deaf and loud-voiced gentleman was heard to tell his neighbour who I was and what I had done. "Yes," he shouted, "I know him ; he is a clever young man. And we have appointed him to do some work for us, to publish the old Bible of India. We have also made him our examiner for the Civil Service of India. A clever young man, I assure you." That is how I rose in the estimation of the LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 169 London world, and how Albemarle Street became crowded with fashionable carriages, and people could hardly find places in order to hear all about Aryan roots and our Aryan ancestors, and our common Aryan home somewhere in Asia. It was in the same Royal Institution that I first raised my voice against the thoughtless extravagances of the so-called Darwinian School, and this at a time when it required more courage to express a doubt on any Darwinian theories than to doubt the descent of all languages from Hebrew. As to Darwin himself, I had expressed my admiration of him in my very first course of lectures, and I had more particularly tried to show how the idea of evolution, or development, or growth, or whatever name we like to use instead of the name of history, had at all times been the guiding principle in the researches of the students of the " Science of Languages ". Our object had always been to dis- cover how languages came to be what they are, to study the origin and growth, or more truly the history of language. If we spoke of the develop- ment or evolution of language i^Entwickelung) it was simply in order to avoid the constant use of the same word. We comparative philologists had, in fact, been talking evolution for more than forty years, as M. Jourdain had been talking prose all his life, without being aware of it (sans que jen susse rien). But we never went into raptures about that blessed word "evolution," or about the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. I/O AULD LANG SYNE. What I, from my own point of view, valued particularly in Darwin's philosophy was the tech- nical term of Nahtral Selection. Logically it was not quite correct, for, say what you like, selection presupposes a selector. Without a selector there is no selection, and unless we speak mythologically, we cannot speak of Nature as a selector. I should have preferred, therefore, Rational Elimination, looking upon Reason, or the Good of Plato, as the power that works for good or for fitness in all that survives or is not crowded out. But with this restriction Natural Selection was the very term we wanted to signify that process which is constantly going on in language — " excluding caprice as well as necessity, including individual exertion as well as general co- operation, applicable neither to the unconscious building of bees nor to the conscious architecture of human beings, yet combining within itself both these operations, and raising them to a higher concep- tion ".* Natural selection was the very term we wanted for a true insight into the so-called growth of language, and it was Darwin who gave it us, even though for our own purposes we had to define it more strictly. I gave Darwin full credit for having discovered and popularised this new " category of thought," but the constant hallelujahs that were raised over the discovery of Evolution showed surely an extra- ordinary ignorance of the history of philosophical thought in Europe. Darwin himself was the very *" Lectures on the Science of Language," vol. ii., p. 343. LITERARY RECOLLECTIONS. 171 last person to claim evolution as a discovery of his own ; but is there a single paper that has not called him the discoverer of Evolution? He knew too well how, particularly in his own special field of study, the controversy whether each so-called genus or species had required a separate act of creation, had been raging for centuries. He remembered the famous controversy in 1830 at the French Institute, between Cuvier and Geoffray Saint- Hilaire, and Goethe's equally famous remarks on the subject. It would seem as if Darwin himself had originally been under the spell of the old idea that every species, if not every individual, required a special act of creation, and he describes, if I remember rightly, the shock it gave him when he saw for the :first time that this idea had to be surrendered. It was evidently considered to be the orthodox view of •creation, though I do not know why ; nay, it seems to be so still, if we remember how the present Arch- bishop of Canterbury was represented as unfit to wear a mitre because he believed in evolution ; that is, as. I should say, in his senses. I myself, on the contrary, was given to understand at the time by my unorthodox friends that my want of belief in -evolution was but a survival of my orthodox opinions. I was much puzzled before I could understand why I was looked at askance, till in one of the reviews I was told in so many words that if I did not believe in evolution, I must believe in the theory of special ■creations, or in nothing at all. Even Tyndall, dear lionest Tyndall, told me one day at the Royal 172 AULD LANG SYNE. Institution that it was no use my kicking against the pricks, and I then had an opportunity of telling him my mind. " When some substance is brought you," I said, "don't you first of all analyse it to find out what it consists of, before you use it for any further experiments ? Well, that is really what a student of language does. When you bring him a word like evolution, the first thing he asks for is an analysis or definition. That may often seem very discourteous, but it cannot be otherwise in any decent laboratory of chemistry or thought. Now if evolution is meant for an action, you cannot have an action without an actor, whether his action is direct or indirect. Of course you will say that we all know that, that it is mere childish logic ; but, if so, we should not imagine that we can neglect this childish logic with impunity, that we can have a successful experiment without first wiping our crucibles clean. If, on the contrary, evolution is to be taken in the sense of a process excluding an actor or evolver, this should be clearly stated, and in that case the more familiar word ' growth ' would have been far preferable, because it would not have raised, unfounded expectations. But even growth means very little unless it is authenticated by history step by step. "If then you tell me that there is growth, not only from the sperm to men like you and me, not only from an egg to a caterpillar, from a caterpillar- to a chrysalis, and from a chrysalis to a butterfly, but likewise from inorganic to organised matter, fronv LITEKAKN' Kia'OLrj'U'TIONS. 173 plants to animals, from rc:ptil<;s to birds, from a|)c;s to nu:n, I hav(; not a wonl to say against it. I know you to Ik; an honest man, an