FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS [Author^ s Edition] BY THE SAME AUTHOR. AN INLAND VOYAGE. EDINBURGH. TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS. NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS. TREASURE ISLAND. THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS. A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. PRINCE OTTO. STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. KIDNAPPED. THE MERRY MEN AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES. UNDERWOODS. MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS. MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN. THE BLACK ARROW. THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE. BALLADS. FATHER DAMIEN: An Open Letter. ACROSS THE PLAINS. A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY. ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS. (WITH MRS. STEVENSON.) MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS: The Dynamiter. WITH LLOYD OSBOURNE.) THE WRONG BOX. THE WRECKER. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1902 [Ail rights reserved\ 7K ^^^ t v.v^tj'^'if' i TO THOMAS STEVENSON CIVIL ENGINEER BY WHOSE DEVICES THE GREAT SEA LIGHTS IN EVERY QUARTER OF THE WORLD NOW SHINE MORE BRIGHTLY THIS VOLUME IS IN LOVE AND GRATITUDE DEDICATED BY HIS SON THE AUTHOR CONTENTS Preface, ...... Victor Hugo's Romances, Some Aspects of Robert Burns, . Walt Whitman, . . , . . Henry David Ihoreau: His Charac ter and Opinions, Yoshida-Torajiro. .... Francois Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker, .... Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, .... John Knox and Women, PAoE 7 27 59 104 137 174 191 229 275 3C7 PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM. These studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the New Quarterly, one in Macmil- lan's, and the rest in the Cornhill Magazifie. To the Cornhill I owe a double debt of thanks ; first, that I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the very best of editors ; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to republish so con- siderable an amount of copy. These nine worthies have been brought too:ether from many different ages and countries. Not the most erudite of men could be perfectly prepared to deal with so many and such various sides of human life and manners. To pass a true judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the very deep- est strain of thought in Scotland, — a country far more essentially different from England than many parts of America ; for, in a sense, the first of these men re- created Scotland, and the second is its most essentially 8 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. national production. To treat fitly of Hugo and Vil- lon would involve yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the author by race, history, and re- ligion, but of the growth and liberties of art. Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau, each is the type of something not so much realized as widely sought after among the late generations of their coun- trymen ; and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the society that brought them forth, an author would require a large habit of life among modern Ameri- cans. As for Yoshida, I have already disclaimed re- sponsibility ; it was but my hand that held the pen. In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book led to another, one study to an- other. The first was published with trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial commission through the ages ; and, having once escaped the perils of the Freemans and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of universal history and criticism. Now, it is one thing to write with enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in your mind from re- cent reading, colored with recent prejudice ; and it is quite another business to put these writings coldly PREFA CE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 9 forth again in a bound volume. We are most of us attached to our opinions ; that is one of the " natural affections" of which we hear so much in youth ; but few of us are altogether free from paralyzing doubts and scruples. For my part, I have a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem with error. One and all were writ- ten with genuine interest in the subject ; many, how- ever, have been conceived and finished with imperfect knowledge ; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing. Of these disadvantages a word must here be said. The writer of short studies, having to condense in a few pages the events of a whole lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many various volumes, is bound, above all things, to make that condensation logical and striking. For the only justification of his writing at all is that he shall present a brief, reasoned, and memorable view. By the necessity of the case, all the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his nar- rative ; and that of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in the text, lends to the mat- ter in hand a certain false and specious glitter. By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his subject throughout in a particular illumination, lo PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. like a studio artifice. Like Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break his sitter's neck to get the proper shadows on the portrait. It is from one side only that he has time to represent his subject. The side selected will either be the one most striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy ; and in both cases that will be the one most liable to strained and sophisticated reading. In a biography, this and that is displayed ; the hero is seen at home, playing the flute ; the different tendencies of his work come, one after another, into notice ; and thus something like a true, general impression of the subject may at last be struck. But in the short study, the writer, having seized his " point of view," must keep his eye steadily to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differ- entiate than truly to characterize. The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the proportions of the portrait ; the lights are heightened, the shadows over- charged ; the chosen expression, continually forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace ; and we have at best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief representations. They take so lit- tle a while to read, and yet in that little while the sub- ject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light and PREFACE, BV WAY OF CRITICISM. ii with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repe- tition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two Enghsh masters of the style, Macaulay and Car- lyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much more poetic comprehension, and he, like his favorite Ram Dass, had a fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together. But the " point of view" was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed ; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied ; it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes be- fore them ; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit. Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers, I hope I should have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is impos- 12 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. sible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there forever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a new " point of view," would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of salt to be taken with the text ; and as some words of apology, addition, cor- rection, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in the volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck ; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea ; and do not, by criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and less partial critics. Hugo s Romances. — This is an instance of the " point of view. " The five romances studied with a different purpose might have given different results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favor. The great contemporary master of wordmanship, and indeed of all literary arts and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often overlooked. Burns. — I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp, partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his amiable but im- PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 13 perfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame ; so good a Wordsworthian was out of character upon that stage. This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall ; but they were to this effect — that Burns was a bad man, the impure vehicle of fine verses ; and that this was the view to which all criticism tended. Now I knew% for my own part, that it was with the pro- foundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied the man's desperate efforts to do righi ; and the more I reflected, the" stranger it appeared to me that any thinking being should feel otherwise. The complete letters shed, indeed, a light on the depths to w^hich Burns had sunk in his character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to have stated this more noisily I now see ; but that any one should fail to see it for himself, is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn. If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad man, I question very much whether either 14 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. I or the writer in the Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good one. All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those about him, and — let us not blink the truth — hurries both him and them into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault, as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous seaboard ; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbor. Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what every one well knows, of Burns' s profli- gacy, and of the fatal consequences of his marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary rea- sons. For, first, there is, in our drunken land, a cer- tain privilege extended to drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above all when compared with any '* irregularity between the sexes." The selfishness of the one, so much more gross in es- sence, is so much less immediately conspicuous in its results that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said — I have PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 15 heard it with tliese ears— that drunkenness " may lead to vice." Now I did not think it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard ; and I was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the eyes of many, my study was a step tov/ard the demonstration ot Burns' s radical badness. But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must never represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that Burns's marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done ; but he had pre- sumed too far on his strength. One after another the lights of his life went out, and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonored sickbed of the end. And surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died reputably an old man. It is his chief title that he refrained from " the wrong that amendeth wrong. ' ' But the common, 1 6 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written and read ; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen hundred years ago ; yet we have still to desire a little Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old, Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith. Walt Whitman. — This is a case of a second difficulty which lies continually before the writer of critical studies : that he has to mediate betv/een the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly in- different and frequently averse. Many articles had been written on this notable man. One after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to praise or blame un- duly. In the last case, they helped to blindfold our fastidious public to an inspiring writer ; in the other, by an excess of unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to revolt. I was here on the horns of a dilemma ; and between these horns I squeezed myself with perhaps some loss to the substance of the paper. Seeing so much in Whitman that was merely ridicu- lous, as well as so much more that was unsurpassed in force and fitness, — seeing the true prophet doubled, as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China Shop, ■ — it appeared best to steer a mid'dls course, and to PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 17 laugh with the scorners when I thought they had any excuse, while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over what is imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his extraordinary poems. That was perhaps the right road ; yet I cannot help feeling that in this attempt to trim my sails between an author w^hom I love and honor and a public too averse to recognize his merit, I have been led into a tone unbecoming from one of my stature to one of Whitman's. But the good and the great man will go on his way not vexed with my little shafts of merriment. He, first of any one, will understand how, in the attempt to ex- plain him credibly to Mrs. Grundy, I have been led into certain airs of the man of the world, which are merely ridiculous in me, and were not intentionally discourteous to himself. But there is a w^orse side to the question ; for in my eagerness to be all things to all men, I am afraid I may have sinned against pro- portion. It will be enough to say here that Whit- man's faults are few and unimportant when they are set beside his surprising merits. I had written an- other paper full of gratitude for the help that had been given me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the intrinsic merit of the poems, and conceived in the noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence. The present study was a rifacimento. From it, with the design 1 8 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM, already mentioned, and in a fit of horror at my old excess, the big words and emphatic passages were ruthlessly excised. But this sort of prudence is fre- quently its own punishment ; along with the exagger- ation, some of the truth is sacrificed ; and the result is cold, constrained, and grudging. In short, I might almost everywhere have spoken more strongly than I did. Thoreau. — Here is an admirable instance of the ** point of view ' * forced throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts. Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten sentences since 1 was introduced to him, but his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance ; I took him on his own explicit terms ; and when I learned details of his life, they were, by the nature of the case and my own parii-pris, read even with a certain vio- lence in terms of his writings. There could scarce be a perversion more justifiable than that ; yet it was still a perversion. The study, indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp (IL A. Page), Thoreau 's sincere and learned disciple, that had either of us been men, I please myself with thinking, of less temper and justice, the difference might have made us enemies in- PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 19 Stead of making us friends. To him who knew the man from the inside, many of my statements sounded hke inversions made on purpose ; and yet when we came to talk of them together, and he had understood how 1 was looking at the man through the books, while he had long since learned to read the books through the man, I believe he understood the spirit in which I had been led astray. On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge, and with the same blow fairly de- molished that part of my criticism. First, if Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden Pond, it was not merely with designs of self-improvement, but to serve mankind in the highest sense. Hither came the flee- ing slave ; thence was he despatched along the road to freedom. That shanty in the woods was a station in the great Underground Railroad ; that adroit and philosophic solitary was an ardent worker, soul and body, in that so much more than honorable move- ment, which, if atonement were possible for nations, should have gone far to wipe away the guilt of slavery. But in history sin always meets with condign punish- ment ; the generation passes, the offence remains, and the innocent must suffer. No underground railroad could atone for slavery, even as no bills in Parlia- ment can redeem the ancient wrongs of Ireland. But 2 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. here at least is a new light shed on the Walden episode. Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau was once fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too much aping of the angel, relin- quished the woman to his brother. Even though the brother were like to die of it, we have not yet heard the last opinion of the woman. But be that as it may, we have here the explanation of the *' rarefied and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught himself to breathe. Reading the man through the books, I took his professions in good faith. He made a dupe of me, even as he was seeking to make a dupe of himself, wresting philosophy to the needs of his own sorrow. But in the light of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so cold, are seen to be alive with feeling. What appeared to be a lack of interest in the philoso- pher turns out to have been a touching insincerity of the man to his own heart ; and that fine-spun airy theory of friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any quality of flesh and blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains. The most temperate of living critics once marked a passage of my own with a cross and the words, ** This seems nonsense. " It not only seemed ; it was so. It was a private bravado of my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits, that I PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 2\ had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended by setting it down as a contribution to the theory of life. So with (he more icy parts of this philosophy of Thoreau's. He was affecting the Spartanism he had not ; and the old sentimental wound still bled afresh, svhile he deceived himself with reasons. Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and him- self another : of the first, the reader will find what I believe to be a pretty faithful statement and a fairly just criticism in the study ; of the second he will find but a contorted shadow. So much of the man as fitted nicely with his doctrines, in the photographer's phrase, came out. But that large part which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or sought no formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even looked askance, is wanting in my study, as it was wanting in the guide I followed. In some ways a less serious writer, in all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau still remains to be depicted. Villon. — I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this subject, not merely because the paper strikes me as too picturesque by half, but because I regarded Villon as a bad fellow. Others still think well of him, and can find beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but artistic evil ; and by the principle of the art, those should have written of the man, and not I. 22 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. Where you see no good, silence is the best. Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least^ to give it expression. The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the infinitely greater Flau- bert ; and, while similar in ugliness, still surpasses them in native power. The old author, breaking with an eclat de voix, out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking impression of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it would be worth doing as well as he has done it ; for the pleasure we take in the author's skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the baseness of his attitude. Fat Peg {La Grosse Margot) is typical of much ; it is a piece of experience that has nowhere else been rendered into literature ; and a kind of gratitude for the author's plainness mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the business. I shall quote here a verse of an old students' song, worth laying side by side with Villon's startling ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he did not choose to share the wages of dishonor ; and it is thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall :— PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 23 Nunc plango florem ^tatis tenerae Nitidiorem Veneris sidere : Tunc columbinam Mentis dulcedinem, Nunc serpentinam Amaritudinem. Verbo rogantes Removes ostio, Munera dantes . Foves cubiculo, IIlos abire praecipis A quibus nihil accipis, Caecos claudosque recipis, Viros illustres decipis Cum melle venenosaJ But our illustrious writer of ballades it was uxiTiecejv sary to deceive ; it was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honor, that he lamented in his song ; and the nameless mediaeval vagabond has the best of the comparison. There is now a Villon Society in England ; and Mr. John Payne has translated him entirely into Eng- lish, a task of unusual difficulty. I regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the 1 Gaudeamus : Carmina vagorujn selecta. Leipsic. Triibner. iSy-^ 2 4 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. author's meaning ; in such cases I am bound to sup- pose that he is in the right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything beyond a formal submission. He is now upon a larger venture, prom- ising us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we have all so long looked forward. Charles of Orleans. — Perhaps I have done scanty justice to the charm of the old Duke's verses, and certainly he is too much treated as a fool. The period is not sufficiently remembered. What that period was, to what a blank of imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to those who have waded in the chronicles. Excepting Comines and La Salle and Villon, I have read no author who did not appall me by his torpor ; and even the trial of Joan of Arc, conducted as it was by chosen clerks, bears wit- ness to a dreary, sterile folly, — a twilight of the mind peopled with childish phantoms. In relation to his contemporaries, Charles seems quite a lively character. It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry Pyne, who, immediately on the appearance of the study, sent me his edition of the Debate between the Heralds : a courtesy from the expert to the ama- teur only too uncommon in these days. Knox. — Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies dead and buried in the works of the PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. 25 learned and unreadable IM'Crie. It remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a human book. With the best in- tentions in the world, I have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors, to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the world ; I have touched him in my turn with that " mace of death," which Carlyle has attributed to Dryasdust ; and my two dull papers are, in the mat- ter of dulness, worthy additions to the labors of M'Crie. Yet I believe they are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox. I trust his book may be a masterpiece ; and I indulge the hope that my two studies may lend him a hint or per- haps spare him a delay in its composition. Of the Pepys I can say nothing ; for it has been too recently through my hands ; and I still retain some of the heat of composition. Yet it may serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I have been amply just ; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too grudg- ing of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions. Perhaps some coward- ice withheld me from the proper warmth of tone ; per- 26 PREFACE, BY WAY OF CRITICISM. haps it is easier to be just to those nearer us in rank of mind. Such at least is the fact, which other critics may explain. For these were all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved ; or when I did not love the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them and lived with them ; for months they were continually in my thoughts ; I seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs ; and behold, when I came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly courteous and seldom wholly just. R. L. S. VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosalque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman a creer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, a la fois drame et epop6e, pittoresque mais poetique, reel mais ideal, vrai mais grand, qui enchassera Walter Scott dans Homere. — Victor Hugo on Qtientin Durivard. Victor Hugo's romances occupy an important posi- tion in the history of literature ; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been carried boldly out to their last consequences ; much that was indefinite in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity ; many things have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other ; and it is only in the last romance of all, Quatre Vingt Treize, that this culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that of his prede- cessors, goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognizable. The same princi- 28 VICTOR HUGO' S ROMANCES. pie of growth that carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clew to comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it maybe the very weak- est of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them — of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by Qiiatre Vingt Treize for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition ; and hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them to make the chaos plain : this is continually so in literary history ; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of literary tendency. When we coriipare the novels of Waiter Scott with those of the man of genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honor as a master in the art — I mean Henry Fielding— we shall be somewhat puz-. zled, at the first moment, to state the difference that there is betwefen theste two. Fielding has as much VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 29 numan science ; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller of his story ; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner ; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humored as the great Scotchman. With all these points of resemblance be- tween the men, it is astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in the hands of Fielding ; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it could utilize. The difference between these two men marks a great en- franchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended Quriosity and an en- franchised imagination, has begun. This is a trite thing to say ; but trite things are often very indefinitely comprehended : and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps been'explained with any clearness. To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of conventions upon which plan's and ro- mances are respectively based. The purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure by means of things that remain dutside of the art ; by 3© VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. means of real things, that is, and not artistic conven- tions for things. This is a sort of reahsm that is not to be confounded with that reahsm in painting of which we hear so much. The reahsm in painting is ' a thing of purposes ; this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach, carried reahsm from his ends to his means, and plastered real sand upon his canvas ; and that is precisely what is done in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real sand : real live men and women move about the stage ; we hear real voices ; what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is ; we do actually see a woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we do actually see her very shame- fully produced again. Now all these things, that re- main as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and diffi- cult to deal with ; and hence there are for the drama- tist many resultant limitations in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate toward those of painting : the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but to the duration of each scene or act ; he is confined to the stage, almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Cer- tain moments of suspense, certain significant disposi- tions of personages, a certain logical growth of emo- VIC TOR HUGO' S R OMANCE S. 3 1 tion, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumer and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury ; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here noth- ing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have de- scribed, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and large- ness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a fiat board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the fiat board on to which the novelist throws every- thing. And from this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject ; so that he can now subordi- nate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and 32 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. the gossip of country market women, the gradual de- cay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one point of view — equally able, if he looks at it from another point of view— to repro- duce a color, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment oc- cupy the foreground of his story, the continual sugges- tion of the landscape ; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly fore- shadowed on the horizon ; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board — all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration. This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become suddenly con- scious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand, although he had recognized that the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapa- ble of a regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is rneant is, that Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. ^T, vi'hich the novel possesses over the drama ; or, at least, neglected and did not develop them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them. The world with which he dealt, the world he had realized for himself and sought to realize and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively human interest. As for landscape, he was content to underline stage directions, as it might be done in a play-book : Tom and INIolly retire into a practicable wood. As for na- tionality and public sentiment, it is curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of his creatures ; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all un- known to him ; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the spirit of the times could be for anything in a story ; and so, naturally and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, the instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him otherwise ; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small pro- 34 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. portion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality ; that per- sonality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitution of things. It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history. For art precedes philosophy and even science. People must have noticed things and interested themselves in them be- fore they begin to debate upon their causes or influ- ence. And it is in this way that art is the pioneer of knowledge ; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet realized, ever another and another corner ; and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there will be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation. Scott took an in- terest in many things in which Fielding took none ; and for this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If he had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was so lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little scandalized. At the time when he wrote, VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 35 the real drift of this new manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent ; and, even now, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are enabled to form any proper judgment in the mat- ter. These books are not only descended by ordinary generation from the V/averley novels, but it is in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of Scott carried farther ; that we shall find Scott him- self, in so far as regards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in his own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this pro- duction definitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment as only successive generations can pass over : and it is but natural that one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in self- consciousness. Both men follow the same road ; but where the one went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than Scott ; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The passage at the head of these pages shows how organically he had understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the five great romances (which alone I purpose here to ex- amine), two deliberate designs : one artistic, the other consciously ethical and intellectual. This is a man 36 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. living in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels having any moral influence at all ; but still Hugo is too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas ; and the truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance, to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical result. The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is diffi- cult to put a name upon it ; and yet something as simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive, but they are so only in appear- ance. The fact is that art is working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name ; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance : it is clear enough to us in thought ; but we are not used to consider anything clear until vi^e are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has left with us ; and it is only because language is the medium of romance, that we are prevented from seeing that VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 37 the two cases are the same. It is not that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left with us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its own kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of our philosophical speech. It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical value, that I pro- pose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we shall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of realizing, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our complicated lives. This epical value is -not to be found, let it be un- derstood, in every so-called novel. The great major- ity are networks of art in anything but a very second- ary signification. One might almost number on one's fingers the works in which such a supreme artistic in- tention has been in any way superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic, that gen- erally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works' it would have been equally possible to accom^^^li our present de- sign : and that man is Hawthorne. There is a unity, 38 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. an unwavering creative purpose, about some at leasi of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on the most indifferent reader ; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of his works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo : unity, if he attains to it, is indeed unity out of multitude ; and it is the wonderful power of subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure of his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this, could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present essay is to re- call to the reader the more general features of each of the five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will permit, and rather as a suggestion than any- thing more complete. The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of Notre Dame de Paris was (he tells us) to ' ' denounce ' ' the external fatality that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible super- stition. To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with the artistic concep- tion ; moreover it is very questionably handled, while the artistic conception is developed with the most con- summate success. Old Paris lives for us with new- ness of life : we have ever before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat^shaped island " moored "" by five bridges to the different VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 39 shores, and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admir- able description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude from this, that they were pages thrown away ; but this is not so : we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different layers of paint on a completed picture ; but the thing desired has been accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the " Gothic profile" of the city, of the " surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and bel- fries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far greater than that of its twin towers : the Cathedral is present to us from the first page to the last ; the title has given us the clew, and already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of mirage ; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out above the city ; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say ; but it is an effect that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than their surroundings. We 40 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. know this generation already : we have seen them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passion- ate contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat an exception ; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the romance : are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins .? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle .? What is the whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art.? It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances, there should be so little of that extrava- gance that latterly we have come almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we are dis- tressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and alienate the sympathies. The scene of the in pace, for example, in spite of its strength, verges d-ingerously on the province of the penny novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell ; I should as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 41 And again the followingttwo sentences, out of an other- wise admirable chapter, surely surpass what it has ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine (vol. ii. p. 180) : *' II souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait des poignees de c\\Qwt\iyi, pour voir s ils ne blanchtssaient pas." And, p. 181 : " Ses pensees etaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tete a deux mains et tachait de I'arracher de ses epaules pour la hriser sur le pave. ' ' One other fault, before we pass on. In spice of the horror and misery that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in Notre Dame, the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer is un- pleasant enough ; but when she betrays herself in her last hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this sordid hero who has long since forgotten her— well, that is just one of those things that readers will not forgive ; they do not like it, and they are quite right ; life is hard enough for poor mor- tals, without having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art. We look in vain for any similar blemish in Les Miserahles. Here, on the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary restraint that Hugo has ever made : there is here certainly the ripest and 42 VICTOR HUGO'b ROMANCES. most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be — for such awakenings are unpleasant — to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by, to the labor and sweat of those who support the litter, civilization, in which we ourselves are so smoothly car- ried forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes ; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be once roughly Justin the general ; that the bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death — by the deaths of ani- mals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labor, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in Les Miser a- bles ; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most ser- viceable ; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the ma- chinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels with the VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 43 iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps hor- ribly out upon us ; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognizes the face of the detective ; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer ; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of oppression. We have the preju- dices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws ; a just creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder. With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can forget the passage wheie Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands in ad- miration before the illuminated booth, and the huck- ster behind '* lui faisait un peu Teffet d'etre ie Pere 44 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. eternel ?" The pathos of the forlorn sabot laid trust- ingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat ; there is nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosetteand Mariusare very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reserva- tion of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to ; the melo- dramatic coarsenesses that disfigured Notre Dame are no longer present. There is certainly much that is pain- fully improbable ; and again, the story itself is a little too well constructed ; it produces on us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fits again and again into th'j plot, and is, like the child's cube, serviceable on six faces ; things are not so well arranged in life as all that comes to. Some of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do nothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book remains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full of pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence. Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt v/ith in the first two members of the series, it re- mained for Les Travailleurs de la Mcr to show man hand to hand with the elements, the Inst form of ex- ternal force th?.t is brouc^ht acrainst him. And here VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 45 onc3 more the artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type of human industry in the midst of the vague " diffusion of forces into the illimitable," and the vis- ionary development of '* wasted labor" in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once the note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with his indefatigable toil ; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the clamor of his anvil ; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for example ; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by side than Les Travail- leurs and this other of "the old days before art had learned to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead and utterly unrealized by the artist ; but this is not how we feel with Gilliat ; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces," that an "immense animosity" surrounds him ; we are the witnesses of the terrible warfare that he wages with " the silent inclemency of phenomena gomg their own way, and the great general law, im- placable and passive :" "a conspiracy of the indiffer- ency of things' ' is against him. There is not one in 46 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. terest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognize Gilliat for the hero, we recognize, as implied by this indifferency of things, this direction of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another character who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the two face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm, they fight itepically out, and Gilliat remains the victor ; — a victor, how- ever, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say nothing of the grewsome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene ; it will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book ; here, indeed, is the true position of man in the universe. But in Les Travailleurs, with all its strength, with all its eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something that will not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the storm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be possible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any amount of breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way of speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea was quite calm next day ? Is this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting after all ? And when we have forgiven VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 47 Gilliat's prodigies of strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in the Vicomte de Bragelonne than is quite desirable), what is to be said to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in ade- quate terms that unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloop disappeared over the horizon, and the head under the water, at one and the same moment ? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better ; we know very well that they did not ; a thing like that raises up a despairing spirit of oppo- sition in a man's readers ; they give him the lie fierce- ly, as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginning of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if there are neither proof sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous ' ' first of the fourth, ' ' and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It is here that we learn that *' laird " in Scot- land is the same title as " lord " in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun. In L' Homme qui Rit, it was Hugo's object to " de- nounce" (as he would say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England ; and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two last, must answer for much that is un- 48 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. pleasant in the book. The repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is bound up with impossibihties and absurdities, discourage the reader at the outset, and it needs an effort to lake it as seriously as it deserves. And yet when we judge it dehberately, it will be seen that, here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more happily imagined, as a reductio ad ahsurduvi of the aristocratic principle, than the ad- ventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and in- stalled without preparation as one of the hereditary leg- islators of a great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which all this; depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. What^ again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants } The horrible laughter, stamped forever " by order of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to the scene ; in all time, travesty- lias been the argument of oppression ; and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer : *' If I am vile, is it not your system that has made me so .?" This ghastly laughter gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running through the web of this unpleasant story : the love of the blind girl Dea for the monster. It is a most benignant providence VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 49 that thus harmoniously brings together these two mis- fortunes ; it is one of those compensations, one of those afterthoughts of a relenting destiny, that recon- cile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world ; the atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic love ; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full moon over the night of some foul and feverish city. There is here a quality in the narration more inti- mate and particular than is general with Hugo ; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and his wolf are pleasant enough companions ; but the former is nearly as much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite par- donable in the drama where needs must, but is with- out excuse in the romance. Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of this not immaculate novel ; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at once. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded already in speak- ing of Les Travailleurs, are of a sort that is really in- different in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Tim-Jack to be a likely nickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that matter, be guilty of " figments enough to con- fuse the march of a whole history — anachronisms 50 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. enough to overset all chronology," ^ the life of their creations, the artistic truth and accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come upon a passage like the sinking of the " Ourque" in this romance, we can do nothing but cover our face with our hands : the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic false- hoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated ; and above all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgive in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the " Ourque" go down ; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of sincerity in conception or workmanship. In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure from the traditional canons of romance ; but takmg each separately, one would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any theory upon what was perhaps purely acci- dental. The appearance of Quatre Vingt Treize has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a doc- tor who has long been hesitating how to classify an ^ Prefatory letter to Peverzl of the Peak- VICTOR HUGO' S ROMANCES. 51 epidemic malady, we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is at an end. It is a novel built upon ** a sort of enigma," which was at that date laid beiore revolutionary France, and which is presented by Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this : ' * Can a good action be a bad ac- tion ? Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep ?" This question, as I say, meets with one an- swer after another during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law ; what we really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us. We know how history continues through century after century ; how this king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or injured. And so it is here : Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics $2 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. in military annals ; what we regard is what remains behind ; it is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them for a while with heroic in- spiration, and has the power, now that they are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the novel centres about revolutionary France : just as the plot is an abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealrng with them so master- fully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of customary romance. The episode of the mother and children in Quatre Vingt Treize is equal to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the second volume, for instance, called " Sein gucri, cceur saignant,'" that is fall of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be more delightful than the humors of the three children on the day before the assault. The passage on La Vendee is really great, and the scenes in Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also, somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over employment of conventional dialogue than in VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 53 L Homme qui Rit ; and much that should have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his characters. We should hke to know what becomes of the main body of the troop in the wood of La Saudraie during tiie thirty pages or so in which the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose .^ Of the chapter in which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less said the better ; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over dur- ing the course of Lantenac' s harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inim- itable workmanship that suggest the epithet " statu- esque" by their clear and trenchant outline ; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the stage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated. 54 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. Such then, with their faults and their signai excel- lences, are the five great novels. Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a certain appearance of fluency ; but there are few who can ever bend it to any practi- cal need, few who can ever be said to express them- selves in it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a perfect command over his stories ; and we see that they are constructed with a high regard to some ulterior pur- pose, and that every situation is informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be confused with " the novel with a pur- pose" as familiar to the English reader : this is gen- erally the model of incompetence ; and we see the moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance ; it is the or- ganizing principle. If you could somehow despoil Les Miserahles or Lcs Travailleurs of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the story had lost its in- terest and the book was dead. Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken, you will be astonished at the fieedom with VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 55 which the original purposes of story-telUng have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the two lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley novels, and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake ? Sometimes they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man against the sea and sky, as in Les Travailleurs ; some- times, as in Les Miser ables, they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in the epic of oppression ; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in Quatre Vingt Treize. There is no hero in Noire Dame : in Les Miserabies it is an old man : in L' Homme qui Ritii is a monster : in Quaire Vifigi Treize it is the Revo- lution. Those elements that only began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Wal- ter Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas ; until we find the whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centriiig around matter that Field- ing would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a role, as the man, Gil- liat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortuiies of a nation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir ; and the forces that oppose and corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individual interests that w^re supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood 56 VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. out over everything else and formed as it were the spine of the story, figure here only as one set of in- terests among many sets, one force among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without an- tecedent or relation here below, but a being irivolved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a centre of such action and reaction ; or an unit in a great multitude, chased hither and thither by epi- demic terrors and aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a long way that we have travelled : between such work and the work of Fielding is there not, indeed, a great gulf in thought and sentiment .? Art, thus conceived, realizes for men a larger por» tion of life, and that portion one that it is more diffi- cult for them to realize unaided ; and, besides help- ing them to feel more intensely those restricted personal interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness of those more general rela- tions that are so strangely invisible to the average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place m nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this generalization of interest, we never miss those small humanities that are at the op- posite pole of excellence in ait ; and while we admire the intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another sentiment for the tender heart VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES. 57 that slipped the piece of gold into Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the de- formity of the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination hith- erto unequalled ; and as, in reaching forward to one class of effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is more nearly complete work, and his art, wiih all its imperfections, deals more compre- hensively with the materials of life than that of any of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors. These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and yet they are but one fa9ade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same unaccountable prctervities that have already astonished us in the romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions — an emphasis that is somehow akin to weakness — a strength that is a little epileptic. He stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than others ; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something that is above question ; we like to 58 VICTOR HUGO' S ROMANCES. place an implicit faith in them, and see them always on the platform of their greatness ; and this, unhap- pily, cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat deformed ; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly ; we shall have the wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also to recognize in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and, in many ways, one of the great- est artists of time. If we look back, yet once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to the charge of no other man in the number of the famous ; but to what other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and signifi- cant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely think of the amount, of equally consum- mate performance ? SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. To write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeHng and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or blame accordmg as we find him related to us by the best or worst in ourselves ; but it is only in virtue of some re- lationship that we can be his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's character ; those to which we are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, inconsistencies, and ex- cursions of the diabolic ; we conceive them with re- pugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we find them in con- junction with talents that we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now, Principal Shairp's recent volume, al- though I believe no one will read it without respect and interest, has this one capital defect — that there is imperfect sympathy between the author and the sub- ject, between the critic and the personality under criti- cism. Hence an inorganic, if not an incoherent, pres- entation of both the poems and the man. Of Holy Willie s Prayer^ Principal Shairp remarks that " those 6 o SOME A SPE C TS OF R OBER T B URNS. who have loved most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was ever written." To i\iQ Jolly Beggars, so far as my memory serves me, he refers but once ; and then only to remark on the " strange, not to say painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the Cotter s Saturday Night should have stooped to write \\\q Jolly Beggars. The Saturday Night may or may not be an admirable poem ; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set be- side XhQ Jolly Beggars. To take a man's work piece- meal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that Burns, teres atque rotundus — a burly figure in literature, as, from our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and in- dulgent but orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt and disappointed by the behavior of his red-hot /ro//^/, and solacing himself with the explanation that the poet was " the most in- consistent of men.' ' If you are so sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject, and so paternally de- lighted with his virtues, you will always be an excel- lent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biog- rapher. Indeed, we can only be sorry and surprised SOME A SPECTS OF ROBER T B URNS. 6 1 that Principal Shairp should have chosen a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes neither Holy Willie, nor the Beggars, nor the Ordinalion, nothing is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Geronte : " Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" And every merit we fmd in the book, which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with biographies of Burns, only leads us to regret more heartily that good work should be so greatly thrown away. It is far from my intention to tell over aga:in a story that has been so often told ; but there are certainly some points in the character of Burns that will bear to be brought out, and some chapters in his life that de- mand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man's na- ture, for all its richness, has fallen somewhat out of sight in the pressure of new information and the apologetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle made an inimitable bust -of the poet's head of gold ; may I not be forgiven if my business should have more to do with the feet, which were of clay ? Youth. Any view of Burns would be misleading which passed over in silence the influences of his home and his father. That father, William Burnes, after having been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, and, like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own hands. Poverty of the most dis- tressing sort, with sometimes the near prospect of a 62 SOME A SPE CTS OF ROBER T B URNS. jail, embittered the remainder of his hfe. Chill, back- ward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family, he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more result in theory than practice ; and he had re- flected upon many subjects as he delved the garden. His great delight was in solid conversation ; he would leave his work to talk with the schoolmaster Mur- doch ; and Robert, when he came home late at night, not only turned aside rebuke but kept his father two hours beside the fire by the charm of his merry and vigorous talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in general, and William Burnes in particular, than the pains he took to get proper schooling for his boys, and, when that was no longer possible, the sense and resolution with which he set himself to supply the de- ficiency by his own influence. For many years he was their chief companion ; he spoke with them seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown men ; at night, when work was over, he taught them arithmetic ; he borrowed books for them on history, science, and theology ; and he felt it his duty to supplement this last— the trait is laughably Scottish — by a dialogue of his own composition, where his own private shade of orthodoxy was exactly represented. He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield herding cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild flowers, or to sit by her side when it thundered. Distance to strangers, deep family tenderness, love of knowledge, a narrow. SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 63 precise, and formal reading of theology — everything we learn of him hangs well together, and builds up a popular Scotch type. If I mention the name of An- drew Fairservice, it is only as I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with old Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader's comprehension by a popular but unworthy instance of a class. Such was the influence of this good and wise man that his household became a school to itself, and neighbors who came into the farm at meal-time would find the whole family, father, brothers, and sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding a book in the other. We are sur- prised at the prose style of Robert ; that of Gilbert need surprise us no less ; even William writes a re- markable letter for a young man of such slender op- portunities. One anecdote marks the taste of the family. Murdoch brought Titus Andronictis, and, with such dominie elocution as we may suppose, be- gan to read it aloud before this rustic audience ; but when he had reached the passage where Tamora in- sults Lavinia, with one voice and "in an agony of distress" they refused to hear it to an end. In such a father and with such a home, Robert had already the making of an excellent education ; and what Mur- doch added, although it may not have been much in amount, was in character the very essence of a liteiary training. Schools and colleges, for one great man whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen ; the strong spirit can do well upon more scanty fare. Robert step^ before us, almost from the first, in his 64 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURA'S. complete character — a proud, headstrong, impetuous lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy o£ notice ; in his own phrase " panting after distinction, " and in his brother's *' cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were richer or of more consequence than himself :" with all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature. Al- ready he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his plaid, which was of a particular color, wrapped iri a particular manner round his shoulders/' Ten years later, when a married man, the father of a family, a farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great- coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is the spirit which leads to the extravagant array of Latin Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the English landscape-painter ; and, though the pleasure derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general at- tention and remark. His father wrote the family name Burnes ; Robert early adopted the orthography Burness from his cousin in the Mearns ; and in his twenty-eighth year changed it once more to Burns. It is plain that the last transformation was not made without some qualm ; for in addressing his cousin he adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling num- ber two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about the manner of his appearance even down to the name, and little willing to follow custom. Again, he SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURiVS. 65 was proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conver- sation. To no other man's have we the same conclu- sive testimony from different sources and from every rank of life. It is almost a commonplace that the best of his works was what he said in talk. Robertson the historian " scarcely ever met any man whose conver- sation displayed greater vigor ;" the Duchess of Gor- don declared that he " carried her off her feet ;" and, when he came late to an inn, the servants would get out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days at least, he was determined to shine by any means. He made himself feared in the village for his tongue. He would crush weaker men to their faces, or even perhaps — for the statement of Sillar is not absolute — say cutting things of his acquaintances behind their back. At the church door, between sermons, he would parade his religious views amid hisses. These details stamp the man. -He had no genteel timidities in the conduct of his life. He loved to force his per- sonality upon the world. He would please himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing Jehan for Jean, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade. A leading trait throughout his whole career was his desire to be in love. Ne fait pas ce four qui veuL His affections were often enough touched, but per- haps never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he 66 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. ever touched the happy isle. A man brings to love a deal of ready-made sentiment, and even from child- hood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this vital malady. Burns was formed for love ; he had passion, tenderness, and a singular bent in the direc- tion ; he could foresee, with the intuition of an artist, what love ought to be ; and he could not conceive a worthy life without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was besides so greedy after every shadow of the true divinity, and so much the slave of a strong tempera- ment, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart had lost the power of self-devotion before an oppor- tunity occurred. The circumstances of his youth doubtless counted for something in the result. For the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was over and the beasts were stabled, would take the road, it might be in a winter tempest, and travel perhaps miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour or two in courtship. Rule lo of the Bachelors' Club at Tar- bolton provides that " every man proper for a member of this Society must be a professed lover of one or ^^zorg- of the female sex." The rich, as Burns himself points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupa- tions, but these lads had nothing but their " cannie hour at e'en." It was upon love and flirtation that this rustic society was built ; gallantry was the es- sence of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the Court of Versailles ; and the days were distinguished from each other by love-letters, meetings, tiffs, lecon- ciliations, and expansions to the chos'en confidant, as SOME A SPE C TS OF R OBER T B URNS. 6 7 in a comedy of IMarivaux. Here was a field for a man of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, where he might pursue his voyage of discovery in quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs by the way. He was " constantly the victim of some fair enslaver" — at least, when it was not the other way about ; and there were often underplots and second- ary fair enslavers in the background. Many — or may we not say most ? — of these affairs were entirely arti- ficial. One, he tells us, he began out of " a vanity of showing his parts in courtship," for he piqued him- self on his ability at a love-letter. But, however they began, these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the end ; and he stands unsurpassed in his power of self-deception, and positively without a competitor in the art, to use his own words, of " battering him- self into a warm affection," — a debilitating and futile exercise. Once he had worked himself into the vein, " the agitations of his mind and body" were an aston- ishment to all who knew him. Such a course as this, however pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his nature. He sank more and more toward the pro- fessional Don Juan. With a leer of what the French call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of his seductions ; and the same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the .scandal at the birth of his first bastard. We can well believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an acquaintance with women : he would have conquer- ing manners ; he would bear down upon his rustic 6 8 SOME A SPE C TS OF K OBEK T B URNS. game with the grace that comes of absolute assurance • — the RicheHeu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet an- other manner did these quaint ways of courtship help him into fame. If he were great as principal, he was unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a pas- sion ; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own phrase, so old a hawk ; nay, he could turn a letter for some unlucky swain, or even string a few lines of verse that should clinch the business and fetch the hesitating fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only his " curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity" that recom- mended him for a second in such affairs ; it must have been a distinction to have the assistance and ad- vice of Rah the Rafiterj and one who was in no way formidable by himself might grow dangerous and at- tractive through the fame of his associate. I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in that rough moorland country, poor among the poor with his seven pounds a year, looked upon with doubt by respectable elders, but for all that the best talker, the best letter-writer, the most famous lover and con- fidant, the laureate poet, and the only man who wore his hair tied in the parish. He says he had then as high a notion of himself as ever after ; and I can well believe it. Among the youth he \N2W.^di facile pr in- ceps, an apparent god ; and even if, from time to time, the Reverend Mr. Auld should swoop upon him with the thunders of the Church, and, in company with seven others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday on the stool of repentance, would there SOME A SPE CrS OF R OBER T B URNS. 6 9 not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis, in so conspicuous a shame ? Was not RicheUeu in disgrace more idoHzed than ever by the dames of Paris ? and when was the highwayman most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn ? Or, to take a simile from nearer home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even corporal punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly schoolmaster, against the in- fluence and fame of the school's hero ? And now we come to the culminating point of Burns' s early period. He began to be received into the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and be- gan to reach the ushers and monitors of this great Ayrshire academy. This arose in part from his lax views about religion ; for at this time that old war of the creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling from end to end of our poor Scotland, brisked up in these parts into a hot and virulent skirmish ; and Burns found himself identified with the opposition party, — a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical divines, with wit enough to appreciate the value of the poet's help, and not sufiicient taste to moderate his grossness and personality. We may judge of their surprise when Holy Willie was put into 'their hand ; like the amorous lads of Tarbolton, they recognized in him the best of seconds. His satires began to go the round in manuscript ; Mr. Aiken, one of the lawyers, " read him into fame ;" he himself was soon welcome in many houses of a better sort, where his 70 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a country dancing school, completed what his poems had begun. We have a sight of him at his first visit to Adamhill, in his ploughman's shoes, coasting around the carpet as though that were sacred ground. But he soon grew used to carpets and their owners ; and he was still the superior of all whom he encoun- tered, and ruled the roost in conversation. Such was the impression made, that a young clergyman, himself a man of ability, trembled and became confused when he saw Robert enter the church in which he was to preach. . It is not surprising that the poet determined to publish : he had now stood the test of some pubr , licity, arxd under this hopeful impulse he composed in:/ six winter months the bulk of his more imporjari't poems. Here was a young man who, from a very humble place, was mounting rapidly ; from the cyiioy . sure of a parish, he had become the talk of a county'; once the bard of rural courtships, he was now about to appear as a bound and printed poet in the world's bookshops. A few more intimate strokes are necessary to com- plete the sketch. This strong young ploughman, who feared rto competitor with the flail, suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapors ; he would fall into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for the past and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps devoted to religion, but haunted by it ; and at a touch of sickness prostrated himself SOME A SPECTS OF ROBER T B URNS. 7 i before God in what I can only call unmanly peni- tence. As he had aspirations beyond his place in the world, so he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses to match. He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a winter tempest ; he had a singular tenderness for animals ; he carried a book with him in his pocket when he went abroad, and wore out in this service two copies of the Man of Feeling. With young people in the field at work he was very long-suffering ; and when his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to them — " O man, ye are no for young folk," he would say, and give the defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts of the men whom he met, he read as in a book ; and, what is yet more rare, his knowledge of himself equalled his knowledge of others. There are no truer things said of Burns than what is to be found in his own letters. Country Don Juan as he was, he had none of that blind vanity which values itself on what it is not ; he knew his own strength and weak- ness to a hair : he took himself boldly for wnat he was, and, except in moments of hypochondria, de- clared himself content. The Love Stories. On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young men and women of the place joined in a penny ball, according to their custom. In the same set danced Jean Armour, the master-mason's daughter, and our dark-eyed Don Juan. His dog (not the immortal Luath, but a successor unknown to fame, caret quia 72 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. vate sacro), apparently sensible of some neglect, fol- lowed his master to and fro, to the confusion of the dancers. Some mirthful comments followed ; and Jean heard the poet say to his partner— or, as I should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the com- pany at large — that ' ' he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as w^ell as his dog. ' ' Some time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on Mauch- line green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied by his dog ; and the dog, " scouring in long excur- sion," scampered with four black paws across the linen. This brought the two into conversation ; when Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any of the lasses to like him as well as his dog ?" It is one of the misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honor forbids him to refuse battle ; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like the sworn physician who must at- tend on all diseases. Burns accepted the provocation ; hungry hope reawakened in his heart ; here w^as a girl — pretty, simple at least, if not honesdy stupid, and plainly not averse to his attentions : it seemed to him once more as if love might here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth ! for this facile and empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation ; and her heart, from the first and en to the end of her story, was engaged by another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of "battering himself into a warm affection ;" and the proofs of his success are to be found in many SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 73 •/erses of the period. Nor did he succeed with himsell only ; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his fascination, and early in the next year the nat- ural consequence became manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's seri- ous issues. Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes ; the best she had now to expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest thoughts ; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never have chosen. As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognized that his voyage of discov- ery had led him into a wrong hemisphere — that he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in the pressure of the hour. ' ' Against two things, ' ' he writes, ' ' I am as fixed as fate— staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first, by heaven, I will not do ! — the last, by hell, I will never do !" And then he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper : "If you see Jean, tell her I will meet her, so God help me in my hour of need." They met accordingly ; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these heights of independence, and gave her a written ac- knowledgment of marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually false positions — relations in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way ; let us be glad that Burns 7 4 SOME A SPE C TS OF R OBER T B URNS. was better counselled by his heart. When we discover that we can be no longer true, the next best is to be kind. I dare say he came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious conscience ; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favorite, " How are Thy servants blest, O Lord !" Jean, on the other hand, armed with her " lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his wife. Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves in their farm ; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do country lass ; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to cover it. Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction ; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace to his connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been busy " battering himself" back again into his affection for the girl ; and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the heart. He relieved himself in verse ; but for such a smart- SOME A SPE CTS OF R OBER T B URNS. 7 5 ing affront manuscript poetry was insufficient to con. sole him. He must find a more powerful remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon another. The universe could not be yet exhausted ; there must be hope and love waiting for him somewhere ; and so, with his head down, this poor, insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and gentle Highland nursery- maid at service in a neighboring family ; and he had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret engagement. Jean's marriage hnes had not been destroyed till March 13, 1786 ; yet all was settled between Burns an.d Mary Campbell by Sunday, jMay 14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as they vowed eternal faith. Then they ex- changed Bibles, on one of which Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding nature of an oath ; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the wandering affections, here were two people united for life. IMary came of a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites ; but they must have been eminentlv to the taste of Burns at 76 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. this period ; for nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his tottering constancy. Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life. His book was announced ; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the ali- ment of the child ; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets ; he was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his wife ; now, he had " orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard the Nancy, Captain Smith ;" now his chest was already on the road to Greenock ; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he measures verses of farewell : — " The bursting tears my heart declare ; Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr !" But the great master dramatist had secretly another in- tention for the piece ; by the most violent and com- plicated solution, in which death and birth and sud- den fame all play a part as interposing deities, the act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of twins, and, by an amicable ar- rangement, the Burnses took the boy to bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success of the book was immediate and emphatic ; it put ^20 at once into the author's purse ; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh and push his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for Robert. He went to the window to read it ; a sudden change came SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 77 over his face, and he left the room without a word. Years afterward, when the story began to leak out, his family understood that he had then learned the death of Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself made no reference to this passage of his life ; it was an adventure of which, for I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury the details. Of one thing we may be glad : in after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and left her with the impression that he was " a real warm-hearted chield. " Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend. The town that winter was *' agog with the ploughman poet." Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair, ** Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were of his acquaintance. Such a revolution is not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must be remembered, twenty-seven years of age ; he had fought since his early boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad seed, and inclement seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the furrow, wielding " the thresher's weary flingin'- tree ;" and his education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman. Now he stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned. We can see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat striped with baff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best ; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly 78 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. legs ; his face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and his large dark eye " literally glowing" as he spoke. " I never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter wScott, " though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether they were lords or omnipotent critics, his manner was plain, dig- nified, and free from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not embar- rassed in this society, because he read and judged the men ; he could spy snobbery in a titled lord ; and, as tor the critics, he dismissed their system in an epi- gram. "These gentlemen," said he, "remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him ; he was scarce commander of himself in their society ; he was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan ; and he, who had been so much at his ease with coun- try lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of deference. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers a speaking sketch of his demeanor. " His manner was not prepossessing — scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if he affected a rus- ticity or landertness, so that when he said the music was ' bonnie, bonnie, ' it was like the expression of a child." These would be company manners ; and doubtless on a slight degree of intimacy the affecta- tion would grow less. And his talk to women had SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 79 always ** a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention particularly." The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once) behaved well to Burns from first to last. Were heaven- born genius to revisit us in similar guise, I am not venturing too far when I say that he need expect neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a peasant, and one of no very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good advice, helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready money, and got him, as soon as he asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the elevation with perfect dignity ; and with perfect dignity returned, Vv'hen the time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense never deserted him, and from the first he recog- nized that his Edinburgh popularity was but an ova- tion and the affair of a day. He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein of gratitude ; but in practice he suffered no man to intrude upon his self- respect. On the other hand, he never turned his back, even for a moment, on his old associates ; and he was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend, although the acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold man who should promise similar conduct in equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an admirable appearance on the stage of life — socially successful, intimately self-respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last. So SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. In the present study, this must only be taken by the way, while we return to Burns' s love affairs. Even on the road to Edinburgh he had seized upon the op- portunity of a flirtation, and had carried the " batter- ing" so far that when next he moved from town, it was to steal two days with this anonymous fair one. The exact importance to Burns of this affair may be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, ** because she loves me ;" or, in the tongue of prose : " Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it ; and even now, if it returned, I should not hesi- tate to profit by it again." A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man. Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him regretting Jean in his correspondence. "Because" — such is his reason — " because he does not think he v/ill ever meet so delicious an armful again ;" and then, after a brief excursion into verse, be goes straight on to describe a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the daugh- ter of a Lothian farmer for a heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these references to his future wife ; they are essential to the comprehension of Burns's character and fate. In June, we find him back at Mauchline, a fam^ous man. There, the Armour family greeied him with a " mean, servile compli- ance," which increased his former disgust. Jean was not less compliant ; a second time the poor girl sub- mitted to the fascination of the man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly insulted little SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 8i more than a year ago ; and, though Burns took ad- vantage of her weakness, it was in the ugHest and most cynical spiiit, and with a heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return — a letter to my mind among the most de- grading in the whole collection — a letter which seems to have been inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. " I am afraid," it goes, " I have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former hap- piness — the eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture ; 1 have no paradisiacal evening interviews." Even the process of " battering" has failed him, you perceive. Still he had some one in his eye — a lady, if you please, with a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had '* seen the politest quarters in Europe." " I frequently visited her," he writes, " and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms ; and after her return to , I wrote her in the same terms. Miss, con- struing my remarks further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning ; and wrote me an answer which measured out very completely what an immense way I had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favors. But I am an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, pru- dent reply, as brought my bird from her aerial tower- 82 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. ings, pop, down to my foot, like Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal longing, after this transcrip- tion, to buffet the Old Hawk about the ears. There is little question that to this lady he must have re- peated his addresses, and that he was by her (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly, re- jected. One more detail to characterize the period. Six months after the date of this letter, Burns, back in Edinburgh, is served with a writ m vieditatmie fugce, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of humble rank, who declared an intention of adding to his family. About the beginning of December (1787), anew period opens in the story of the poet's random affec- tions. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes M'Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, who, with her two children, had been deserted by an unworthy husband. She had wit, could use her pen, and had read Werther with attention. Sociable, and even somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, hu- man kernel in the woman ; a warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a considerable, but not authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biographers refer to daintily as " her somewhat volup- tuous style of beauty," judging from the silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her for all in all, I believe she was the best woman Burns encountered. The pair took a fancy for each other on the spot ; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited SOME ASPECTS OE ROBERT BURNS, 83 him to tea ; but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a tete-a-tcie, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a month, and this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspond- ence. It was begun in simple sport ; they are al- ready at their fifth or sixth exchange, when Clarinda writes : "It is really curious so vcvwokifun passing be- tween two persons who saw each other onlyowc^y" but it is hardly safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes in terms too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere acquaint- ance. The exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, and danger may be apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable correspondence ; it is too far away from us, and perhaps, not yet far enough, in point of time and manner ; the imagmation is baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress with the changing phases of the year ; it was enthusiastically admired by the swain, but on the modern mind produces mild amaze- ment and alarm. " Oh, Clarinda," writes Burns, " shall we not meet in a state — some yet unknown state — of being, where the lavish hand of Plenty shall minister to the highest wish of Benevolence, and where the chill north wind of Prudence shall never 84 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. blow over the flowery field of Enjoyment?" The design may be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more suggestive of a Bird of Paradise. It is some- times hard to fancy they are not gravely making fun of each other as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and charming sensibility, are the current topics. " I am delighted, charming Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion," writes Burns ; and the pair entertained a fiction that this was their " favorite sub- ject." "This is Sunday," writes the lady, ** and not a word on our favorite subject. O fy ! * divine Clarinda ! ' " 1 suspect, although quite unconsciously on the part of the lady, who was bent on his redemp- tion, they but used the favorite subject as a stalking- horse. In the meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening steadily into a genuine passion. Visits took place, and then became frequent. Clarinda' s friends were hurt and suspicious ; her clergyman in- terfered ; she herself had smart attacks of conscience ; but her heart had gone from her control ; it was alto- gether his, and she ** counted all things but loss — heaven excepted — that she might win and keep him." Burns himself was transported while in her neighbor- hood, but his transports somewhat rapidly declined during an absence. I am tempted to imagine that, v.'omanlike, he took on the color of his mistress's feel- ing ; that he could not but heat himself at the fire of her unaffected passion ; but that, like one who should leave the hearth upon a winter's night, his temperature soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 85 though he could share the symptoms, that he had never shared the disease. At the same time, amid the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true ex- pressions, and the love verses that he wrote upon Clarmda are among the most moving in the language. We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, Jean once more in the family way, was turned out of doors by her family ; and Burns had her received and cared for m the house of a friend. For he remained to the last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and lacked the sinister courage to desert his victim. About the middle of February (1788), he had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a journey into the south west on business. Clarinda gave him two shirts for his little son. They were daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, too late for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by parcel that she might not have to wait.. Clarinda on her part writes, this time with a beautiful simplicity : " I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday ; and there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I once enjoyed not a little. Miss Wardrobe supped here on Monday. She once named you, which kept me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass of ale — as the lasses do at Hallowe'en — ' in to mysel'.' " Arrived at Mauchline, Burns installed Jean Armour in a lodg- ing, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour to promise her help and countenance in the approaching confine- ment. This was kind at least ; but hear his expres* sions : " I have taken her a room : I have taken her 86 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. to my arms ; I have given her a mahogany bed ; 1 have given her a guinea. ... I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though an}'body should persuade her she had such a claim — which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl. " And then he took advantage oi the situation. To Clarinda he wrote : " I this morn- ing called for a certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her;" and he accused her of " tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning." This was already in March ; by the 13th of that month he was back in Edin- burgh. On the 17th he wrote to Clarinda : " Your hopes, your fears, your cares, my love, are mine ; so don't mind them. I will take you in my hand through the dreary wilds of this world, and scare away the ravening bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on the 21st : " Will you open, with satisfac- tion and delight, a letter from a man who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you, to death, through death, and for ever. . . . How rich am I to have such a treasure as you ! . . . ' The Lord God knoweth,' and, perhaps, * Israel he shall know,' my love and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda 1 I am going to remember you in my prayers." By the 7th of April, seventeen days later, he had already decided to make Jean Armour publicly his wife. A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. And yet his conduct is seen, upon a nearer examina- SOME A SFE C TS OF RO BER T B URNS. 8 7 tion, to be grounded both in reason and in kindness. He was now about to embark on a solid worldly career ; he had taken a farm ; the affair with Clarinda, however gratifying to his heart, was too contingent to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns, to whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of hope and self-respect. This is to regard the question from its lowest aspect ; but there is no doubt that he entered on this new period of his life with a sincere determination to do right. He had just helped his brother with a loan of a hundred and eighty pounds ; should he do nothing for the poor girl whom he had ruined ? It was true he could not do as he did with- out brutally wounding Clarinda ; that was the punish- ment of his bygone fault ; he was, as he truly says, " damned with a choice only of different species of error and misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may thus lead a man through a series of detestable words and actions, and land him at last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he had been strong enough to refrain or bad enough to persevere in evil ; if he had only not been Don Juan at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had been some possible road for him throughout this troublesome world ; but a man, alas ! who is equally at the call of his worse and better instincts, stands among changing events without foundation or resource. ^ ^ For the love affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott Douglas's edition un- der the different dates. SS SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. Downward Course. It may be questionable whether any marriage could have tamed Burns ; but it is at least certain that there was no hope for him in the marriage he contracted. He did right, but then he had done wrong before ; it was. as I said, one of those relations in life which it seems equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. He neither loved nor respected his wife. " God knows," he writes, " my choice was as random as blind man's buff." He consoles himself by the thought that he has acted kindly to her ; that she " has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to him ;" that she has a good figure ; that she has a " wood -note wild," '* her voice rising with ease to B natural, " no less. The effect on the reader is one of unmingled pity for both parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in his own words) could " enter into his favorite studies or relish his favorite authors ;" this was not even a wife, after the affair of the marriage lines, in whom a husband could joy to place his trust. Let her manage a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day long, she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, and an object of pity rather than of equal affection. She could now be faithful, she could now be forgiving, she could now be generous even to a pathetic and touching degree ; but coming from one who was unloved, and who had scarce shown her- self worthy of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away, which could neither change her hus- SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 89 band's heart nor affect the inherent destiny of their relation. From the outset, it was a marriage that had no root in nature ; and we find him, erelong, lyri- cally regretting Highland IMary, renewing correspond- ence with Clarinda in the warmest language, on doubtful terms with jNIrs. Riddel, and on terms unfor- tunately beyond any question with Anne Park. Alas ! this was not the only ill circumstance in his future. He had been idle for some eighteen months, superintending his new edition, hanging on to settle with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with Willie Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose ; and in this period the radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apolo- getical biographers assure us of the contrary ; but from the first, he saw and recognized the danger for himself ; his mind, he .writes, is " enervated to an alarming degree" by idleness and dissipation ; and again, '* my mind has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly recovered. To business he could bring the required diligence and attention without dif- ficulty ; but he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that superior effort of concentra- tion which is required for serious literary work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked no more, and only amused himself with letters. The man who had written a volume of m-asterpieces in six months, during the remainder of his life rarely found courage for any more sustained effort than a song. And the nature 90 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BUR Nib. of the songs is itself characteristic of these idle later years ; for they are often as polished and elaborate as his earlier works were frank, and headlong, and col- loquial ; and this sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for a man of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. The change in manner co- incides exactly with the Edinburgh visit. In 1786 he had written the Address to a Louse, which may be taken as an extreme instance of the first manner ; and already, in 1787, we come upon the rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which are extreme examples of the second. The change was, therefore, the direct and very natural consequence of his great change in life ; but it is not the less typical of his loss of moral cour- age that he should have given up all larger ventures, nor the less melancholy that a man who first attacked liteiature with a hand that seemed capable of moving mountains, should have spent his later years in whit- tling cherry-stones. Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper ; he had to join to it the salary of an exciseman ; at last he had to give It up, and rely altogether on the latter resource. He was an active officer ; and, though he sometimes tempered severity with mercy, we have local testimony oddly representing the public feeling of the period, that, while " in everything else he was a perfect gentleman, when he met with anything seizable he was no better than any other gauger." There is but one manifestation of the man in these last years which need delay us : and that was the sud- SOME A SPE CTS OF R OBER T B URNS. 9 1 den interest in politics which arose from his sympathy with the great French Revolution. His only political feeling had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not more or less respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, and the rest of what George Borrow has nicknamed the " Charlie over the water" Scotchmen. It was a sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in its origin, built on ballads and the adventures of the Young Chevalier ; and in Burns it is the more ex- cusable, because he lay out of the way of active poli- tics in his youth. With the great French Revolution, something living, practical, and feasible appeared to him for the first time in this realm of human action. The young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation animated with the same desire. Already in 1788 we find the old Jacobitism hand in hand with the new popular doctrine, when, in d letter of indig- nation against the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes : "I dare say the American Congress in 1776 will be allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the English Convention was in 1688 ; and that their pos- terity will celebrate the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely as we do ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed house of Stuart." As time wore on, his sentiments grew more pronounced and even violent ; but there was a basis of sense and generous feeling to his hottest excess. What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in life ; an open road to success and distinction for all 92 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. classes of men. It was in the same spirit that he had helped to found a public library in the parish where his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were it alone, this verse : — " Here's freedom to him that wad read, Here's freedom to him that wad write ; There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard But them wham the truth wad indite." Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided by wisdom. Many stories are preserved of the bitter and unwise words he used in country coteries ; how he proposed Washington's health as an amendment to Pitt's, gave as a toast " the last verse of the last chap- ter of Kings," and celebrated Dumouriez in a dog- grel impromptu full of ridicule and hate. Now his sympathies would inspire him with Scots, wha hae j now involve him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, and consequent apologies and explanations, hard to offer for a man of Burns' s stomach. Nor was this the front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took part in the capture of an armed smug- gler, bought at the subsequent sale four carronades, and despatched them with a letter to the French As- sembly. Letter and guns were stopped at Dover by the English officials ; there was trouble for Burns with his superiors ; he was reminded firmly, however deli- cately, that, as a paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be silent ; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have rushed to his head SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 93 at the humiliation. His letter to jMr. Erskine, subse- quently Earl of i\Iar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an excise- man ; alas ! had he not a family to keep } Already, he wrote, he looked forward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler as this : " Burns, notwith- standing i\\Q /an/aronnade of independence to be found in his works, and after having been held forth to view and to public estimation as a man of some genius, yet^ quite destitute of resources within himself to sup- port his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry exciseman, and shrunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind." And then on he goes, in a style of rhodomontade, but filled with living indignation, 10 declare his right to a political opinion, and his will- ingness to shed his blood for the political birthright of his sons. Poor, perturbed spirit ! he was indeed ex- ercised in vain ; those who share and those who differ from his sentiments about the Revolution, alike un- derstand and sympathize with him in this painful strait ; for poetry and human manhood are lasting like the race, and politics, which are but a wrongful striv- ing after right, pass and change from year to year and age to age. The Twa Dogs has already outlasted the constitution of Sieyesand the policy of the Whigs ; and Burns is better known among English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox. 94 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, his steps led downward. He knew, knew bit- terly, that the best was out of him ; he refused to make another volume, for he felt that it would be a disappointment ; he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was sure it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he would take nothing ; they were all that he could do ; the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series of Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water ; and in a fling of pain and disappointment, which is surely noble with the nobility of a viking, he would rather stoop to borrow than to accept money for these last and inadequate efforts of his muse. And this des- perate abnegation rises at times near to the height of madness ; as when he pretended that he had not writ- ten, but only found and published, his immortal Aula Lang Syne. In the same spirit he became more scrupulous as an artist ; he was doing so little, he would fain do that little well ; and about two months before his death, he asked Thomson to send back all his manuscripts for revisal, saying that he would rather write five songs to his taste than twice that number otherwise. The battle of his life was lost ; in forlorn efforts to do well, in desperate submissions to evil, the last years flew by. His temper is dark and explosive, launching epigrams, quarrelling with his friends, jeal- ous of young puppy officers. He tries to be a good father ; he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad, and jaded, he can refuse no occasion of temporary pleas- ure, no opportunity to shine ; and he who had once SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 95 refused the invitations of lords and ladies is now whistled to the inn by any curious stranger. His death (July 21, 1796), in his thirty -seventh year, was indeed a kindly dispensation. It is the fashion to say he died of drink ; many a man has drunk more and yet lived with reputation, and reached a good age. That drink and debauchery helped to destroy his con- stitution, and were the means of his unconscious sui- cide, is doubtless true ; but he had failed in life, had lost his power of work, and was already married to the poor, unworthy, patient Jean, before he had shown his inclination to convivial nights, or at least before that inclination had become dangerous either to his health or his self-respect. He had trifled with life, and must pay the penalty. He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had grasped at temporary pleasures, and sub- stantial happiness and solid industry had passed him by. He died of being Robert Burns, and there is no levity in such a statement of the case ; for shall we not, one and all, deserve a similar epitaph ? Works. The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon me throughout this paper only to touch upon those points in the life of Burns where correction or ampli- fication seemed desirable, leaves me little opportunity to speak of the v%^orks which have made his name so famous. Yet, even here, a few observations seem necessary. At the time when the poet madeTiis appearance and 96 SOME A SPECTS OF ROBER T B URNS. great first success, his work was remarkable in two ways. For, first, in an age when poetry had become abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to deal with shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifica- tions, he dealt with the actual circumstances of his life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might be. And, second, in a time when English versification was particularly stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were used with ultra-academical timidity, he wrote verses that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible, and used language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed most fit to give a clear impression. If you take even those English authors whom v/e know Burns to have most admired and studied, you will see at once that he owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shen- stone, for instance, and watch that elegant author as he tries to grapple with the facts of life. He has a description, I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or walking on thin ice, which is a little miracle of incompetence. You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot recollect whether his hero was slid- ing or walking ; as though a writer should describe a skirmish, and the reader, at the end, be still uncer- tain whether it were a charge of cavalry or a slow and stubborn advance of foot. There could be no such ambiguity in Burns ; his work is at the opposite pole from such indefi^nite and stammering performances ; and a whole lifetime passed in the study of Shenstone would only lead a man farther and farther from writ- ing the Address to a Louse, Yet Burns, like most SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 97 great artists, proceeded from a school and continued a tradition ; only the school and tradition were Scotch, and not English. While the English language was becoming daily more pedantic and inflexible, and English letters more colorless and slack, there was an- other dialect in the sister country, and a different school of poetry tracing its descent, through King James I., from Chaucer. The dialect alone accounts for much ; for it was then written colloquially, which kept it fresh and supple ; and, although not shaped for heroic flights, it was a direct and vivid medium for all that had to do with social hfe. Hence, whenever Scotch poets left their laborious imitations of bad English verses, and fell back on their own dialect, their style would kindle, and they would write of their convivial and somewhat gross existences with pith and point. In Ramsay, and far more in the poor lad Fergusson, there was mettle, humor, literary courage, and a power of saying what they wished to say defi- nitely and brightly, which in the latter case should have justified great anticipations. Had Burns died at the same age as Fergusson, he would have left us lit- erally nothing worth remark. To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, he was indebted in a very uncom- mon degree, not only following their tradition and using their measures, but directly and avowedly imi- tating their pieces. The same tendency to borrow a hint, to work on some one else's foundation, is not- able in Burns from first to last, in the period of song- writing as well as in that of the early poems ; and 98 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. Strikes one oddly in a man of such deep originality, who left so strong a print on all he touched, and whose work is so greatly distinguished by that character of " inevitability" which Wordsworth denied to Goethe. When we remember Burns' s obligations to his pred- ecessors, we must never forget his immense advances on them. They had already " discovered " nature ; -but Burns discovered poetry— a higher and more in- tense way of thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a higher and more ideal key of words in which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson ex- celled at making a popular — or shall we say vulgar ? — sort of society verses, comical and prosaic, written, you would say, in taverns while a supper party waited for its laureate's word ; but on the appearance of Burns, this coarse and laughing literature was touched to finer issues, and learned gravity of thought and natural pathos What he had gained from his predecessors was a direct, speaking style, and to walk on his own feet in- stead of on academical stilts. There was never a man of letters with more absolute command of his means ; and we may say of him, without excess, that his style was his slave. Hence that energy of epithet, so con- cise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted to explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the dialect he wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and complete- ness of description which gives us the very physiog- nomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his best SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. 99 pieces, which keeps him from any slip into the weari- ful trade of word painting, and presents everything, as everything should be presented by the art of words, in a clear, continuous medium of thought. Principal Shairp, for instance, gives us a paraphrase of one tough verse of the original ; and for those who know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has the very quality they are accustomed to look for and admire in Greek. The contemporaries of Burns were surprised that he should visit so many celebrated mountains and waterfalls, and not seize the opportunity to make a poem. Indeed, it is not for those who have a true command of the art of words, but for peddling, pro- fessional amateurs, that these pointed occasions are most useful and inspiring. As those who speak French imperfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they may have talked upon or heard others talk upon before, because they know appropriate words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse rejoices to behold a waterfall, because he has learned the sentiment and knows ap- propriate words for it in poetry. But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with any subject ; and whether it was a stormy night, a shepherd's collie, a sheep struggling in the snow, the conduct of cowardly sol- diers in the field, the gait and cogitations of a drunken man, or only a village cockcrow in the morning, he could find language to give it freshness, body, and re- lief. He was always ready to borrow^ the hint of a design, as though he had a difficulty in commencing — a difficulty, let us say, in choosing a subject out of LofC. loo SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. a world which seemed all equally living and signifi- cant to him ; but once he had the subject chosen, he could cope with nature single-handed, and make every stroke a triumph. Again, his absolute mastery in his art enabled him to express each and all of his differ- ent humors, and to pass smoothly and congruously from one to another. Many men invent a dialect for only one side of their nature — perhaps their pathos or their humor, or the delicacy of their senses — and, for lack of a medium, leave all the others unexpressed. You meet such an one, and find him in conversation full of thought, feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art to employ in his writings. But Burns was not thus hampered in the practice of the literary art ; he could throw the whole weight of his nature into his work, and impregnate it from end to end. If Doctor Johnson, that stilted and accomplished stylist, had lacked the sacred Boswell, what should we have known of him ? and how should we have delighted in his acquaintance as we do .? Those who spoke with Burns tell us how much we have lost who did not. But I think they exaggerate their privilege : I think we have the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his consummate verses. It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he affected Wordsworth and the world. There is, in- deed, only one merit worth considering in a man of letters — that he should write well ; and only one damning fault — that he should write ill. We are little SOME A SPE CTS OF ROBERT B URNS. i o i the better for the reflections of the sailor's parrot in the story. And so, if 'Bums helped to change the course of literary history, it was by his frank, direct, and masterly utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects. That was imposed upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He wrote from his own experi- ence, because it was his nature so to do, and the tra- dition of the school from which he proceeded was for- tunately not opposed to homely subjects. But to these homely subjects he communicated the rich commen- tary of his nature ; they were all steeped in Burns ; and they interest us not in themselves, but because they have been passed through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a man. Such is the stamp of living lit- erature : and there was never any more alive than that of Burns. What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes flowing out in byways hitherto unused, upon mice, and flowers, and the devil himself ; sometimes speak- ing plainly between human hearts ; sometimes ring- ing out in exultation like a peal of bells ! When we compare the Farmer s Salutation to his Auld Mare ATaggie, with the clever and inhumane production of half a century earlier. The Auld Man's Mare's dead, we see in a nutshell the spirit'of the change introduced by Burns. And as to its manner, who that has read it can forget how the collie, Luath, in the Twa Dogs, describes and enters into the merry-making in the cottasre ? I02 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS. " The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill, Are handed round wi' rieht guJd will ; The canty auld folks crackin' crouse, The young- anes rantin' through the house — My heart has been sae fain to see them That I for joy hae barkit wi' them." It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal to so many women, and, through Jean Armour, to him- self at last. His humor comes from him in a stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him the best of humorous poets. He turns about in the midst to utter a noble sentiment or a trenchant remark on human life, and the style changes and rises to the oc- casion. I think it is Principal Shairp who says, hap- pily, that Burns would have been no Scotchman if he had not loved to moralize ; neither, may we add, would he have been his father's son ; but (what is worthy of note) his moralizings are to a large extent the moral of his own career. He was among the least impersonal of artists Except in the Jolly Beggar Sy he shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has complained that Tam o' Shanter is, from the ab- sence of this quality, only a picturesque and exter- nal piece of work ; and I may add that in the Tiva Dogs it is precisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety that a great deal of the humor of the speeches depends for its existence and effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of his identity that it breaks forth on every page ; and there is scarce an appropriate remark either in praise or blame of his own conduct, but he has put SOME A SPE CTS OF R OBER T B URNS. 1 03 it himself into verse. Alas ! for the tenor of these remarks ! They are, indeed, his own pitiful apology for such a marred existence and talents so misused and stunted ; and they seem to prove forever how small a part is played by reason in the conduct of man's affairs. Here was one, at least, who with un- failing judgment predicted his own fate ; yet his knowledge could not avail him, and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic destiny. Ten years before the end he had written his epitaph ; and neither subse- quent events, nor the critical eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it to alter. And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last unanswerable plea .'* — • " Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman ; Though they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human : One point must still be greatly dark " One .? Alas ! I fear every man and woman of us is " greatly dark" to all their neighbors, from the day of birth until death removes them, in their greatest virtues as well as in their saddest faults ; and we, who have been trymg to read the character of Burns, may take home the lesson and be gentle in our thoughts. WALT WHITMAN. Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied about in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and ill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by irreverent enemies. Now, whether his poetry is good or bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit of a dif- ference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses in Samsoii Agonistes ; but, I think, we may shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that, when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare ; to appreciate his works is not a condition necessary to salvation ; and I would not disinherit a son upon the question, nor even think WALT WHITMAN. 105 much the worse of a critic, for I should always have an idea what he meant. What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not possible to acquit any one of defective intelligence, or else stiff prejudice, who is not interested by Whitman's matter and the spirit it represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent position. Whether he may greatly influence the future or not, he is a notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer ; and yet where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous contemporaries ? Mr. Spencer so decorous — I had almost said, so dandy — in dissent ; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the " barbaric yawp" of Whitman } Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was a theorizer about society be- fore he was a poet. He first perceived something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the To6 WALT WHITMAN. want. The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically ex- pounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as lar as it can be from the case of the spon- taneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although sometimes he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and preconceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the tendencies around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down into some more or less un- just compromise as in older nations, but still in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn out ; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse, and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle wonder to active speculation is but a step ; and he seems to have been early struck with the in- efficacy of literature and its extreme unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls " Feudal Literature" could have little living action on the tumult of Ameri- can democracy ; what he calls the *' Literature of Wo," meaning the whole tribe of Wertherand Byron, could have no action for good in any time or place. Both propositions, if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be true enough ; and as this seems to be Whitman's view, they were true enough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which WALT WHITMAN. 107 was to inhere in the life of the present ; which was to be, first, human, and next, American ; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract ; to give culture in a popular and poetical presentment ; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of humanity which should be equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favorite phrases, to " the average man." To the formation of some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many contributions, one sometimes explaining, sometimes superseding, the other : and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but he pretends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the poetry, but he flatters himself he has done some- thing toward making the poets. His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order, the materials of their existence. He is " The An- swerer ;" he is to find some way of speaking aoout life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment, man's enduring astonishment at his own position. And be- sides having an answer ready, it is he who shall pro- voke the question. He must shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some elec- tion in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream. Life is a business we are all apt to mis- Io8 WALT WHITMAN. manage ; either living recklessly from day to day, OT suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by the inanities of custom. We should despise a man who gave as little activity and forethought to the con- duct of any other business. But in this, which is the one thing of all others, since it contains them all, we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impres- sion obliterates another. There is something stupe- fying in the recurrence of unimportant things. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an outlook beyond daily concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits and great possibilities of our exist- ence. It is the duty of the poet to induce such mo- ments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the max- ims of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily disown after two hours' serious reflection on the subject is, I am afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of considerate vir- tue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in *he middle of God's beautiful and wonderful universe ; WALT WHITMAN. 109 the drowsy heads have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell asleep ; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles in life. And it happens that literature is, in some wajs, but an indifferent means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world ; and yet a particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed ; like a bright window in a dis- tant view, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind, produce, in ten niinutes, what it would require a laborious volume to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put it into words ; for the words are all colored and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them in no WALT WHITMAN. man's speech ; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute con- victions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication, not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into the domain of conduct ; and the majority of women, not learned in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or mo- tives. Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman's scru- pulous and argumentative poet ; he must do more than waken up the sleepers to his words ; he must persuade them to look over the book and at life with their own eyes. This side of truth is very present to Whitman ; it is this that he means when he tells us that " To glance with an eye confounds the learning of all times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descant- ing on the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye, were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion, than to read the works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may be said to end in certainty, the certainty in the one case tran- scends the other to an incalculable degree. If people WALT WHITMAN-. in see a lion, they run away ; if they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an ex- perimental humor. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and not like books ? Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking to- gether ? Yes, there is one : the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe ; that, alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any convic- tion, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, or pos- tulate, before it becomes fully operative. Strange ex- cursions and high-flying theories may interest, but they cannot rule behavior. Our faith is not the high- est truth that we perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, b^ flashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic ; it is not by induction, deduction, or construction ; it is not by forcing him on from one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually renewed. He cannot be made to believe anything ; but he can be made to see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It is when the reader cries, " Oh, I know !" and is, perhaps, half irritated to see how nearly the author has forestalled his own thoughts, that he is on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith. 112 WALT WHITMAN. Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity of ideal to the average population of America — to gather their activities about some con- ception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if only for the moment — the poet must portray that population as it is. Like hum.an law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people ; and,, by the same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence Whitman's own formula : " The poet is individual — he is complete in himself : the others are as good as he ; only he sees it, and they do not." To show them how good they are, the poet must study his fellow-countrymen and him- self somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for his book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all true books are books of travel ; and all genuine poets must run their risk of being charged with the travel- ler's exaggeration ; for to whom are such books more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully and smartly pictured ? But this danger is all upon one side ; and you may judiciously flatter the portrait without any likelihood of the sitter's disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned : that by drawing at first hand from himself and his neigh- bors, accepting without shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make sure of belief, and at the same time encourage people for^vard by the means of praise. WALT WHITMAN. 113 II. We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at con- siderable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators ; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hys- terically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we hke to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires. It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wis- dom, we must be careful how we tamper wath our ploughmen. Where a man in not the best of cir- cumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the in- tervals of dull and unremunerative labor ; where a 114 WALT WHITMAN. man in this predicament can afford a lesson bj the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there is plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is than to teach him whin- ing. It is better that he should go without the cheer- ful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralyzing sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs and decolorizes for poor natures the wonderful pageant of consciousness ; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sympathize ; but let us see to it, above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man up in courage while we demolish its substi- tute, indifference. Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the liv- ableness of life. His poems, he tells us, are to be " hymns of the praise of things." They are to make for a certain high joy in living, or what he calls him- self " a brave delight fit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no difficulty in introducing his optimism : it fitted readily enough with his system ; for the aver- age man is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to do throughout : Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances ; WALT IV HITMAN. 115 throws them out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something hke beauty ; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end. "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early- risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of healthy women for the manly form, sea- faring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, — all is an old unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people." There seems to me something truly original in this choice of trite examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said " the love of healthy men for the female form," he wonld have said almost a silliness ; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy, and is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by re- versing it, he tells us something not unlike news ; something that sounds quite freshly in words ; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great self- satisfaction and spiritual aggrandizement. In many different authors you may find passages more remark- able for grammar, but few of a more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our con- nection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is a sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over something else. Not to be upsides in Il6 WALT WHITMAN. this with any groom or gardener, is to be very meanly organized. A man should be ashamed to take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense and enjoyable occupation. Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keep- ing up a sort of outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read " among the cooling influences of external nature ;" and this rec- ommendation, like that other famous one which Haw- thorne prefixed to his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest ; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper ; little things seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous ; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. ) He thinks very ill of the atmosphere of parlors or libraries. Wisdom keeps school outdoors. And he has the art to recom- mend this attitude of mind by simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue ; so that the reader, to keep the advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and em- phatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and surprising, dis- tinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home WALT IVHITMAAr. 117 to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of touchirfg nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, ** the huge and thoughtful night. " And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic ; and the youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders. IIL Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars, as that one man should rise from the dead. He declares ' ' a hair on the back of his hand just as curious as any special revelation." His whole life is to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, one perpetual miracle. Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful ; from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the first time, and pro- fesses astonishment on principle. But he has no lean- ing toward mythology ; avows his contempt for what Ii8 WALT WHITMAN. he calls *' unregenerate poetry ;" and does not mean by nature "The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing billions of tons." Nor is this exhaustive ; for in his character of ideal- ist all impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is not against religion ; not, indeed, against any religion. He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities ; his cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them ; his statement of facts must in- clude all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsisten- cies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong, pictu- resque, and popular lineaments, for the understanding of the average man. One of his favorite endeavors is to get the whole matter into a nutshell ; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears ; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and space ; to focus all this about his own momentary WALT WHITMAN. 119 personality ; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the incon- ceivable numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words : The desire of the moth for the star. The same truth, but to what a different purpose ! Whitman's moth is mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that imagination flags in the effort to conceive it ; but here, in the meantime, is the world under our feet, a ver}' warm and habitable corner. ' ' The earth, that is sufficient ; I do not want the constellations any nearer," he remarks. And again : " Let your soul stand cool and composed," says he, " before a million universes." It is the language of a transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered. But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon of philoso- phy, is not content with a few pregnant hints ; he must put the dots upon his i's ; he must corroborate the songs of Apollo by some of the darkest talk of hu- man metaphysic. He tells his disciples that they must be ready " to confront the growing arrogance of Real- ism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of this universal edifice. " Nothing, not I20 WALT WHITMAN. God, " he says, " is greater to one than oneself is ;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight ; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He will give effect to his own character with- out apology ; he sees " that the elementary laws never apologize." " I reckon," he adds, with quaint col- loquial arrogance, " I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law^ of its being ; so, unrelentingly, will he ; everything, every person, is good in his own place and way ; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. For he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. ' ' No array of terms, ' ' quoth he, '* no array of terms can say how much at peace I am about God and about death." There cer- tainly never was a prophet who carried things with a higher hand ; he gives us less a body of dogmas than a series of proclamations by the grace of God ; and language, you will observe, positively fails him to ex- press how far he stands above the highest human doubts and trepidations. But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself, comes the attraction of one per- son for another, and all that we mean by the word love : — " The dear love of man for his comrade — the attraction of friend for friend, Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, Of city for city and land for land." WALT WHITMAN. 121 The solitude of the most subHme ideaHst is broken in upon by other people's faces ; he sees a look in ihtir eyes that corresponds to something in his own lieait ; there comes a tone in their voices which con- victs him of a startling weakness for his fellow- creatures. While he is hymning the ego and com- mercing with God and the universe, a woman goes below his window ; and at the turn of her skirt or the color of her eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality with the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily persuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. And so sympathy pairs with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on earth ; and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, and self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his strength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffenng love for others. To some extent this is takmg away with the left hand what has been so gen- erously given with the right. Morality has been cere- moniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by the window. We are told, on one page, to do as we please ; and on the next w^e are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own right ; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw him- self in clear ether a moment before is plunged down 122 WALT WHITMAN. again among the fogs and complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and be- tween friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense political sympathies ; and his ideal man must not only be a generous friend but a conscien- tious voter into the bargain. His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind, by proving that we are free and kind already. He passes our cor- porate life under review, to show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the advo- cate. "There is no object so soft," he says some- where in his big, plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe." Rightly understood, it is on the softest of all objects, the sympathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily and securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for doubt or discussion, about con- duct, where every one is to follow the law of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt, depre- cates discussion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy phrases, " the satisfaction and aplomb of animals." If he preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the ranting optimism of his cos- mology, it is because he declares it to be the original WALT WHITMAN. 123 deliverance of the human heart ; or at least, for he would be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present Christianized. His is a morality without a prohibition ; his policy is one of encourage- ment all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to Whitman's standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues ; but of a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little to say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two upon the other side. He would lay down noth- ing that would be a clog ; he would prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The great point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this would be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was good ; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry " Tally-ho," and man- kind will break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to another class of minds, it may look like the result of the somewhat cynical reflection that you will not make a kind man out of one who is unkind by any precepts under heaven ; tempered by the belief that, in natural circumstances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and act more courageously, the balance of results will be for good. So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine ; as a picture of man's life it is incomplete and misleading, although eminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge ; for if he is prophetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of 124 WALT WHITMAN. consistency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere ; and then pat comes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a woman : " Very well, then, 1 contradict myself !" with this addition, not so feminine and perhaps not ■altogether so satisfactory : " I am large— I contain multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel accord- ing to Whitman, even if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretch- edness like an honest man ; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a con- viction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end ; that " what is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even ' ' the old man who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse than gall." But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the present. Pangloss, smart- ing under one of the worst things that ever was sup- posed to come from America, consoled himself with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for cochineal. And with that murderous parody, logical optimism and the praises of the best of possible words went irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in the mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all allusions to the cochineal ; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome ; WALT WHITMAN. 125 as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious to be done. I do not know many better things in literature than the brief pictures, — brief and vivid like things seen by lightning, — with which he tries to stir up the world's heart upon the side of mercy. He braces u^, on the one hand, with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness ; on the other, he touches us with pitiful instances of people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story ; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave ; to stop our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all the afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call one of ultra-Christianity ; and however wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that no one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his con- science ; no one, however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supporting welcome. IV. Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battle of well-doing ; he has given to his precepts the authority of his own brave example. Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no sense of humor, he has succeeded as well in life as in 126 WALT WHITMAN'. his printed performances. The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan ; but I never met any one who had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection and respect for the man's character. He practises as he professes ; he feels deeply that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful delight in serving others, which he often celebrates in literature with a doubtful measure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, the best and the most human and convincing passages are to be found in " these soil'd and creas'd little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fast- ened with a pin," which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded or in the excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in the formal meaning of the word ; he has left his jottings for the most part as he made them ; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter — short, straight- forward to the point, with none of the trappings of composition ; but they breathe a profound sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is an honor to love. Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited be- lief in the future of These States (as, with reverential WALT WHITMAN. 127 capitals, he loves to call them), made the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue, Unionism, of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fall- en into premature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance. A.nd the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues ; it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tor- tured him intimately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a theatre, it was a place of education, it was like a season of religious revival. He watched Lin- coln going daily to his work ; he studied and frater- nized with young soldiery passing to the front ; above all, he walked the hospitals, readino^ the Bible, dis- tributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco ; a pa- tient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches. His memoranda of this period are almost bewilder- ing to read. From one point of view they seem those of a district visitor ; from another, they look like the formless jottings of an artist in the picturesque. More than one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed the writer for a fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identify him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty of style. And yet the story touches home ; and if you are of the weeping order of mankind, you will certainly find your eyes fill with tears, of which you have no reason to be ashamed. There is only one way to characterize a work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is a passage from a letter to a 128 WALT WHITMAN. mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in hospital : — " Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in sur- gical treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. He was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of com- ing in afternoons and sitting by him, and he liked to have me — liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on my knee — would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night — often fancied himself with his regiment — by his talk sometimes seem'd as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his ofBcers for some- thing he was entirely innocent of — said ' I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.' At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem'd to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving them good advice ; would talk to them a long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or idea escaped him. It was remark'd that many a man's conversation in his senses was not half so good as Frank's delirium. " He was perfectly willing to die — he had become very weak, and had suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly re- sign' d, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed. And now, like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in herservice. Such things are gloomy — yet there is a text, ' God doeth all things well,' the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul. " I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, WALT- WHITMAN. 129 might be worth while, for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him." It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but what are we to say of its profound good- ness and tenderness ? It is written as though he had the mother's face before his eyes, and saw her wincing in the flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to say of its sober truthfulness, not exaggerating, not running to phrases, not seeking to make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave young man ? Literary reticence is not Whitman's stronghold ; and this reticence is not literary, but humane ; it is not that of a good artist but that of a good man. He knew that w^hat the mother wished to hear about w^as Frank ; and he told her about her Frank as he was. V. Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essence of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author, and goes solemnly about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indication is worth notice. : He has chosen a rough, unrhymed, lyrical verse ; sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement ; often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected principally because it was easy to write, although not without recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our 130 WALT IV HITMAN. English Old Testament. According to Whitman, on the other hand, " the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers of form between Prose and Poetry ... for the most cogent purposes of those great inland states, and for Texas, and California, and Oregon ;" — a statement which is among the happiest achievements of American humor. He calls his verses " lecitatives," in easily followed allusion to a musical form. " Easily-written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, " I feel the thrum of your climax and close." Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can perceive the rhythm ; and in spite of Mr. Swin- burne, a great part of his work considered as verse is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse, but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admir- able merits. The right detail is seized ; the right word, bold and trenchant, is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither afraid of being slangy nor of being dull ; nor, let me add, of being ridiculous. The result is a most sur- prising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affectation, and downright nonsense. It would be useless to follow his detractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his worst ; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted specimens of how happily he can write when he is at his best. These come in to most advantage in their own place ; owing something, it may be, to the offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is certain, that no one WALT WHITMAN. 131 can appreciate Whitman's excellences until he has grown accustomed to his faults. Until you are con- tent to pick poetry out of his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's transla- tion, your gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed, and the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly flagrant production by the Poet Close. A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, un- fortunate in taking for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is. not only on the hill-tops, but in the fac- tory ; not only by the harbor full of stately ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show beauty in common things is the work of the rar- est tact. It is not to be done by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it home to men's minds is the problem of literature, and is only accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one's right hand by way of pistol ; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein ; to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no distinction in one's enthusi- asm over the most incomparable matters ; to prove one's entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical apostrophe ; — this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way to do it. It may be very wrong, and very v;ounding to a respectable branch of indusirr, but the word "hatter" cannot 132 WALT WHITMAN. be used seriously in emotional verse ; not to under- stand this, is to have no literary tact ; and I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teems with similar comicalities ; and, to a reader who is determined to take it from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun. A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter ? One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the " great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other. A most incontrovertible sentiment surely, and one which no- body would think of controverting, where — and here is the point — where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case ? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his fel- low-men have miscalled him, at the crisis of a high- flown rhapsody .? And what are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exulta- tion, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no more color or coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary ? I do not know that we can say anything, but that it is a prodigiously amusing exhi- bition for a line or so. The worst of it is, that Whit- man must have known better. The man is a great WALT WHITMAN. 133 critic, and, sc? far as I can make out, a good one ; and how much criticism does it require to know that capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same thing as discoursing music ? I wish I could believe he was quite honest with us ; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a purpose ? It is a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity. One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon, however shortly. In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply, it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with some plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon as ridicu- lous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in his cheek ; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink. But the Philistines have been too strong ; and, to say truth. Whitman has rather played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is im- proving ; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on these close privacies of life ; that on this subject, as on all others, he now and then lets fall a pregnant saying. But we are not satisfied. We feel that he u'as not the man for so difficult an enterprise. 134 WALT WHITMAN, He loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attracting too much of our attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little more art, we might have been solemnized ourselves, it is too often Whitman alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorously amused. VI. Lastly, as most important, after all, to human be- ings in our disputable state, what is that higher pru- dence which was to be the aim and issue of these delib- erate productions ? Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct for- mula. If he could have adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its contradictions, and leave the up- shot with God who planned it. What he has made of the world and the world's meanings is to be found at large in his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems of belief and conduct ; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some ways loose and contradictory. And yet there are two pas- sages from the preface to the Leaves of Grass which do pretty well condense his teaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his spirit. "This is what you shall do," he says in the one, "love the earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to WALT WHITMAN. 135 every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, de- vote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men ; go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and Avith the young, and mothers of families, read these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every year of your life ; re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any book, and dis- miss whatever insults your own soul." " The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other — and the greatest poet is, of course, himself — " knows that the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding well for himself ; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning ; and that only that person has no great pru- dence to learn, who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things, and favors body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any emergency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death." There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly Christian, Any reader who bears in mind Whitman's own advice and " dismisses whatever in- sults his own soul " will find plenty that is bracing, brightening, and chastening to reward him for a little patience at first. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from so healthy a book as the Leaves of Grass, which is simply comical wherever it falls short of nobility ; but if there be any such, who 136 WALT WHITMAN. cannot both take and leave, who cannot let a single opportunity pass by without some unworthy and un- manly thought, I should have as great difficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommending the works of Whitman as in lending them Shakespeare, or letting them go abroad outside of the grounds of a private asylum. HENRY DAVID THOREAU : HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. I. Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind ; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing ; he had no waste lands nor kitchen- midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharp- ened to a point. " He was bred to no profession," says Emerson ; " he never married ; he lived alone ; he never went to church ; he never voted ; he refused to pay a tax to the State ; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco ; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, * the nearest' " So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages. 1 38 HENR V DA VID T MORE A U : under the impression that they were beneath the dig- nity of his moral muse ; and there we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was " much easier," says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say 720 ihanyes ; and that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a useful accomplishment to be able to say 710, but surely it is the essence of amiability to prefer to say j'es where it is possible. There is some- thing wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he is constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses ; he had not enough of them to be truly polar with humanity ; whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable, in the capacious theatre of their dis- positions. Such can live many lives ; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual fore- sight. He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort ; and he had this one great merit, that he suc- ceeded so far as to be happy. " I love my fate to the core and rind," he wrote once ; and even while he lay dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble to control the pen) : " You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about it. I may say that I am enjoying existence as HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 139 much as ever, and regret nothing." It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom ; for this world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude ; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble ; that his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world ; and that his luxu- ries v/ere all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of goodness, and morbid even in the pur- suit of health. I cannot lay my hands on the passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this : He thought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants ; let him but see the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the labors of the day. That may be reason good enough to abstain from tea ; but when we go on to I40 HENR V DA VID THOREA U find the same man, on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything that his neighbors in- nocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain, we rec- ognize that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself We need have no re- spect for a state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must separate himself from his neighbors' habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence. Thoreau' s faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness ; for they were all delicacies. He could guide himself about the woods on the darkest night by the touch of his feet. He could pick up at once an exact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and gauge cubic contents by the eye. His smell was so dainty that he could perceive the foetor of dweliing-houses as he passed them by at night ; his palate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the taste of wine — or perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that was good ; and his knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he could have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 141 aspect of the plants. In his deahngs with animals, he was the original of Hawihorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail ; the hunted fox came to him for protection ; wild squirrels have been seen to nestle in his waistcoat ; he would thrust his arm into a pool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in the palm of his hand. There were few things that he could not do. He could make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar, a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage a boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physical accomplishment ; and a manufacturer, from merely observing his dexterity with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case, for he could do most things with unusual perfection. And perhaps he had an approv- ing eye to himself when he wrote : " Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the uni- verse are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.'' H. Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life of self-improvement : the needle did not tremble as with richer natures, but pointed stead- 142 HENRY DAVID THOREAU : ily north ; and as he saw duty and inclination in one, he turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon the threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation without what are quaintly but happily denominated private means ; these absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the public such as the public cares to pay him for ; or, as Thoreau loved to put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer neces- sity than it is to most ; there was a love of freedom, a strain of the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the yoke of custom ; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy in his own society, that he could consent with difficulty even to the interruptions of friendship. " Such are my engagemejifs io myself that I dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation ; and the italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome ; but Thoreau is so busy improving himself, that he must think twice about a morning call. And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial and unmeaning business ! He shrank from the very look of the me- chanical in life ; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly progressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencil?, and, when he had HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 143 gained the best certificate and his friends began to congratulate him on his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make another. " Why should I ?" said he ; "I would not do again what I have done once. ' ' For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and when it became needful to support his family, he re- turned patiendy to this mechanical art — a step more than worthy of himself. The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experi- ment in the service of Admetus ; but others followed. " I have thoroughly tried school-keeping," he writes, *' and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income ; for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and be- heve, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bar- gain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my fellow- men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. 1 have tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil." Nothing, in- deed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. " The whole enterprise of this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes ; "it is not warmed by a sentiment ; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay down his life, nor even his gloves." And again : " If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of this 144 HENRY DAVID THOREAU : world would be staggered. The statement that ninety six in a hundred doing such business surelv break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the fig- ures ; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire. Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus dis- carded one after another, Thoreau, with a stroke ol strategy, turned the position. He saw his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing ; and Admetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It was his ambition to be an oriental philosopher ; but he was always a very Yankee, sort of oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude ia which be stood to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he displayed a vast amount of truly dovv'n East calculation, and he adopted poverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, some- thing essentially youthful distinguishes all Thoreau' s knock-down blows at current opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind ol speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the accepted arguments apply no longer ; he attacks HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 145 it in a new dialect where there are no catchwords ready made for the defender ; after you have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt. " The cost of a thing," says he, *' is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. " I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we have 10 pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to find a third definition of his own ; and it follows, on one or other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There are two questions to be considered — the quality of what we buy, and the price we have to pay for jt. Do you want a thousand a year, a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood .? and can you afford the one you want ? It is a matter of taste ; it is not in the least degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improbable ; not many do ; and the art of growing rich is not only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at all train a man for practising the other. " Money might be of great service to me," writes Thoreau ; " but 1 46 HENR Y DA VID T HO RE A U : the difficulty now is that I do not improve my oppor- tunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have my opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else, except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two hundred a year. Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to be master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the body ; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, un- fettered, active life among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such being his inclina- tion he determined to gratify it. A poor man must save off something ; he determined to save off his livelihood. " When a man has attained those things which are necessary to life," he writes, " there is an- other alternative than to obtain the superfluities ; he may adventure on life 7tow, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced." Thoreau would get shel- ter, some kind of covering for his body, and neces- sary daily bread ; even these he should get as cheaply as possible ; and then, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to oriental philoso- phers, the study of nature, and the work of self- improvement. Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wis- dom and hoard against the day of sickness, was not a HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 1 47 favorite with Thoreau. He preferred that other, whose name is so much misappropriated : Faith. When he had secured the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents or torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no tol- eration for the man " who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently." He would trust himself a little to the world. "We may safely trust a good deal more than we do," says he. " How much is not done by us ! or what if we had been taken sick .?" And then, with a stab of satire, he de- scribes contemporary mankind in a phrase : " All the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourseU'es to uncertainties." It is not likely that the public will be much affected by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they profess ; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same " hazardous ventures ; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbors for all that we are worth ; and it is chilling to think how many must lose their wager. In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have usually declined into some conform- ity with the world, Thoreau, with a capital of some- thing less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in life. He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with characteristic and workman-like pride, sharper than when he borrowed 1 48 HENR V DA VI D THOREA U : it ; he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and sweet corn ; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the matter of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or some other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more than five years, this was all that he required to do for his support, and he had the winter and most of the summer at his entire disposal. For six weeks of occupation, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening, the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood. Or we must rather allow that he had done far better ; for the thief himself is contin- ually and busily occupied ; and even one born to in- herit a million will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well might he say, " What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and find you can. ' ' And how surprising is his conclusion : '* I am con- vinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, hut a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely ; as the pursuits of simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done the one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other ; and that is perhaps the story of the hermits ; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own example, and did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an experiment and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is not his frugality which is worthy of note ; for, to HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 149 begin with, that was inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently constituted ; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of his view of life, and the insight with which he recognized the position of money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and a livelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had per- ceived, and was acting on, a truth of universal appli- cation. For money enters in two different characters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each one of us in the present order of so- ciety ; but beyond that amount, money is a commod- ity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other. And there are many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite, flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we have only to look round us in society to see how scantily it has been recognized ; and perhaps even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to spend a trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the article of freedom. 1 5 o HENR V DA VID THOREA U : III. *' To have done anything by which you earned money merely," says Thoreau, "is to be" (have been, he means) " idle and worse." There are two passages in his letters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which must be brought together to be lightly understood. So taken, they contain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work in its relation to something broader than mere liveli- hood. Here is the first : ** I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night— and for what ? I set- tled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day ; but that wasn't the final settlement. I got off cheaply from him. At last one will say : ' Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir ? ' And I shall shudder to tnink that the next question will be, ' What did you do while you were warm ? ' " Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr. Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been serviceable to man- kind, or something else must follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself ; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 151 to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of pri- vate means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man. The second passage is this : " There is a far more important and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thor- oughly warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near selling it to the ash- man, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the worker ; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau says, '' earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one. " We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he says in another place ; and then exclaims, " How admi- rably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to his art !" We may escape uncon- genial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher busi- ness that even Apollo dare play the truant from Ad- metus. We must all work for the sake of work ; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any " ab- sorbing pursuit — it does not much matter what, so it 1 5 2 HENR V DA VI D THOREA U : be honest;" but the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued effort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man's na- ture ; that into which he will plunge with ardor, and from which he will desist with reluctance ; in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not that of satiety ; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man to- gether, braced at all points ; it does not suffer him to doze or wander ; it keeps him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests ; it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pas- time. This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and less in- timate pursuits. For other professions stand apart from the human business of life ; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist's doings^nd. sufferings, deals directly with his experiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe : " Spat erklingt Avas friih erklang ; Gliick und Ungllick wird Gesang." Now Thoreau's art was literature ; and it was one of which he had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said well, " Life is not habitually seen from any common plat- form so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of lit- erature. " But the literature he loved was of the heroic order. " Books, not which afford us a cower- HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 153 ing enjoyment, but in which each thought is of un- usual daring ; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions — such I call good books. " He did not think them easy to be read. ' ' The heroic books, ' ' he says, ' ' even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times ; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have, " Xor does he suppose that such books are easily writ- ten. " Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet often only makes an irruption, like the Par- thian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats ; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student. For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast ; and those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of utterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton's Areopagitica, and can name no other instance for the moment. Two things 154 HENRY DAVID THOREAU : at least are plain : that if a man will condescend to nothing more commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large library ; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he will find his work cut out for him. Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and composition were with him inti- mately connected ; for we are told that " the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. " He speaks in one place of " plainness and vigor, the ornam-ents of style," which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another he remarks : " As for stjle of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground. " We must conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase " if one has an)' thing to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and with- out conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out of fulness of think- ing that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit ; and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he had been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness, compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till after a busy and a prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass of their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS, 155 clean manuscript ; but in face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of Hamlet^ this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were unacquainted with the common enough phe- nomenon called a fair copy. He who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently and earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in one direction ; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only by the occasional finish, but by the determined exag- geration of his style. " I trust you realize what an exaggerator I am — that I lay myself out to exagger- ate," he writes. And again, hinting at the explana- tion : " Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever V And yet once more, in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand : "No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the time there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East, but from a desire that people should under- stand and realize what he was writing. He was near the truth upon the general question ; but in his own particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture ; and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, 156 HENRY DAVID THOREAU : or a starry night, is to make a man despair of his Lil- liputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selec- tion, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not suit his purpose. Thus we extract the pure gold ; and thus the well-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to put the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half, you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a different thought which is not yours. Thoreau' s true subject was the pursuit of self-im- provement combined with an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies ; it is there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of his intellect ; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous, and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in books of a different purport. Walden, or Life in the Woods, A Week on the Concord and Merriinack Rivers, The Maine Woods, — such are the titles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical per- ception that the true business of literature is with nar- rative ; in reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 157 enjoys all its advantages, and suffers least from its de- fects. Dry precept and disembodied disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction, can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural impression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect of anec- dote on simple minds ; and hence good biographies and works of high, imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more edifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent ; but he sought to gain the same elbow- room for himself, and to afford a similar relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of ex- perience. Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should call mystery in a painting, and which be- longs so particularly to the aspect of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The seeming significance of nature's appear- ances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedes- trian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages ; and that, if it were once thus captured and expressed, a new and instruc- 1 5 8 HENR V DA VID THOREA I ' .• tive relation might appear between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a but- terfly net. Hear him to a friend : " Let me suggest a theme for you — to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied that all that was im- portant in your experience is in it. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again ; especially when, after a suffi- cient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." Such was the method, not consistent for a man whose meanings were to " drop from him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the most successful work that Thoreau ever accom- plished in this direction is to be found in the passages relating to fish in the Week. These are remarkable for a vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of language, not frequently surpassed. Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progres- sion — I cannot call it a progress — in his work toward a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson men- tions havinsr once remarked to Thoreau : " Who HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 159 would not like to write something which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe .^ and who does not see with re- gret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody ?" I must say in passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights the world in Robinson^ but the romantic and philosophic interest of the fable. The same treat- ment does quite the reverse of delighting us when it is applied, in Colonel Jack, to the management of a plan- tation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely similar in meaning. He be- gan to fall more and more into a detailed materialistic treatment ; he went into the business doggedly, as one who should make a guide-book ; he not only chronicled what had been important in his own ex- perience, but whatever might have been important in the experience of anybody else ; not only what had affected him, but all that he saw or heard. His ardor had grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a right materialistic treatment to display such emotions as he felt ; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose, from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the saving quality of humor. He was not one of those authors who have learned, in his own words, " to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his full quantity upon the reader in such books as Cape Cod, or The Yankee in Canada. Of the latter he con- fessed that he had not managed to get much of him- self into it. Heaven knows he had not. nor vet much 1 60 HENR V DA VID THOREA U : of Canada, we may hope. " Nothing, " he says some- where, " can shock a brave man but dulness. " Well^ there are few spots more shocking to the brave than the pages of The Yankee in Canada. There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure : the Week, Walden^ and the col- lected letters. As to his poetry, Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily said : " The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey.' ' In this, as in his prose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrote throughout in faith. It was an exercise of faith to suppose that many would under- stand the sense of his best work, or that any could be exhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. " But," as he says, " the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound,, as we learn from the echo ; and I know that the nature toward which I launch these sounds is so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain. ' ' IV. "What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul such an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair.?" The question is an echo and an illustration of the words last quoted ; and it forms the key-note of his thoughts on friend- ship. No one else, to my knowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindly relations ; and HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. i6i ^ doubt whether it be a drawback that these lessons should come from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in this branch. The very coldness and egoism of his own intercourse gave him a clearer in- sight into the intellectual basis of our warm, mutual tolerations ; and testimony to their worth comes with added force from one who was solitary and disoblig- ing, and of whom a friend remarked, with equal wit and wisdom, '' I love Henry, but I cannot like him." He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between love and friendship ; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of meditation, had he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, too accurate an observer not to have remarked that "there exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberality" between men and women; yet, he thought, " friendship is no respecter of sex." Per- haps there is a sense in which the words are true ; but they were spoken in ignorance ; and perhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love a foundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can be possible without it. For there are deli- cacies, eternal between persons of the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love. To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature and condition. " We are not what we are," says he, " nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being." " A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compli- ment of expecting all the virtues from us, and who 1 6 2 HENR V DA VI D THOREA U : can appreciate them in us." " Tlie friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him." " It is the merit and preservation of friendship that it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant." This is to put friendship on a pedestal indeed ; and yet the root of the matter is there ; and the last sentence, in particu- lar, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteries plain. We are different with different friends ; yet if we look closely we shall find that every such relation reposes on some particular apotheosis of oneself ; with each friend, although we could not dis- tinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one special reputation to preserve : and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called better, but to be better men m point of fact. We seek this soci- ety to flatter ourselves with our own good conduct And hence any falsehood in the relation, any incom- plete or perverted understanding, will spoil even the pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again : "Only lovers know the value of truth." And yet again : " They ask for words and deeds, when a true relation is word and deed." But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other hopes, and each is, in a very hon- est manner, playing a part above his powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both, *' We may bid farewell sooner than complain, " says HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 163 Thoreau, " for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered." " We have not so good a right to hate any as our friend." " It were treason to our love And a sin to God above, One iota to abate Of a pure, impartial hate." Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. " O yes, be- lieve me," as the song says, ** Love has eyes !" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of those we love ; and because you love one, and would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never will forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge without change. It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps, to recognize and certainly to utter this truth ; for a more human love makes it a point of honor not to acknowledge those faults of which it is most conscious. But his point of view is both high and dry. He has no illusions ; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A more bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been presented. He is an egoist ; he does not remember, or does not think it worth while to re- mark, that, in these near intimacies, we are ninety- nine times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once 1 64 HENR V DA VI D T HO RE. 4 U : that we are disappointed in our friend ; that it is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us ; and that it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavor. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies ; moral profit, certainly, but still profit to himself. It you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively, " my education cannot dispense with your so- ciety." His education ! as though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried : "As for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm -tree 1" As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's, "nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match ; and even then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some after-thought of self-improve- ment, as though you had come to the cricket match to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other too frequently, so that their curiosity was not properly HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 165 whetted, nor had they anything fresh to communicate ; but friendship must be something else than a society for mutual improvement — indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some extent unconsciously ; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a manner of elm- tree, he would have felt that he saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We might remind him of his own words about love : " We should have no reserve ; we should give the whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly m.en have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading oriental philosophers. It is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that you suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving in- timacy impossible. Nothing is given for nothing in this world ; there can be no true love, even on your own side, without devotion ; devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows ; but if you will give enough of that, if you will pay the price in a sufficient *' amount of what you call life," why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and .yet improving intercourse as shall make time a mo- ment and kindness a delight. The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no tincture, but part in his engross- ing design of self-improvement and part in the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so 166 HENR V DA VID THOREA U : much difficult about his fellow human beings as iie could not tolerate the terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcut- ter in Walde7t ; but he would not consent, in his own words, to ' * feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think, that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes place on a lower level than the characters oi any of the parties would warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is of greatly less ac- count than what you will get from him in (as the French say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality ; he had not enough of the superficial, even at command ; he could not swoop into a parlor and, in the naval phrase, " cut out" a human being from that dreary port ; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow-creatures, — a melan- choly, lean degeneration of the human character. " As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up : " Any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base of the moun- tain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with } Will you go to glory with me ? is the bur- den of the song. It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 167 on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to receive, to serve than to use our companions ; and above all, where there is no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy their com- pany like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways dispiriting that a writer may be always best cor- rected out of his own mouth ; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which seem.s aimed directly at himself : " Do not be too moral ; you may cheat yourself out o( much life so. . . . All fables, ijideed, have their morals j but the innocent en- joy the story. ' ' " The only obligation," says he, " which I have a right to assume is to .do at any time what I think right." *' Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice ?'' " There is a nearer neighbor within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neigh- bor without to tell us of some false, easier way.'* *' The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. It is " when we fall behind our- selves' ' that ' ' we are cursed with duties and the neg- lect of duties." " I love the wild," he says, " not less than the good." And again: "The life of a 1 68 HENR V DA VID THOREA U : good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and " (mark this) " our lives are sustained by a nearly equal ex- pe?ise of virtue of some kind. " Even although he were a prig, it will be owned he could announce a startling doctrine. " As for doing good," he writes elsewhere, " that is one of the professions that are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strar\ge as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not conscien- tiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere he returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus : " If I ever did a man any good in their sense, of course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I am constantly doing by being what I am." There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this unshaken confidence in himself and in- difference to the wants, thoughts, or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity. This was partly the result of theory, for he held the world too mysterious to be criticised, and asks con- HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 169 clusively : ** What right have 1 to grieve who have not ceased to wonder ?' ' But it sprang still more from constitutional indifference and superiority ; and he grew up healthy, composed, and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a green bay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack in himself that he failed to do justice to the spirit of Christ ; for while he could glean more meaning from individual precepts than any score of Christians, yet he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed it with such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of the doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him unimpressed. He could understand the idealism of the Christian view, but he was himself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognize the human inten- tion and essence of that teaching. Hence he com- plained that Christ did not leave us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world, not having con- ceived the nature of the rule that was laid down ; for things of that character that are sufficiently unaccept- able become positively non-existent to the mind. But perhaps we shall best appreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the case of Whitman. For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other ; it is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls ; it is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference ! the same argument, but used to what a new conclusion ! Thoreau had plenty of humor until he tutored himself out of it, and so forfeited that best birthright of a sensible man ; Whit- I 7 o HENR Y DA VID THOREA U . man, in that respect, seems to have been sent into the world naked and unashamed ; and yet by a strange consummation, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and claustral. Of these two philoso- phies so nearly identical at bottom, the one pursues Self-improvement — a churlish, mangy dog ; the other is up with the morning, in the best of health, and fol- lowing the nymph Happiness, buxom, blithe, and debonair. Happiness, at least, is not solitary ; it joys to communicate ; it loves others, for it depends on them for its existence ; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that are not unkind in themselves ; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous passage ; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the prig, and, if he be not of an ex- cellent constitution, may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of us to live. In the case of Thoreau, so great a show of doctrine demands some outcome in the field of action. If nothing were to be done but build a shanty beside Walden Pond, we have heard altogether too much of these declarations of independence. That the man wrote some books is nothing to the purpose, for the same has been done in a suburban villa. That he kept himself happy is perhaps a sufficient excuse, but it is disappointing to the reader. We may be unjust, but when a man despises commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good so soaring that he must HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 171 take himself apart from mankind for their cultivation, we will not be content without some striking act It was not Thoreau's fault if he were not martyred ; had the occasion come, he would have made a noble end- ing. As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the world's course ; he made one practical appearance on the stage of affairs ; and a strange one it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and the eccen- tricity of the man. It was forced on him by his calm but radical opposition to negro slavery. " Voting for the right is doing nothingfor it, " he saw^ ; " it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail." For his part, he would not "for an in- stant recognize that political organization for his gov- ernment which \'s, ih^ slave s government also." "I do not hesitate to say," he adds, " that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts." That is what he did : in 1843 he ceased to pay the poll-tax. The highway-tax he paid, for he said he was as desir- ous to be a good neighbor as to be a bad subject ; but no more poll-tax to the State of Massachusetts. Thoreau had now seceded, and was a polity unto him- self ; or, as he explains it with admirable sense, " In fact, I quietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases. ' ' He was put in prison ; but that was a part of his de- sign. "Under a government which imprisons any 172 HENR V DA VTD THOREA U : unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name— ay, if one honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartner- ship, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be ; what is once well done is done forever." Such was his theory of civil disobedience. And the upshot } A friend paid the tax for him ; continued year by year to pay it in the sequel ; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested. It v/as a fiasco, but to me it does not seem laughable ; even those who joined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by this quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We may compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as out- weighing half a hundred voters at some subsequent election : and if Thoreau had possessed as great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had, counted a party however small, if his example had been followed by a hundred or by thirty of his fel- lows, I cannot but believe it would have greatly pre- cipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervor, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they cause ; but when we see them wake an active horror in our fellow- man, when we see a neighbor prefer to lie in prison rather than be so much as passively implicated in their HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS. 173 perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realize them with a quicker pulse. Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence. The commit- tees wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature. ' ' I did not send to you for advice, ' ' said he, " but to announce that I was to speak." I have used the word " defence ;" in truth he did not seek to defend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that he should die ; but he praised his action as I think Brown would have liked to hear it praised. - Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to a character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own path of self- improvement for more than half a century, part gym- nosophist, part backwoodsman ; and thus did it come twice, though in a subaltern attitude, into the field of political history. Note. — For many facts in the above essay, among which I may mention the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to Thoreau : His Life and Aims, by J- A. Page, or, as is well known, Dr. Japp. YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO. The name at the head of this page is probably un» known to the English reader, and yet I think it should become a household word like that of Garibaldi or John Brown. Some day soon, we may expect to hear more fully the details of Yoshida's history, and the degree of his influence in the transformation of Japan ; even now there must be Englishmen acquainted with the subject, and perhaps the appearance of this sketch may elicit something more complete and exact. I wish to say that I am not, rightly speaking, the author of the present paper : I tell the story on the authority of an intelligent Japanese gentleman, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who told it me with an emotion that does honor to his heart ; and though I have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be corrected, this can be no more than an imperfect outline. Yoshida-Torajiro was son to the hereditary military instructor of the house of Choshu. The name you are to pronounce with an equality of accent on the different syllables, almost as in French, the vowels as in Italian, but the consonants in the English manner — except they, which has the French sound, or, as it has been cleverly proposed to write it, the sound of YOSHIDA- TORAJIRO. 1 7 5 zh. Yoshida was very learned in Chinese letters, or, as we might say, in the classics, and in his father's subject ; fortification was among his favorite studies, and he was a poet from his boyhood. He was born to a lively and intelligent patriotism ; the condition of Japan was his great concern ; and while he pro- jected a better future, he lost no opportunity of im- proving his knowledge of her present state. With this end he was continually travelling in his youth, going on foot and sometimes with three days' provision on his back, in the brave, self-helpful manner of all heroes. He kept a full diary while he was thus upon his journeys, but it is feared that these notes liave been destroyed. If their value were in any respect such as we have reason to expect from the man's character, this would be a loss not easy to exaggerate. It is still wonderful to the Japanese how far he contrived to push these explorations ; a cultured gentleman of that land and period would leave a complimentary poem wherever he had been hospitably entertained ; and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a great wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida's passage in very remote regions of Japan. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary ; but Yoshida con- sidered otherwise, and he studied the miseries of his fellow-countrymen with as much attention and re- search as though he had been going to write a book instead of merely to propose a remedy. To a man of his intensity and singleness, there is no question 1 76 YOSHIDA . TOR A J IRQ. but that this survey was melancholy in the extreme. His dissatisfaction is proved by the eagerness with which he threw himself into the cause of reform ; and what would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his task. As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the defences of Japan that occupied his mind. The external feebleness of that country was then illustrated by the manners of overriding bar- barians, and the visits of big barbarian war ships : she was a country beleaguered. Thus the patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have de- feated itself : he had it upon him to keep out these all-powerful foreigners, whom it is now one of his chief merits to have helped to introduce ; but a man who follows his own virtuous heart will be always found in the end to have been fighting for the best. One thing leads naturally to another in an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from, effect to cause. The power and knov.^ledge of these foreigners were things inseparable ; by envying them their mili- tary strength, Yoshida came to envy them their cul- ture ; from the desire to equal them in the fir-st, sprang his desire to share wnth them in the second ; and thus he is found treating in the same book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of Kioto and of the estab- lishment, in the same city, of a university of foreign teachers. He hoped, perhaps, to get the good of othe? lands without their evil ; to enable Japan to profit by the knowledge of the barbarians, and still keep her inviolate with her own arts and virtues. But whatever VO SH ID A - TORAJIR O. 177 was the precise nature of his hope, the means b} which it was to be accompHshed were both difficult and obvious. Some one with eyes and understanding must break through the official cordon, escape into the new world, and study this other civilization on the spot. And who could be better suited for the busi- ness ? It was not without danger, but he was without fear. It needed preparation and insight ; and what had he done since he was a child but prepare himself with the best culture of Japan, and acquire in his ex- cursions the power and habit of observing .^ He was but twenty-two, and already all this was clear in his mind, when news reached Choshu that Commodore Perry was lying near to Yeddo. Here, then, was the patriot's opportunity. Among the Samurai of Choshu, and in particular among the councillors of the Daimio, his general culture, his views, which the enlightened were eager to accept, and, above all, the prophetic charm, the radiant per- suasion of the man, had gained him many and sincer*- disciples. He had thus a strong influence at the prO' vincial Court ; and so he obtained leave to quit thf district, and, by way of a pretext, a privilege to follow his profession in Yeddo. Thither he hurried, and ar- rived in time to be too late : Perry had weighed anchor, and his sails had vanished from the waters of Japan. But Yoshida, having put his hand to the plough, was not the man to go back ; he had entered upon this business, and, please God, he would carr}Mt through ; and so he gave up his professional career and remained 1 7 8 VO SHI DA - TORAJIR O. in Yeddo to be at hand against the next opportunity. By this behavior he put himself into an attitude toward his superior, the Daimio of Choshu, which I cannot thoroughly explain. Certainly, he became a Ronyin, a broken man, a feudal outlaw ; certainly he was liable to be arrested if he set foot upon his native province ; yet 1 am cautioned that " he did not leally break his allegiance," but only so far separated him- self as that the prince could no longer be held account- able for his late vassal's conduct. There is some nicety of feudal custom here that escapes my compre- hension. In Yeddo, with this nondescript political status, and cut off from any means of livelihood, he was jo}'fully supported by those who sympathized with his design. One was Sakuma-Shozan, hereditary retainer of one of the Shogun's councillors, and from him he got more than money or than money's worth. A steady, respectable man, with an eje to the world's opinion, Sakuma was one of those who, if they cannot do great deeds in their own person, have yet an ardor of ad- miration for those who can, that recommends them to the gratitude of history. They aid and abet greatness more, perhaps, than we imagine. One thinks of them in connection with Nicodemus, who visited our Lord by night. And Sakuma was in a position to help Yoshida more practically than by simple countenance ; for he could read Dutch, and was eager to communi- cate what he knew. While the young Ronyin thus lay studying in Yed- YO SHIDA - TORAJIR 0. 179 do, news came of a Russian ship at Nangasaki. No time was to be lost. Sakuma contributed " a long copy of encouraging verses ;" and off set Yoshida on foot for Nangasaki. His way lay through his own province of Choshu ; but, as the highroad to the south lay apart from the capital, he was able to avoid arrest. He supported himself, like a trouvtre, by his profi- ciency in verse. He carried his works along with him, to serve as an introduction. When he reached a town he would inquire for the house of any one cele- brated for swordsmanship, or poetry, or some of the other acknowledged forms of culture ; and there, on giving a taste of his skill, he would be received and entertained, and leave behind him, when he went away, a compliment in verse. Thus he travelled through the Middle Ages on his voyage of discovery into the nineteenth century. When he reached Nan- gasaki he was once more too late. The Russians were gone. But he made a profit on his journey in spite of fate, and stayed awhile to pick up scraps of knowl- edge from the Dutch interpreters — a low class of men, but one that had opportunities ; and then, still full of purpose, returned to Yeddo on foot, as he had come. It was not only his youth and courage that supported him under these successive disappointments, but the continual affluence of new disciples. The man had the tenacity of a Bruce or a Columbus, with a pliabil- ity that was all his own. He did not fight for what the world would call success ; but lor ** the wages of going on." Check him off in a dozen directions, he i 80 YOSHIDA - TORAJIRO. would find another outlet and break forth. He missed one vessel after another, and the main work still halt- ed ; but so long as he had a single Japanese to en- lighten and prepare for the better future, he could still feel that he was working for Japan. Now, he had scarce returned from Nangasaki, when he was sought out by a new inquirer, the most promising of all. This was a common soldier, of the Hemming class, a dyer by birth, who had heard vaguely' of Yoshida's movements, and had become filled with wonder as to their design. This was a far different inquirer from Sakuma-Shozan, or the councillors of the Daimio of Choshu. This was no tvvo-sworded gentleman, but the common stuff of the country, born in low tradi- tions and unimproved by books ; and yet that influ- ence, that radiant persuasion that never failed Yoshida in any circumstance of his short life, enchanted, en- thralled, and converted the common soldier, as it had done already with the elegant and learned. The man instantly burned up into a true enthusiasm ; his mind had been only waiting for a teacher ; he grasped in a moment the profit of these new ideas ; he, too, would go to foreign, outlandish parts, and bring back the knowledge that was to strengthen and renew Japan ; 1 Yoshida, when on his way to Nangasaki, met the soldier and talked with him by the roadside ; they then parted, but the soldier was so much struck by the words he heard, that on Yoshida's return he sought him out and declared his intention of devoting his life to the good cause. I venture, in the absence of the writer, to insert this correction, having been present when the story was told by Mr. Masaki. — F. J. And I, there being none to settle the difference, must reproduce both versions. — R. L. S. VO SHIDA - TORAJIR 0, 1 8 1 and in the meantime, that he might be the better pre- pared, Yoshida set himself to teach, and he to learn, the Chinese literature. It is an episode most honor- able to Yoshida, and yet more honorable still to the soldier, and to the capacity and virtue of the com- mon people of Japan. And now, at length, Commodore Perry returned to Simoda. Friends crowded round Yoshida with help, counsels, and encouragement. One presented him \vilh a great sword, three feet long and very heavy, which, in the exultation of the hour, he swore to carry throughout all his wanderings, and to bring back — a far-travelled weapon — to Japan. A long letter was prepared in Chinese for the American officers ; it was revised and corrected by Sakuma, and signed by Yoshida, under the name of Urinaki-Manji, and by the soldier under that of Ichigi-Koda. Yoshida had supplied himself with a "prof usion of materials for writ- ing ; his dress was literally stuffed with paper which was to come back again enriched with his observations, and make a great and happy kingdom of Japan. Thus equipped, this pair of emigrants set forward on foot from Yeddo, and reached Simoda about nightfall. At no period within history can travel have presented to any European creature the same face of awe and terror as to these courageous Japanese. The descent of Ulysses into hell is a parallel more near the case than the boldest expedition in the Polar circles. For their act was unprecedented ; it was criminal ; and it was to take them beyond the pale of humanity into a jt 8 2 VO SHI DA - TO RAJIR O. land of devils. It is not to be wondered at if the) were thrilled by the thought of their unusual situation ; and perhaps the soldier gave utterance to the senti- ment of both when he sang, " in Chinese singing" (so that we see he had already profited by his lessons), these two appropriate verses : •' We do not know where we are to sleep to-night, In a thousand miles of desert where we can see no human smoke." In a little temple, hard by the sea- shore, they lay down to repose ; sleep overtook them as they lay ; and when they awoke, '* the east was already white" for their last morning in Japan. They seized a fish- erman's boat and rowed out — Perry lying far to sea because of the two tides. Their very manner of boarding was significant of determination ; for they had no sooner caught hold upon the ship than they kicked away their boat to make return impossible. And now you would have thought that all was over. But the Commodore was already in treaty with the Shogun's Government ; it was one of the stipulations that no Japanese was to be aided in escaping from Japan ; and Yoshida and his followers were handed over as prisoners to the authorities at Simoda. That night he who had been to explore the secrets of the barbarian slept, if he might sleep at all, in a cell too short for lying down at full length, and too low for standing upright. There are some disappointments too great for commentary. YO SHIDA - TORAJIR O. 183 Sakuma, implicated by his handwriting, was sent into his own province in confinement, from which he was soon released. Yoshida and the soldier suffered a long and miserable period of captivity, and the lat- ter, indeed, died, while yet in prison, of a skin dis- ease. But such a spirit as that of Yoshida-Torajiro is not easily made or kept a captive ; and that which cannot be broken by misfortune you shall seek in vain to confine in a bastille. He was indefatigably active, writing reports to Government and treatises for dis- semination. These latter were contraband ; and yet he found no difficulty in their distribution, for he al- ways had the jailer on his side. It was in vain that they kept changing him from one prison to another ; Government by that plan only hastened the spread of new ideas ; for Yoshida had only to arrive to make a convert. Thus, though he himself has laid by the heels, he confirmed and extended his party in the State. At last, after many lesser transferences, he was given over from the prisons of the Shogun to those of his own superior, the Daimio of Choshu. I conceive it posjible that he may then have served out his time for the attempt to leave Japan, and was now resigned to the provincial Government on a lesser count, as a Ronyin or feudal rebel. But, however that may be, the change was of great importance to Yoshida ; for by the influence of his admirers in the Daimio's council, he was allowed the privilege, underhand, of dwellins: in his own house. And there, as well to 1 84 VO SHIDA - TORAJIKO. keep up communication with his fellow-reformers as to pursue his work of education, he received boys to teach. It must not be supposed that he was free ; he was too marked a man for that ; he was probably as- signed to some small circle, and lived, as we should say, under police sur\'eillance ; but to him, who had done so much from under lock and key, this would seem a large and profitable liberty. It was at this period that Mr. Masaki was brought into personal contact with Yoshida ; and hence, through the eyes of a boy of thirteen, we get one good look at the character and habits of the hero. He was ugly and laughably disfigured with the small-pox ; and while nature had been so niggardly with him from the first, his personal habits were even sluttish. His clothes were wretched ; when he ate or washed he wiped his hands upon his sleeves ; and as his hair was not tied more than once in the two months, it was often disgusdng to behold. With such a picture, it is easy to believe that he never married. A good teacher, gentle in act, although violent and abusive in speech, his lessons were apt to go over the heads of his scholars, and to leave them gaping, or more often laughing, Such was his passion for study that he even grudged himself natural repose ; and when he grew drowsy over his books he would, if it was sum- mer, put m.osquitoes up his sleeve ; and, if it was winter, take ofi his shoes and run barefoot on the snow. His handwriting was exceptionally villainous ; poet though he was, he had no taste for what was elegant ; YOSIIIDA - TORAJIRO. 1 85 and in a country where to write beautifully was not the mark of a scrivener but an admired accomplish- ment for gentlemen, he suffered his letters to be jolted out of him by the press of matter and the heat of his convictions. He would not tolerate even the appear- ance of a bribe ; for bribery lay at the root of much that was evil in Japan, as well as in countries nearer home ; and once when a merchant brought him his son to educate, and added, as was customary,' a little private sweetener, Yoshida dashed the money in the giver's face, and launched into such an outbreak of indignation as made the matter public in the school. He was still, when Masaki knew him, much weak- ened by his hardships in prison ; and the presentation sword, three feet long, was too heavy for him to wear without distress ; yet he would always gird it on when he vv'cnt to dig in his garden. That is a touch which qualifies the man. A weaker nature would have shrunk from the sight of what only commemorated a failure. But he was of Thoreau's mind, that if you can "make your failure tragical by courage, it will not differ from success." He could look back with- out confusion to his enthusiastic promise. If events had been contrary, and he found himself unable to carry out that purpose — well, there was but the more reason to be brave and constant in another ; if he could not carry the sword into barbarian lands, it should at least be witness to a life spent entirely for Japan, ^ I understood that the merchant was endeavoring surreptitiously to obtain for his son instruction to which he was not entitled. — F. J. 1 86 YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO, This is the sight we have of him as he appeared to schoolboys, but not related in the schoolboy spirit. A man so careless of the graces must be out of court with boys and women. And, indeed, as we have all been more or less to school, it will astonish no one that Yoshida was regarded by his scholars as a laugh- ing-stock. The schoolboy has a keen sense of humor. Heroes he learns to understand and to admire in books ; but he is not forward to recognize the heroic under the traits of any contemporary man, and least of all in a brawling, dirty, and eccentric teacher. But as the years went by, and the scholars of Yoshida con- tinued in vain to look around them for the abstractly perfect, and began more and more to understand the drift of his instructions, they learned to look back upon their comic schoolmaster as upon the noblest of mankind. The last act of this brief and full existence was al- ready near at hand. Some of his work was done ; for already there had been Dutch teachers admitted into Nangasaki, and the country at large was keen for the new learning. But though the renaissance had begun, it was impeded and dangerously threatened by the power of the Shogun. His minister—the same who was afterward assassinated in the snow in the very midst of his bodyguard—not only held back pupils from going to the Dutchmen, but by spies and detec- tives, by imprisonment and death, kept thinning out of Japan the most intelligent and active spirits. It is the old story of a power upon its last legs— learning to YOSHIDA - TORAJIRO. 1 87 the Bastille, and courage to the block ; when there are none left but sheep and donkeys, the State will have been saved. But a man must not think to cope with a Revolution ; nor a minister, however fortified with guards, to hold in check a country that had given birth to such men as Yoshida and his soldier follower. The violence of the ministerial Tarquin only served to direct attention to the illegality of his master's rule ; and people began to turn their allegiance from Yeddo and the Shogun to the long-forgotten Mikado in his seclusion at Kioto. At this juncture, whether in con- sequence or not, the relations between these two rulers became strained ; and the Shogun' s minister set forth for Kioto to put another affront upon the rightful sov- ereign. The circumstance was well fitted to precipi- tate events. It was a piece of religion to defend the Mikado ; it was a plain piece of political righteous- ness to oppose a tyrannical and bloody usurpation. To Yoshida the moment for action seemed to have arrived. He was himself still confined in Choshu. Nothing was free but his intelligence ; but with that he sharpened a sword for the Shogun' s minister. A party of his followers were to waylay the tyrant at a village on the Yeddo and Kioto road, present him with a petition, and put him to the sword. But Yoshida and his friends were closely observed ; and the too great expedition of two of the conspirators, a boy of eighteen and his brother, wakened the suspi cion of the authorities, and led to a full discovery of the plot and the arrest of all who were concerned. 1 88 YOSHIDA - TORAJIRO. In Yeddo, ^o which he was taken, Yoshida wa? thrown again into a strict confinement. But he was not left destitute of sympathy in this last hour of trial. In the next cell lay one Kusakabe, a reformer from the southern highlands of Satzuma. They were in prison for different plots indeed, but for the same in- tention ; they shared the same beliefs and the same aspirations for Japan ; many and long were the con- versations they held through the prison wall, and dear was the sympathy that soon united them. It fell first to the lot of Kusakabe to pass before the judges ; and when sentence had been pronounced he was led toward the place of death below Yoshida' s window. To turn the head would have been to implicate his fellow- prisoner ; but he threw him a look from his eye, and bade him farewell in a loud voice, with these two Chinese verses : — ** It is better to be a crystal and be broken, Than to remain perfect like a tile upon the housetop." So Kusakabe, from the highlands of Satzuma, passed out of the theatre of this world. His death was like an antique worthy's. A little after, and Yoshida too must appear before the Court. His last scene was of a piece with his career, and fitly crowned it. He seized on the op- portunity of a public audience, confessed and gloried in his design, and, reading his auditors a lesson in the history of their country, told at length the illegality of the Shogun's power and the crimes by which its exer- YOSHIDA TORAJIRO. 189 cise was sullied. So, having said his say for once, he was led forth and executed, thirty-one years old. A military engineer, a bold traveller (at least in wish), a poet, a patriot, a schoolmaster, a friend to learning, a martyr to reform, — there are not many men, dying at seventy, who have served their country in such various characters. He was not only wise and provident in thought, but surely one of the fieriest of heroes in execution. It is hard to say which is most remarkable — his capacity for command, which sub- dued his very jailers ; his hot, unflagging zeal ; or his stubborn superiority to defeat. He failed in each par- ticular enterprise that he attempted ; and yet we have only to look at his country to see how complete has been his general success. His friends and pupils made the majority of leaders in that final Revolution, now some twelve years old ; and many of them are, or were until the other day, high placed among the rulers of Japan. And when we see all round us these brisk intelligent students, with their strange foreign air, we should nevtr lorget how Yoshida marched afoot from Choshu to Yeddo, and from Yeddo to Nangasaki, and from Nangasaki back again to Yeddo ; how he boarded the American ship, his dress stuffed with writing material ; nor how he languished in prison, and finally gave his death, as he had formierly given all his life and strength and leisure, to gain for his native land that very benefit which she now enjoys so largely. It is better to be Yoshida and perish, than to be only Sakuma and yet save the hide. Kusakabe, 1 go YOSHIDA ■ TO RAJ IRQ. of Satzuma, has said the word : it is better to be a crystal and be broken. I must add a word ; for I hope the reader will not fail to perceive that this is as much the story of a heroic people as that of a heroic man. It is not enough to remember Yoshida ; we must not forget the common soldier, nor Kusakabe, nor the boy of eighteen, Nomura, of Choshu, whose eagerness be- trayed the plot. It is exhilarating to have lived in the same days with these great hearted gentlemen. Only a few miles from us, to speak by the proportion of the universe, while I was droning over my lessons, Yoshida was goading himself to be wakeful with the stings of the mosquito ; and while you were grudging a penny mcome tax, Kusakabe was stepping to death with a noble sentence on his lips. FRANQOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER. Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in lit- erary history is the sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of Frangois Vil- lon. ^ His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will recall, with a flavor of satire, that characteristic passage in which he bequeaths his spec- tacles — with a humorous reservation of the case— to the hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen- Score. Thus equipped, let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in the cemetery of the Innocents ! For his ov\^n part the poet can see no distinction. IMuch have the dead people made of their advantages. What does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and nourished portly bodies upon cakes and cream ! Here they all lie, to be trodden in the mud ; the large estate and the small, sounding vir- tue and adroit or powerful vice, in very much the same condition ; and a bishop not to be distinguished from a lamplighter with even the strongest spectacles. ^ Etude Biographique sur Francois Villon. Paris : H. Menu. 192 FRAN go IS VILLON, Such was Villon's cynical philosophy. Four hun- dred years after his death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of critical specta- cles have been applied to his own remains ; and though he left behind him a sufficiently ragged repu- tation from the first, it is only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among the good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a fine figure of the im- perishability of men's acts, that the stealth of the pri- vate inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and dusty past. We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied. In the extreme of disso- lution, when not so much as a man's name is remem- bered, when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps the very grave and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have been forgotten, dese- crated, and buried under populous towns, — even in this extreme let an antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the name will be recalled, the old in- famy will pop out into daylight like a toad out of a fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little while ago and Villon was al- most totally forgotten ; then he was revived for the sake of his verses ; and now he is being revived with a vengeance in the detection o? his misdemeanors. How unsubstantial is this projection of a man's exist- ence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries and STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER. 193 then be brushed up again and set forth for the consid- eration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot ! This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present. A Wild Youth. Franfois de Montcorbier, alias Fran9ois des Loges, alias Francois Villon, alias Michel Mouton, Master of Arts in the University of Paris, was born in that city in the summer of 143 1. It was a memorable year for France on other and higher considerations. A great-hearted girl and a poor-hearted boy made, the one her last, the other his first appearance on the public stage of that unhappy country. On the 30th of May the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the 2d of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into disaffect- ed and depopulating Paris. Sword and fire still rav- aged the open country. On a single April Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides children, made their escape out of the starving capital. The hangman, as is not uninteresting to note in connection with Master Francis, was kept hard at work in 143 1 ; on the last of April and on the 4th of May alone, sixty-two bandits swung from Paris gibbets. ^ A more confused or troublous time it would have been difficult to select for a start in life. Not even a man's nationality was 1 Bourgeois de Paris., ed. Pantheon, pp. 688, 689. 194 FRAN go IS VILLON, certain ; for the people of Paris there was no such thing as a Frenchman. The English were the English indeed, but the French were only the Armagnacs, whom, with Joan of Arc at their head, they had beaten back from under their ramparts not two years before. Such public sentiment as they had centred about their dear Duke of Burgundy, and the dear Duke had no more urgent business than to keep out of their neigh- borhood. ... At least, and whether he liked it or not, our disreputable troubadour was tubbed and swaddled as a subject of the English crown. We hear nothing of Villon's lather except that he was poor and of mean extraction. His mother was given piously, which does not imply very much in an old Frenchwoman, and quite uneducated. He had an uncle, a monk in an abbey at Angers, who must have prospered beyond the family average, and was reported to be worth five or six hundred crowns. Of this uncle and his money-box the reader will hear once more. In 1448 Francis became a student of the University of Paris ; in 1450 he took the degree of Bachelor, and in 1452 that of Master of Arts. His bourse^ or the sum paid weekly for his board, was of the amount of two sous. Now two sous was about the price of a pound of salt butter in the bad times of 1417 ; it was the price of half-a-pound in the worse times of 14 19 ; and in 1444, just four years before Villon joined the University, it seems to have been taken as the average wage for a day's manual labor. ^ 1 Bourgeois^ pp. 627, 656, and 725. STUDENT, POET AND HOUSEBREAKER. 195 In short, it cannot have been a very profuse allowance to keep a sharp-set lad in breakfast and supper for seven mortal days ; and Villon's share of the cakes and pastry and general good cheer, to which he is never weary of referring, must have been slender from the first. The educational arrangements of the University of Paris were, to our way of thinking, somewhat incom- plete. Worldly and monkish elements were presented in a curious confusion, which the youth might disen- tangle for himself. If he had an opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much hair- drawn divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The lecture room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the same roof with establishments of a very different and peculiarly unedifying order. The stu- dents had extraordinary privileges, which by all ac- counts they abused extraordinarily. And while some condemned themselves to an almost sepulchral regu- larity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered in the street * ' with their thumbs in their girdle, ' ' passed the night in riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo in the romance of Notre Dame de Paris. Villon tells us himself that he was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal. The burlesque erudition in which he some- times indulged implies no more than the merest smat- tering of knowledge ; whereas his acquaintance with blackguard haunts and industries could only have been 196 FRANCOIS VILLOiV, acquired by early and consistent impiety and idleness. He passed his degrees, it is true ; but some of us who have been to modern universities will make their own reflections on the value of the test. As for his three pupils, Colin Laurent, Girard Gossouyn, and Jehan Marceau— if they were really his pupils in any serious sense — what can we say but God help them ! And sure enough, by his own description, they turned out as ragged, rowdy, and ignorant as was to be looked for from the views and manners of their rare preceptor. At some time or other, before or during his uni- versity career, the poet was adopted by Master Guil- laume de Villon, chaplain of Saint Benoit-le-Betourne near the Sorbonne. From him he borrowed the sur- name by which he is known to posterity. It was most likely from his house, called the Porte Rouge, and situated in a garden in the cloister of Saint Benoit, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne ring out the Angel us while he was finishing his Small Testa7nent at Christmastide in 1546. Toward this benefactor he usually gets credit for a respectable dis- play of gratitude. But with his trap and pitfall style of writing, it is easy to make too sure. His senti- ments are about as much to be relied on as those of a professional beggar ; and in this, as in so many other matters, he comes toward us whining and piping the eye, and goes off again with a whoop and his finger to his nose. Thus, he calls Guillaume de Villon his " more than father," thanks him with a great show of sincerity for having helped him out of many scrapes, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER, 197 and bequeaths him his portion of renown. But the portion of renown which belonged to a young thiet, distinguished (if, at the period when he wrote this legacy, he was distinguished at all) for having written some more or less obscene and scurrilous ballads, must have been little fitted to gratify the self-respect or increase the reputation of a benevolent ecclesiastic. The same remark applies to a subsequent legacy of the poet's library, with specification of one work which was plainly neither decent nor devout. We are thus left on the horns of a dilemma. If the chaplain was a godly, philanthropic personage, who had tried to graft good principles and good behavior on this wild slip of an adopted son, these jesting legacies would obviously cut him to the heart. The position of an adopted son toward his adoptive father is one full of delicacy ; w^here a man lends his name he looks for great consideration. And this legacy of Villon's por- tion of renown may be taken as the mere fling of an unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recog- nize in his own shame the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy benefactor's feelings. The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this reading, as a fright- ful minus quantity. If, on the other hand, those jests were given and taken in good humor, the w^hole rela- tion between the pair degenerates into the unedifying complicity of a debauched old chaplain and a witty and dissolute young scholar. At this rate the house with the red door may have rung with the most mun- dane minstrelsy ; and it may have been below its 198 FRANCOIS VILLON, roof that Villon, through a hole in the plaster, studied, as he tells us, the leisures of a rich ecclesiastic. It was, perhaps, of some moment in the poet's life that he should have inhabited the cloister of Saint Benoit. Three of the most remarkable among his early acquaintances are Catherine de Vausselles, for whom he entertained a short-lived affection and an enduring and most unmanly resentment ; Regnier de Montigny, a young blackguard of good birth ; and Colin de Cayeux, a fellow with a marked aptitude for picking locks. Now we are on a foundation of mere conjecture, but it is at least curious to find that two of the canons of Saint Benoit answered respectively to the names of Pierre de Vaucel and Etienne de Mon- tigny, and that there was a householder called Nicolas de Cayeux in a street — the Rue des Poirees — in the immediate neighborhood of the cloister. M. Long- non IS almost ready to identify Catherine as the niece of Pierre ; Regnier as the nephew of Etienne, and Colin as the son of Nicolas. Without going so far, it must be owned that the approximation of names is significant. As we go on to see the part played by each of these persons in the sordid melodrama of the poet's life, we shall come to regard it as even more notable. Is it not Clough who has remarked that, after all, everything lies in juxtaposition ? Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing apparently more grave than a pretty face on the opposite side of the street and a couple of bad companions round the corner. STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER. 199 Catherine de Vausselles (or de Vaucel — the change is within the Hmits of Villon's license) had plainly delighted in the poet's conversation ; near neighbors or not, they were much together ; and Villon made no secret of his court, and suffered himself to believe that his feeling was repaid in kind. This may have been an error from the first, or he may have estranged her by subsequent misconduct or temerity. One can easily imagine Villon an impatient wooer. One thing, at least, is sure : that the affair terminated in a man- ner bitterly humiliating to Master Francis. In pres- ence of his lady-love, perhaps under her window and certainly with her connivance, he was unmercifully thrashed by one Noe le Joly — beaten, as he says him- self, like dirty linen on the washmg-board. It is char- acteristic that his malice had notably increased between the time when he wrote the Small Testament imme- diately on the back of the occurrence, and the time when he wrote the Large Testament five years after. On the latter occasion nothing is too bad for his " damsel with the twisted nose," as he calls her. She is spared neither hint nor accusation, and he tells his messenger to accost her with the vilest insults. Vil- lon, it is thought, was out of Paris v/hen these ameni- ties escaped his pen ; or perhaps the strong arm of Noe le Joly would have been again in requisition. So ends the love story, if love story it may properly be called. Poets are not necessarily fortunate in love ; but they usually fall among more romantic circumstances and bear their disappointment with a better grace. 200 FRANQOIS VILLON, The neighborhood of Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux was probably more influential on his after life than the contempt of Catherine„ For a man who is greedy of all pleasures, and provided with little money and less dignity of character, we may prophesy a safe and speedy voyage downward. Humble or even truckling virtue may walk unspotted in this life. But only those who despise the pleasures can afford to despise the opinion of the world. A man of a strong, heady temperament, like Villon, is very differently tempted. His eyes lay hold on all provocations greedily, and his heart flames up at a look into im- perious desire ; he is snared and broached to by any- thing and everything, from a pretty face to a piece of pastry in a cookshop window ; he will drink the rins- ing of the wine cup, stay the latest at the tavern party ; tap at the lit windows, follow the sound of singing, and beat the whole neighborhood for another reveller, as he goes reluctantly homeward ; and grudge himself every hour of sleep as a black empty period in which he cannot follow after pleasure. Such a person is lost if he have not dignity, or, failing that, at least pride, which is its shadow and in many ways its substitute. Master Francis, I fancy, would follow his own eager mstincts without much spiritual struggle. And we soon find him fallen among thieves in sober, literal earnest, and counting as acquaintances the most dis- reputable people he could lay his hands on : fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat ; sergeants of the crim- inal court, and archers of the watch ; blackguards who S T UDEN 7\ F OE T, A ND HO USEE RE A KER. 2 o i «lept at night under the butchers' stalls, and for whom the aforesaid archers peered about carefully with lan- terns ; Rej^nier de Montigny, Colin de Cayeux, and their crew, all bound on a favoring breeze toward the gallows ; the disorderly abbess of Port Royal, who went about at lair time with soldiers and thieves, and conducted her abbey on the queerest principles ; and most likely Perelte Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman 1 of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most re- luctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.^ Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent ; and he could make himself use- ful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of Bohemia, and whosoever loved good cheer without at all loving to work and pay for it, are addressed in con- temporary verses as the '* Subjects of Franyois Vil- lon. " He was a good genius to all hungry and un- scrupulous persons ; and became the hero of a whole legendary cycle of tavern tricks and cheateries. At best, these were doubtful levities, rather too thievish for a schoolboy, rather too gamesome for a thief. But he would not linger long in this equivocal borderland. He must soon have complied with his surroundings. He was one who would go where the cannikin clinked, not caring who should pay ; and from supping in the wolves' den, there is but a step to hunting with the ' Chron'ique Scandaleuse^ ed. Pantheon, p. 237. 2 02 FRAN(^01S VILLON, pack. And here, as I am on the chapter of his deg- radation, 1 shall say all I mean to say about its dark- est expression, and be done with it for good. Some charitable critics see no more than a jeu d' esprit, a graceful and trifling exercise of the imagination, in the grimy ballad of Fat Peg {Grosse Mar got). I am not able to follow these gentlemen to this polite extreme. Out of all Villon's works that ballad stands forth in flaring reality, gross and ghastly, as a thing written in a contraction of disgust. M. Longnon shows us more and more clearly at every page that we are to read our poet literally, that his names are the names of real persons, and the events he chronicles were actual events. But even if the tendency of criticism had run the other way, this ballad would have gone far to prove itself. I can well understand the reluctance of worthy persons in this matter ; for of course it is un^ pleasant to think of a man of genius as one who held, in the words of Marina to Boult — " A place, for which the pained"* st fiend Of hell would not in reputation change." But beyond this natural unwillingness, the whole difficulty of the case springs from a highly virtuous ignorance of life. Paris now is not so different from the Paris of then ; and the whole of the doings of Bo- hemia are not written in the sugar-candy pastorals of Murger. It is really not at all surprising that a young man of the fifteenth century, with a knack of making verses, should accept his bread upon disgraceful terms STUD EN T, POET, A ND HO USEBREAKER. 2 o. The race of those who do is not extinct ; and som; of them to this day write the prettiest verses imagin- able. . . . After this, it were impossible for Master Francis to fall lower : to go and steal for himself would be an admirable advance from every point of view, divine or human. And yet it is not as a thief, but as a homicide, that he makes his first appearance before angry justice. On June 5, 1455, when he was about twenty-four, and had been Master of Arts for a matter of three years, we behqld him for the first time quite definitely. Angry justice had, as it were, photographed him in the act of his homicide ; and M. Longnon, rummag- ing among old deeds, has turned up the negative and printed it off for our instruction. Villon had been supping — copiously we may believe — and sat on a stone bench in front of the Church of St. Benoit, in company with a priest called Gilles and a woman of the name of Isabeau. "It was nine o'clock, a mighty late hour for the period, and evidently a fine summer's night. Master Francis carried a mantle, like a pru- dent man, to keep him from the dews [serairi), and had a sword below it dangling from his girdle. So these three dallied in front of St. Benoit, taking their pleasure [pour soy esbatre). Suddenly there arrived upon the scene a priest, Philippe Chermoye or Ser- maise, also with sword and cloak, and accompanied by one Master Jehan le Mardi. Sermaise, according to Villon's account, which is all we have to go upon, came up blustering and denying God ; as Villon rose 204 FRANQOIS VILLON, to make room for him upon the bench, thrust him rudely back into his place ; and finally drew his sword and cut open his lower lip, by what I should imagine was a very clumsy stroke. Up to this point, Villon professes to have been a model of courtesy, even of leebleness : and the brawl, in his version, reads like the fable of the wolf and the lamb. But now the lamb was roused ; he drew his sword, stabbed Sermaise in the groin, knocked him on the head with a big stone, and then, leaving him to his fate, went away to have his own lip doctored by a barber of the name of Fouquet. In one version, he says that Gilles, Isa- beau, and Le Mardi ran away at the first high words, and that he and Sermaise had it out alone ; in an- other, Le Mardi is represented as returning and wrest- ing Villon's sword from him : the reader may please himself. Sermaise was picked up, lay all that night in the prison of Saint Benoit, where he was examined by an official of the Chatelet and expressly pardoned Villon, and died on the following Saturday in the Hotel Dieu. This, as I have said, was in June. Not before Jan- uary of the next year could Villon extract a pardon from the king ; but while his hand was in, he got two. One is for ' ' Frangois des Loges, alias {autre- merit dit) de Villon ;" and the other runs in the name of Francois de Montcorbier. Nay, it appears there was a further complication ; for in the narrative of the first of these documents, it is mentioned that he passed himself off upon Fouquet, the barber-surgeon, as one- S T UDEN T, PO£T,A ND HO USEE RE A KER. 205 Michel Mouton. M. Longnon has a theory that this unhappy accident with Sermaise was the cause of Vil- lon's subsequent irregularities ; and that up to that moment he had been the pink of good behavior. But the matter has to my eyes a more dubious air. A pardon necessary for Des Loges and another for Montcorbier ? and these two the same person ? and one or both of them known by the alias of Villon, however honestly come by ? and lastly, in the heat of the moment, a fourth name thrown out with an as- sured countenance ? A ship is not to be trusted that sails under so many colors. This is not the simple bearing of innocence. No — the young master was already treading crooked paths ; already, he would start and blench at a hand upon his shoulder, with the look we know so well in the face of Hogarth's Idle Apprentice ; already, in the blue devils, he would see Henry Cousin, the executor of high justice, go- ing in dolorous procession toward Montfaucon, and hear the wind and the birds crying around Paris gibbet. A Gang of Thieves. In spite of the prodigious number of people who managed to get hanged, the fifteenth century was by no means a bad time for criminals. A great confu- sion of parties and great dust of fighting favored the escape of private housebreakers and quiet fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat. Prisons were leaky ; and as we shall see, a man with a few crowns in his pocket and perhaps some acquaintance among the 2o6 FRANqOIS VILLON, officials, could easily slip out and become once more a free marauder. There was no want of a sanctuary where he might harbor until troubles blew by ; and accomplices helped each other with more or less good faith. Clerks, above all, had remarkable facilities for a criminal way of life ; for they were privileged, ex- cept in cases of notorious incorrigibility, to be plucked from the hands of rude secular justice and tried by a tribunal of their own. In 1402, a couple of thieves, both clerks of the University, were condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. As they were taken to Mont- faucon, they kept crying ' ' high and clearly ' ' for their benefit of clergy, but were none the less pitilessly hanged and gibbeted. Indignant Alma Mater inter- fered before the king ; and the Provost was deprived of all royal offices, and condemned to return the bodies and erect a great stone cross, on the road from Paris to the gibbet, graven with the effigies of these two holy martyrs. ' We shall hear more of the benefit of clergy ; for after this the reader will not be surprised to meet with thieves in the shape of tonsured clerks, or even priests and monks. To a knot of such learned pilferers our poet certainly belonged ; and by turning over a few more of M. Long- non's negatives, we shall get a clear idea of their character and doings. Montigny and De Cayeux are names already known ; Guy Tabary, Petit- Jehan, Dom Nicolas, little Thibault, who was both clerk and goldsmith, and who made picklocks and melted plate ' JMonstrelet : Panthdon Littdraire, p. 26. STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER, 207 for himself and his companions — with these the reader has still to become acquainted. Petit- Jehan and De Cayeux were handy fellows and enjoyed a useful pre- eminence in honor of their doings with the picklocl^. " Dictus des Cahyeus est fortis operator crochetorum^'' says Tabary's interrogation, "" sed dictus Peiit-Jeha7i, ejus socius, est /or cms operator.'' But the flower of the flock was little Thibault ; it was reported that no lock could stand before him ; he had a persuasive hand ; let us salute capacity wherever we may find it. Perhaps the term gang is not quite properly applied to the persons whose fortunes we are now about to follow ; rather they were independent malefactors, socially intimate, and occasionally joining together for some serious operation, just as modern stockjobbers form a syndicate for an important loan. Nor were they at all particular to any branch of misdoing. They did not scrupulously confme themselves to a single sort of theft, as I hear is common among modern thieves. They were ready for anything, from pitch- and-toss to manslaughter. Montigny, for instance, had neglected neither of these extremes, and we find him accused of cheating at games of hazard on the one hand, and on the other of the murder of one Thevenin Pensete in a house by the Cemetery of St. John. If time had only spared us some particulars, might not this last have furnished us with the matter of a grisly winter' s tale ? At Christmas-time in 1456, readers of Villon will rt> inember that he was en'^a2^ed on the Small Testamenf. zoS ^J^ANfO/S FILLOJV, About the same period, circa festum nativitaiis DoTnvm^ he took part in a memorable supper at the Mule Tavern, in iront of the Church oi St. Mathurin. Tabary, who seems to have been y^xy much Villon's creature, had ordered the supper in the course oi the. afternoon. He was a man who had had troubles ir^ his time and languished in the Bishop of Paris' s prisons on a suspicion oi picking locks ; confiding, convivial, not very astute — who had copied out a v/hole improper romance with his own right hand. This supper-party was to be his first introduction to De Cayeux and Petit-Jehan, which was probably a matter of some concern to the poor man's muddy wits ; in the sequel, at least, he speaks of both with an undisguised respect, based on professional inferior- ity in the matter of picklocks. Dom Nicolas, a Pic- ardy mxonk, was the fifth and last at table. When supper had been despatched and fairly washed down» we may suppose, with white Baigneux or red Beaune, which were favorite winesamong the fellowship, Tabary was solemnly sworn over to secrecy on the night's per- formances ; and the party left the IMule and proceeded to an unoccupied house belonging- to Robert de Saint- Simon. This, over a low wall, they entered without difficulty. All but Tabary took off their upper gar- ments ; a ladder was found and applied to the high wall which separated Saint-Simon's house from the court of the College of Navarre ; the four fellows in Iheir shirt-sleeves (as we might say) clambered over in a twinkling ; and ]^Iaster Guy Tabary remained STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER. 209 alone beside the overcoats. From the court the burg- lars made their way into the vestry of the chapel, where they found a large chest, strengthened with iron bands and closed with four locks. One of these locks they picked, and then, by levering up the corner, forced the other three. Inside was a small coffer, of walnut wood, also barred with iron, but fastened with only three locks, which were all comfortably picked by way of the keyhole. In the walnut coffer — a joyous sight by our thieves' lantern — were five hundred crowns of ^•old. There was some talk of opening the aumries, where, if they had only known, a booty eight or nine times greater lay ready to their hand ; but one of the party (I have a humorous suspicion it was Dom Nico- las, the Picardy monk) hurried them away. It was ten o'clock when they mounted the ladder ; it was about midnight befory Tabary beheld them coming back. To him they gave ten crowns, and promised a share of a two- crown dinner on the morrow ; whereat we may suppose his mouth watered. In course of time, he got wind of the real amount of their booty and understood how scurvily he had been used ; but he seems to have borne no malice. How could he, against such superb operators as Petit- Jehan and De Cayeux ; or a person like Villon, who could have made a new improper romance out of his own head, instead of merely copying an old one with mechanical right hand ? The rest of the winter was not uneventful for the gang. First they made a demonstration against the 2IO FRANQOTS VILLON, Church of St. Mathurin after chaHces, and were ig- nominiously chased away by barking dogs. Then Tabary fell out with Casin Chollet, one of the fellows who stole ducks in Paris Moat, who subsequently be- came a sergeant of the Chatelet and distinguished himself by misconduct, followed by imprisonment and public castigation, during the wars of Louis Eleventh. The quarrel was not conducted with a proper regard to the kmg's peace, and the pair publicly belabored each other until the police stepped in, and Master Tabary was cast once more into the prisons of the Bishop. While he still lay in durance, another job was cleverly executed by the band in broad daylight, at the Augustine Monastery. Brother Guillaume Coifher was beguiled by an accomplice to St. Mathu- rin to say mass ; and during his absence, his chamber was entered and five or six hundred crowns in money and some silver plate successfully abstracted. A mel- ancholy man was Coiffier on his return ! Eight crowns from this adventure were forwarded by little Thibault to the incarcerated Tabary ; and with these he bribed the jailer and reappeared in Paris taverns. Some time before or shortly after this, Villon set out for Angers, as he had promised in the Small Testamenl. The object of this excursion was not merely to avoid the presence of his cruel mistress or the strong arm of Noe le Joly, but to plan a deliberate robbery on his uncle the monk. As soon as he had properly studied the ground, the others were to go over in force from Paris — picklocks and all — and away with my uncle's STUDENT, POE T, AND HO USEBREAKER. 2 1 1 Strongbox ! This throws a comical sidelight on his own accusation against his relatives, that they had " forgotten natural duty" and disowned him because he was poor. A poor relation is a distasteful circum- stance at the best, but a poor relation who plans de- liberate robberies against those of his blood, and trudges hundreds of weary leagues to put them into execution, is surely a little on the wrong side of tolera- tion. The uncle at Angers may have been mon- strously undutiful ; but the nephew from Paris was upsides with him. On the 23d April, that venerable and discreet per- son, T»*Iaster Pierre Marchand, Curate and Prior of Paray-le-Monial, in the diocese of Chartres, arrived in Paris and put up at the sign of the Three Chandeliers, in the Rue de la Huchette. Next day, or the day after, as he was breakfasting at the sign of the Arm- chair, he fell into talk, with two customers, one of whom was a priest and the other our friend Tabary. The idiotic Tabary became mighty confidential as to his past life. Pierre INIarchand, who was an acquaint- ance of Guillaume Coifher's and had sympathized with him over his loss, pricked up his ears at the mention of picklocks, and led on the transcriber of improper romances from one thing to another, until they were fast friends. For picklocks the Prior of Paray professed a keen curiosity ; but Tabary, upon some late alarm, had thrown all his into the Seine. Let that be no difficulty, however, for was there not little Thibault, who could make them of all shapes 212 FRANQOIS VILLON, and sizes, and to whom Tabary, smelling an accom- plice, would be only too glad to introduce his new ac- quaintance ? On the morrow, accordingly, they met ; and Tabary, after having first wet his whistle at the Prior's expense, led him to Notre Dame and presented him to four or five " young companions," who were keeping sanctuary in the church. They were all clerks, recently escaped, like Tabary himself, from the episcopal prisons. Among these we may notice Thi- bault, the operator, a litde fellow of twenty-six, wear- ing long hair behind. The Prior expressed, through Tabary, his anxiety to become their accomplice and altogether such as they were [de leur sorte et de leurs complices). Mighty polite they showed themselves, and made him many fine speeches in return. But for all that, perhaps because they had longer heads than Tabary, perhaps because it is less easy to wheedle men in a body, they kept obstinately to generalities and gave him no information as to their exploits, past, present, or to come. I suppose Tabary groaned under this reserve ; for no sooner were he and the Prior out of the church than he fairly emptied his heart to him, gave him full details of many hanging matters in the past, and explained the future intentions of the band. The scheme of the hour was to rob another Augustine monk, Robert de la Porte, and in this the Prior agreed to take a hand with simulated greed. Thus, in the course of two days, he had turned this wineskin of a Tabary inside out. For a while longer the farce was carried on ; the Prior was introduced to STUDEKT, POE T, A ND HOUSEBREAKER. 2 1 3 Petit-Jehan, whom be describes as a little, very smart man of thirty, with a black beard and a short jacket ; an appointment was made and broken in the de la Porte affair ; Tabary had some breakfast at the Prior's charge and leaked out more secrets under the influ- ence of wine and friendship ; and then all of a sud' den, on the 1 7th of May, an alarm^ sprang up, the Prior picked up his skirts and walked quietly over to the Chatelet to make a deposition, and the whole band took to their heels and vanished out of Paris and the sight of the police. Vanish as they like, they all %o with a clog about their feet. Sooner or later, here or there, they will be caught in the fact, and ignominiously sent home. From our vantage of four centuries afterward, it is odd and pitiful to watch the order in which the fugitives are captured and dragged in. Montigny was the first. In August of that same year, he was laid by " the heels on many grievous counts ; sacrilegious robberies, frauds, incorrigibility, and that bad business about Thevenin Pensete in the house by the Cemetery of St. John. He was reclaimed by the ecclesiastical authorities as a clerk ; but the claim was rebutted on the score of incorrigibility, and ultimately fell to the ground ; and he was condemned to death by the Provost of Paris. It was a very rude hour for Montigny, but hope was not yet over. He was a fellow of some birth ; his father had been king's pander ; his sister, probably married to some one about the Court, was in the family way, and her health 214 FRANCOIS VILLON, would be endangered if the execution was proceeded with. So down comes Charles the Seventh with let- ters of mercy, commuting the penalty to a year in a dungeon on bread and water, and a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in Galicia. Alas I the document was incomplete ; it did not contain the full tale of Montigny's enormities ; it did not recite that he had been denied benefit of clergy, and it said nothing about Thevenin Pensete. Montigny's hour was at hand. Benefit of clergy, honorable descent from king's pantler, sister in the family way, royal letters of commutation — all were of no avail. He had been in prison in Rouen, in Tours, in Bordeaux, and four times already in Paris ; and out of all these he had come scathless ; but now he must make a little ex- cursion as far as Montfaucon with Henry Cousin, ex- ecutor of high justice. There let him swing among the carrion crows. About a year later, in July 1458, the police laid hands on Tabary. Before the ecclesiastical commis- sary he was twice examined, and, on the latter occa- sion, put to the question ordinary and extraordinary. What a dismal change from pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph with expert operators and great wits 1 He is at the lees of life, poor rogue ; and those fingers which once transcribed improper romances are now agonizingly stretched upon the rack. We have no sure knowledge, but we may have a shrewd guess of the conclusion. Tabary, the admirer, >vould go the same way as those whom he admired. S T UDEN 7\ FOE T, A ND HO USEE RE A KER. 2 1 5 The last we hear of is CoHn de Cayeux. He was caught in autumn 1460, in the great Church of St. Leu d'Esserens, which makes so fine a figure in the pleasant Oise valley between Creil and Beaumont. He was reclaimed bv no less than two bishops ; but the Procureur for the Provost held fast by incorrigible Colin. 1460 was an ill-starred year : for justice was making a clean sweep of " poor and indigent persons, thieves, cheats, and lockpickers," in the neighbor- hood of Paris ;' and Colin de Cayeux, with many others, was condemned to death and hanged.^ Villon and the Gallows. Villon was still absent on the Angers expedition when the Prior of Paray sent such a bombshell among his accomplices ; and the dates of his return and arrest remain undiscoverable. M. Campaux plausibly enough opined for the autumn of 1457, which would make him closely follow on Montigny, and the first of those denounced by the Prior to fall into the toils. We may suppose, at least, that it was not long thereafter ; we may suppose him competed for between lay and clerical Courts ; and we may sup- pose him alternately pert and impudent, humble and ^ Chron. Scand. ut supra. 2 Here and there, principally in the order of events, this article differs from M. Longnon's own reading of his material. The ground on which he defers the execution of Montigny and De Cayeux beyond the date of their trials seems insufficient. There is a law of parsimony for the construction of historical documents ; simplicity is the first duty of narration ; and hanged they were. 2i6 FRANQOIS VILLON, fawning, in his defence. But at the end of all sup- posing, we come upon some nuggets of fact. For first, he was put to the question by water. He who had tossed off so many cups of white Baigneux or red Beaune, now drank water through linen folds, until his bowels were flooded and his heart stood still. After so much raising of the elbow, so much outcry of fictitious thirst, here at last was enough drinking for a lifetime. Truly, of our pleasant vices, the gods make whips to scourge us. And secondly he was condemned to be hanged. A man may have been expecting a catastrophe for years, and yet find himself unprepared when it arrives. Certainly, Villon found, in this legitimate issue of his career, a very staggering and grave consideration. Every beast, as he says, clings bitterly to a whole skin. If everything is lost, and even honor, life still remains ; nay, and it be- comes, like the ewe lamb in Nathan's parable, as dear as all the rest. " Do you fancy," he asks, in a lively ballad, " that I had not enough philosophy under my hood to cry out : ' I appeal ' .? If I had made any bones about the matter, I should have been planted upright in the fields, by the St. Denis Road " — Mont- faucon being on the way to St. Denis. An appeal to Parliament, as we saw in the case of Colin de Cayeux, did not necessarily lead to an acquittal or a commu- tation ; and while the matter was pending, our poet had ample opportunity to reflect on his position. Hanging is a sharp argument, and to swing with many others on the gibbet adds a horrible corollary for the S TUDEN 7\ POE T, A ND HO USEBREAKER. 2 1 7 imagination. With the aspect of Montfaucon he was well acquainted ; indeed, as the neighborhood appears to have been sacred to junketing and nocturnal picnics of wild young men and women, he had probably studied it under all varieties of hour and weather. And now, as he lay in prison waiting the mortal push, these difierent aspects crowded back on his imagina- tion with a new and startling significance ; and he wrote a ballad, by way of epitaph for himself and his companions, which remains unique in the annals of mankind. It is, in the highest sense, a piece of his biography : — " La pluye nous a debuez et lavez, Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz ; Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez, Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz. Jamais, nul temps, nous ne sommes rassis ; Puis 9a, puis li, comme le vent varie, A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie, Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez i couldre. Ne soyez done de nostre confrairie, Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre." Here is some genuine thieves' literature after so much that was spurious ; sharp as an etching, written with a shuddering soul. There is an intensity of con- sideration in the piece that shows it to be the transcript of familiar thoughts. It is the quintessence of many a doleful nightmare on the straw, when he felt himself swing helpless in the wind, and saw the birds turn about him, screaming and menacing his eyes. 2iS FRAN(:OIS VILLON, And, after all, the Parliament changed his sentence into one of banishment ; and to Roussillon, in Dau- phiny, our poet must carry his woes without delay. Travellers between Lyons and Marseilles may remem- ber a station on the line, some way below Vienne, where the Rhone fleets seaward between vine-clad hills. This was Villon's Siberia. It would be a little warm in summer perhaps, and a little cold in winter in tha* draughty valley between two great mountain fields ; but what with the hills, and the racing river, and the fiery Rhone wines, he was little to be pitied on the conditions of his exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad ballad, written in a breath, heartily thanked and ful- somely belauded the Parliament ; the envoi, like the proverbial postscript of a lady's letter, containing the pith of his performance in a request for three days' delay to settle his affairs and bid his friends farewell. He was probably not followed out of Paris, like An- toine Fradin, the popular preacher, another exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes ;' but I dare say one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a bottle with him before they turned. For banished people, in those days, seem to have set out on their own responsibility, in their own guard, and at their own expense. It was no joke to make one's way from Paris to Roussillon alone and penniless in the fifteenth century. Villon says he left a rag of his tails on every bush. Indeed, he must have had mary 1 Chron. Scand., p. 338. STUDENT, FOE T, AND HO USEBREAKER. 2 19 a wear}'' tramp, many a slender meal, and many a to- do with blustering captains of the Ordonnance. But with one of his light fingers, we may fancy that he took as good as he gave ; for every rag of his tail, he would manage to indemnify himself upon the population in the shape of food, or wine, or ringing money ; and his route would be traceable across France and Bur- gundy by housewives and inn-keepers lamenting over petty thefts, like the track of a single human locust. A strange figure he must have cut in the eyes of the good country people : this ragged, blackguard city poet, with a smack of the Paris student, and a smack of the Paris street arab, posting along the highways, in rain or sun, among the green fields and vineyards. For himself, he had no taste for rural loveliness ; green fields and vineyards would be mighty indifferent to Master Francis ; but he would often have his tongue in his cheek at the simplicity of rustic dupes, and often, at city gates, he might stop to contemplate the gibbet with its swinging bodies, and hug himself on his escape. How long he stayed at Roussillon, how far he be- camie the protege of the Bourbons, to whom that town belonged, or when it was that he took part, under the auspices of Charles of Orleans, in a rhyming tourna- ment to be referred to once again in the pages of the present volume, are matters that still remain in dark- ness, in spite of M. Longnon's diligent rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in sum- mer 146 1, alas ! he is once more in durance : this 220 FRANCOIS VILLON, time at Meun-sur-Loire, in the prisons of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been low- ered in a basket into a noisome pit, where he lay, all summer, gnawing hard crusts and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a rake : a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for be- ing excessive and burlesque, and all the more proper to the man for being a caricature of his own misery. His eyes were "bandaged with thick walls." It might blow hurricanes overhead ; the lightning might leap in high heaven ; but no word of all this reached him in his noisome i)it. *' Iln'entre, ou gist, n'escler ni tourbillon." Above all, he was fevered with envy and anger at the freedom of others ; and his heart flowed over into curses as he thought of Thibault d'Aussigny, walking the streets in God's sunlight, and blessing people with extended fingers. So much we find sharply lined in his own poems. Why he was cast again into prison — how he had again managed to shave the gallows — this we know not, nor, from the destruction of authorities, are we ever likely to learn. But on October 2d, 1461, or some day immediately preceding, the new King, Louis Eleventh, made his joyous entry into Meun. Now it was a part of the formality on such occasions for the new I^ing to liber- ate certain prisoners ; and so the basket was let down into Villon's pit, and hastily did Master Francis scramble in, and was most joyfully hauled up, and shot out, blinking and tottering, but once more a free man, into the blessed sun and wind. Now or never S r UDEN T, POET, A ND HO USEE RE A KER. 2 2 1 is the time for verses ! Such a happy revolution would turn the head of a stocking- weaver, and set him iin.o^ling rhymes. And so — after a voyage to Paris, where he finds Montigny and De Cayeux clattering their bones upon the gibbet, and his three pupils roi- stering in Paris streets, " with their thumbs under their girdles," — down sits Master Francis to write his Large Testament, and perpetuate his name in a sort of glorious ignominy. The Large Testament. Of this capital achievement and, with it, of V^il- lon's style in general, it is here the place to speak. The Large Teslament is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd. With so free a design, no thought that occurred to him would need to be dismissed without expression ; and he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul, and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his exploits and suffer- ings. If the reader can conceive something between the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's Don Juan and the racy humorous gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter writer — except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be paralleled from no other language known to me — he bears a particular resemblance. In 222 FRANQOIS VILLON, common with Bums he has a certain rugged com- pression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigor, a delight in local personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure ; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the absolute darkness ot cant language. They are perhaps the only two great masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary. " Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Mon- taigne, "that he has a handsome leg.?" It is a far more serious claim that we have to put forward in be- half of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his writing, so full of color, so eloquent, so pictu- resque, stands out in an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers could have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a pas- time, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of Charles Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age and country, and ini- tiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long ago, in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recog- nized him as the first articulate poet in the language ; and if we measure him, not by priority of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison with obscure forerunners, but with great and famous suc- cessors, we shall install this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche in glory's temple than was S T UDEN T, POET, A AW HO USEBREA KER. 223 ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in itself, a memorable fact that, before 1542, in the very dawn of piinting, and while modern France was in the mak- ing, the works of Villon ran through seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais ; and through Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, permanent, and growing inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way of looking upon the Sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes everv day a more specific feature in the literature of France. And oiily the other year, a work of some power ap- pearea in Paris, and appeared with infinite scandal, which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward form to the study of our rhyming thief. The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death ; monks and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry ; the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window ; people with patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls ; chuckling Tabary transcribes an improper romance ; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffiing students swagger in the streets ; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward ; the graveyard is full of bones ; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux and Mon- tigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be seen than sordid misery and worthless joys ? Only where the poor old mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes tremulous supplication to the Mother of God. 224 FRAN(;OIS VILLON, In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not long before, Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in the whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet could perceive. His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth. He dwelt all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Meun. In the moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognizable out of holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speed- ing home deep-laden ships and sweeping rubbish from the earth ; the lightning leaps and cleans the face of heaven ; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men's spirits ; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is mumbling crusts and picking vermin. Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another characteristic of his work : its unrivalled insincerity. I can give no better similitude of this quality than I have given already : that he comes up v/ith a whine, and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his nose. His pathos is that of a profes- sional mendicant who should happen to be a man of genius ; his levity that of a bitter street arab. full ol bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages pre- occupy the reader, and he is cheated out of an alms in the shape of sympathy. But when the thing is studied the illusion fades away : in the transitions, above all, we can detect the evil, ironical temper of the man ; and instead of a flighty work, where many crude but genuine feelings tumble together for the STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER. 225 mastery as in the lists of tournament, we are tempted to think of the Large Testament as of one long-drawn epical grimace, pulled by a merry-andrew, who has found a certain despicable eminence over human re- spect and human affections by perching himself astride upon the gallows. Between these two views, at best, all temperate judgments will be found to fall ; and rather, as I imagine, toward the last. There were two things on which he felt with perfect and, in one case, even threatening sincerity. The first of these was an undisguised envy of those richer than himself. He was forever drawing a paral- lel, already exemplified from his own words, between the happy life of the well-to do and the miseries of the poor. Burns, too proud and honest not to work, con- tinued through all reverses to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Beranger waited till he was him- self beyond the reach of want, before writing the Old Vagabond or Jacques. Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, " was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty" in his ill days. Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox burrowing in their vitals. But Villon, who had not the courage to be poor with honesty, now whiningly implores our sympathy, now shows his teeth upon the dung-heap with an ugly snarl. He envies bitterly, envies passionately. Poverty, he protests, drives men to steal, as hunger makes the wolf sally from the forest. The poor, he goes on, will always have a carping word to sav, or. if that outlet be denied, nourish rebellious 2 26 FRANC^OIS VILLON, thoughts. It is a calumny on the noble army of the poor. Thousands in a small way of life, ay, and even in the smallest, go through life with tenfold as much honor and dignity and peace of mind, as the rich gluttons whose dainties and state-beds awakened Villon's covetous temper. And every morning's sun sees thousands who pass whistling to their toil. But Villon was the " mauvais pauvre" defined by Victor Hugo, and, in its English expression, so admirably stereotyped by Dickens. He was the first wicked sans-culotte. He is the man of genius with the mole- skin cap. He is mighty pathetic and beseeching here in the street, but I would not go down a dark road with him for a large consideration. The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common to the middle ages ; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the tran- sitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. ^t)ld age and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an after-world — these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease. An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its reper- tory, and none of them will tickle an audience into good humor. " Tousjours vieil synge est desplai- sant. " It is not the old jester who receives most rec- ognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome, who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air. Of this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious. As for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his STUDE.VT, FOE T, A ND BO USEBREAKER. 227 reflections on their old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for me. Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune ; but what Horace throws out with an ill-favored laugh, Villon dwells on with an almost maudlin whimper. It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration ; in the swift and sorrowful change that overtakes beauty ; in the strange revolution by which great fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of churchyard dust ; and in the utter passing away of what was once lovable and mighty. It is in this that the mixed tex- ture of his thought enables him to reach such poig- nant and terrible effects, and to enchance pity with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral march. It is in this, also, that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art. So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no more than letters and a legend. " Where are the snows of yester year ?" runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apos- tles and the golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and trumpeters, who also bore their part in the world's pageantries and ate greedily at great folks' tables : all this to the refrain of "So much carry the winds away !" Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their bones on Paris gibbet. Alas, and with so pitiful an 228 FRANQOIS VILLON. experience of life, Villon can offer us nothing but ter- ror and lamentation about death ! No one has ever more skilfully communicated his own disenchant- ment ; no one ever blown a more ear-piercing note of sadness. This unrepentant thief can attain neither to Christian confidence, nor to the spirit of the bright Greek saying, that whom the gods love die early. It is a poor heart, and a poorer age, that cannot accept the conditions of life with some heroic readiness. TV *¥• ^ T» T^ The date of the Large Testament is the last date in the poet's biography. After having achieved that ad- mirable and despicable performance, he disappears into the night from whence he came. How or when he died, whether decently in bed or trussed up to a gallows, remains a riddle for foolhardy commentators. It appears his health had suffered in the pit at Meun ; he was thirty years of age and quite bald ; with the notch in his under lip where Sermaise had struck him with the sword, and what wrinkles the reader may imagine. In default of portraits, this is all I have been able to piece together, and perhaps even the bald- ness should be taken as a figure of his destitution. A sinister dog, in all likelihood, but with a look in his eye, and the loose flexile mouth that goes with wit and an overweening sensual temperament. Certainly the sorriest figure on the rolls of fame. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. EoR one who was no great politician, nor (as men go) especially wise, capable or virtuous, Charles of Orleans is more than usually enviable to all who love that better sort of fame which consists in being known not widely, but intimately. ** To be content that time to come should know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, or to subsist under naked denominations, without deserts or noble acts," is, says Sir Thomas Browne, a frigid ambition. It is to some more specific memory that youth looks forward in its vigils. Old kings are sometimes disin- terred in all the emphasis of life, the hands untainted by decay, the beard that had so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon the royal bosom ; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days is handed down. In this way, public curiosity^ may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize ; and so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face, figura afiimi magis quam corporis. Of those who have thus sur\'ived themselves most completely, left a sort of personal seduction be- 230 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. hind them in the world, and retained, after death, the art of making friends, Montaigne and Samuel John- son certainly stand first. But we have portraits of all sorts of men, from august Csesar to the king's dwarf ; and all sorts of portraits, from a Titian treasured in the Louvre to a profile over the grocer's chimney-shelf. And so in a less degree, but no less truly, than the spirit of Montaigne lives on in the delightful Essays, that of Charles of Orleans survives in a few old songs and old account-books ; and it is still in the choice of the reader to make this duke's acquaintance, and, if their humors suit, become his friend. His birth — if we are to argue from a man's parents — was above his merit. It is not merely that he was the grandson of one king, the father of another, and the uncle of a third ; but something more specious was to be looked for from the son of his father, Louis de Valois, Duke of Orleans, brother to the mad king Charles VL, lover of Queen Isabel, and the leading patron of art and one of the leading politicians in France. And the poet might have inherited yet higher virtues from his mother, Valentina of Milan, a very pathetic figure of the age, the faithful wife of an unfaithful husband, and the friend of a most unhappy king. The father, beautiful, eloquent, and accom- plished, exercised a strange fascination over his con- temporaries ; and among those who dip nowadays CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 231 into the annals of the time there are not many — and these few are Httle to be envied — who can resist the fascination of the mother. All mankind owe her a debt of gratitude because she brought some comfort into the life of the poor madman who wore the crown of France. Born (]\Iay 1391) of such a noble stock, Charles was to know from the first all favors of nature and art. His father's gardens were the admiration of his con- temporaries ; his castles were situated in the most agreeable parts of France, and sumptuously adorned. We have preserved, in an inventory of 1403, the de- scription of tapestried rooms where Charles may have played in childhood.^ "A green room, with the ceiling full of angels, and the dossier of shepherds and shepherdesses seeming {^faisant contenance) to eat nuts and cherries. A room of gold, silk and worsted, with a device of little children in a river, and the sky full of birds. A room of green tapestry, showing a knight and lady at chess in a pavilion. Another green room, with shepherdesses in a trellised garden worked in gold and silk. A carpet representing cherry-trees, where there is a fountain, and a lady gathering cher- ries in a basin." These were some of the pictures over which his fancy might busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large a space in the attention of mediaeval men might be occupied by such figured hangings on * ChampolHon-Figeac's Louis et Charles d' Orleans, p. 348. 232 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. the wall. There was something timid and purblind in the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of traditional axioms ; and little of the physical aspect of things entered vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows and the walls and floors of palaces. The reader will remember how Villon's mother conceived of heaven and hell and took all her scanty stock of theology from the stained glass that threw its light upon her as she prayed. And there is scarcely a detail of external effect in the chronicles and romances of the time, but might have been borrowed at second hand from a piece of tapestry. It was a stage in the history of mankind which we may see paralleled, to some extent, in the first infant school, where the representations of lions and elephants alternate round the wall with moral verses and trite presentments of the lesser virtues. So that to live in a house of many pictures was tantamount, for the time, to a liberal education in itself. At Charles's' birth an order of knighthood was in- augurated in his honor. At nine years old, he was a squire ; at eleven, he had the escort of a chaplain and a schoolmaster ; at twelve, his uncle the king made him a pension of twelve thousand livres d' or. ^ He saw the most brilliant and the most learned per- sons of France, in his father's Court ; and would not fail to notice that these brilliant and learned persons 1 D'Hericault's admirable Memoir^ prefixed to his edition of Charles's works, vol. i. p. xi. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 233 were one and all engaged in rhyming. Indeed, if it is difficult to realize the part played by pictures, it is perhaps even more difficult to realize that played by verses in the polite and active history of the age. At the siege of Pontoise, English and French exchanged defiant ballades over the walls. ^ If a scandal hap- pened, as in the loathsome thirty-third story of the Cent NoiiveUes Nouvelles, all the wits must make rondels and chansonettes, which they would hand from one to another with an unmanly sneer. Ladies carried their favorite's ballades in their girdles.- IMargaret of Scotland, all the world knows already, kissed Alain Chartier's lips in honor of the many virtuous thoughts and golden sayings they had uttered ; but it is not so well known, that this princess was herself the most in- dustrious of poetasters, that she is supposed to have hastened her death by her literary vigils, and sometimes wrote as many as twelve rondels in the day.^ It was in rhyme, even, that the young Charles should learn his lessons. He might get all manner of instruction in the truly noble art of the chase, not without a smack of ethics by the way, from the compendious didactic poem of Gace de la Eigne. Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming : in the verses of his father's ^laitre d' Hotel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated of " I'art de dictier et de faire changons, ballades, virelais et rondeaux," along with many other * Vallet de Viriville, Charles I'll, et sen Epoque, ii. 428, note 2. ' See Lecoy de la Marche, Le Roi Rend, i. 167. « Vallet, Charles VII., ii. 85, 86, note 2. 234 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. matters worth attention, from the courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of France. ^ At this rate, all knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song. We need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very well-educated person. He could string Latin texts together by the hour, and make ballades and rondels better than Eus- tache Deschamps himself. He had seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken em- peror who could not keep his hand from the wine- cup. He had spoken a great deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who helped his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies dance on into broad daylight, and much burn- ing of torches and waste of dainties and good wine.'^ And when all is said, it was no very helpful prepara- tion for the battle of life, "I believe Louis XL," writes Comines, " would not have saved himself, if he had not been very differently brought up from such other lords as I have seen educated in this country ; for these were taught nothing but to play the jacka- napes with finery and fine words." ^ I am afraid Charles took such lessons to heart, and conceived of life as a season principally for junketing and war. * ChampoUion-Figeac, 193-198. 2 Ibid. 2og. 3 The student will see that there are facts cited, and expressions borrowed, in this paragraph, from a period extending over almost the whole of Charles's life, instead of being confined entirely to his boyhood. As I do not believe there was any change, so I do not believe there is any anachro- nism involved. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 235 His view of the whole duty of man, so empty, vain, and wearisome to us, was yet sincerely and consistently held. When he came in his ripe years to compare the glor}' of two kingdoms, England and France, it was on three points only, — pleasures, valor, and riches, — that he cared to measure them ; and in the very outset of that tract he speaks of the life of the great as passed, * ' whether in arms, as in assaults, bat- tles, and sieges, or in jousts and tournaments, in high and stately festivities and in funeral solemnities." ^ When he was no more than thirteen, his father had him affianced to Isabella, virgin-widow of our Richard II. and daughter of his uncle Charles VI. ; and, two years after (June 29, 1406), the cousins were married at Compiegne, he fifteen, she seventeen years of age. It was in every way a most desirable match. The bride brought five hundred thousand francs of dowry. The ceremony was of the utmost magnificence, Louis of Orleans figuring in crimson velvet, adorned with no less than seven hundred and ninety-five pearls, gath- ered together expressly for this occasion. And no doubt it must have been very gratifying for a young gentleman of fifteen, to play the chief part in a pageant so gayly put upon the stage. Only, the bridegroom might have been a little older ; and, as ill-luck would have it, the bride herself was of this way of thinking, and would not be consoled for the loss of her title as 1 The Debate between the Heralds of France and England, translated and admirably edited by Mr. Henry Pyne. For the attribution of this tract'to Charles, ths reader is referred to Mr. Pyne's conclusive argument 236 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. queen, or the contemptible age of her new husband. Pleuroit fort ladite Isaheau ; the said Isabella wept copiously. ' It is fairly debatable whether Charles was much to be pitied when, three years later (Septembei 1409), this odd marriage was dissolved by death. Short as it was, however, this connection left a lasting stamp upon his mind ; and we find that, in the last decade of his life, and after he had remarried for per- haps the second time, he had not yet forgotten or for- given the violent death of Richard II. " Ce mauvais cas" — that ugly business, he writes, has yet to be avenged. The marriage festivity was on the threshold of evil days. The great rivalry between Louis of Orleans and John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, had been for- sworn with the most reverend solemnities. But the feud was only in abeyance, and John of Burgundy still conspired in secret. On November i^, 1407 — in that black winter when the frost lasted six-and-sixty days on end — a summons from the king reached Louis of Orleans at the Hotel Barbette, where he had been sup- ping with Queen Isabel. It was seven or eight in the evening, and the inhabitants of the quarter were abed. He set forth in haste, accompanied by two squires rid- ing on one horse, a page, and a few varlets running with torches. Ashe rode, he hummed to himself and trifled with his glove. And so riding, he was beset by the bravoes of his enemy and slain. My lord of Bar- gundy set an ill precedent in this deed, as he found 1 Des Ursin.^. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 237 some years after on the bridge of Montereau ; and even in the meantime he did not profit quietly by his rival's death. The horror of the other princes seems to have perturbed himself ; he avowed his guilt in the council, tried to brazen it out, finally lost heart and fled at fall gallop, cutting bridges behind him, toward Bapaume and Lille. And so there we have the head of one faction, who had just made himself the most formidable man in France, engaged in a remarkably hurried journey, with black care on the pillion. And meantime, on the other side, the widowed duchess came to Paris in appropriate mourning, to demand justice for her husband's death. Charles VI. , who was then in a lucid interval, did probably all that he could, when he raised up the kneeling suppliant with kisses and smooth words. Things were at a dead -lock. The criminal might be in the sorriest fright, but he was still the greatest of vassals. Justice was easy to ask and not difficult to promise ; how it was to be ex- ecuted was another question. No one in France was strong enough to punish John of Burgundy ; and per- haps no one, except the widow, very sincere in wish- ing to punish him. She, indeed, was eaten up of zeal ; but the intensity of her eagerness wore her out ; and she died about a year after the murder, of grief and indignation, unre- quited love and unsatisfied resentment. It was during the last months of her life that this fiery and generous woman, seeing the soft hearts of her own children, looked with envy on a certain natural son of her hus- 238 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. band's destined to become famous in the sequel as the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. " You were stolen from ?7ie," she said ; *' it is you who are fit to avenge your father. " These are not the words of or- dinary mourning, or of an ordhiary woman. It is a saying, over which Balzac would have rubbed his epis- copal hands. That the child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her body, was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan ; and the ex- pression of this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance, in such straightforward and vivid words as we are accustomed to hear only on the stress of actual life, or in the theatre. In history — where we see things as in a glass darkly, and the fashion of former times is brought before us, deplorably adul- terated and defaced, fitted to very vague and pompous words, and strained through many men's minds of everything personal or precise — this speech of the widowed duchess startles a reader, somewhat as the footprint startled Robinson Crusoe. A human voice breaks in upon the silence of the study, and the stu- dent is aware of a fellow-creature in his world of docu- ments. With such a clew in hand, one may imagine how this wounded lioness would spur and exasperate the resentment of her children, and what would be the last words of counsel and command she left behind her. With these instances of his dying mother — almost a voice from the tomb— still tingling in his ears, the position of young Charles of Orleans, when he was left CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 239 at the head of that great house, was curiously similar to that of Shakspeare's Hamlet. The times were out of joint ; here was a murdered father to avenge on a powerful murderer ; and here, in both cases, a lad of inactive disposition born to set these matters right. Valentina's commendation of Dunois involved a judg- ment on Charles, and that judgment was exactly cor- rect. Whoever might be, Charles was not the man to avenge his father. Like Hamlet, this son of a dear father murdered was sincerely grieved at heart. Like Hamlet, too, he could unpack his heart with words, and wrote a most eloquent letter to the king, com- plaining that what was denied to him would not be denied " to the lowest born and poorest man on earth." Even in his private hours he strove to pre- serve a lively recollection of his injury, and keep up the native hue of resolution. He had gems engraved with appropriate legends, hortatory or threatening : *' Dieu le scet,"' God knows it ; or *' Souveiiez-vous de— ' ' Remember ! ' It is only tosvard the end that the two stories begin to differ ; and in some points the historical version is the more tragic. Hamlet only stabbed a silly old councillor behind the arras ; Charles of Orleans trampled France for five years undet the hoofs of his banditti. The miscarriage of Ham- let's vengeance was confined, at widest, to the palace ; the ruin wrought by Charles of Orleans was as broad as France. Yet the first act of the young duke is worthy of hon- 1 Michelet, iv. App. 179, p. ^37. 240 CHARLES OF ORLEANS, orable mention. Prodigal Louis had made enormous debts ; and there is a story extant, to illustrate how lightly he himself regarded these commercial obliga- tions. It appears that Louis, after a narrow escape he made in a thunder-storm, had a sm,art access of peni- tence, and announced he would pay his debts on the following Sunday. More than eight hundred creditors presented themselves, but by that time the devil was well again, and they were shown the door with more gayety than politeness. A time when such cynical dishonesty was possible for a man of culture is not, it will be granted, a fortunate epoch for creditors. When the original debtor was so lax, we may imagine how an heir would deal with the incumbrances of his in- heritance. On the death of Philip the Forward, fatheE of that John the Fearless whom we have seen at work, the widow went through the ceremony of a public re- nunciation of goods ; taking off her purse and girdle, she left them, on the grave, and thus, by one notable act, cancelled her husband's debts and defamed his honor. The conduct of young Charles of Orleans was very different. To ra,eet the joint liabilities of his lather and mother (for Valentina also was lavish), he had to sell or pledge a quantity of jewels ; and yet he would not take advantage of a pretext, even legally valid, to diminish the amount. Thus, one Godefroi Lefevre, having disbursed many odd sums for the late duke, and received or kept no vouchers, Charles or- dered that he should be believed upon his oath.^ To 1 ChampoUion-Figeac, pp. 279 Zz.. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 241 a modern mind this seems as honorable to his father's memory as if John the Fearless had been hanged as high as Haman. And as things fell out, except a re- cantation from the University of Paris, which had justi- fied the murder out of party feeling, and various other purely paper reparations, this was about the outside of what Charles was to effect in that direction. He lived five years, and grew up from sixteen to twenty-one, in the midst of the most horrible civil war, or series of civil wars, that ever devastated France ; and from first to last his wars were ill-starred, or else his victories useless. Two years after the murder (]\Iarch 1409), John the Fearless having the upper hand for the mo- ment, a shameful and useless reconciliation took place, by the king's command, in the church of Our Lady at Chartres. The advocate of the Duke of Bur- gundy stated that Louis of Orleans had been killed "for the good of the king's person and realm." Charles and his brothers, with tears of shame, under protest, pour nepas desobeir aiiroi, forgave their father's murderer and swore peace upon the missal. It was, as I say^ a shameful and useless ceremony ; the very grefiier, entering it in his register, wrote in the margin, ** Pax, pax, i7iquit Propheta, etnoneslpax." ^ Charles was soon after allied with the abominable Bernard d'Armagnac, even betrothed or married to a daughter of his, called by a name that sounds like a contradic- tion in terms. Bonne d'Armagnac. From that time forth, throughout all this monstrous period — a very ' Michelet, iv. pp. 123-4. 242 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. nightmare in the history of France— he is no more than a stalking-horse for the ambitious Gascon. Some- times the smoke hfts, and you can see him for the twinkhng of an eye, a very pale figure ; at one mo ment there is a rumor he will be crowned king ; at an- other, when the uproar has subsided, he will be heard still crying out for justice ; and the next (14 12), he is showing himself to the applauding populace on the same horse with John of Burgundy. But these are exceptional seasons, and, for the most part, he merely rides at the Gascon's bridle over devastated France. His very party go, not by the name of Orleans, but by the name of Armagnac. Paris is in the hands of the butchers : the peasants have taken to the woods. Alliances are made and broken as if in a country dance ; the English called in, now by this one, now by the other. Poor people sing in church, with white faces and lamentable music : ' ' Domiiie Jesu, parce poptdo iuo, dirige in viam pads principes. ' ' And the end and upshot of the whole affair for Charles of Orleans is another peace with John the Fearless. France is once more tranquil, with the tranquillity of ruin ; he may ride home again to Blois, and look, with what countenance he may, on those gems he had got en- graved in the early days of his resentment, " Sotivenez- voiis de — " Remember! He has killed Polonius, to be sure ; but the king is never a penny the worse. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 243 II. From the battle of Agincourt (Oct. 14 15) dates the second period of Charles's life. The English readei will remember the name of Orleans in the play of Henry K ; and it is at least odd that we can trace a resemblance between the puppet and the original. The interjection, " I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress" (Act iii. scene 7), may very well indi- cate one who was already an expert in that sort of trifle ; and the game of proverbs he plays with the Constable in the same scene, would be quite in char- acter for a man who spent many years of his life cap- ping verses with his courtiers. Certainly, Charles was in the great battle with five hundred lances (say, three thousand men), and there he was made prisoner as he led the van. According to one story, some ragged English archer shot him down ; and some diligent English Pistol, hunting ransoms on the field of battle, extracted him from under a heap of bodies and retailed him to our King Henry. He was the most important capture of the day, and used with all consideration. On the way to Calais, Henry sent him a present of bread and wine (and bread, you will remember, was an article of luxury in the English camp), but Charles would neither eat nor drink. Thereupon, Henry came to visit him in his quarters. ** Noble cousin/' said he, *' how are you.?" Charles replied that he was well. " Why, then, do }0u neither eat nor 244 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. drink?" And then with some asperity, as I imagine, the young duke told him that " truly he had no in- clination lor food." And our Henry improved the occasion with something of a snuffle, assuring his prisoner that God had fought against the French on account of their manifold sins and transgressions. Upon this there supervened the agonies of a rough sea passage ; and many French lords, Charles, certainly, among the number, declared they would rather endure such another defeat than such another sore trial on shipboard. Charles, indeed, never forgot his suffer- ings. Long afterward, he declared his hatred to a sea- faring life, and willingly yielded to England the em- pire of the seas, " because there is danger and loss of life, and God knows what pity when it storms ; and sea-sickness is for many people hard to bear ; and the rough life that must be led is little suitable for the no- bility :" ^ which, of all babyish utterances that ever fell from any public man, may surely bear the bell. Scarcely disembarked, he followed his victor, with such wry face as we may fancy, through the streets of holi- day London. And then the doors closed upon his last day of garish life for more than a quarter of a cen- tury. After a boyhood passed in the dissipations of a luxurious court or in the camp of war, his ears still stunned and his cheeks still burning from his enemies' jubilations ; out of all this ringing of English bells and singing of English anthems, from among all these shouting citizens in scarlet cloaks, and beautiful vir- * Debate between the Heralds. CHARLES 0f mRLEANS. 245 gins attired in white, he passed into the silence and solitude of a political prison/ His captivity was not without alleviations. He was allowed to go hawking, and he found England an ad- mirable country for the sport ; he was a favorite with English ladies, and admired their beauty ; and he did not lack for money, wine, or books ; he was honorably imprisoned in the strongholds of great nobles, in Wind- sor Castle and the Tower of London. But when all is said, he was a prisoner for five-and-twenty years. For five-and-twenty years he could not go where he would, or do what he liked, or speak with any but his jailers. We may talk very wisely of alleviations ; there is only one alleviation for which the man would thank ycu : he would thank you to open the door. With what regret Scottish James 1. bethought him (in the next room perhaps to Charles) of the time when he rose " as early as the day. " What would he not have given to wet his boots once more with morning dew, and follow his vagrant fancy among the meadows ? The only alleviation to the misery of constraint lies in the disposition of the prisoner. To each one this place of discipline brings his own lesson. It stirs Latude or Baron Trenck into heroic action ; it is a hermitage for pious and conformable spirits. Beranger tells us he found prison life, with its regular hours and long evenings, both pleasant and profitable. The Pilgrim s Progress and Do?i Quixote were begun in prison. It was after they were become (to use the ^ Sir H. Nicholas, Agincowrt. 246 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. words of one of them), " Oh, worst imprisonment — the dungeon of themselves !" that Homer and Milton worked so hard and so well for the profit of mankindo In the year 14 15 Henry V. had two distinguished prisoners, PVench Charles of Orleans and Scottish James I., who whiled away the hours of their captivity with rhyming. Indeed, there can be no better pas- time for a lonely man than the mechanical exercise of verse. Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from childhood, the ballade vith its scanty rhymes ; the rondel, with the recurrence lirst of the whole, then of half the burden, in thirteen verses, seem to have been invented for the prison and the sick-bed. The common Scotch saying, on the sight of anything operose and finical, " he must have had little to do that made that !" might be put as epigraph on all the song books of old France. Making such sorts of verse belongs to the same class of pleasures as guess- ing acrostics or " burying proverbs." It is almost purely formal, almost purely verbal. It must be done gently and gingerly. It keeps the mind occupied a long time, and never so intently as to be distressing ; for anything like strain is against the very nature of the craft. Sometimes things go easily, the refrains fall into their place as if of their own accord, and it becomes something of the nature of an intellectual tennis ; you must make your poem as the rhymes will go, just as you must strike your ball as your adver- sary played it. So that these forms are suitable rather for those who wish to make verses, than for those who CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 247 wish to express opinions. Sometimes, on the other hand, difficulties arise : rival verses come into a man's head, and fugitive words elude his memory. Then it is that he enjoys at the same time the deliberate pleas- ures of a connoisseur comparing wines, and the ardor o( the chase. He may have been sitting all day long in prison with folded hands ; but when he goes to bed, the retrospect will seem animated and eventful. Besides confirming himself as an habitual maker of verses, Charles acquired some new opinions during his captivity. He was perpetuallj reminded of the change that had befallen him. He found the climate of Eng- land cold and " prejudicial to the human frame ;" he had a great contempt for English fruit and English beer ; even the coal fires were unpleasing in his eyes. ^ He was rooted up from among his friends and cus- toms and the places that had known him. And so in this strange land he began to learn the love of his own. Sad people all the world over are like to be moved when the wind is in some particular quarter. So Burns preferred when it was in the west, and blew to him from his mistress ; so the girl in the ballade, looking south to Yarrow, thought it might carry a kiss betwixt her and her gallant ; and so we find Charles singing of the " pleasant wind that comes from France."" One day, at '* Dover-on-the-Sea," he looked across the straits, and saw the sandhills about Calais. And it happened to him, he tells us in a bal- lade, to remember his happiness over there in the 1 Debate between the Heralds. ^ Works (ed. d'Hericault), i. 43. 248 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. past ; and he was both sad and merry at the recollec- tion, and could not have his fill of gazing on the shores of France. ' Although guilty of unpatriotic acts, he had never been exactly unpatriotic in feeling. But his sojourn in England gave, for the time at least, some consistency to what had been a very weak and ineffectual prejudice. He must have been under the influence of more than usually solemn considerations, when he proceeded to turn Henry's puritanical homily after Agincourt into a ballade, and reproach France, and himself by implication, with pride, gluttony, idle- ness, unbridled covetousness, and sensuality.- For the moment, he must really have been thinking more of France than of Charles of Orleans. And another lesson he learned. He who was only to be released in case of peace, begins to think upon the disadvantages of war. " Pray for peace," is his refrain : a strange enough subject for the ally of Ber- nard d'Armagnac.^ But this lesson was plain and practical ; it had one side in particular that was specially attractive for Charles ; and he did not hesi- tate to explain it in so many words. " Everybody," he writes — 1 translate roughly — " everybody should be much inclined to peace, for everybody has a deal to gain by it." ' Charles made laudable endeavors to acquire Eng- lish, and even learned to write a rondel in that tongue 1 Works (ed. d'Hericault), i. 143. 3 Ibid, 144. 2 Ibid. 190. 4 Jbid, 158. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 249 of quite average mediocrity. ' He was for some time billeted on the unhappy Suffolk, who received four- teen shillings and fourpence a day for his expenses ; and from the fact that Suffolk afterward visited Charles in France while he was negotiating the marriage of Henry VI., as well as the terms of that nobleman's impeachment, we may believe there was some not un- kindly intercourse between the prisoner and his jailer : a fact of considerable interest when we remember that Suffolk's wife was the granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer.^ Apart from this, and a mere catalogue of dates and places, only one thing seems evident in the story of Charles's captivity. It seems evident that, as these five- and- twenty years drew on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against tne growth of such a feeling. One after an- other of his fellow- prisoners was ransomed and went home. -More than once he was himself permitted to visit France ; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land. Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair ; but if a man is persecuted by a series of brief and irritat- ing hopes, his mind no more attains to a settled frame of resolution, than his eye would grow familiar with a night of thunder and lightning. Years after, when he ^ M. Champollion-Figeac gives many in his editions of Charles's works, most 'as ) should think) of very doubtful authenticity, or worse. 2 Rymer, x. 564. D'Hericault's Memoir., p. xli. Gairdner's Paston Let- ters., i. 27, 99. 250 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. was speaking at the trial oi that Duke of Alen9on, who began hfe so hopefully as the boyish favorite of Joan of Arc, he sought to prove that captivity M^as a harder punishment than death. ' ' For I have had experience myself," he said ; " and in my prison of England, for the weariness, danger, and displeasure in which I then lay, I have many a time wished I had been slain at the battle where they took me." ^ This is a flour- ish, if you will, but it is something more. His spirit would sometimes rise up in a fine anger against the petty desires and contrarieties of life. He would compare his own condition with the quiet and dignified estate of the dead ; and aspire to lie among his comrades on the field of Agincourt, as the Psalmist prayed to have the wings of a dove and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea. But such high thoughts came to Charles only in a flash. John the Fearless had been murdered in his turn on the bridge of Montereau so far back as 14 19. His son, Philip the Good — partly to extinguish the feud, partly that he might do a popular action, and partly, in view of his ambitious schemes, to detach another great vassal from the throne of France— had taken up the cause of Charles of Orleans, and negotiated dili- gently for his release. In 1433 a r>urgundian embassy was admitted to an interview with the captive duke, in the presence of Suliolk, Charles shook hands most affectionately with the ambassadors. They asked after his health. " I am well enough i a body," he replied, ' ChampoUion-Figeac, 377. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 251 " but far from well in mind. I am dying of grief at having to pass the best days of my life in prison, with none to sympathize. " The talk falling on the chances of peace, Charles referred to Suffolk if he were not sincere and constant in his endeavors to bring it about. "If peace depended on me," he said, "I should procure it gladly, were it to cost me my life seven days after." We may take this as showing what a large price he set, not so much on peace, as on seven days of freedom. Seven days ! —he would make them seven years in the employment. Finally, he assured the ambassadors of his good will to Philip of Burgundy ; squeezed one of them by the hand and nipped him twice in the arm to signify things unspeak- able before Suffolk ; and two days after sent them Suffolk's barber, one Jean Garnet, a native of Lille, to testify more freely of his sentiments. " As I speak French," said this emissary, " the Duke of Orleans is more familiar with me than with any other of the household ; and I can bear witness he never said any- thing against Duke Philip." ' It will be remembered that this person, with whom he was so anxious to stand well, was no other than his hereditary enemy, the son of his father's murderer. But the honest fel- low bore no malice, indeed not he. lie began ex- changing ballades with Philip, whom he apostrophizes as his companion, his cousin, and his brother. He assures him that, soul and body, he is altogether Bur- gundian ; and protests that he has given his heart in 1 Dom Plancher, iv. 178-9. 252 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. pledge to him. Regarded as the history of a vendetta, it must be owned that Charles's life has points of some originality. And yet there is an engaging frankness about these ballades which disarms criticism.^ You see Charles throwing himself headforemost into the trap ; you hear Burgundy, in his answers, begin to inspire him with his own prejudices, and draw melan- choly pictures of the misgovernment of France. But Charles's own spirits are so high and so amiable, and he is so thoroughly convinced his cousin is a fine fel- low, that one's scruples are carried away in the torrent of his happiness and gratitude. And his would be a sordid spirit who would not clap hands at the consum- mation (Nov. 1440) ; when Charles, after having sworn on the Sacrament that he would never again bear arms against England, and pledged himself body and soul to the unpatriotic faction in his own country, set out from London with a light heart and a damaged integrity. In the magnificent copy of Charles's poems, given by our Henry VII. to Elizabeth of York on the occa- sion of their marriage, a large illumination figures at the head of one of the pages, which, in chronological perspective, is almost a history of his imprisonment. It gives a view of London with all its spires, the river passing through the old bridge and busy with boats. One side of the White Tower has been taken out, and we can see, as under a sort of shrine, the paved room where the duke sits writing. He occupies a high- backed bench in front of a great chimney ; red and 1 Works, i. 157-63. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 253 black ink are before him ; and the upper end of the apartment is guarded by many halberdiers, with the red cross of England on their breast. On the next side of the tower he appears again, leaning out of win- dow and gazing on the river ; doubtless there blows just then " a pleasant wind from out the land of France," and some ship comes up the river: "the ship of good news." At the door we find him yet again ; this time embracing a messenger, while a groom stands by holding two saddled horses. And yet further to the left, a cavalcade defiles out of the tower ; the duke is on his way at last toward ' ' the sunshine of France." III. During the five and -twenty years of his captivity, Charles had not lost in the esteem of his fellow-coun- trymen. For so young a man, the head of so great a house, and so numerous a party, to be taken prisoner as he rode in the vanguard of France, and stereotyped for all men in this heroic attitude, was to taste untime- ously the honors of the grave. Of him, as of the dead, it would be ungenerous to speak evil ; what litde energy he had displayed would be remembered with piety, when all that he had done amiss was cour- teously forgotten. As English folk looked for Arthur ; as Danes awaited the coming of Ogier ; as Somerset- shire peasants or sergeants of the Old Guard expected the return of Monmouth or Napoleon ; the country- men of Charles of Orleans looked over the straits 254 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. toward his English prison with desire and confidence. Events had so fallen out while he was rhyming bal- lades, that he had become the type of all that was most truly patriotic. The remnants of his old party had been the chief defenders of the unity of France. His enemies of Burgundy had been notoriously fa- vorers and furtherers of English domination. People forgot that his brother still lay by the heels for an un- patriotic treaty with England, because Charles himself had been taken prisoner patriotically fighting against it. That Henry V. had left special orders against his liberation, served to increase the wistful pity with which he was regarded. And when, in defiance of all contemporary virtue, and against express pledges, the En^rlish carried war into their prisoner's fief, not only France, but all thinking men in Christendom, were roused to indignation against the oppressors, and sympathy with the victim. It was little wonder if he came to bulk somewhat largely in the imagina- tion of the best of those at home. Charles le Bout- teillier, when (as the story goes) he slew Clarence at Beauge, was only seeking an exchange for Charles of Orleans. ^ It was one of Joan of Arc's declared in- tentions to deliver the captive duke. If there was no other way, she meant to cross the seas and bring him home by force. And she professed before her judges a sure knowledge that Charles of Orleans was beloved QfGod.^ Alas ! it was not at all as a deliverer that Charles 1 Vallet's Charles VII. , i. 251. ^ Proces de Jeanne d'' Arc, i. 133-55. VHARLES OF ORLEANS. 255 returned to France. He was nearly fifty years old. Many changes had been accomplished since, at twenty- three, he was taken on the field of Agincourt. But of all these he was profoundly ignorant, or had only heard of them in the discolored reports of Philip of Burgundy. He had the ideas of a former generation, and sought to correct them by the scandal of a fac- tious part3^ With such qualifications he came back eager for the domination, the pleasures, and the dis- play that befitted his princely birth. A long disuse of all political activity combined with the flatteries of his new^ friends to fill him. with an overweening con- ceit of his own capacity and influence. If aught had gone wrong in his absence, it seemed quite natural men should look to him for its redress. Was not Kino^ Arthur come again ? The Duke of Burgundy received him with politic honors. He took his guest by his foible for pageant- ry, all the easier as it "was a foible of his own ; and Charles walked right out of prison into much the same atmosphere of trumpeting and bell-ringing as he had left behind when he went in. Fifteen days after his deliverance he was married to Mary of Cleves, at St. Omer. The marriage was celebrated with the usual pomp of the Burgundian court ; there were joustings, and illuminations, and animals that spouted wine ; and many nobles dined together, comme en brigade, and were served abundantly w^ith many rich and curious dishes. ^ It must have rem.inded Charles 3 Mni5>lre!e{. 256 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. not a little of his first marriage at Compiegne ; only then he was two years the junior of his bride, and this time he was five-and-thirty years her senior. It will be a fine question which marriage promises more : for a boy of fifteen to lead off with a lass of seventeen, or a man of fifty to make a match of it with a child of fifteen. But there was something bitter in both. The lamentations of Isabella will not have been for- gotten. As for Mary, she took up with one Jaquet de la Lain, a sort of muscular Methody of the period, with a huge appetite for tournaments, and a habit of confessing himself the last thing before he went to bed. ^ With such a hero, the young duchess's amours were most likely innocent ; and in all other ways she was a suitable partner for the duke, and well fitted to enter into his pleasures. When the festivities at St. Omer had come to an end, Charles and his wife set forth by Ghent and Tournay. The towns gave him offerings of money as he passed through, to help in the payment of his ransom. From all sides, ladies and gentlemen thronged to offer him their services ; some gave him their sons for pages, some archers for a bodyguard ; and by the time he reached Tournay, he had a follow- ing of 300 horse. Everywhere he was received as though he had been the King of France.'^ If he did not come to imagine himself something of the sort, 1 Vallet's Charles VII. ^ iii. chap. i. But see the chronicle that bears Jaquet's name : a lean and dreary book. ' Monstrelet. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 257 he certainly forgot the existence of any one with a better claim to the title. He conducted himself on the hypothesis that Charles VII. was another Charles VI. He signed with enthusiasm that treaty of Arras, which left France almost at the discretion of Bur- gundy. On Decem.ber 18 he was still no farther than Bruges, where he entered into a private treaty with Philip ; and it was not until January 14, ten weeks after he disembarked in France, and attended by a ruck of Burgundian gentlemen, that he arrived in Paris and offered to present himself before Charles VII. The king sent word that he might come, if he would, with a small retinue, but not with his present follow- ing ; and the duke, who was mightily on his high horse after all the ovations he had received, took the king's attitude amiss, and turned aside into Touraine, to receive more welcome and more presents, and be convoyed by torchlight into faithful cities. And so you see, here was King Arthur home again, and matters nowise mended in consequence. The best we can say is, that this last stage of Charles's public life was of no long duration. His confidence was soon knocked out of him in the contact with others. He began 10 find he was an earthen vessel among many vessels of brass ; he began to be shrewdly aware that he was no King Arthur. In 1442, at Limoges, he made himself the spokesman of the mal- content nobility. The king showed himself humiliat- ingly indifferent to his counsels, and humiliatingly generous toward his necessities. And there, with 258 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. some blushes, he may be said to have taken farewell of the political stage. A feeble attempt on the county of Asti is scarce worth the name of exception. Thence- forward let Ambition wile whom she may into the turmoil of events, our duke will walk cannily in his well-ordered garden, or sit by the fire to touch the slender reed. ^ IV. If it were given each of us to transplant his life wherever he pleased in time or space, with all the ages and all the countries of the world to choose from, there would be quite an instructive diversity of taste. A certain sedentary majority would prefer to remain where they were. Many would choose the Renais- sance ; many some stately and simple period of Gre- cian life ; and still more elect to pass a few years wan- dering among the villages of Palestine with an mspired conductor. For some of our quaintly vicious con- temporaries, we have the decline of the Roman Em- pire and the reign of Henry III. of France. But there are others not quite so vicious, who yet cannot look upon the world with perfect gravit}', who have never taken the categorical imperative to wife, and have more taste for what is comfortable than for what is magnanimous and high ; and I can imagine some of these casting their lot in the Court of Blois during the last twenty years of the life of Charles of Orleans. 1 D'Hericault's Mtr.tnir. xl. xli. Vallet, Charles VI., ii. 4.-^s. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 259 The duke and duchess, their staff of officers and ladies, and the high-born and learned persons who were attracted to Blois on a visit, formed a society for kiUing time and perfecting each other in various ele- gant accomplishments, such as we might imagine for an ideal watering place in the Delectable Mountains- The company hunted and went on pleasure-parties ; they played chess, tables, and many other games. What we now call the history of the peiiod passed, I imagine, over the heads of these good people much as It passes over our own. News reached them, in- deed, of great and joyful import. William Peel re- ceived eight livres and five sous from the duchess, when he brought the first tidings that Rouen was re- captured from the English. ^ A little later and the duke sang, in a truly patriotic vein, the deliverance of Guyenne and Normandy.'^ They were liberal of rhymes and largesse, and welcomed the prosperity of their country much as they welcomed the coming of spring, and with no more thought of collaborating toward the event. Religion was not forgotten in the Court of Blois. Pilgrimages were agreeable and pic- turesque excursions. In those days a well-served chapel was something like a good vinery in our own, an opportunity for display and the source of mild en- j oy ments. There was probably something of his rooted delight in pageantry, as well as a good deal of gentle piety, in the feelings with which Charles give dinner every Friday to thirteen poor people, served them 1 ChampolHon-Figeac, 368. ^ Works, i. 115. 2Go CHARLES OF ORLEANS. himself, and washed their feet with his own hands. ^ Solemn affairs would interest Charles and his courtiers from their trivial side. The duke perhaps cared less for the deliverance of Guyenne and Normandy than for his own verses on the occasion ; just as Dr. Rus- sell's correspondence in The Times was among the most material parts of the Crimean War for that tal- ented correspondent. And I think it scarcely cynical to suppose that religion as well as patriotism was principally cultivated as a means of filling up the day. It was not only messengers fiery red with haste and charged with the destiny of nations, who were made welcome at the gates of Blois. If any man of accom- plishment came that way, he was sure of an audience, and something for his pocket. The courtiers would have received Ben Jonson like Drummond of Haw- thornden, and a good pugilist like Captain Barclay. They were catholic, as none but the entirely idle can be catholic. It might be Pierre, called Dieu d'amours, the juggler ; or it might be three high English min- strels ; or the two men, players of ghitterns, from the kingdom of Scotland, who sang the destruction of the Turks ; or again Jehan Rognelet, player of instru- ments of music, who played and danced with his wife and two children ; they would each be called into the castle to give a taste of his proficiency before my lord the duke.^ Sometimes the performance was of a more personal interest, and produced much the same sensa- * D'Hericault's Memoir., xlv. 2 ChampoUion-Figeac, 381, 361, 381. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 2.^1 tions as are felt on an English green on the arrival of a professional cricketer, or round an English billiard table during a match between Roberts and Cooke. This was when Jehan Negre, the Lombard, came to Blois and played chess against all these chess-players, and won much money from my lord and his intimates ; or when Baudet Harenc of Chalons made ballades be- fore all these ballade-makers/ It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers of ballades and rondels. To write verses for May day, seems to have been as much a matter of course, as to ride out with the cavalcade that went to gather hawthorn. The choice of Valentines was a standing challenge, and the courtiers pelted each other with humorous and sentimental verses as in a literary carnival. If an indecorous adventure befell our friend Maistre Estienne le Gout, my lord the duke would turn it into the funniest of rondels, all the rhymes be- ing the names of the cases of nouns or the moods of verbs ; and Maistre Estienne would make reply in similar fashion, seeking to prune the story of its more humiliating episodes. If Fredet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to upbraid him ; and it was in a rondel that Fredet would excuse himself. Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic jargon. Some of the poetasters were heavy enough ; others v/ere not wanting in ad- dress ; and the duchess herself was among those who 1 Champollion-Figeac, 359, 361. 202 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. most excelled. On one occasion eleven competitors made a ballade on the idea, "I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge" (Je meurs de soif empres de la fontaine). These eleven ballades still exist ; and one of them arrests the attention rather irom the name of the author than from any special merit in itself. It purports to be the work of Frangois Villon ; and so far as a foreigner can judge (which is indeed a small way), it may very well be his. Nay, and if any one thing is more probable than another, in the great iahula rasa, or unknown land, which we are fain to call the biog- raphy of Villon, it seems probable enough that he may have gone upon a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons, found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell nowadays the degree of Baudet' s excellence in his art ?), favor would not be wanting for the great- est ballade-maker of all time. Great as would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter from Villon's dungeon at Meun ; yet each in his own degree had been tried in prison. Each in his own way also, loved the good things of this life and the service of the Muses. But the same gulf that separated Burns from his Edinburgh patrons CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 263 would separate the singer of Bohemia from the rhym- ing duke. And it is hard to imagine that Villon's training among thieves, loose women, and vagabond students, had fitted him to move in a society of any dignity and courtliness. Ballades are very admirable things ; and a poet is doubtless a most interesting visitor. But among the courtiers of Charles, there would be considerable regard for the proprieties of eti- quette : and even a duke will sometimes have an eye to his teaspoons. Moreover, as a poet, I can conceive he may have disappointed expectadon. It need sur- prise nobody if Villon's ballade on the theme, "I die of thirst beside the fountain's edge," was but a poor performance. He would make better verses on the lee-side of a flagon at the sign of the Pomme du Pin, than in a cushioned settle in the halls of Blois. Charles liked change of place. He was often, not so much travelling as making a progress ; now to join the king for some great tournament : now to visit King Rene, at Tarascon, where he had a study of his own and saw all manner of interesting things — oriental curios, King Rene painting birds, and, what parUcu- larly pleased him, Triboulet, the dwarf jester, whose skull-cap was no bigger than an orange.^ Sometimes the journeys were set about on horseback in a large party, with the fourriers sent forward to prepare a lodging at the next stage. We find almost Gargantuan 1 Lecoy de la Marche, Roi Rene, ii. 155, 177. 264 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. details of the provision made by these oflEicers against the duke's arrival, of eg^s and butter and bread, cheese and peas and chickens, pike and bream and barbel, and wine both white and red. ' Sometimes he went by water in a barge, playing chess or tables with a friend in the pavilion, or watching other vessels as they went before the wind. ^ Children ran along the bank, as they do to this day on the Crinan Canal ; and when Charles threw in money, they would dive and bring it up.^ As he looked on at their exploits, I wonder whether that room of gold and silk and worsted came back into his memory, with the device of little children in a river, and the sky full of birds .? He was a bit of a book-fancier, and had vied with his brother Angouleme in bringing back the library of their grandfather Charles V., when Bedford put it up for sale in London." The duchess had a library of her own ; and we hear of her borrowing romances from ladies in attendance on the blue stocking Marga- ret of Scotland.^ Not only were books collected, but new books were written at the Court of Blois. The widow of one Jean Fougere, a bookbinder, seems to have done a number of odd commissions for the bibliophilous count. She it was who received three 1 Champollion-Figeac, chaps, v. and vi. 2 Ibid. 364 ; Works, i. 172. 3 Champollion-Figeac, 364 : " Jeter de I'argent aux petis enfans qui estoient au long de Bourbon, pour les faire nonner en I'eau et aller querre I'argent au fond." * Champollion-Figeac, 387. * Nouvelle Biographie Diaot, art. " Marie de Cleves." Vallet, Charles VI I. y iii. 8s, note i. CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 265 vellum-skins to bind the duchess's Book of Hours, and who was employed to prepare parchment for the use of the duke's scribes. And she it was who bound in vermilion leather the great manuscript of Charles's own poems, which was presented to hiai by his secre- tary, Anthony Astesan, with the text in one column, and Astesan' s Latin version in the other.' Such tastes, with the coming of years, would doubt- less take the place of many others. We find in Charles's verse much semi- ironical regret for other days, and resignation to growing infirmities. He who had been " nourished in the schools of love," now sees nothing either to please or displease him. Old age has imprisoned him withindoors, where he means to take his ease, and let younger fellows bestir them- selves in life. He had w^ritten (in earlier days, we may presume) a bright and defiant little poem in praise of solitude. If they would but leave him alone with his own thoughts and happy recollections, he declared it was beyond the power of melancholy to affect him. But now, w^hen his animal strength has so much de- clined that he sings the discomforts of winter mstead of the inspirations of spring, and he has no longer any appetite for life, he confesses he is wretched when alone, and, to keep his mind from grievous thoughts, he must have many people around him, laughing, talking, and singing." While Charles was thus falling into years, the order of things, of which he was the outcome and ornament, 1 Champollion-Figeac, 383, 384-386. 2 Works, ii. 57, 258, 2 66 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. was growing old along with him. The semi-royalty of the princes of the blood was already a thing of the past ; and when Charles VII. was gathered to his fathers, a new king reigned in France, who seemed every way the opposite of royal. Louis XI. had aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were in- conceivable to his contemporaries. But his contem- poraries were able enough to appreciate his sordid ex- terior, and his cruel and treacherous spirit. To the whole nobility of France he was a fatal and unreason- able phenomenon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend Rene's in Provence, would soon be made impossible ; interference was the order of the day ; hunting was already abolished ; and who should say what was to go next ? Louis, in fact, must have appeared to Charles primarily in the light of a kill-joy. I take it, when missionaries land in South Sea Islands and lay strange embargo on the simplest things in life, the islanders will not be much more puzzled and irri- tated than Charles of Orleans at the policy of the Elev- enth Louis. There was one thing, I seem to appre- hend, that had always particularly moved him ; and that was, any proposal to punish a person of his acquaint- ance. No matter what treason he may have made or meddled with, an Alengon or an Armagnac was sure to find Charles reappear from private life, and do his best to get him pardoned. He knew them quite well. He had made rondels with them. They were charming people in every way. There must certainly be some mistake. Had not he himself made anti-national CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 267 treaties almost before he was out of his nonage ? And for the matter of that, had not every one else done the like ? Such are some of the thoughts by which he might explain to himself his aversion to such extremi- ties ; but it was on a deeper basis that the feeling probably reposed. A man of his temper could not fail to be impressed at the thought of disastrous revo- lutions in the fortunes of those he knew. He would feel painfully the tragic contrast, when those who had everything to make life valuable were deprived of life itself. And it was shocking to the clemency of his spirit, that sinners should be hurried before their Judge without a fitting interval for penitence and satisfaction. It was this feeling which brought him at last, a poor, purblind blue-bottle of the later autumn, into collision with ** the universal spider," Louis XI. He took up the defence of the Duke of Brittany at Tours. But Louis was then in no humor to hear Charles's texts and Latin sentiments ; "he had his back to the wall, the future of France was at stake ; and if all the old men in the world had crossed his path, they would have had the rough side of his tongue like Charles of Orleans. I have found nowhere what he said, but it seems it was monstrously to the point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke never recovered the indig- nity. He got home as far as Amboise, sickened, and died two days after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy- fourth year of his age. And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious rondels to the end of time. 268 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. The futility of Charles's public life was of a piece /throughout. He never succeeded in any single pur- pose he set before him ; for his deliverance from Eng- land, after twenty five years of failure and at the cost of dignity and consistency, it would be ridiculously hyperbolical to treat as a success. During the first part of his life he was the stalking horse of Bernard d'Armagnac ; during the second, he was the passive instrument of English diplomatists ; and before he was well entered on the third, he hastened to become the dupe and catspaw of Burgundian treason. On each of these occasions, a strong and not dishonorable personal motive determined his behavior. In 1407 and the following years, he had his father's murder uppermost in his mind. During his English captivity, that thought was displaced by a more immediate desire for his own liberation. In 1440 a sentiment of grati- tude to Philip of Burgundy blinded him to all else, and led him to break with the tradition of his party and his own former life. He was born a great vassal, and he conducted himself like a private gentleman. He be- gan life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism ; but it was resolv able into two parts : a preference for life among his fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honor. In England, he could comfort himself by the reflection CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 269 that " he had been taken while loyally doing his de- voir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the previous years, when he had prepared the disaster of Agincourt by wasteful leud. This unconsciousness of the larger interests is perhaps most happily exarapled out of his own mouth. When Alengon stood accused of betraying Normandy into the hands of the English, Charles made a speech in his defence, from which I have already quoted more than once. Alengon, he said, had professed a great love and trust toward him ; '* yet did he give no great proof thereof, when he sought to betray Normandy ; whereby he would have made me lose an estate of 10,000 livres a year, and might have occasioned the destruction of the kingdom and of all us Frenchmen." These are the words of one, mark you, against whom Gloucester warned the English Council because of his " great sublility and cautelous disposition." It is not hard to excuse the impatience of Louis XL, if such stuff was foisted on him by way of political deliberation. This incapacity to see things with any greatness, this obscure and narrow view, was fundamentally character- istic of the man as well as of the epoch. It is not even so striking in his public life, where he failed, as in his poems, where he notably succeeded. For wherever we might expect a poet to be unintelligent, it certainly would not be in his poetry. And Charles is unintelli- gent even there. Of all authors whom a modern may "^till read and read over again with pleasure, he has perhaps the least to say. His poems seem to bear 270 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. testimony rather to the fashion of rhyming, which dis- tinguished the age, than to any special vocation in the man himself. Some of them are drawing-room exer- cises, and the rest seem made by habit. Great writers are struck with something in nature or society, with which they become pregnant and longing ; they are possessed with an idea, and cannot be at peace until they have put it outside of them in some distinct em- bodiment. But with Charles literature was an object rather than a mean ; he was one who loved bandying words for its own sake ; the rigidity of intricate metri- cal forms stood him in lieu of precise thought ; instead of communicating truth, he observed the laws of a game ; and when he had no one to challenge at chess or rackets, he made verses in a wager against himself. From the very idleness of the man's mind, and not from intensity of feeling, it happens that all his poems are more or less autobiographical. But the}^ form an autobiography singularly bald and uneventful. Little is therein recorded beside .sentiments. Thoughts, in any true sense, he had none to record. And if we can gather that he had been a prisoner in England, that he had lived in the Orleannese, and that he hunted and went in parties of pleasure, I believe it is about as much definite experience as is to be found in all these five hundred pages of autobiographical verse. Doubdess, we find here and there a complaint on the progress of the infirmities of age. Doubtless, he feels the great change of the year, and distinguishes winter from spring ; winter as the time of snow and the fire- CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 271 side ; spring as the return of grass and flowers, the time of St. Valentine's day and a beating heart. And he feels love after a fashion. Again and again, we learn that Charles of Orleans is in love, and hear him ring the changes through the whole gamut of dainty and tender sentiment. But there is never a spark of passion ; and heaven alone knows whether there was any real woman in the matter, or the whole thing was an exercise in fancy. If these poems were indeed in- spired by some living mistress, one would think he had never seen, never heard, and never touched her. There is nothing in anyone of these so numerous love- songs to indicate who or what the lady was. Was she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple } Was it always one woman } or are there a dozen here immortalized in cold indistinction } The old English translator mentions gray eyes in his ver- sion of one of the amorous rondels ; so far as I re- member, he was driven by some emergency of the verse ; but in the absence of all sharp lines of charac- ter and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now preoccupies and excites a poet, .s best given by a positive example. If, besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch ot/ourriers, while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. 272 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. This seems to be his favorite image ; it reappears like Jhe upas-tree in the early work ol Coleridge : we may' Judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the world, if one of the sights which most impiessed himi was that of a man going to order dinner. Although they are not inspired by any deeper mo- tive than the common run of contemporaneous draw- ing-room verses, thc^se of Charles of Orleans are ex- ecuted with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch„ They deal with floating and colorless sentiments, and the wriler is never greatly moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin con- ceptions with a m_ultiplicity of phrases. Bis ballades are generally thin and scanty of iniport ; for the bal- lade presented too large a canvas, and he was preoccu- pied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he has put himself before all competitors by a happy- knack and a prevailing distinction of m-anner. He is very much more of a dake in his verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman ;: and how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all pretension, turgidity^ or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace. Theodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a fa- mous generation now nearly extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in his happiest vein, a lew experiments in imitation of Charles oi Orleans. I would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old duke, nr^t oalv he.cav.se CHARLES OF ORLEANS. 273 they are delightful in themselves, but because they serve as a contrast to throw into relief the peculiarities of their model. When De Banville revives a forgotten form of verse— and he has already had the honor of reviving the ballade — he does it in the spirit of a workman choosing a good tool wherever he can find one, and not at all in that of the dilettante, who seeks to renew bygone forms of thought and make historic forgeries. With the ballade this seemed natural enough ; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than De Banville himself. But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles of Orleans, and the difference betsveen two ages and two literatures is illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines. Something, certainly, has been retained of the old naovement ; the refrain falls in time like a well- played bass ; and the very brevity of the thing, by hampering and restraining the greater fecundity of the modern mind, assists the imitation. ButDe Banville' s poems are full of form and color ; they smack racily of modern life, and own small kindred with the verse of other days, when it seems as if men walked by twi light, seeing little, and that with distracted eyes, and instead of blood, some thin and spectral fluid circu- lated in their veins. They might gird themselves for battle, make love, eat and drink, and acquit them- selves manfully in all the external parts of life ; but of the life that is within, and those processes by which we render ourselves an intelligent account of what we 2 74 CHARLES OF ORLEANS. feel and do, and so represent experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being ; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and ab- straction. Feeling seems to have been strangely dis- proportioned to the occasion, and words were laugh- ably trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment for them all : that ' ' it was great pity. ' ' Perhaps, after too much of our florid literature, we find an adventitious charm in what is so different ; and while the big drums are beaten every day by perspiring editors over the loss of a cock-boat or the rejection of a clause, and nothing is heard that is not proclaimed with sound of trumpet, it is not wonderful if we retire with pleasure into old books, and listen to authors who speak small and clear, as if in a private conversation. Truly this is so with Charles of Orleans. We are pleased to find a small man without the buskin, and obvious senti- ments stated without affectation. If the sentiments are obvious, there is all the more chance we may have experienced the like. As we turn over the leaves, we may find ourselves in sympathy with some one or other of these staid joys and smiling sorrows. If we do we shall be strangely pleased, for there is a genu- ine pathos in these simple words, and the lines go with a lilt, and sino: themselves to music of their own. SAMUEL PEPYS. In two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the character and position of Samuel Pepys. Mr. Mynors Bright has given us a new transcription of the Diarv, increasing it in bulk by near a third, cor- recting many errors, and completing our knowledge of the man in some curious and important points. We can only regret that he has taken liberties with the author and the public. It is no part of the duties of the editor of an established classic to decide what may or may not be "tedious to the reader." The book is either an historical document or not. and in condemning Lord Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself. As for the time-honored phrase, " unfit for publication," without being cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution more or less commercial ; and we miy think, without being sordid, that when we purchase six huge and distressingly expensive vol- umes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children. But Mr. Bright may rest assured : while we comphin, we are still grateful. Mr. Wneatley, to divide our obligation, brings together, clearly and with no lost words, a body of iUustrative material. Sometimes we might ask a little more ; never, I think, less. And as a matter of 276 SAMUEL PEP VS. fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's volume might be transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to the margin of the text, for it is precisely what the reader wants. In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to read our author. Between them they contain all we can expect to learn for, it may be, many years. Now, if ever, we should be able to form some notion of that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind — • unparalleled for three good reasons : first, because he was a man known to his contemporaries in a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants with an indecent familiarity, like a tap-room com- rade ; second, because he has outstripped all com- petitors in the art or virtue of a conscious honesty about oneself ; and, third, because, being in many ways a very ordinary person, he has yet placed him- self before the public eye with such a fulness and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius like Montaigne. Not then for his own sake only, but as a character in a unique position, endowed with a unique talent, and shedding a unique light upon the lives of the mass of mankind, he is surely worthy of prolonged and patient study. The Diary. Thctt there should be such a book as Pepys 's Diary iS incomparably strange. Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public employments, toiling hard and keeping his honor bright. Much of the little good that is set down to James the Second SAMUEL PEPYS, 277 comes by right to Pepys ; and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate. To his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness ol England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead ^Ir. Pepys of the Navy Office had some considerable share. He stood well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by some of the best and wisest m.en in England. He was President of the Royal Society ; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in that solemn hour — thinking it need- less to say more — that it was answerable to the great- ness of his life. Thus he walked in dignity, guards of soldiers sometimes attending him in his walks, subal- terns bowing before his periwig ; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable to his state and ser- vices. On February 8, 1668, we find him writing to Evelyn, his mind bitterly occupied with the late Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story of the repulse of the Great Armada : " Sir, you will not wonder at the backwardness of my thanks for the pres- ent you made me, so many days since, of the Prospect of the Medway, while the Hollander rode master in it, when 1 have told you that the sight of it hath led me to such reflections on my particular interest, by my employment, in the reproach due to that miscar- riage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied to have who found his face in INIichael Angelo's hell The same should serve me also in excuse for ray silence in celebrating your mastery shown in the de* 278 SAMUEL PEPYS. sign and draught, did not indignation rather than courtship urge me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture of our House of Lords changed from the story of '88 to that of '67 (of Evelyn's de- signing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the temper of that age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings more operative than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments." This is a letter honorable to the writer, where the meaning rather than the words is eloquent. Such was the account he gave of himself to his contemporaries ; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language : giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public ser- vant. We turn to the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to his descendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter, blaming the " madness of the House of Commons" and '* the base proceedings, just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House of Lords ;" and then, without the least transition, this is how our diarist proceeds : " To the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there bought an idle, rogueish French book, Vescholle des Filles, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found. " Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable ; but what about the man, I do not SAMUEL PEP VS. 279 say wht) bought a roguish book, but who was ashamed of doing so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the shame in the pages of his daily journal ? We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves vvhen we address our fellows ; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side ; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation. Pepys's letter to Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to Mrs. Knipp which he signed by the pseudonym of Dapper Dicky j yet each would be suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with his company and surroundings ; and these changes are the better part of his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to march through life like a drum- major, is to be highly disagreeable to others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp we understand the double facing ; but to whom was he posing in the Diary, and what, in the name of astonishment, was the nature of the pose ? Had he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorifi- cation, in either case w^e should have made him out. But no ; he is full of precautions to conceal the " dis- grace" of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary. 28o SAMUEL PEPYS. Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just com- plaints against her husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys the tell-tale document ; and then— you disbelieve your eyes — down goes the whole story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private book to prove he was not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist ; but at a moment's thought the re- semblance disappears. The design of Pepvs is nol at all to edify ;. it is not from repentance that he chroni- cles his peccadilloes, for he tells us when he does re- pent, and, to be just to him, there often follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very formal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you come upon good, substantive misdemeanors ; beams in his eye of which he alone remains unconscious ; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, and laughable subterfuges to him-' self that always command belief and often engage the sympathies. Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world, sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of twelve. In our tender years SAMUEL PEP VS. 281 we Still preserve a freshness of surprise at our pro- longed existence ; events make an impression out of all proportion to their consequence ; we are unspeak- ably touched by our own past adventures, and look forward to our future personality with sentimental in- terest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys. Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental about himself. His own past clung about his heart, an evergreen. He was the slave of an association. He could not pass by Isling- ton, where his father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the " King's Head " and eat and drink " for remembrance of the old house sake." He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old walks, " where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had the first senti- ments of love and pleasure in a woman's company, discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes about weighing up the Assurajice, which lay near Woolwich under water, and cries in a parenthesis, " Poor ship, that I have been tv/ice merry in, in Captain Holland's time ;" and after revisiting the Naseby, now changed into the Charles, he confesses " it was a great pleasure to myself to see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that he was cut for he preserved in a case ; and to the Turners he kept alive such gratitude for their as- sistance that for years, and after he had begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that family to dinner on the anniversary of the opera- 282 SAMUEL PEPYS. tion. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times they might express it more romantically ; and if Pepys shared with them this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the Confessions, or Hazlitt, who wrote the Liber Amoris, and loaded his essays with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his un- wearied egotism ? For the two things go hand in hand ; or, to be more exact, it is the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing. But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf of more than one book, the date and the place where 1 then was — if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden ; these were jottings for my future self ; if I should chance on such a note in after years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recog- nize myself across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come upon them now, and not be moved one tittle — which shows that I have comparatively failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism ; as when he explams that his candle is going out, " which makes me write thus slobber- ingly ;" or as in this incredible particularity, "To my study, where I only wrote thus much of this day's passages to this *, and so out again ;" or lastly, as here, with more of circumstance ; *' I staid up till the bellman came by with his bell under mv window, ^75" SAMUEL PEPYS. 283 / was wriling of this very line, and cried, * Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning. ' ' ' Such passages are not to be misunderstood. The ap- peal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable. He desires that dear, though unknown, gentleman keenly to realize his predecessor ; to remember why a passage was uncleanly written ; to recall (let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the early, windy morning, and the very line his own ro- mantic self was scribing at the moment. The man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences — a sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in dis- tress, and turns some others into sentimental liber- tines : and the whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys's own address. Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable at- titude preserved by him throughout his Diary, to that unflinching — I had almost said, that unintelligent — sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He was not unconscious of his errors — far from it ; he was often startled into shame, often re- formed, often made and broke his vows of change. But whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self ; still that entrancing ego of whom alone he cared to write ; and still sure of his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and the writer come to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said, or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of his 284 SAMUEL PEPYS. career ; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or than Alexander, so all should be faith- fully set down. I have called his Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found something, word or deed, exactly proper to a favorite character in play or novel, he will neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act mean." The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his adored protagonist : adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part of the Diary ; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, and so petty, that I am ashamed to name them. ( It may be said that we all of us write such a diary in airy characters upon our brain ; but I fear there is a dis- tinction to be made ; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an account of our daily fortunes and behavior, we too often weave a tissue of romantic com- pliments and dull excuses ; and even if Pepys were the ass and coward that men call him, Ave must take rank as sillier and more cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw clearly and set down unsparingly. It is improbable that the Diary can have been car- ried on in the same single spirit in which it was be- SAMUEL PEPYS. 285 gun. Pepys was not such an ass, but he must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might ulti- mately decipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day ; and the thought, although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives, the gun-cotton and the giant pow- der, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let some con- temporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged forever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth, he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieutenant in the navy ; but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts I think we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought of a far- distant publicity. The first is of capital importance : the Diary was not destroyed. The second — that he took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in '' rogueish" passages— proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the " great- ness of his behavior" at the approach of death, he 286 SAMUEL PEP VS. may have had a twinkling hope of immortality. Mens cujusque is est qiiisque, said his chosen motto ; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable of the de- sire of man for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to com- municate its smallness also ; and, while contempo- raries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his periwig was once alive with nits. But this thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor his deepest ; it did not color one word that he wrote ; and the Diary, for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret ; it added a zest to all his pleasures ; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn words, when he closed that confidant forever : " And so I betake myself to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the grave ; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me." A Liberal Genius. Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic, composing " a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own to be) to all studies and pleasures. " The song was unsuccessful, but the Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was SAMUEL PEPYS. 287 seeking ; and his portrait by Hales, so admirably re- produced in Mynors Bright' s edition, is a confirma- tion of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his business ; and though he put his sitter (.0 a deal of trouble, almost breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows, " and draping him in an Ind- ian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was pre- occupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the Diary by the picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the number of those who can " surprise the manners in the face." Here we have a mouth pouting, moist with desires ; eyes greedy, protuberant, and yet apt for weeping too ; a nose great alike in character and dimensions ; and altogether a most fleshly, melting countenance. The face is attractive by its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word greedy, but the reader must not sup- pose that he can change it for that closely kindred one of hungry, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face of an artist ; it is the face of a viveur — kindly, pleased and pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shift- ing versatility of his desires. For a sirfgle desire is more rightly to be called a lust ; but there is health in a variety, where one may balance and control an- other. The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida. Wherever he went, his steps were 288 SAMUEL PEPYS. winged with the most eager expectation ; whatever tie did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets of knowledge, filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life ; he was never happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in Holland, he was " with child " to see any strange thing. Meeting some friends and singing with them in a palace near the Hague, his pen fails him to express his passion of delight, " the more so because in a heaven of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced " with a broad wound,"' he says, " that makes my hand now shake to write of it." He learned to dance, and was ** like to make a dancer." He learned to sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields " humming to myself (which is now my constant practice) the trillo." He learned to play the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned to com- pose songs, and burned to give forth ' ' a scheme and theory of music not yet ever made in the world." When he heard " a fellow whistle like a bird exceed- ing well," he promised to return another day and give an angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, " I took the Bezan back with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the Hope, taking SAMUEL PEPYS. ^89 great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing when they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society be- fore it had received the name. Boyle's Hydrostatics was " of infinite delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber ; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage ; mathe- matics and accounting ; the hull and the rigging of ships from a model ; and " looking and improving himself of the (naval) stores with" — hark to the fel- low ! — "great delight." His familiar spirit of de- light was not the same with Shelley's ; but how true it was to him through life ! He is only copying some- thing, and behold, he " takes great pleasure to rule the lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink ;' ' he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold, " it do please him exceedingly." A hog's harslett is " a piece of meat he loves. " He cannot ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with breathless gusto, " his noble, rich coach." When he is bound for a supper party, he anticipates a " glut of pleasure." When he has a new watch, " to see my childishness," says he, '* I could not forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times." To 2:0 to 290 SAMUEL PEPYS. Vauxhall, he says, and " to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and there fine peo- ple walking, is mighty divertising. " And the night- mgales, 1 take it, were particularly dear to him ; and it was again " with great pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke through. He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by playing on the flageolet ; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile the way in case the nightingales were silent ; and even along the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true head- mark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure ; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eat- ing, he " knew not how to eat alone ;" pleasure for SAMUEL PEPYS. 291 him must heighten pleasure ; and the eye and ear must be flattered hke the palate ere he avow himself content. He had no zest in a good dinner when it fell to be eaten " in a bad street and in a periwig- maker's house ;" and a collation was spoiled for him by indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman's service in this breathless chase of pleasures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions that he went to bed " weary, which I seldom am j" and al- ready over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure- seeker ; for in that career, as in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enjoys so wholly and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is just the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his right to fiddle on the leads, or to be " vexed to the blood" by a solecism in his wife's attire ; and we find in consequence that he was always peevish when he was hungry, and that his head ** aked mightily" after a dispute. But nothing could divert him from his aim in life ; his remedy in care was the same as his delight in prosperity ; it was with pleasure, and with pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow ; and, whether he was jealous of his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he would equally take refuge in the theatre. There, if the house be full and the company noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the play diverting, this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private self- adorer, will speedily be healed of his distresses. 292 SAMUEL PEPYS. Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his fel- low-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors. And perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly said to begin at home. It does not matter what qual- ity a person has : Pepys can appreciate and love him for it He ' fills his eyes" with the beauty of Lady Castlemaine ; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her for years ; if a woman be good- looking and not painted, he will walk miles to have another sight of her ; and even when a lady by a mis- chance spat upon his clothes, he was immediately con- soled when he had observed that she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mis. Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his Aunt James : **a poor, religious, well meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of Coventry. He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but listens with interest and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the story of a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions. He lends a critical ear to the discourse of kings and royal dukes. He spends an evening at Vauxhall with " Killigiew SAMUEL PEPYS. 293 and young Newport— loose company," says he, " but worth a man's being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of talk and lives. " And when a rag-boy lights him home, he examines him about his business and other ways of livelihood for destitute children. This is almost half-way to the beginning of philanthropy ; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a man iamous for good deeds. And it is through this quality that he rises, at times, superior to his surprising egotism ; his interest in the love affairs of others is, indeed, imper- sonal ; he is filled with concern for my Lady Castle- maine, whom he only knows by sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her in her successes ; and it is not untrue, however strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved his maid Jane because she was in love with his man Tom. Let us hear him, for once, at length : " So the women and W. Hewerand I walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was ; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him ; so I made the boy read to me, which he did with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty ; and then I did give him something, and went to the father, and talked with him. He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever 1 saw in my life, and it brought 294 SAMUEL PEPYS. those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days alter. We took notice of his woollen knit stockings of two colors mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great nails in the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty ; and taking notice of them, ' Why,' says the poor man, ' the downes, yon see, are full of stones, and we are faine to shoe ourselves thus ; and these,' says he, ' will make the stones fly till they ring before me. ' I did give the poor man something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to cast stones with his home crooke. He values his dog mightily, thai would turn a sheep any way which he would have him, when he goes to fold them ; told me there was about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four shillings a week the year round for keeping of them ; and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life." And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's pleasuring ; with cups of milk, and glowworms, and people walking at sundown with their wives and chil- dren, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming " of the old age of the world "' and the early innocence of man. This was how he walked through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and bis hand, you will observe, not shut ; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the m.anners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a lingering glamour of romance. SAMUEL PEPYS. 295 It was *' two or three days after" that he extended this passage in the pages of his Journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some reflection. It is generally supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank at the bottom of the scale of merit. But a style which is indefatigably lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely weari- some, which condescends to the most fastidious par- ticulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright cur- rent of the narrative, — such a style may be ungram- matical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thor- oughly performed throughout ; and though the man- ner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight. The gusto of the man speaks out fierily after all these years. For the differ- ence between Pepys and Shelley, to return to that half whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not one of degree ; in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true prose of poetry — prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire conviction and un- mingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing fell out, not otherwise ; and you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, 296 SAMUEL PEPYS. a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored reminis- cence of your own. There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The tang was in the family ; while he was writing the journal for our enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an am- ateur. It is not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to understand. That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or ex- cuse. He certainly admired him as a poet ; he was the first beyond mere actors on the rolls of that in- numerable army who have got " To be or not to be" by heart. Nor was he content with that ; it haunted his mind ; he quoted it to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, indeed, is more notable than the heroic quality of the verses that our little sen- sualist in a periwig chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from brave Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his sublime theorbo. " To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler" — " Beauty retire, thou dost my pity m.ove' ' — " It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O Rome ;" — open and dignified in the sound, various and ma- jestic in the scntimrnt, it was no inapt, as it was cer- SAMUEL PEPYS 297 tainly no timid, spirit that selected such a range of themes. Of " Gaze not on Swans," I know no more than these four words ; yet that also seems to promise well. It was, however, on a probable suspicion, the work of his master, Mr. Berkenshaw — as the drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young ladies' sem- inary are the work of the professor attached to the es- tablishment. i\Ir. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil. The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world still clogging him ; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the man who taught him composition. In relation to the stage, which he so warmly loved and under- stood, he was not only more hearty, but more gener- ous to others. Thus he encounters Colonel Reames, "a man," says he, "who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for it. ' ' And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridiculous in- sipid piece, " Glad we were," he writes, " that Bet- terton had no part in it." It is by such a zeal and loyalty to those who labor for his delight that the am- ateur grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind that, not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to recognize his betters. There was no: one speck of envy in the whole human-hearted t?gotist. Respectability. When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded meaning of the word, they are usu- 298 SAMUEL PEPYS. ally suspected of a taste for clay pipes and beer cellars ; and their performances are thought to hail from the OwVs Nest of the comedy. They have something more, however, in their eye than the dulness of a round million dinner parties that sit down yearly in old England. For to do anything because others do it, and not because the thing is good, or kind, or hon- est in its own right, is to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste to the devil v^^ith the greater number. We smile over the ascen- dency of priests ; but I had rather follow a priest than what they call the leaders of society. No life can better than that of Pepys illustrate the dangers of this respectable theory of living. For what can be more untoward than the occurrence, at a critical period and while the habits are still pliable, of such a sweeping transformation as the return of Charles the Second .? Round went the whole fleet of England on the other tack ; and while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by the stars and their own pri- vate compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among '* the stupid starers and the loud huzzas." The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the more will he require this support ; and any positive quality relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, Pepys was quite strong enough to please him- self without regard for others ; but his positive qualities SAMUEL PEPYS. 299 were not coextensive with the field of conduct ; and in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the footprints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, particularly, he lived by the countenance of others ; felt a slight from another more keenly than a meanness in himself ; and then first repented when he was found out. You could talk of religion or mo- rality to such a man ; and by the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he could rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you said. All that matter in religion which has been nick- named other-worldliness was strictly in his gamut ; but a rule of life that should make a man rudely vir- tuous, following right in good report and ill report, was foolishness and a stumbling-block to Pepys. He was much thrown across the Friends ; and nothing can be more instructive than his attitude toward these most interesting people of that age. I have mentioned how he conversed with one as he rode ; when he saw some brought from a meeting under arrest, " I would to God," said he, '* they would either conform, or be more wise and not be catched ;" and to a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid though effectual protection. Meanwhile there was growing up next door to him that beautiful nature, William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned him for a fop ; odd, though natural enough when you see Pen's portrait, that Pepys was jealous of him with his wife. But the cream of the story is when Pen publishes his Sandy Foundation Shaken, and Pepys has it read aloud by his 300 SAMUEL PEPYS. wife. ** I find it," he says, '* so well writ as, I think, it is too good for him ever to have writ it ; and it is a serious sort oi book, and not fd for everybody to read." Nothing is more galling to ihe merely respectable than to be brought in contact with religious ardor. Pepys had his own foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from practical considerations, and he would read the book with true uneasiness of spirit ; for conceive the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen were to convert him 1 It was a different kind of doctrine that he judged profitable for himself and others. " A good sermon of, Mr. Gifford's at our church, upon ' Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven.' A very excellent and persuasive, good and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy." It is thus that respectable people desire to have their Greathearts address them, telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection ; and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, be- comes a manual of worldly prudence, and a handy- book for Pepys and the successful merchant. The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth except for the Diary. He has no care that a thing shall be, if it but appear ; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has seem- ingly got nothing but a lawsuit ; and is pleased to be thought liberal when he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously osienlauous, I say conscien- SAMUEL PEPYS. 301 tiously, with reason. He could never have been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous periwig ; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions, not fop- pishly before, nor dowdily behind, the central move- ment of his age. For long he durst not keep a car- riage ; that, in his circumstances, would have been improper ; but a times comes, with the growth of his fortune, when the impropriety has shifted to the other side, and he is " ashamed to be seen in a hackney." Pepys talked about being " a Quaker or some very melancholy thing ;" for my part, I can imagine noth- ing so melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be concerned about such problems. But so respect- abiUty and the duties of society haunt and burden their poor devotees ; and what seems at first the very primrose path of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest. And the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respectable, when he must not only order his pleasures, but even clip his virtuous movements, to the public patter of the age. There was some jug- gling among officials to avoid direct taxation ; and Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge himself with £1000 ; hut finding none to set him an example, " nobody of our ablest merchants" with this moderate liking for clean hands, he judged it " not decent ;" he feared it would "be thought vain glory;" and, rather than appear singular, cheerfully remained a thief. One 302 SAMUEL PEPYS. able merchant's countenance, and Pepys had dared to do an honest act ! Had he found one brave spirit, properly recognized by society, he might have gone far as a disciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of his senses, that Pen's venison pasty stank like the devil ; but, on the other hand, Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for office or emolument .? " Thank God, I have enough of my own, ' ' says he, ' ' to buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an ungrateful country shall have dismissed them from the field of public service ; Coventry living re- tired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in, ' * it may be, to read a chapter of Seneca. ' ' Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment. He would not be " bribed to be unjust," he says, though he was " not so squeamish as to refuse a present after," suppose the king to have received no wrong. His new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier, he tells us with honest complacency, will save the king a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred pounds a year, — a statement which exactly fixes the degree of the age's enlighten- ment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too high. It was an unending struggle for the SAMUEL PEPYS. 303 man to stick to his business in such a garden of Armi- da as he found this hfe ; and the story of his oaths, so often broken, so courageously renewed, is worthy rather of admiration than the contempt it has re- ceived. Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's in- fluence, we find him losing scruples and daily com- plying further v/ith the age. When he began the Journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic ; merry enough, to be sure, over his private cups, and still re- membering Magdalene ale and his acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season with all ; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble ; and in spite of a disor- dered practice, Pepys's theory, the better things that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where there was " tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he felt "ashamed, and went away;" and when he slept in church, he prayed God forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping each other awake " from spite," as though not to sleep in church were an obvious hardship ; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service, looking about him, with a per- spective glass, on all the pretty women. His favorite ejaculation, " Lord 1" occurs but once that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at ].east five times in '63 ; after which the " Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary " damned," as it were a whale among the 304 SAMUEL PEPYS. shoal. He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon o)! some innocent freedoms at a marriage, are soon con- tent to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's mis- tress, who was not even, by his own account, the most discreet of mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking, become his naturali element ; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring courtiers are to be found in his society ; until the man grew so involved with Saturnalian manners and com- panions that he was shot almost unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668. That was the legitimate issue and punishment ol years of staggering walk and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in a pow- der magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim, of a hideous disaster. So with our pleasant- minded Pepys and his peccadilloes. All of a sudden^ as he still trips dexterously enough among the dangers of a double-faced career, thinking, no great evil, hum- ming to himself the Irillo', Fate takes the further con- duct of that matter from his hands, and brings him lace to face with the consequences of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although not the constant lover, of his wife, — for a man, besides,, who was so greatly careful of appearances, — the reve- lation of his infidelities was a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the indignities that he endured, are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and novi justly incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail ol suffering. She was violent, threatening him with the SAMUEL PEPYS. 305 tongs ; she was careless of his honor, driving him to insult the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard ; worst of all, she was hopelessly incon- sequent, in word and thought and deed, now lulling hmi with reconciliations, and anon flaming forth again with the original anger. Pepys had not used his wife well ; he had wearied her with jealousies, even while himself unfaithful ; he had grudged her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon himself ; he had abused her in words ; he had bent his fist at her in anger ; he had once blacked her eye ; and it is one of the oddest particulars in that odd Diary of his, that, while the injury is referred to once in passing, there is no hint as to the occasion or the manner of the blow. But now, when he is in the wrong, nothing can ex- ceed the long-suffering affection of this impatient hus- band. While he was still sinning and still undiscov- ered, he seems not to have known a touch of penitence stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to the theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress, by way of compensation. Once found out, however, and he seems to himself to have lost all claim to decent usage. It is perhaps the strongest instance of his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame her ; he has no weapon left but tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have re- spected him more had he not given way so utterly- above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow- 3o6 SAMUEL PEPYS. culprit, Miss Willet ; but somehow I believe we like him better as he was. The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the impression of this episode upon his mind. For the remaining years of his long life we have no Diary to help us, and we have seen al- ready how little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his correspondence ; but what with the recollection of the catastrophe of his married life, what with the natural influence of his advancing years and reputa- tion, it seems not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys ; and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at last to an honored and agreeable old age among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton, and, in one instance at least, the poetical counsellor of Dryden. Through all this period, that Diary which contained the secret memoirs of his life, with all its inconsistencies and escapades, had been religiously preserved ; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to have provided for its destruc- tion. So we may conceive him faithful to the end to all his dear and early memories ; still mindful of Mrs. Hely in the woods at Epsom ; still lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness to the dead ; still, if he heard again that air that once so much disturbed him, thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him to his wife. JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. I. —The Controversy about Female Rule. When first the idea became widely spread among men that the Word of God, instead of being truly the foundation of all existing institutions, was rather a stone which the builders had rejected, it was but natural that the consequent havoc among received opinions should be accompanied by the generation of many new and lively hopes for the future. Some« what as in the early days of the French Revolution, men must have looked for an immediate and uni- versal improvement in their condition. Christianity, up to that time, had been somewhat of a failure politi- cally. The reason was now obvious, the capital flaw was detected, the sickness of the body politic traced at last to its efficient cause, it was only necessary to put the Bible thoroughly into practice to set them- selves strenuously to realize in life the Holy Common- wealth, and all abuses and iniquities would surely pass away. Thus, in a pageant played at Geneva in the year 1523, the world was represented as a sick man at the end of his wits for help, to whom his doc- tor recommends Lutheran specifics. * ^jGaberel's Eglise de GeJiive-, i. 88. 3o8 JOHN KNOX The Reformers themselves had set their affections in a different world, and professed to look for the finished result of their endeavors on the other side of death. They took no interest in politics as such ; they even condemned political action as Antichiistian : notably, Luther in the case of the Peasants' War. And yet, as the purely religious question was insepa- rably complicated with political difBculties, and they had to make opposition, from day to day, against principalities and powers, they were led, one alter an- other, and again and again, to leave the sphere which was more strictly their own, and meddle, for good and evil, with the affairs of State. Not much was to be expected from interference in such a spirit. Whenever a minister found himself galled or hindered, he would be inclined to suppose some contravention of the Bible. Whenever Christian liberty was restrained (and Christian liberty for each individual would be about coextensive with what he wished to do), it was obvious that the State was Antichristian. The great thing, and the one thing, was to push the Gospel and the Reformers' own interpretation of it. Whatever helped was good ; whatever hindered was evil ; and if this simple classification proved inapplicable over the whole field, it was no business of his to stop and rec- oncile incongruities. He had more pressing concerns on hand ; he had to save souls ; he had to be about his Father's business. Thisshort-sighted view resulted in a doctrine that was actually Jesuitical in application. They had no serious ideas upon politics, and the) yy AND HIS RELATIONS 7^0 WOMEN. 309 «^'ere ready, nay, they seemed almost bound, to adopt and support whichever ensured for the moment the greatest benefit to the souls of their fellow-men. They were dishonest in all rincerity. Thus Labitte, in the introduction to a book ^ in which he exposes the hypocritical democracy of the Catholics under the League, steps aside for a moment to stigmatize the hypocritical democracy of the Protestants. And no- where was this expediency in political questions more apparent than about the question of female sovereignty. So much was this the case that one James Thomasius, of Leipsic, wrote a little paper "- about the religious partialities of those who took part in the controversy, in which some of these learned disputants cut a very sorry figure. Now Knox has been from the first a man well hated ; and it is somewhat characteristic of his luck that he figures here in the very forefront of the list of partial scribes who trimmed their doctrine with the wind in ail good conscience, and were political weather- cocks out of conviction. Not only has Thomasius mentioned him, but Bayle has taken the hint from Thomasius, and dedicated a long note to the matter at the end of his article on the Scotch Reformer. This is a little less than fair. If any one among the evangelists of that period showed more serious politi* cal sense than another, it was assuredly Knox ; and * La Di7nocratie chez les Prddicateurs de la Ligue. * Hisforia ajfecttmm se iminiscentium controversice de syneecocratia. It is in his collected prefaces, Leipsic, 1683. 3IO JOHN KNOX even in this very matter of female rule, although I do not suppose any one nowadays will feel inclined to endorse his sentiments, I confess I can make great allowance for his conduct. The controversy, besides, has an interest of its own, in view of later controversies. John Knox, from 1556 to 1559, was resident in Geneva, as minister, jointly with Goodman, of a little church of English refugees. He and his congregation were banished from England by one woman, Mary Tudor, and proscribed in Scotland by another, the Regent Mary of Guise. The coincidence was tempt- ing : here were many abuses centring about one abuse ; here was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous posver. He had not far to go to find the idea that female government was anomalous. It was an age, indeed, in which women, capable and incapable, played a conspicuous part upon the stage of European history ; and yet their rule, whatever may have been the opinion of here and there a wise man or enthusiast, was regarded as an anomaly by the great bulk of their contempo- raries. It was defended as an anomaly. It, and all that accompanied and sanctioned it, was set aside as a single exception ; and no one thought of reasoning down from queens and extending their privileges to ordinary women. Great ladies, as we know, had the privilege of entering into monasteries and cloisters, otherwise forbidden to their sex. As with one thing, so with another. Thus, Margaret of Navarre wrote books with great acclamation, and no one, seemingly, AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 311 saw fit to call her conduct in question ; but Made- moiselle de Gournay, Montaigne's adopted daughter, was in a controversy with the world as to whether a woman might be an author without incongruity. Thus, too, we have Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne writing to his daughters about the learned women of his century, and cautioning them, in conclusion, that the study of letters was unsuited to ladies of a mid- dling station, and should be reserved for princesses. ' And once more, if we desire to see the same princi- ple carried to ludicrous extreme, we shall find that Reverend Father in God the Abbot of Brantome, claiming, on the authority of some lord of his ac- quaintance, a privilege, or rather a duty, of free love for great princesses, and carefully excluding other ladies from the same gallant dispensation." One sees the spirit in which these immunities were granted ; and how they were but the natural consequence of that awe for courts and "kings that made the last writer tell us, with simple wonder, how Catherine de Medici would " laugh her fill just like another" over the humors of pantaloons and zanies. And such servility was, of all things, what would touch most nearly the republican spirit of Knox. It was not difficult lor him to set aside this weak scruple of loyalty. The lantern of his analysis did not always shine with a very serviceable light ; but he had the virtue, at least, to carry it into many places of fictitious holiness, and was not abashed by the tinsel divinity that hedged ^ CEuvres de d' A udigtie, i. 449. 2 Dames Iliustres, pp. 358-360, 312 JOHN KNOX kings and queens from his contemporaries. And so he could put the proposition in the form already men- tioned : there was Christ's Gospel persecuted in the two kingdoms by one anomalous power ; plainly, then, the " regiment of women" was Antichristian. Early in 1558 he communicated this discovery to the world, by publishing at Geneva his notorious book — The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. ' As a whole, it is a dull performance ; but the preface, as is usual with Knox, is both interesting and morally fine. Knox was not one of those who are humble in the hour of triumph ; he was aggressive even when things were at their worst. He had a grim reliance in himself, or rather in his mission ; if he were not sure that he was a great man, he was at least sure that he was one set apart to do great things. And he judged simply that whatever passed in his mind, whatever moved him to flee from persecution instead of constantly facing it out, or, as here, to publish and withhold his name from the title-page of a critical work, would not fail to be of interest, per- haps of benefit, to the world. There may be some- thing more finely sensitive in the modern humor, that tends more and more to withdraw a man's personality from the lessons he inculcates or, the cause that he has espoused ; but there is a loss herewith of whole- some responsibility ; and when we find in the works of Knox, as in the Epistles of Paul, the man himself 1 Works of John Knox, iv. 349. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 313 Standing nakedly forward, courting and anticipating criticism, jutting his character, as it were, in pledjre for the sincerity of his doctrine, we had best waive the question of delicacy, and make our acknowledgments for a lesson of courage, not unnecessary in these days of anonymous criticism, and much light, otherwise unattainable, on the spirit in which great movements were initiated and carried forward. Knox's personal revelations are always interesting ; and, in the case of the " First Blast," as I have said, there is no exception to the rule. He begins by stating the solemn re- sponsibility of all who are watchmen over God's flock ; and all are watchmen (he goes on to explain, with that fine breadth of spirit that characterizes him even when, as here, he shov/s himself most narrow), all are watchmen *' whose eyes God doth open, and whose conscience he pricketh to admonish the un- godly." And with the full consciousness of this great duty before him, he sets himself to answer the scruples of timorous or worldly-minded people. How can a man repent, he asks, unless the nature of his transgression is made plain to him .? " And there- fore I say," he continues, " that of necessity it is that this monstriferous empire of w^omen (which among all enormities that this day do abound upon the face of the whole earth, is most detestable and damnable) be openly and plainly declared to the world, to the end that some may repent and be saved." To those who think the doctrine useless, because it cannot be ex- pected to amend those princes whom it would dis- 314 JOHN KNOX possess if once accepted, he makes answer in a strain that shows him at his greatest. After having instanced how the rumor of Christ's censures found its way to Herod in his own court, "even so," he continues, *' may the sound of our weak trumpet, by the support of some wind (blow it from the south, or blow it from the north, it is of no matter), come to the ears of the chief offenders. But whether it do or not, yet dare we not cease to blow as God will give strength. For we are debtors to more than to princes, to ivit, to the great multitude of our brethren, of whom, no doubt, a great number have heretofore offended by error and igno- rance." It is for the multitude, then, he writes ; he does not greatly hope that his trumpet will be audible in palaces, or that crowned women will submissively discrown themselves at his appeal ; what he does hope, in plain English, is to encourage and justify rebellion ; and we shall see, before we have done, that he can put his purpose into words as roundly as I can put it for him. This he sees to be a matter of much hazard ; he is not " altogether so brutish and insensible, but that he has laid his account what the finishing of the work may cost.'' He knows that he will find many ad- versaries, since " to the most part of men, lawful and godly appeareth whatsoever antiquity hath received." He looks for opposition, " not only of the ignorant multitude, but of the wise, politic, and quiet spirits of the earth.' ' He will be called foolish, curious, de- spiteful, and a sower of sedition ; and one day, per- AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 315 haps, for all he is now nameless, he may be attainted of treason. Yet he has " determined to obey God, notwithstanding that the world shall rage thereat." Finally, he makes some excuse for the anonymous appearance of this first instalment : it is his purpose thrice to blow the trumpet in this matter, if God so permit ; twice he intends to do it without name ; but at the last blast to take the odium upon himself, that all others may be purged. Thus he ends the preface, and enters upon his argu- ment with a secondary title : " The First Blast to awake Women degenerate." We are in the land of assertion without delay. That a woman should bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire over any realm, nation, or city, he tells us, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order. Women are weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish. God has denied to woman wisdom to consider, or providence to foresee, what is profitable to a comm.on- wealth. Women have been ever lightly esteemed ; they have been denied the tutory of their own sons, and subjected to the unquestionable sway of their hus- bands ; and surely it is irrational to give the greater where the less has been withheld, and suffer a woman to reign supreme over a great kingdom who would be allowed no authority by her own fireside. He appeals to the Bible ; but though he makes much of the first transgression and certain strong texts in Genesis and Paul's Epistles, he does not appeal with entire success. The cases of Deborah and Huldah can be brought into 3i6 JOHN KNOX no sort of harmony with his thesis. Indeed, I may say that, logically, he left his bones there ; and that it is but the phantom of an argument that he parades thenceforward to the end. Well was it for Knox that he succeeded no better ; it is under this very am- biguity about Deborah that we shall find him fain to creep for shelter before he is done with the regiment of women.- After having thus exhausted Scripture, and formulated its teaching in the somewhat blas- phemous maxim that the man is placed above the woman, even as God above the angels, he goes on triumphantly to adduce the testimonies of TertuUian, Augustine, Ambrose, Basil, Chrysostom, and the Pandects ; and having gathered this little cloud of witnesses about him, like pursuivants about a herald, he solemnly proclaims all reigning women to be traitoresses and rebels against God ; discharges all men thenceforward from holding any office under such monstrous regiment, and calls upon all the lieges with one consent to " sludy to repress the inordinate pride i/ and tyranny' of queens. If this is not treasonable teaching, one would be glad to know what is ; and yet, as if he feared he had not made the case plain enough against himself, he goes on to deduce the startling corollary that all oaths of allegiance must be incontinently broken. If it was sin thus to have sworn even in ignorance, it were obstinate sin to con- tinue to respect them after fuller knowledge. Then comes the peroration, in which he cries aloud against *he cruelties of that cursed Jezebel of England — that AND HIS DELATIONS TO WOMEN. 317 horrible monster Jezebel of England ; and after hav. ing predicted sudden destruction to her rule and to the rule of all crowned women, and warned all men that if they presume to defend the same when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to vindicate the liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical flourish: "And therefore let all men be advertised, for the Trumpet hath once blown." The capitals are his own. In writing, he probably felt the want of some such reverberation of the pulpit under strong hands as he was wont to emphasize his spoken utterances withal ; there would seem to him a want of passion in the orderly lines of type ; and I suppose we may take the capitals as a m.ere substitute for the great voice with which he would have given it forth, had we heard it from his own lips. Indeed, as it is, in this little strain of rhetoric about the trumpet, this current allusion to the fall of Jericho, that alone distinguishes his bitter and hasty production, he was probably right, according to all artistic canon, thus to support and accentuate in conclusion the sustained metaphor of a hostile proclamation. " It is curious, by the way, to note how favorite an image the trumpet was with the Reformer. He returns to it again and again ; it is the Alpha and Omega of his rhetoric ; it is to him what a ship is to the stage sailor ; and one would al- most fancy he had begun the world as a trumpeter's apprentice. The partiality is surely characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses before 3i8 JOHN KNOX various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not all. Wherever he appears in history his speech is loud, angry, and hostile ; there is no peace in his life, and little tenderness ; he is always sounding hopefully to the front for some rough enterprise. And as his voice had something of the trumpet's hardness, it had some- thing also of the trumpet's warlike inspiration. So Randolph, possibly fresh from the sound of the Re- former's preaching, writes of him to Cecil : — " Where your honor exhorteth us to stoutness, I assure you the voice of one man is able, in an hour, to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears." ^ Thus was the proclamation made. Nor was it long in wakening all the echoes of Europe. What success might have attended it, had the question decided been a purely abstract question, it is difficult to say. As it was, it was to stand or fall, not by logic, but by polit- ical needs and sympathies. Thus, in France, his doc- trine was to have some future, because Protestants suffered there under the feeble and treacherous regency of Catherine de Medici ; and thus it was to have no future anywhere else, because the Protestant interest was bound up with the prosperity of Queen Elizabeth. This stumbling-block lay at the very threshold of the matter ; and Knox, in the text of the " First Blast," had set everybody the wrong example and gone to the ground himself. He finds occasion to regret " the blood of innocent Lady Jane Dudley." But Lady 1 M'Crie's Life of Knox ^ ii. 41. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 319 Jane Dudley, or Lady Jane Grey, as we call her, was a would be traitoress and rebel against God, to use his own expressions. If, therefore, political and re- ligious sympathy led Knox himself into so grave a partiality, what was he to expect from his disciples ? If the trumpet gave so ambiguous a sound, who could heartily prepare himself for the battle ? The question whether Lady Jane Dudley was an innocent martyr, or a traitoress against God, whose inordinate pride and tyranny had been effectually repressed, was thus left altogether in the wind ; and it was not, perhaps, won- derful if many of Knox's readers concluded that all right and wrong in the matter turned upon the degree of the sovereign's orthodoxy and possible helpfulness to the Reformation. He should have been the more careful of such an ambiguity of meaning, as he must have known well the lukewarm indifference and dis- honesty of his fellow-reformers in political matters. ^ He had already, in 1556 or 1557, talked the matter over with his great master, Calvin, in " a private con- versation ;" and the interview^ must have been truly distasteful to both parties. Calvin, indeed, went a far way with him in theory, and owned that the ** gov- ernment of women was a deviation from the original and proper order of nature, to be ranked, no less than slavery, among the punishments consequent upon the fall of man." But, in practice, their two roads sepa= rated. For the Man of Geneva saw difficult'.es in the way of the Scripture proof in the cases of Deborah and 1 Described by Calvin in a letter to Cecil. Knox's M'orks. vol. iv. 320 JOHN KNOX Huldah, and in the prophecy of Isaiah that queens should be the nursing mothers of the Church. And as the Bible was not decisive, he thought the subject should be let alone, because " by custom and public consent and long practice, it has been established that realms and principalities may descend to females by hereditary right, and it would not be lawful to unset- tle governments which are ordained by the peculiar providence of God." I imagine Knox's ears must have burned during this interview. Think of him listening dutifully to all this — how it would not do to meddle with anointed kings — how there was a peculiar providence in these great affairs ; and then think of his own peroration, and the *' noble heart" whom he boks for " to vindicate the liberty of his country ;" or his answer to Queen Mary, when she asked him who he was, to interfere in the affairs of Scotland : — •' Madam, a subject born within the same !" In- deed, the two doctors who differed at this private con- versation represented, at the moment, two principles of enormous import in the subsequent history of Eu- rope. In Calvin we have represented that passive obedience, that toleration of injustice and absurdity, that holding back of the hand from political affairs as from something unclean, which lost France, if we are to believe M. Michelet, for the Reformation ; a spirit necessarily fatal in the long run to the existence of any sect that may profess it ; a suicidal doctrine that sur- vives among us to this day in narrow views of personal duty, and the low political morality of many virtuo'ug AND HIS KELATIONS TO WOMEN. 32 1 men. In Knox, on the other hand, we see foreshad- owed the whole Puritan Revolution and the scaffold of Charles I. ~' There is little doubt in my mind that this interview was what caused Knox to print his book without a name. ^ " It was a dangerous thing to contradict the Man of Geneva, and doubly so, surely, when one had had the advantage of correction from him in a private conversation ; and Knox had his little flock of English refugees to consider. If they had fallen into bad odor at Geneva, where else was there left to flee to ? It was printed, as I said, in 1558 ; and, by a singular mal-d-propos, in that same year ]\Iary died, and Eliza- beth succeeded to the throne of England. And just as the accession of Catholic Queen ]Mary had con- demned female rule in the eyes of Knox, the accession of Protestant Queen Elizabeth justified it in the eyes of his colleagues. Female rule ceases to be an anom- aly, not because Elizabeth can " reply to eight am- bassadors in one day in their different languages," but because she represents for the moment the political future of the Reformation. The exiles troop back to England with songs of praise in their mouths. The bright occidental star, of which we have all read in the Preface to the Bible, has risen over the darkness of Europe. There is a thrill of hope through the perse- cuted Churches of the Continent. Calvin writes to ^ It was anonymously published, but no o le seems to have been in doubt about its authorship ; he might as well have set his name to it, for all the good he got by holding it back. 322 JOHN KNOX Cecil, washing his hands of Knox and his political heresies. The sale of the " First Blast" is prohibited in Geneva ; and along with it the bold book of Knox's colleague, Goodman— a book dear to Milton— where female rule was briefly characterized as a " monster in nature and disorder among men." ' Any who may ever have doubted, or been for a moment led away by Knox or Goodman, or their own wicked imaginations, are now more than convinced. They have seen the occidental star. Aylmer, with his eye set greedily on a possible bishopric, and " the better to obtain the favor of the new Queen," " sharpens his pen to con- found Knox by logic. What need } He has been confounded by facts. " Thus what had been to the refugees of Geneva as the very word of God, no sooner were they back in England than, behold ! it was the word of the devil." ^ Now, what of the real sentiments of these loyal sub- jects of Elizabeth ? They professed a holy horror for Knox's position : let us see if their own would please a modern audience any better, or was, in substance, greatly different. John Aylmer, afterward Bishop of London, pub- lished an answer to Knox, under the title of An Har- bour for Faithful and true Subjects against the late Blown Blast, concerning the goverfi?nent of Women.* And ' Knox's Works, Iv. 358. ^ Strype's Ay biter, p. 16. 3 It may interest the reader to know that these (so says Thomasius) are the "ipsissima verba Schlusselburgii." 4 I am indebted for a sight of this book to the kindness of Mr. David Laing, the editor of Knox's V/orks. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 323 certainly he was a thought more acute, a thought less precipitate and simple, than his adversary. He is not to be led away by such captious terms as natural and tiiinaiural. It is obvious to him that a woman's dis- ability to rule is not natural in the same sense in which it is natural for a stone to fall or fire to burn. He is doubtful, on the whole, whether this disability be natural at all ; nay, when he is laying it down that a woman should not be a priest, he shows some ele- mentary conception of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter. "The bringing-up of women," he says, "is commonly such" that they cannot have the necessary qualifications, " for they are not brought up in learning in schools, nor trained in disputation." And even so, he can ask, " Are there not in England women, think you, that for learning and wisdom could tell their household and neighbors as good a tale as any Sir John there ?' ' For all that, his advocacy is weak. " If women's rule is not unnat- ural in a sense preclusive of its very existence, it is neither so convenient nor so profitable as the govern- ment of men. He holds England to be specially suit- able for the government of women, because there the governor is more limited ana restrained by the other members of the constitution than in other places ; and this argument has kept his book from being altogether forgotten. It is only in hereditary monarchies that he will offer any defence of the anomaly. " If rulers were to be chosen by lot or suffrage, he would not that anv women should stand in the election, but men 324 JOHN KNOX only. " The law of succession of crowns was a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a law to Mr. Herbert Spencer ; and the one and the other counsels his readers, in a spirit suggestively alike, not to kick against the pricks or seek to be more wise than He who made them. ' If God has put a female child into the direct line of inheritance, it is God's affair. His strength will be perfected in her weakness. He makes the Creator address the objectors in this not very flattering vein : — " I, that could make Daniel, a suck- ing babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers ; a brute beast to reprehend the folly of a prophet ; and poor fishers to confound the great clerks of the world — cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over you .?" This is the last word of his reasoning. Al- though he was not altogether without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what he says of the incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather loyalty to the old order of things than any generous belief in the capacity of women, that raised up for them this clerical champion. His courtly spirit contrasts singularly with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox. " Thy knee shall bow," he says, "thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall speak reverently of thy sovereign." For himself, his tongue is even more than reverent. Nothing can stay the issue of his eloquent adulation. Again and again, '* the remembrance of Elizabeth's virtues" carries him away ; and he has to hark back again to find the scent of his argument. He is repressing his vehement 1 Social Statics^ p. 64, etc. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 325 adoration throughout, until, when the end comes, and he feels his business at an end, he can indulge him- self to his heart's content in indiscriminate laudation of his royal mistress. It is humorous to think that this illustrious lady, whom he here praises, among many other excellences, for the simplicity of her attire and the * ' marvellous meekness of her stomach, ' ' threatened him, years after, in no very meek terms, for a sermon against female vanity in dress, which she held as a reflection on herself. ' Whatever was wanting here in respect for women generally, there v/as no want of respect for the Queen ; and one cannot very greatly wonder if these devoted servants looked askance, not upon Knox only, but on his little flock, as they came back to England tainted with disloyal^ doctrine. For them, as for him, the oc- cidental star rose somewhat red and angry. As for poor K^nox, his position was the saddest of all. For the juncture seemed to' him of the highest importance ; it was the nick of time, the flood-water of opportu- nity. Not only was there an opening for him in Scot- land, a smouldering brand of civd liberty and religious enthusiasm which it should be for him to kindle into flame with his powerful breath ; but he had his eye seemingly on an object of even higher worth. For now, when religious sympathy ran so liigh that it could be set against national aversion, he wished to begin the fusion together of England and Scotland, / and to begin it at the sore place. If once the open * Hallam''s Const. Hist, of England^ i. 225, note "« 326 JOHN KNOX wound were closed at the Border, the work would be half done. Ministers placed at Berwick and such places might seek their converts equally on either side of the march ; old enemies would sit together to hear the gospel of peace, and forget the inherited jealousies of many generations in the enthusiasm of a common faith ; or — let us say better — a common heresy. For people are not most conscious of brotherhood when they continue languidly together in one creed, but when, with some doubt, with some danger perhaps, and certainly not without some reluctance, they violently break with the tradition of the past, and go forth from the sanctuary of their fathers to worship under the bare heaven. A new creed, like a new country, is an unhomely place of sojourn ; but it makes men lean on one another and join hands. It was on this that Knox relied to begin the union of the English and the Scotch. And he had, perhaps, better means of judging than any even of his contemporaries. He knew the temper of both nations ; and already during his two years' chaplaincy at Berwick, he had seen his scheme put to the proof. But whether practicable or not, the proposal does him much honor. That he should thus have sought to make a love-match of it between the two peoples, and tried to win their incli- nation tov\^ard a union instead of simply transferring them, like so many sheep, by a marriage, or testa- ment, or private treaty, is thoroughly characteristic of what is best in the man. Nor was this all. He had, besides, to assure himself of English support, secret or AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 327 avowed, for the reformation party in Scotland ; a deli- cate affair, trenching upon treason. And so he had plenty to say to Cecil, plenty that he did not care to '* commit to paper neither yet to the knowledge of many." But his miserable publication had shut the doors of England in his face. Summoned to Edin- burgh by the confederate lords, he waited at Dieppe, anxiously praying for leave to journey through Eng- land. The most dispiriting tidings reach him. His messengers, coming from so obnoxious a quarter, nar- rowly escape imprisonment. His old congregation are coldly received, and even begin to look back again to their place of exile with regret. " JNIy First Blast," he writes ruefully, '* has blov/n from me all my friends of England." And then he adds, with a snarl, " The Second Blast, I fear, shall sound somewhat more sharp, except men be more moderate than I hear they are." ^ But the threat is empty ; there will never be a second blast — he has' had enough of that trumpet. Nay, he begins to feel uneasily that, unless he is to be rendered useless for the rest of his life, unless he is to lose his rjght arm and go about his great work maimed and impotent, he must find some way of making his peace with England and the indignant Queen. The letter just quoted was written on the 6th of April 1559 ; and on the loth, after he had cooled his heels for four days more about the streets of Dieppe, he gave in altogether, and writes a letter of capitulation 1 Knox to Mrs. Locke, 6th April 1559. Works, vi, 14.. 328 JOHN KNOX to Cecil. In this letter, ' which he kept back until the 22d, still hoping that things would come right of themselves, he censures the great secretary for having " followed the world in the way of perdition," char- acterizes him as " worthy of hell," and threatens him, if he be not found simple, sincere, and fervent in the cause of Christ's gospel, that he shall " taste of the same cup that politic heads have drunken in before him." This is all, I take it, out of respect lor the Reformer's own position ; if he is going to be humili- ated, let others be humiliated first ; like a child who will not take his medicine until he has made his nurse and his mother drink of it before him. " But I have, say you, written a treasonable book against the regi- ment and empire of women. . . . The writing or that book I will not deny ; but to prove it treasonable I think it shall be hard. ... It is hinted that my book shall be written against. If so be, sir, I greatly doubt they shall rather hurt nor (than) mend the mat- ter. " And here come the terms of capitulation ; for he does not surrender unconditionally, even in this sore strait : "And yet if any," he goes on, "think me enemy to the person, or yet to the regiment, of her whom God hath now promoted, they are utterly deceived in va^, for the viir acid ous work of God, com- forting His afflicted by means of an infirm vessel, I do acknowledge, and the power of His most potent hand 1 will obey. More plainly to speak, if Queen Elizabeth shall con f ess , that the extraordinary dispensation of God' s 1 Knox to Sir William Cecil, loth April 1559. Works, ii. 16, or vi. 15. /lyD If IS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 329 great mercy niaketh that lawful tmto her which both na- ture and God' s law do deny to all women, then shall none in England be more willing to maintain her law- ful authority than I shall be. But if (God's wondrous work set aside) she ground (as God forbid) the just- ness of her title upon consuetude, laws, or ordinances of men, then" — Then Knox will denounce her? Not so ; he is more politic nowadays — then, he "greatly fears" that her ingratitude to God will not go long without punishment. His letter to Elizabeth, written some few months later, was a mere amplification of the sentences quoted above. She must base her title entirely upon the ex- traordinary providence of God ; but if she does this, " if thus, in God's presence, she humbles herself, so will he with tongue and pen justify her authority, as the Holy Ghost hath justified the same in Deborah, that blessed mother in Israel."^ And so, you see, his consistency is preserved ; he is merely applying the doctrine of the " First Blast." The argument goes thus : The regiment of women is, as before noted in our work, repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order. It has nevertheless pleased God to raise up, as exceptions to this law, first Deborah, and afterward Elizabeth Tudor — whose regiment we shall proceed to celebrate. There is no evidence as to how the Reformer's ex- planations were received, and indeed it is most prob- able that the letter was never shown to Elizabeth at 1 Knox to Queen Elizabeth, July 20th, 1559. Works, vi 47, or ii. 26. 330 JOHN KNOX all. For it was sent under cover of another to Cecil, and as it was not of a very courtly conception through- out, and was, of all things, what would most excite the Queen's uneasy jealousy about her title, it is like enough that the secretary exercised his discretion (he had Knox's leave in this case, and did not always wait for that, it is reputed) to put the letter harmlessly away beside other valueless or unpresentable State Papers. I wonder very much if he did the same with another,^ written two years later, after Mary had come into Scodand, in which Knox almost seeks to make Elizabeth an accomplice with him in the matter of the *' First Blast." The Queen of Scotland is going to have that work refuted, he tells her ; and " though it were but foolishness in him to prescribe unto her Majesty what is to be done," he would yet remind her that Mary is neither so much alarmed about her own security, nor so generously interested in Elizabeth's, " that she would take such pains, unless her crafty counsel in so doing shot at a further mark. " There is something really ingenious in this letter ; it showed Knox in the double capacity of the author of the ** First Blast" and the faithful friend of Elizabeth ; and he combines them there so naturally, that one would scarcely imagine the two to be incongruous. Twenty days later he was defending his intemperate publication to another queen — his own queen, Mary Stuart. This was on the first of those three interviews which he has preserved for us with so much dramatic 1 Knox to Queen Elizabeth, August 6th, 1561. Works, vi. 126. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 331 vigor in the picturesque pages of his history. After he had avowed the authorship in his usual haughty style, Mary asked : " You think, then, that I have no just authority?" The question was evaded. "Please your Majesty,'" he answered, " that learned men in all ages have had their judgments free, and most commonly disagreeing from the common judg- ment of the world ; such also have they published by pen and tongue ; and yet notwithstanding they them- selves have lived in the common society with others, and have borne patiently with the errors and imperfec- tions which they could not amend." Thus did " Plato the philosopher :" thus will do John Knox. " I have communicated my judgment to the world : if the realm finds no inconvenience from the regiment of a woman, that which they approve, shall I not further disallow than within mv own breast ; but shall be as well content to live under jour Grace, as Paul was to live under Nerd. And my hope is, that so long as ye defile not your hands with the blood of the saints of God, neither J nor my book shall hurt either you or your authority," All this is admirable in wisdom and moderation, and, except that he might have hit upon a comparison less offensive than that with Paul and Nero, hardly to be bettered. Having said thus much, he feels he needs say no more ; and so, when he is further pressed, he closes that part of the discussion with an astonishing sally. If he has been content to let this matter sleep, he would recom- mend her Grace to follow his example with thankful- 332 JOHN KNOX ness of heart ; it is grimly to be understood which of them has most to fear if the question should be re- awakened. So the talk wandered to other subjects. Only, when the Queen was summoned at last to din- ner (" for it was afternoon") Knox made his saluta- tion in this form of words : " I pray God, Madam, that you may be as much blessed within the Com- monwealth of Scodand, if it be the pleasure of God, as ever Deborah was in the Commonwealth of Is- rael." ^ Deborah again. But he was not yet done with the echoes of his own " First Blast. " In 1571, when he was already near his end, the old controversy was taken up in one of a series of anonymous libels against the Reformer affixed, Sunday after Sunday, to the church door. The dilemma was fairly enough stated. Either his doctrine is false, in which case he is a " false doctor" and seditious ; or, if it be true, why does he " avow and approve the contrare, I mean that regiment in the Queen of England's person ; which he avoweth and approveth, not only praying for the maintenance of her estate, but also procuring her aid and support against his own native country.?" Knox answered the libel, as his wont was, next Sunday, from the pul- pit. He justified the " First Blast " with all the old arrogance ; there is no drawing back there. The regiment of women is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, and a subversion of good order, as before. When he prays for the maintenance of Elizabeth's es- ^ Knox's Workb, ii. 278-280. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 333 tate, he is only following the example of those proph- ets of God who warned and comforted the wicked kings of Israel ; or of Jeremiah, who bade the Jews 'Dray for the prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar. As for the Queen's aid, there is no harm in that : quia (these are his own words) quia omnia inunda mundis : because to the pure all things are pure. One thing, in con- clusion, he " may not pretermit ;" to give the lie in the throat to his accuser, where he charges him with seeking support against his native country. " What I have been to my country," said the old Reformer, ** what I have been to my country, albeit this un- thankful age will not know, yet the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth. And thus I cease, requiring of all men that have anything to oppone against me, that he may (they may) do it so plainly, as that I may make myself and all my doings manifest to the world. For to me it seemeth a thing unreasonable, that, in this my decrepit age, I shall be compelled to fight against shadows, and howlets that dare not abide the lieht. " ' Now, in this, which may be called his Lasl Bias/, there is as sharp speaking as any in the " First Blast " itself. He is of the same opinion to the end, you see, although he has been obliged to cloak and garble that opinion for political ends. He has been tack- ing indeed, and he has indeed been seeking the favor of a queen ; but what man ever sought a queen's >• Calderwood's History of the Kirk of Scotland^ edition of the V/otirow Society, iii. 5:-54- 334 JOHN KNOX favor with a more virtuous purpose, or with as little courtly policy ? The question of consistency is del- icate, and must be made plain. Knox never changed his opinion about female rule, but lived to regret that he had published that opinion. Doubtless he had many thoughts so far cut of the range of public sym- pathy, that he could only keep them to himself, and, in his own words, bear patiently with the errors and im- perfections that he could not amend. For example, I make no doubt myself that, in his own heart, he did hold the shocking dogma attributed to him by more than one calumniator ; and that, had the time been ripe, had there been aught to gain by it, instead of all to lose, he would have been the first to assert that Scotland was elective instead of hereditary — " elective as in the days of paganism," as one Thevet says in holy horror.^ And yet, because the time was not ripe, T find no hint of such an idea in his collected works. Now, the regiment of women w^as another matter that he should have kept to himself ; right or wrong, his opinion did not fit the moment ; right or wrong, as Aylmer puts it, " the Blast was blown out of season. " And this it was that he began to perceive after the ac- cession of Elizabeth ; not that he had been wrong, and that female rule was a good thing, for he had said from the first that " the felicity of some women in their empires" could not change the law of God and the nature of created things ; not this, but that the regiment of women was one of those imperfections of ^ l^ayle's Historical Dictionary, art. Knox, remark G. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 335 society which must be borne with because yet they cannot be remedied. The thing had seemed so obvi- ous to him, in his sense of unspeakable masculine superiority, and his fine contempt for what is only sanctioned by antiquity and common consent, he had imagined that, at the first hint, men would arise and shake off the debasing tyranny. He found himself MTong, and he showed that he could be moderate in his own fashion, and understood the spirit of true com- promise. He came round to Calvin's position, in fact, but by a different way. And it derogates noth- ing from the merit of this wise attitude that it was the consequence of a change of interest. We are all taught by interest ; and if the interest be not merely selfish, there is no wiser preceptor under heaven, and perhaps no sterner. Such is the history of John Knox's connection with the controversy about female rule. In itself, this is obviously an incomplete study ; not fully to be under- stood, without a knowledge of his private relations with the other sex, and what he thought of their position in domestic life. This shall be dealt with in another paper. JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. II. — Private Life. To those who know Knox by hearsay only, I beheve the matter of this paper will be somewhat astonishing. For the hard energy of the man in all pablic matters has possessed the imagination of the world ; he remains for posterity in certain traditional phrases, browbeating Queen Mary, or breaking beautiful carved work in abbeys and cathedrals, that had long smoked them- selves out and were no more than sorry ruins, while he v/as still quietly teaching children in a country gentleman's family. It does not consist with the common acceptation of his character to fancy him much moved, except with anger. And yet the lan- guage of passion came to his pen as readily, whether it was a passion of denunciation against some of the abuses th^t vexed his righteous spirit, or of yearning for the society of an absent friend. He was vehement in affection, as in doctrine. I will not deny that there may have been, along with his vehemence, something shifty, and for the moment only ; that, like many men, and many Scotchmen, he saw the world and his own heart, not so much under any very JOHN KNOX. 337 Steady, equable light, as by extreme flashes of passion, true for the moment, but not true in the long run. There does seem to me to be something of this trace- able in the Reformer's utterances : precipitation and repentance, hardy speech and action somewhat cir- cumspect, a strong tendency to see himself in a heroic light and to place a ready belief in the disposition of the moment. Withal he had considerable confidence in himself, and in the uprightness of his own disci- plined emotions, underlying much sincere aspiration after spiritual humility. And it is this confidence that makes his intercourse with women so interesting to a modern. It would be easy, of course, to make fun of the whole affair, to picture him strutting vainglori- ously among these inferior creatures, or compare a re- ligious friendship in the sixteenth century with what was called, I think, a literary friendship in the eigh- teenth. But it is more just and profitable to recog- nize what there is sterling and human underneath all his theoretical affectations of superiority. Women, he has said in his " First Blast,'' are '* weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish ;" and yet it does not appear that he was himself any less dependent than other men upon the sympathy and affection of these weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish creatures ; it seems even as if he had been rather more dependent than most. Of those who are to act influentially on their fel- lows, we should expect always something large and public in their way of life, something more or less 33 8 JOHN KNOX urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a wife to their bosom, ask no more of woman- kind, just as they ask no more of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our as- sociation — not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make each other happy — by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmos- phere they bear about them — down to the mere im- personal pleasure of passing happy faces in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most luke- warm courtesies of life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received, when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our mothers otherwise than we love our fathers ; a sister is not as a brother to us ; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such friendship is not even possible for all. To con- join tenderness for a woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were, a curiosity in shades of AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 7^:^^ differing sentiment ; or it would mean that he had accepted the large, simple divisions of society : a strong and positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part coarsely, and holds to it stead- fastly, with all its consequences of pain to himself and others ; as one who should go straight before him on a journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small lives under foot. It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished his life ; and we find him preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women friends ; a man of some expan- sion toward the other sex ; a man ever ready to com- fort weeping women, and to weep along with them. Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more intimate thoughts as have sur- vived to us from all the perils that environ written pa- per, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape of letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that is not greatly to the purpose ; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly of women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying. What is really significant is quite apart from marriage. For the man Knox was a true man, and woman, the eivig-weibliche, was as necessary to him, in spite of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in a certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came to her in a glory of art ; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts and minds exercised in the painful complications that 340 JOHN KNOX naturally result from all changes in the world's way of thinking ; and those whom he had thus helped be- came dear to him, and were made the chosen com- panions of his leisure if they were at hand, or encour- aged and comforted by letter if they were afar. It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him, as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in the communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director, so that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while testi- fying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and are not properly to be judged without this idea. There is no friendship so noble, but it is the product of the time ; and a world of litde finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in even between the mother and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter of confidence be- tween them, and this other thing shall not. And thus it is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social atmosphere in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and trusted each other. To the man who had been their priest and was A.VD HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 341 no\v their minister, women would be able to speak with a confidence quite impossible in these latter days ; the women would be able to speak, and the man to hear. It was a beaten road just then ; and I dare say we should be no less scandalized at their plain speech than they, if they could come back to earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly fashions. This, then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many women friends. The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warm.th, of interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry relationship of penitent and confessor. It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women (as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age. At the same time it is just possible that some of a lit- tle group at Edinburgh, with whom he corresponded during his last absence, may have been friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all his female correspondents, the least personally favored. He treats them throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have been a little wounding. Thus, he remits one of them to his former letters, " which I trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our sis- ters, for to me ye are all equal in Christ. ' ' ^ Another letter is a gem. in this way. " Albeit," it begins, " al- beit I have no particular matter to write unto you, be- ' Works, iv. 244. 342 JOHN KNOX loved sister, yet I could not refrain to write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance of you. True it is that I have many whom I bear in equal re- membrance before God with you, to whom at present I write nothing, either for that I esteem them stronger than you, and therefore they need the less my rude labors, or else because they have not provoked me by their writing to recompense their remembrance." ' His "sisters in Edinburgh" had evidently to "pro- voke' ' his attention pretty constantly ; nearly all his letters are, on the face of them, answers to questions, and the answers are given with a certain crudity that I do not find repeated when he writes to those he really cares for. So when they consult him about women's apparel (a subject on which his opinion may be pretty correctl}- imagined by the ingenious reader for himself) he takes occasion to anticipate some of the most offen- sive matter of the " First Blast" in a style of real brutality.^ it is not merely that he tells them " the garments of women do declare their weakness and in- ability to execute the office of man," though that in itself is neither very wise nor very opportune in such a correspondence one would think ; but if the reader will take the troubk to wade through the long, tedious sermon for himself, he will see proof enough that Knox neither loved, nor very deeply respected, the women he was then addressing. In very truth, 1 be- lieve these Edinburgh sisters simply bored him. He had a certain interest in them as his children irx th*» - Works, IV. 246. ^ Ih. iv. 221, AND JUS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 343 Lord ; they were continually " provoking him by their writing ;" and, if they handed his letters about, writing to them was as good a form of publication as was then open to him in Scotland. There is one let- ter, however, in this budget, addressed to the wife of Clerk-Register Mackgil, which is worthy of some fur- ther mention. The Clerk-Register had not opened his heart, it would appear, to the preaching of the Gospel, and Mrs. Mackgil has written, seeking the Reformer's prayers in his behalf. " Your husband," he answers, " is dear to me for that he is a man in- dued with some good gifts, but more dear for that he is your husband. Charity raoveth me to thirst his il- lumination, both for his comfort and for the trouble which you sustain by his coldness, which justly may be called infidelity." He wishes her, however, not to hope too much ; he can promise that his prayers will be earnest, but not that they will be effectual ; it is possible that this is to be her " cross" in life ; that " her head, appointed by God for her comfort, should be her enemy. ' ' And if this be so, well, there is nothing for it ; " with patience she must abide God's merciful deliverance," taking heed only that she does not '* obey manifest iniquity for the pleasure of any mortal man. " ^ I conceive this epistle would have given a very modified sort of pleasure to the Clerk- Register, had it chanced to fall into his hands. Com- pare its tenor — the dry resignation not without a hope of merciful deliverance therein recommended — with 1 Works, iv. 24-,. 344 JOHN KNOX these words from another letter, written but the year before to two married women of London : " Call first for grace by Jesus, and thereafter communicate with your faithful husbands, and then shall God, I doubt not, conduct your footsteps, and direct your counsels to His glory. " ' Here the husbands are put in a very high place ; we can recognize here the same hand that has written for our instruction how the man is set above the woman, even as God above the angels. But the point of the distinction is plain. For Clerk- Register Mackgil was not a faithful husband ; dis- played, indeed, toward religion a " coldness which justly might be called infidelity." We shall see in more notable instances how much Knox's conception of the duty of wives varies according to the zeal and orthodoxy of the husband. As I have said, he may possibly have made the ac- quaintance of Mrs. Mackgil, Mrs. Guthrie, or some other, or all, of these Edinburgh friends while he was still Douglas of Longniddry's private tutor. But our certain knowledge begins in 1549. He was then but newly escaped from his captivity in France, after pull- ing an oar for nineteen months on the benches of the galley Notre Dame ; now up the rivers, holding stealthy intercourse with other Scottish prisoners in the castle of Rouen ; now out in the North Sea, rais- ing his sick head to catch a glimpse of the far-off steeples of St. Andrews. And now he was sent down by the English Privy Council as a preacher to Berwick- 1 Works, iv. 221. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 345 iipon-Tweed ; somewhat shaken in health by all his hardships, full of pains and agues, and tormented by gravel, that sorrow of great men ; altogether, what with his romantic story, his weak health, and his great faculty of eloquence, a very natural object for the sympathy of devout women. At this happy juncture he fell into the company of a Mrs. Ehzabeth Bowes, wife of Richard Bowes, of Aske, in Yorkshire, to whom she had borne twelve children. She was a re- ligious hypochondriac, a very weariful woman, full of doubts and scruples, and giving no rest on earth either to herself or to those whom she honored with her con- fidence. From the first time she heard Knox preach she formed a high opinion of him, and was solicitous ever after of his society. ' Nor was Knox unresponsive. "I have always delighted in your company," he writes, *' and when labors would permit, you know I have not spared hours to talk and commune with you." Often when they had met in depression he reminds her, "God hath sent -great comfort unto both. " ^ We can gather from such letters as are yet extant how close and continuous was their intercourse. " I think it best you remain till the morrow," he writes once, "and so shall we commune at large at afternoon. This day you know to be the day of my study and prayer unto God ; yet if your trouble be intolerable, or if you think my presence may release your pain, do as the Spirit shall move }Ou. . . . Your messenger found me in bed, after a sore trouble Works, vi. 514. 2 /^_ jjj ^^S. 346 JOHN KNOX and most dolorous night, and so dolor may complain to dolor when we two meet. . . . And this is more plain than ever I spoke, to let you know you have a companion in trouble." ' Once we have the curtain raised for a moment, and can look at the two together for the length of a phrase. " After the writing of this preceding," writes Knox, "your brother and mine, Harrie Wycliffe, did advertise me by writing, that your adversary (the devil) took occasion to trouble you because that I did start back from you rehearsing your infii'mities. I renieinber myself so to have done, and that is my common consuetude when anything pierc- eth or toucheth ??y heart. Call to your mind ivhat I did standing at the cupboard at Alnwick. In very deed I thought that no creature had been tempted as I was ; and when 1 heard proceed from your mouth the ver^ same words that he troubles me with, I did wonder and from my heart lament your sore trouble, knowing in myself the dolor thereof." ^ Now intercourse of so very close a description, whether it be religious in- tercourse or not, is apt to displease and disquiet a hus- band ; and we know incidentally from Knox himself that there was some litde scandal about his intimacy with Mrs. Bowes. " The slander and fear of men," he writes, " has impeded me to exercise my pen so oft as I would ; yea, very shame hath holden me from your coinpany, when I was most surely persuaded that God had appointed me at that time to comfort and feed your hungry and afflicted soul. God in His infijide 1 Works, iii. 352, 357., - //•• iii. 350. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 347 mercy , ' * he goes on, * * remove not only from me all fear that tendeth not to godlmess, but fro?n others sus- picion to judge of 7?ie othcnvise than it becometh one member to judge of another. ' ' ^ And the scandal, such as it was, would not be allayed by the dissension in which Mrs. Bowes seems to have lived with her family upon the matter of religion, and the counte- nance shown by Knox to her resistance. Talking of these conflicts, and her courage against " her own flesh and most inward affections, yea, against some of her most natural friends," he writes it, * to the praise of God, he has wondered at the bold constancy which he has found in her when his own heart was faint." * Now, perhaps in order to stop scandalous mouths, perhaps out of a desire to bind the much -loved evan- gelist nearer to her in the only manner possible, Mrs. Bowes conceived the scheme of marrying him to her fifth daughter, Marjorie ; and the Reformer seems to have fallen in with it readily enough. It seems to have been believed in the family that the whole matter had been originally made up between these two, with no very spontaneous inclination on the part of the bride.' Knox's idea of marriage, as I have said, was not the same for all men ; but on the whole, it was not lofty. We have a curious letter of his, written at the request of Queen Mary, to the Earl of Argyle, on very delicate household matters ; which, as he tells us, ** was not well accepted of the said Earl." ^ Wo 1 Works, iii. 390, 391. ^ /^_ [[[_ ^78. 2 /i>. iii. 142. * /l>. ii. 379. 34S JOHN KNOX may suppose, however, that his own home was regU' lated in a similar spirit. I can fancy that for such a man, emotional, and with a need, now and again, to exercise parsimony in emotions not strictly needful, something a little mechanical, something hard and fast and clearly understood, would enter into his ideal of a home. There were storms enough without, and equability was to be desired at the fireside even at a sacrifice of deeper pleasures. So, from a wife, of all women, he would not ask much. One letter to her which has come down to us is, I had almost said, conspicuous for coldness. ^ He calls her, as he called other female correspondents, " dearly beloved sister ;" the epistle is doctrinal, and nearly the half of it bears, not upon her own case, but upon that of her mother. However, we know what Heine wrote in his wife's album ; and there is, after all, one passage that may be held to intimate some tenderness, although even that admits of an amusingly opposite construction. " I think," he says, " I think this be the first letter I ever wrote to you." This, if we are to take it liter- ally, may pair off with the *' two or three children" whom Montaigne mentions having lost at nurse ; the one is as eccentric in a lover as the other in a parent. Nevertheless, he displayed more energy in the course of his troubled wooing than might have been expected. The whole Bowes family, angry enough already at the influence he had obtained over the mother, set their faces obdurately against the match. And I dare say 1 Works, iii. 394. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 349 the opposition quickened his inclination. I find him writing to Mrs. Bowes that she need no further trouble herself about the marriage ; it should now be his busi- ness altogether ; it behoved him now to jeopard his life " for the comfort of his own flesh, both fear and friendship of all earthly creature laid aside." ^ This is a wonderfully chivalrous utterance for a Reformer forty- eight years old ; and it compares well with the leaden coquetries of Calvin, not much over thirty, tak- ing this and that into consideration, weighing together dowries and religious qualifications and the instancy of friends, and exhibiting what M. Bungener calls " an honorable and Christian difficulty" of choice, in frigid indecisions and insincere proposals. But Knox's next letter is in a humbler tone ; he has not found the negotiation so easy as he fancied ; he de- spairs of the marriage altogether, and talks of leaving England, — regards not " what country consumes his wicked carcass." " You shall understand, " he says, " that this sixth of November, I spoke with Sir Robert Bowes" (the head of the famil}^ his bride's uncle) " in the matter you know, according to your request ; whose disdainful, yea, despiteful, words hath so pierced my heart that my life is bitter to me. I bear a good countenance with a sore troubled heart, because he that ought to consider matters with a deep judgment is become not only a despiser, but also a taunter of God's messengers — God be merciful unto him ! Among others his most unpleasing words, while that 1 Works, iii. 376 35 o JOHN KNOX I was about to have declared my heart in the whole matter, he said, ' Away with your rhetorical reasons ! for I will not be persuaded with them.' God knows I did use no rhetoric nor colored speech ; but would have spoken the truth, and that in most simple man- ner. I am not a good orator in my own cause ; but what he would not be content to hear of me, God shall declare to him one day to his displeasure, unless he repent." ' Poor Knox, you see, is quite com- moved. It has been a very unpleasant interview. And as it is the only sample that we have of how things went with him during his courtship, we may infer that the period was not as agreeable for Knox as it has been for some others. However, when once they were married, I imagine he and Marjorie Bowes hit it off together comfortably ^ enough. The little we know of it may be brought together in a very short space. She bore him two sons. He seems to have kept her pretty busy, and depended on her to some degree in his work ; so that when she fell ill, his papers got at once into disorder. ^ Certainly she sometimes wrote to his dictation ; and, in this capacity, he calls her " his left hand." ^ In June 1559, at the headiest moment of the Reforma- tion in Scotland, he writes regretting the absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, " whose presence" (this is the not very grammatical form of his lament) *' whose presence I more thirst, than she that is my 1 Works, lii. 378. 2 //,. vi. 104. 3 lb. v. 5. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 351 own flesh." ' And this, considering i^^he source and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender sentiment. He tells us himself in his history, on the occasion of a certain meeting at the Kirk of Field, that " he v.as in no small heaviness by reason of the late death of his dear bed -fellow, Marjorie Bowes." '^ Calvin, condoling with him, speaks of her as " a wife whose like is not to be found everywhere" (that is very like Calvin), and again, as " the most delightful of wives. " We know what Calvin thought desirable in a wife, " good humor, chastity, thrift, patience, and solicitude for her husband's health," and so we may suppose that the first i\Irs. Knox fel' not far short of this ideal. The actual date of the marriage is uncertain ; but by September 1566, at the latest, the Reformer was settled in Geneva with his \vifc. There is no fear either that he will be dull ; even if the chaste, thrifty, patient Marjorie should" not altogether occupy his mind, he need not go out of the horse to seek more female sympathy ; for behold ! Mrs. Bowes is duly domesticated with the young couple. Dr. M'Crie imagined that Richard Bowes was now dead, and his widow, consequently, free to live where she would ; and where could she go more naturally than to the tiouse of a married daughter .? This, however, is not the case. Richard Bowes did not die till at least two years later. It is impossible to believe that he ap- proved of his wife' s desertion, after so many years of * Works, vi. 27. '-^ lb. ii. 138. 35^ JOHN KNOX marriage, after twelve children had been born to them ; and accordingly we find in his will, dated 1558, no mention either of her or of Knox's wife.^ This is plain sailing. It is easy enough to understand the anger of Bowes against this interloper, who had come into a quiet family, married the daughter in spite ol the lather's opposition, alienated the wife frora the husband and the husband's religion, supported her in a long course of resistance and rebellion, and, after years of intimacy, already too close and tender lor any jealous spirit to behold without resentment, carried her away with him at last into a foreign land. But it is not quite easy to understand how, except out of sheer weariness and disgust, he was ever brought to agree to the arrangement. Nor is it easy to square the Reformer's conduct with his public teaching. We have, for instance, a letter addressed by him, Craig, and Spottiswood, to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, anent " a wicked and rebellious woman,'" one Anne Good, spouse to " John Barron, a minister of Christ Jesus his evangel," who, " after great rebel- lion shown unto him, and divers admonitions given, as well by himself as \>y others in his name, that she should in no wise depart from this realm, nor from his house without his license, hath not the less stubbornly and rebelliously departed, separated herself from his society, left his house, and withdrawn herself from this realm." ^ Perhaps some sort of license v/as ex- 1 Mr. Laing's preface, to. the sixth, volume of Knox's. Works, p» Ixii. 2 Works, vL 534. AXD HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 353 torted, as I have said, from Richard Bowes, wearv with years of domestic dissension ; but setting that aside, the words employed with so much righteous in- dignation by Knox, Craig, and Spottiswood, to de- scribe the conduct of that wicked and rebellious woman, ]\Irs. Barron, would describe nearly as exactly the conduct of the religious r^Irs. Bowes. It is a little bewildering, until we recollect the distinction between faithful and unfaithful husbands ; for Barron was " a minister of Christ Jesus his evangel," while Richard Bowes, besides being own brother to a despiser and taunter of God's messengers, is shrewdly suspected to have been " a bigoted adherent of the Roman Catho- lic faith," or, as Knox himself would have expressed it, "a rotten Papist." You would have thought that Knox was now pretty well supplied with female society. But we are not yet at the end of the roll. The last year of his sojourn in England had been spent principally in London, where he was resident as one of the chaplains of Ed- ward the Sixth ; and here he Coasts, although a stranger, he had, by God's grace, found favor before many. ^ The godly women of the metropolis made much of him ; once he writes to ]\Irs. Bowes that her last letter had found him closeted with three, and he and the three women were all in tears. ^ Out of all, however, he had chosen two. " God," he writes to them, * ' brought us in such familiar acquaintance, that your hearts were incensed and kindled with a special care 1 Works, iv. 220. 2 /jj_ ^i^ 280. 354 JOHN KNOX over me, as a vioiher iiseth to he over her natural child ; and my heart was opened and compelled in your pres- ence to be more plain than ever I was to any." ^ And out of the two even he had chosen one, Mrs. Anne Locke, wife to Mr. Harry Locke, merchant, nigh to Bow Kirk, Cheapside, in London, as the ad- dress runs. If one may venture to judge upon such imperfect evidence, this was the woman he loved best. I have a difficulty in quite forming to myself an idea of her character. She may have been one of the three tearful visitors before alluded to ; she may even have been that one of them who was so profoundly moved by some passages of Mrs. Bowes' s letter, which the Reformer opened, and read aloud to them before they went. " O would to God," cried this impressionable matron, " would to God that I might speak with that person, for I perceive there are more tempted than I." ^ This may have been Mrs. Locke, as I say ; but even if it were, we must not conclude from this one fact that she was such another as Mrs. Bowes. All the evidence tends the other way. She was a woman of understanding, plainly, who followed political events with interest, and to whom Knox thought it worth while to write, in detail, the history of his trials and successes. She was religious, but without that morbid perversity of spirit that made religion so heavy a bur- den for the poor-hearted Mrs. Bowes. More of her I do not find, save testimony to the profound affection that united her to the Reformer. So we find him 1 V^orks, iv. 220. ^ lb. iii. 380. A. YD HIS RE [.AT IONS TO WOMEN. 355 writin^i^ to her from Geneva, in such terms as these : — " You write that your desire is earnest to see me. Dear sister, if I should express the thirst and lafigicor which I have had for your presence, I should appear to pass measure. . . . J'ea, I iveep and rejoice in re- viemhrance of you j but that would evanish by the comfort of your presence, which I assure you is so dear to me, that if the charge of this httle flock here, gathered together in Christ's name, did not impede me, my coming should prevent my letter."^ I say that this was written from Geneva ; and yet you will observe that it is no consideration for his wife or mother-in-law, only the charge of his little flock, that keeps him from setting out forthwith for London, to comfort himself with the dear presence of Mrs. Locke. Remem.ber that was a certain plausible enough pretext for ]\Irs. Locke to come to Geneva — " the most per- fect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles" — for we are now under the reign of that ** horrible monster Jezebel of England," when a lady of good orthodox Sentiments w^as better out of London. It was doubtful, however, whether this was to be. She was detained in England, partly by circumstances unknown, " partly by empire of her head," Mr. Harry Locke, the Cheapside merchant. It is somewhat humorous to see Knox struggling for resignation, now that he has to do with a faithful hus- band (for Mr. Harry Locke was faithful). Had it been otherwise, ** in my heart," he says, "I could 1 Works, iv. 238 356 JOHN KNOX have wished— yea, ' ' here he breaks out, * ' yea, an^ cannot cease to wish — that God would guide you to this place." ^ And after all, he had not long to wait, for, whether Mr. Harry Locke died in the interval, or was wearied, he too, into giving permission, five months after the date of the letter last quoted, " Mrs. Anne Locke, Harry her son, and Anne her daughter, and Katharine her maid," arrived in that perfect school of Christ, the Presbyterian paradise, Geneva. So now, and for the next two years, the cup of Knox's happiness was surely full. Of an afternoon, when the bells rang out for the sermon, the shops closed, and the good folk gathered to the churches, psalm-book in hand, we can imagine him drawing near to the English chapel in quite patriarchal fashion, with Mrs. Knox and Mrs. Bowes and Mrs. Locke, James his servant, Patrick his pupil, and a due following of chil- dren and maids. He might be alone at work all morning in his study, for he wrote much during these two years ; but at night, you may be sure there was a circle of admiring women, eager to hear the new par- agraph, and not sparing of applause. And what work, among others, was he elaborating at this time, but the notorious " First Blast " } So that he may have rolled out in his big pulpit voice, how women were weak, frail, impatient, feeble, foolish, inconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel, and how men were above them, even as God is above the angels, in the ears of his own wife, and the two dearest 1 Works, Iv. atD. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 357 friends he had on earth. But he had lost the sense of incongruity, and continued to despise in theory the ?ex he honored so much in practice, of whom he chose his most intimate associates, and whose courage he was compelled to wonder at, when his own heart was faint. We may say that such a man was not worthy of his fortune ; and so, as he would not learn, he was taken away from that agreeable school, and his fellowship of women was broken up, not to be reunited. Called into Scotland to take at last that strange position in history which is his best claim, to commemoration, he was followed thither by his wife and his mother in-law. The wife soon died. The death of her daughter did not altogether separate ]\Irs. Bowes from Knox, but she seems to have come and gone between his house and England. In 1562, however, we fmd him char- acterized as " a sole man by reason of the absence of his mother-in-law, ]\Irs'. Bowes," and a passport is got for her, her man, a maid, and " three horses, whereof two shall return," as well as liberty to take all her own money with her into Scotland. This looks like a definite arrangement ; but whether she died at Edinburgh, or went back to England yet again, I can- not find. With that great family of hers, unless in leaving her husband she had quarrelled with them all, there must have been frequent occasion for her pres- ence, one would think. Knox at least survived her ; and we possess his epigraph to their long intimacy, given to the world by him in an appendix to his latest 358 JOHN- KNOX publication, I have said in a former paper that Knox was not shy of personal revelations in his published works. And the trick seems to have grown on him. To this last tract, a controversial onslaught on a Scot- tish Jesuit, he prefixed a prayer, not very pertinent to the matter in hand, and containing references to his family which were the occasion of some wit in his ad- versary's answer ; and appended what seems equally irrelevant, one of his devout letters to Mrs. Bowes, with an explanatory preface. To say truth, I believe he had always felt uneasily that the circumstances of this intimacy were very capable of misconstruction ; and now, when he was an old man, taking " his good night of all the faithful in -both realms," and only de- sirous " that without any notable sclander to the evangel of Jesus Christ, he might end his battle : for as the world was weary of him, so wa.s he of it \ ' — in such a spirit it was not, perhaps, unnatural that he should return to this old story, and seek to put it right in the eyes of all men, ere he died. " Because that God," he says, " because that God now in His mercy hath put an end to the battle of my dear mother, Mis- tress Elizabeth Bowes, before that He put an end to my wretched life, I could not cease but declare to the world what was the cause of our great familiarity and long acquaintance ; which was neither flesh nor blood, but a troubled conscience upon her part, which never suffered her to rest but when she was in the company of the faithful, of whom (from the fnst hear- ing of the word at my mouth) she judged me to be AND H/S RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 359 one. . . . Her company to me was comfortable (yea, honorable and profitable, for she was to me and m\ne a mother), but yet it was not without some cross ; for besides trouble and fashery of body sus- tained for her, my mind was seldom quiet, for doing somewhat for the comfort of her troubled con- science." ^ He had written to her years before, from his first exile in Dieppe, that '* only God's hand" could withhold him from once more speaking with her face to face ; and now, when God's hand has indeed interposed, when there lies between them, instead of the voyageable straits, that great gulf over which no man can pass, this is the spirit in which he can look back upon their long acquaintance. She was a re- ligious hypochondriac, it appears, whom, not without some cross and fashery of mind and body, he was good enough to tend. He might have given a truer character of their friendship, had he thought less of his own standing in public estimation, and more of the dead woman. But he was in all things, as Burke said of his son in that ever-memorable passage, a pub- lic creature. He wished that even into this private place of his affections posterity should follow him with a complete approval ; and he was willing, in order that this might be so, to exhibit the defects of his lost friend, and tell the world what weariness he had sus- tained through her unhappy disposition. There is something here that reminds one of Rousseau. I do not think he ever saw Mrs. Locke after he left 1 Works, vi. gts, Si4. 3tJo JOHN KNOX Geneva ; but his correspondence with her continued for three years. It may have continued longer, of course, but I thin!.: the last letters we possess read like the last that would be written. Perhaps ]\Irs. Locke was then remarried, for there is much obscurity over her subsequent history. For as long as their intimacy was kept up, at least, the human element remains in the Reformer's life. Here is one passage, for exam- ple, the most likable utterance of Knox's that I can quote : — Mrs. Locke has been upbraiding him as a bad correspondent. " My remembrance of you," he answers, " is not so dead, but I trust it shall be fresh enough, albeit it be renewed by no outward token for one year. 0/ nature, I am churlish ; yet one thing I ashame not to affirm, that familiarity once thoroughly con- tracted was never yet broken 07i my default. The cause may he that I have rather need of all, than that any have need of me. However it {that) be, it cannot be, as I say, the corporal absence of one year or two that can quench in my heart that familiar acquaintance in Christ Jesus, which half a year did engender, and al- most two years did nourish and confirm. And there- fore, whether I write or no, be assuredly persuaded that I have you in such memory as becometh the faithful to have of the faithful." ' This is the truest touch of personal humility that I can remember to have seen in all the five volumes of the Reformer's col- lected works : it is no small honor to IMrs. Locke that his affection for her should have brought home to him 1 Works, vi. II. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN. 361 this unwonted feeling of dependence upon others. Everything else in the course of the correspondence testifies to a good, sound, downright sort of friendship between the two, less ecstatic than it was at first, per- haps, but serviceable and very equal. He gives her ample details as to the progress of the work of refor- mation ; sends her the sheets of the Conftssion of Faiih, "in quairs," as he calls it; asks her to assist him with her prayers, to collect money for the good cause in Scotland, and to send him books for himself — books by Calvin especially, one on Isaiah, and a new revised edition of the " Institutes." " I must be bold on your liberality," he writes, " not only in that, but in greater things as I shall need." ^ On her part she applies to him. for spiritual advice, not after the man- ner of the drooping Mrs. Bowes, but in a more posi- tive spirit, — advice as to practical points, advice as to the Church of England, for instance, whose ritual he condemns as a " mingle-mangle." ^ Just at the end she ceases to write, sends him "a token, without writing." " 1 understand your impediment, " he an- swers, " and therefore I cannot complain. Yet if you understood the variety of my temptations, I doubt not but you would have written somewhat." ^ One letter more, and then silence. And I think the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence. It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come ^ Works, vi. pp. 21, 101, 108, 130. ^ lb. vi. 83, ^ Ih. vi, isg. 562 JOHN KNOX to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January 1563, Randolph writes to Cecil : " Your Honor will take it for a great won- der when I shall write unto you that Mr. Knox shall marry a very near kinswoman of the Duke's, a Lord's daughter, a young lass not above sixteen years of T.ge." ^ He adds that he fears he will be laughed at for reporting so mad a story. And yet it was true ; and on Palm Sunday, 1564, Margaret Stewart, daugh- ter of Andrew Lord Stewart of Ochiltree, aged seven- teen, was duly united to John Knox, Minister of St. Giles's Kirk, Edinburgh, aged fifty-nine, — to the great disgust of Queen Mary from family pride, and I would fain hope of many others for more humane con- siderations. " In this," as Randolph says, " I wish he had done otherwise.'"' The Consistory of Geneva, " that most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles, ' ' were wont to forbid marriages on the ground of too great a dispro- portion in age. I cannot help wondering whether the old Reformer's conscience did not uneasily remind him, now and again, of this good custom of his re- ligious metropolis, as he thought of the two-and- forty years that separated him from his poor bride. Fitly enough, we hear nothing of the second Mrs. Knox until she appears at her husband's deathbed, eight 1 WorV:5, vi. $32. AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN, 363 years after. She bore him three daughters in the in- terval ; and I suppose the poor child's martyrdom was made as easy for her as might be. She was ** ex- tremely attentive to him" at the end, we read ; and he seems to have spoken to her with some confidence. Moreover, and this is very characteristic, he had copied out for her use a little volume of his own de- votional letters to other women. This is the end of the roll, unless we add to it Mrs. Adamson, who had delighted much in his com- pany " by reason that she had a troubled conscience," and whose deathbed is commemorated at some length in the pages of his history. ' And now, looking back, it cannot be said that Knox's intercourse with women was quite of the high- est sort. It is characteristic that we find him more alarmed for his own reputation than for the reputation of the women with whom he was familiar. There was a fatal preponderance of self in all his intimacies : many women came to learn from him, but he never condescended to become a learner in his turn. And so there is not anything idyllic in these intimacies of his ; and they were never so renovating to his spirit as they might have been. But I believe they were good enough for the women. I fancy the women knew what they were about when so many of them followed after Knox. It is not simply because a man is always fully persuaded that he knows the right from the wrong and sees his way plainly through the maze of life, 1 Works, i. 246. 364 JOHN KNOX great qualities as these are, that people will love and follow him, and write him letters full of their ** earnest desire for him" when he is absent. It is not over a man, whose one characteristic is grim fixity of purpose, that the hearts of women are " incensed and kindled with a special care," as it were over their natural chil- dren. In the strong quiet patience of all his letters to the weariful Mrs. Bowes, we may perhaps see one cause of the fascination he possessed for these religious women. Here was one whom you could besiege all the year round with inconsistent scruples and com- plaints ; you might write to him on Thursday that you were so elated it was plain the devil was deceiving you, and again on Friday that you were so depressed it was plain God had cast you ofi forever ; and he would read all this patiently and sympathetically, and give you an answer in the most reassuring polysyl- lables, and all divided into heads— who knows.? — like a treatise on divinity. And then, those easy tears of his. There are some women who like to see men cry- ing ; and here was this great-voiced, bearded man of God, who might be seen beating the solid pulpit every Sunday, and casting abroad his clamorous denuncia- tions to the terror of all, and who on the Monday would sit in their parlors by the hour, and weep with them over their manifold trials and temptations. Now- adays, he would have to drink a dish of tea with all these penitents. ... It sounds a little vulgar, as the past will do, if we look into it too closely. We could not let these great folk of old into our drawing-rooms. AND HIS RELAl^IONS TO Queen Elizabeth would positively not be eligible for a housemaid. The old manners and the old customs go sinking from grade to grade, until, if some mighty emperor revisited the glimpses of the moon, he would not find any one of his way of thinking, any one he could strike hands with and talk to freely and Vv^ithout offence, save perhaps the porter at the end of the street, or the fellow with his elbows out who loafs all day be- fore the public-house. So that this little note of vul- garity is not a thing to be dwelt upon ; it is to be put away from us, as we recall the fashion of these old in- timacies ; so that we may only remember Ivnox as one who was very long suffering with women, kind to them in his own way, loving them in his own way — and that not the worst way, if it was not the best — and once at least, if not twice, moved to his heart of hearts by a woman, and giving expression to the yearning he had for her society in words that none of us need be ashamed to borrow. And let us bear in mind always that the period I have gone over in this essay begins when the Reformer was already beyond the middle age, and already broken in bodily health : it has been the story of an old man's friendships. This it is that makes Knox enviable. Unknown until past forty, he had then before him five-and-thirty years of splendid and influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an uncommon degree of powder, lived in his own country as a sort of king, and did what he would with the sound of his voice out of the pulpit. And besides all this, such a 366 JOHN KNOX. following of faithful women ! One would take the first forty years gladly, if one could be sure of the last thirty. IMost of us, even if, by reason of great strength and the dignity of gray hairs, we retain some degree of public respect in the latter days of our existence, will find a falling away of friends, and a solitude mak- ing itself round about us day by day, until we are left alone with the hired sick nurse. For the attraction of a man's character is apt to be outlived, like the attrac- tion of his body ; and the power to love grows feeble in its turn, as well as the power to inspire love in others. It is only with a few rare natures that friend- ship is added to friendship, love to love, and the man keeps growing richer in affection — richer, I mean, as a bank may be said to grow richer, both giving and receiving more — after his head is white and his back weary, and he prepares to go down into the dust ci death. THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Sidney Colvin. With drawings by Peixottc and GuERlN. 2 vols., 8vo, $5.00 net. The following volumes, i2?no, red clothe 25 volumes, i?i a box, $j2.oo. St. Ives. The Adventures of a French Prisoner in England. i2mo, $1.50. " St. Ives " is a story of action and adventure in the author's most buoyant and stirring manner. One does not expect to find commonplaces m Stevenson, but even his most ardent admirers may well be surprised at the grim tragedy in the opening chapters of "St. Ives." In the South Seas. With Map. i2mo, $1.50. This volume is made up of selections from the interesting sketches contributed to periodicals by Mr. Stevenson, narratmg his experiences and observations m the M^rq.ie^as (the scene of .Melville's "Typee"), Paumotus. and the Gilbert Islands, gathered in the course of two cruises on the yacht " Casco " (1888) and the schooner " Equator" (1889I. Weir of Hermiston. i2mo, $1.50. "Surely no son of Scotland has died, leaving with his last breath a worthier tribute to the land he loved." — Sidney Colviv. Poems and Ballads. i2mo, $1.50. 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A masterpiece of narrative." — The Saturday Review. THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON The Master of Ballantrae. A Winter's Tale. With lo full-page illustrations by William Hole. i2mo, $1.50. *• We have here a fresh and striking example of Mr. Stevenson's remarkable intellectual versatility and flexibility. It is a fine novel, realistic and romantic by turns, marked by rare skill of draughtmanship and vigor of imagination, an honor to the author and a credit to literature."— AVa*/ 1 ork Tribune. The Wrecker. By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. With 12 full-page illustrations by William Hole and W. L. Metcalf. l2mo, $1.50. " It seems much the most enticing romance at present before the veorld." — Andrew Lang. Prince Otto. A Romance. i2mo, $1.00. " A graceful and unusual romance, full of surprises, full of that individuality which is so charming in every page this author has published, and so unhack- neyed that one knows not what to expect from any one paragraph to the next." — Boston Courier. The Merry Men, And Other Tales and Fables, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. l2mo, $1.25. " Everything in the collection is worthy of its remarkable author." — The Independent. The Black Arrow. A Tale of the Two Roses. Illustrated by Will H. Low and Alfred Brennan. i2mo, $1.25. "It has all the good qualities of his other stories — their invention, their spirit and their charming English. The hand that wrote ' Kidnapped ' is vis- ible in its stirring pages."— R. H. Stoddard. New Arabian Nights. i2mo, $1.25. " There is something in his work which engages and fixes the attention from the first page to the last, which shapes itself before the mind's eye while reading, and which refuses to be forgotten long after the book has been put away." — R. 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Contents : Victor Hugo's Romances, Some Aspects of Robert Burns, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Yoshida Torajiro, Francois Villon, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, John Knox, and Women. An Inland Voyage. i2mo, $1.00. *' Mr. Stevenson does not make canoeing itself his main theme, but delights in charming bits of description that, in their close attention to picturesque detail, remind one of the work of a skilled ' genre ' painter. Nor does he hesitate .... to indulge in a strain of gently humorous reflection that furnishes some of the pleasantest passages of the book." — 'Good Literature. Travels with a Donkey In the Cevennes. i2mo, $1.00. " The author sees everything with the eye of a philosopher. He has a steady flow of humor that is as apparently spontaneous as a mountain brook, and he views a landscape or a human figure, not only as a tourist seeking subjects for a book, but as an artist to whom the slightest line or tint carries a definite impres- sion." — Boston Courier. 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We have first a description of the curious and complex elements of discord, both native and foreign, in Samoa, and then a mar- velous story of how these discordant elements have been at work during eight jeaxs."— Public Opinion. /^•^z p THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON The following volumes^ i6mo, green buckram^ 6 volumes, in a box, $6^0. Fables. i6mo, $1.00. In these delightful fables will be found a new and interesting expression of Mr. Stevenson's genius. They are here collected and issued for the first time in book form, attractively bound, in uniform style with the '* Vailima Letters." Vailima Letters. 2 vols., i6mo, $2.25. "The work is full of charm, of brightness, of changeful light and shadow and thick-coming fancies. Again it is readable in a high degree, and will, we make no doubt, delight thousands of readers." — London Spectator. The Ebb Tide. i6mo, $1.25. The Amateur Emigrant. i6mo, $1.25. M a c a i r e . A Melodramatic Farce. By R. L. Stevenson and W. E. Henley. i6mo, $1.00. IN SPECIAL EDITIONS. A Child*s Garden of Verses. New Edition. Profusely and beautifully illustrated by Charles Robinson. i2mo, $1.50. "An edition to be recommended in every way. An artist possessing a graceful fancy and a sure decorative sense has supplied a profusion of illustrations. The letter-press is beautiful."— -A^. Y. Evening Post. A Christmas Sermon. i6mo, net, 50 cents. Ballads. i2mo, $1.00. A Child's Garden of Verses. l2mo, $1.00. Virginibus Puerisque. Cameo Edition. i6mo, $1.25. Underwoods. i2mo, $1.00. Treasure Island. Illustrated, i2mo, $1.25. Three Plays. By R. L. Ste- venson and W. E. Henley. 8vo, $2.00 net. The Suicide Club. {^Ivory Series 7^ i6mo, 75 cents. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. i2mo, $1.00. THE THISTLE EDITION. Sold only by Subscription. Each vol. 8vo. $2.00 net. In this luxurious edition of Mr. Stevenson's works, the Novels and Tales occupy twelve volumes, the Travels and Essays four, the Poems are complete in a single volume, and the Letters and Mis- cellanies seven, or 24 volumes in all. Each volume has a photo- gravure or etched frontispiece. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS •S3->57 Fifth Avenue, - . - New York