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ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF
BARRETT WENDELL




LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS




ESSAYS
IN MEMORY OF
BARRETT WENDELL
BY
HIS ASSISTANTS


CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1926




COPYRIGHT, 1926
BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF
HARVARD COLLEGE


PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.




Dedicated to
MRS. WENDELL








PREFACE


THE name of Barrett Wendell belongs to the literary tradition of America and needs no memorials
to ensure its enduring place in that tradition. The
present volume, therefore, was not conceived with the
thought of adding lustre to the name which will be remembered long after these essays are forgotten. This
memorial is rather the expression of a desire on the
part of some of those most closely associated with him
to express their admiration and affection for the man.
Composed only of contributions from Mr. Wendell's
former assistants in his courses at Harvard, the present
volume, it is believed, is unique among such tributes.
The group of contributors is a small circle indeed, only
one of many that would be honored to pay homage to
the great teacher. But through more than thirty years
Mr. Wendell's relations with his successive assistants
were peculiarly intimate; the companionship which he
gave to those working with him was an inspiration. It
is, therefore, appropriate for them to commemorate
their gratitude for his abiding influence.
W. R. CASTLE, JR.
PAUL KAUFMAN


Easter, 1926.




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TIHE essay "Lyric Poetry" appeared, in The Nation,
March 5, 1914; "Joseph Conrad -Alchemist of the
Sea," in The International Book Review, September,
1924;' "The Crux of Dante's Comedy," in The Romanic
Review, October-December, 192.)5. They are reprinted
here by permission' of the editors of these periodicals.




CONTENTS


BARRETT WENDELL - TEACHER...........
WILLIAM R. CASTLE, Jr.
PROFESSOR WENDELL AND THE PHILOSOPHERS.
DANIEL SARGENT.      I
II


WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?............ 21
OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL
THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE................. 41
H. W. L. DANA
THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY..............     61
J. B. FLETCHER


CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE...........
H. R. PATCH
THE QUESTION OF MEDIAEVALISM..............
T. L. RIGGS
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST..........
H. W. HERRINGTON
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"............
ROBERT WITHINGTON
IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES..................
H. B. LATHROP
HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS...............
PAUL KAUFMAN
IVANHOE AND ITS LITERARY CONSEQUENCES......
G. H. MAYNADIER
THE ASIAN LYRIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE......
H. L. SEAVER
LYRIC  POETRY.......................
H. DEW. FULLER
THE FORSAKEN MERMAN.................
H. G. LEACH
A NOTE ON YEATS..................
N. J. O'CoNoR
JOSEPH CONRAD -ALCHEMIST OF THE SEA........
P. A. HUTCHISON
STELLIGERI -A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY.......
E. E. HUNT


~ 93. 109. 119. 153
S169. 189. 219
S235. 257
273. 283. 291
301








BARRETT WENDELL - TEACHER








BARRETT WENDELL - TEACHER


BY WILLIAM R. CASTLE, JR.
THERE is a German tradition of scholarship in American
letters which rates exploration above discovery, the process above the conclusion. The exponents of this theory are
more interested in Chaucer's verse than in his poetry; they
read through microscopes, searching for faults rather than for
beauty; they are so interested in tracing the origin of a great
idea to its obscure progenitors that they forget the vitality
and the influence of the idea itself. They spend years over the
sources and the analysis of second-rate plays that were hardly
worth the cost of printing and are not, intrinsically, worthy of
an hour's study. They are the word-grubbers of literature, exalting the text above the thought expressed by the text. Yet
they are immensely important in what might be called their
accidental discoveries, in the by-products of their grubbing.
A squirrel, digging for nuts, uproots a pebble, and the man,
following the track of the squirrel, finds the gold under the
crusted surface. So the student of ideas draws from the laborious accumulations of the grammarians new interpretations
which explain misunderstood phases of the history of human
thought, thereby illuminating the present and marking the
path of the future.
These patient dissecters of works of imagination, therefore,
are invaluable aids to true understanding of literature, which
is literature only in so far as it is a true picture of many-sided
life. No one recognized more clearly than Barrett Wendell,
the importance of this kind of scholarly research. The reason
that men sometimes criticized his attitude was that he refused
to consider research as an end in itself. He respected it as mental discipline, but questioned the value of mental discipline




4


WILLIAM R. CASTLE, JR.


which has only itself as an aim. Wendell could respect a young
man who spent a year in the collection of evidence as to the
sources of an Elizabethan play. He could not fully respect the
same man who, ten years later, was unable to correlate that
evidence, to draw deductions from that evidence which would
constitute a permanent contribution to human knowledge. In
other words, mental discipline which did not create the power
to reach and to express just and vital decisions seemed to him
sterile.
In any consideration of Barrett Wendell as a teacher this
attitude of mind toward what is commonly called scholarship,
but is actually only one angle of scholarship, is of paramount
importance. He had in his own make-up few of the characteristics of the average Doctor of Philosophy. He was frankly
not interested in philology except in so far as it revealed new
meanings in the texts. He read.Eschylus and Horace, in the
one case for the sublimity of thought and its magnificent expression, in the other for the delicate accuracy and charm of
the portrayal of Roman life and ideas; but in neither case was
he interested in the grammatical construction except in so far
as it was necessary to explain the thought. He did not parse
Greek and Latin; he read them. He was by nature too impatient for minute research, but was always ready gratefully to
utilize the discoveries of others. He knew the value of research,
but knew also that to undertake it himself was to waste his
talents, just as it would be economic and artistic waste for a
portrait painter to spend his time over the mechanical preparation of his colors. His power was synthetic rather than analytic. He understood how to use the tools which others made
for him.
As a lecturer Wendell's eccentricities of manner repelled intolerant students, who believed them affectation. That they
were not affectation does not change the fact that they diminished his usefulness as a teacher since they demonstrably nar



BARRETT WENDELL - TEACHER                  5
rowed his field of influence. Youth is very often intolerant.
He lost yet other followers because he refused to be stereotyped, refused to make his lectures mere collections of facts.
To him dates, for example, were important as indicators of the
period in which men lived and worked, not as the birthday or
the death-day of this or that individual. It all seemed horribly vague to those who depend on written road signs rather
than on the contour of the country. Some were bewildered and
called him a false guide. Some called him an iconoclast in
spite of his conservatism. This was because he always spoke
the truth as he saw it, and those who had been taught by
worthy school-mistresses that the "Ode to the Nativity" was
the most sublime of English poems felt aggrieved and insulted
when Wendell called it jejune, ridiculed its turgid metaphors
and its false philosophy. His just and discriminating discussions of Milton's great poems seemed to them an incomplete
apology.
Wendell's aim in teaching was to make his students think
for themselves. His lectures were never textbooks. They
were mental tonics. On active minds the reaction was both
instantaneous and lasting; on sluggish or prosaic minds the
effect was generally only irritating. The lecturer opened the
windows; he did not stand by with a pulmotor to make sure
that the patient breathed the air which blew through the win.
dow. His lectures, based on an astonishingly comprehensive
and often minute knowledge of his subject, were never
intended to be a complete presentation. They were always
introductions, phrased in a manner to raise interest or curiosity. Wendell felt that knowledge of an author's work was
an essentially personal and subjective affair, that it was no
more possible to know a book through hearing people talk
about it than it is to know a man through hearing him discussed. He never dissected a piece of literature because he
knew that to dissect is too often to kill. He touched on its






6           W. R. CASTLE, JR.


goo.d points and its bad, as they seemed to him personally
good or bad., and urged his students to test his conclusions for
themselves. He did not want them to feel., at the end of a
lecture, that they had the whole story, but rather that they had
been introduced to somebody tremendously worth the trouble
of knowing, or that they had been led through a gate whence
radiated many paths, any one of which presented fascinating
possibilities of exploration -or romance. He tried to pass on
to them his own intense belief in the limitless extent and lure
of intellectual adventure.
There are undoubtedly men alive to-day who believed that
Wendell dwelt on the depraved or, as the college student
would call it, the "smutty" side of books. People who hold
any such belief are those who have permanent Sunday-school
minds. It is quite true that, in lecturing on Fielding or on
Donne's Love Poems, Wendell did not attempt to gloss over
the vulgarities, to pretend a purity that was non-existent;
but he never emphasized the impurity. He had the utmost
contempt for "smut," for sly insinuation, for innuendo. It so
thoroughly disgusted him that he could hardly be fair to an
author like Sterne. He was not afraid of a spade so long as it
was not gilded and used as a household decoration. He hated
vice, in literature or anywhere else, but he loved truth too
much to pretend virtue because rottenness was hidden under
a cloth of gold. The value of our older literature, he pointed
out., could never be tested by nineteenth-century standards of
morals., since literature, to be vital, must be a true expression
of the age in which it is produced. If it fell below that standard it was contemptible, just as it ceased also to be literature
if it ignored human frailty and became priggish. The great
literature of Greece is no less ennobling because it does not
preach the moral tenets of a sectarian Christianity. Wendell
was essentially, honestly, robustly pure-minded, an attribute
which showed as clearly in his teaching as in his life.




BARRETT WENDELL - TEACHER 7




Wendell was never afraid to be enthusiastic, but his enthusiasm was only for the great things. When he read a bit of
verse, put down the book, sat silent for a moment, and then
cried, "Is n't it beautiful?" his students knew that it was
beautiful. They had perhaps not recognized it before; but
the lecturer's emotion was real, and when he read the stanza
again, all but the dullest felt at least a trace of his exaltation.
Generally he made no comment; he only read a passage aloud
in such manner as to impart to others the effect it had on him.
And curiously enough Wendell, with all his eccentricities of
speech, was a vivid and effective reader. This may have been
by reason of the fact that his aim in reading was to bring out
the author's thought - just, indeed, as it was his aim in
lecturing. Nothing is eternally beautiful that is a mere matter
of surface. The most beautiful clothes cannot wholly mask
an ugly body, nor can beautiful expression permanently hide
vacuity or viciousness of mind. This was why Wendell had
such utter contempt for a writer like Oscar Wilde. For Wendell the thought always came first and its expression second.
The rare combination of sublimity of thought and expression
in such a phrase as Dante's " In lasuavoluntade e' nostra pace"y
was the ultimate hope of literature., seldom, alas, to be obtained., but always glowing like a star at the end of every
upward-leading path. No student of Wendell will ever forget
that great literature is the fit and therefore the beautiful expression of great thinking.
This idea Wendell carried over with him into the prosaic
task of teaching men to write. Here, -as in his courses on literature, his purpose was to. make his students think. He knew
they could never write even passably well unless they had
something to say. He knew also that the attempt to express
a thought clearly, concisely, and effectively is one of the best
ways to clarify the thought itself. In his conferences with
individual students, therefore, he laid little stress on mere




8


8            W. R. CASTLE, JR.


formal rhetorical construction and very great stress on straight
thinking. That was the reason his conferences were stimulating to men with good minds, to all who were honestly trying
to tell something; the reason also that other students were
angry when he ruthlessly tore away the trappings of brave
words and scornfully exhibited the vacuity of mind beneath
the words. The only way to say a thing well is to have something to say.
Some students felt that Wendell was cruel in that he expected too much of them, that he looked for the miracle of
a mature mind in an immature body, and that, not finding it,
he scoffed. This is not true. He understood and loved youth,
and the gropings of youth. The miracle of maturity of mind
in a boy of twenty could point only to later rigidity, to the
priggishness of excessive self-confidence. But he insisted on
sincerity, on honest search for the truth. To the boy who was
trying to think things out he was kindness itself, ready with a
helping hand over the hard places, but never willing to furnish
crutches, which only confirm inherent weakness. He was
savage only to pretense, to conscious attempts to deceive,
sarcastic only when laziness resulted in shoddy thinking and
therefore shoddy writing. Sometimes the boys who suffered
under- the lash were angered or shamed into making a real
effort, and then Wendell's advice was generously helpful. The
only students who gained nothing from his courses in composition were the incorrigibly lazy and the incorrigibly commonplace; and even they, perhaps, when their minds stirred
in later years, remembered something useful from these early
neglected lectures and conferences. It is possibly true, indeed, that many men have only long after realized the value
of those hours with Barrett Wendell. He had the happy
faculty of putting what he had to say memorably; his phrases
linger and their application to life becomes clearer as life
itself is better understood.




BARRETT WENDELL- TEACHER


9


That was, perhaps, Wendell's outstanding distinction as a
teacher -- that he made his students feel the inevitable relation between the things he taught and the lives they lived.
This is true in the broadest possible sense. His lectures on
literature were not designed to enable a student to go out and
make his living by teaching, but rather to make the literature
discussed a part of the texture of his thought, broadening his
vision, sharpening his appreciation, and thus enriching his
life. His discussion of English composition was not intended
to fit a man to join an advertising firm, but to develop his
power of clear thinking by forcing him to express accurately
and vividly what was in his mind. That a man could write a
better advertisement or deliver a better lecture as a result of
this teaching was, so to speak, a by-product of the teaching.
Its main object was to develop the man through giving him
keener appreciation of the fine and beautiful things of life,
thus to broaden and at the same time clarify his vision, and
finally, by enabling him to think through a subject, to express his thoughts with precision and vigor.
To those who had the privilege of working in close association with Barrett Wendell there came a new conception of
the profession of college instruction. The old idea of the
pedagogue rigidly dispensing knowledge in neatly wrapped
packages gave place to the idea of the vigorous human being
who shared generously with his students his own abundant
stores of learning. He was like some vital force giving out
light but never satisfied to have those around him act merely
as reflectors; he wanted rather to inspire them with his own
vitality, that they too might give out light, each according to
his own inner power. That individual power was what he
strove to cultivate. He never saw his students as a mass to
be raised with the same lever, but rather every one as a separate, living problem who would respond to special treatment.
That was why he was great in conference, sympathetic with




io


I0          W. R. CASTLE, JR.


some, sarcastic with others, tolerant of those who remem'bere  butdidnot hin, eagerly appreciative of those who
had ideas of their own which he could so often help them to
express. Few there were who realized how unreservedly he
gave of his own strength to break down the barriers of diffidence, or inertia, or obstinacy, which bound or choked back the
intelligence of the young men who made up his classes.
There was nothing of pedantry in Wendell. It was abhorrent to a man of his essentially modest nature. He could not
be pedantic when his purpose in life was far less to teach facts
than to give such substance of thought, such ability to express
and such eagerness to achieve, that any one of his students
might forge ahead of him. He respected them all, unless they
were consciously and intentionally lazy or intellectually dishonest, and thereby set a standard of modesty for his assistants. He died young because he had given the strength
which most reserve to make his students use their own brains.,
to make them intellectually independent, to teach them
through his own unconscious example the dignity of service,
to enable them to be powerful with gentleness., teachers and
leaders of men with due humility.
Some scoffed at Wendell, some were afraid of him, a few
laughed at him; but his enduring monument is the army of
men who were inspired by him to high thinking; who were
helped by him to understand the fullness and the richness of
life; who', in their turn, have become light-givers.




PROFESSOR WENDELL AND THE
PHILOSOPHERS








PROFESSOR WENDELL AND THE
PHILOSOPHERS
By DANIEL SARGENT
IT may seem gratuitous to consider Professor Wendell in his
relation to philosophers. He did not associate with them,
he did not claim himself of them. He called himself " a man
of letters." In his teaching of literature, moreover, he was
always afraid lest the theories of philosophy might with their
little arrogance obscure the mighty pages with which they
were concerned. He warned himself against theorists, against
theories. I remember with what gently concealed satisfaction
he told me that it had been remarked of him by an eminent
foreigner that he was notable as the only extant American
without a panacea.
His aversion to philosophy was in a sense itself a philosophy.
He had elaborated it. An individual man could not feasibly
pretend to solve life's mysteries. His span of life was too
short. His prejudices were too strong. His fallibility had been
proven. His part of wisdom, then, would be to be at least
sympathetic to the established creeds which he could not
individually accept, and tolerant of traditions which he could
not temporarily justify. If an individual man did entertain
personal theories, as an individual man must, he should certainly not suppress them. He should treat them hospitably,
use them for intellectual commerce with his friends, but remain wary of them. Above all, he should not wreck the world
for them, nor torment his' well-wishers by them.
But in spite of his intellectual forbearance, Professor Wendell did present certain positive philosophical theories. No
course of instruction did he ever give without justifying, to




14


DANIEL SA~RGENT


himself at least, its very existence. Among his papers I happen to have come upon what might be called his justification
of his course of English composition. It is on two sheets of
letter-paper contained in an envelope with this legend on it:
"Final Talk in English 12, 28 May, 1888." The writing,
which is so good an example of what he called " thinking, pen
in hand," begins thus: "Were English Composition no more
than what it is commonly thought, the art of using one's own
language decently; were the final result of the study nothing
but an increased power of putting words together prettily, I
should agree with whoever condemns it as unfit for a university
career."  What exactly he considers "English composition"
to be, is thereupon explained in ten carefully expressed paragraphs which in their final analysis present the thesis that
"English composition" is a fine art, and that the teaching of
it as such initiates those taught into a wisdom above the limits
of the fine art. "And so, I think," he goes on, "this art work
of ours teaches us in a way I have hardly suggested to you
before, to see what real life is, by learning more than without
this training we could learn, to feel, to sympathize with, to
penetrate, to attune, the weakness that is the inevitable mark
of humanity in the work of even our strongest fellows."
Whether it is advisable to seek in this paragraph a definite
statement of Professor Wendell's philosophy is a matter of
doubt. It was written in 1888, and it is known that his ideas.
concerning composition, and particularly the teaching of it,
underwent a definite change. It is entirely fitting, however,
to find in them an evidence of the busily speculative quality
of his mind.
Almost all Professor Wendell's courses of lectures came,,
each of them, ultimately to be embodied in a book. No one
of these books is devoid of philosophic interest. Possibly
"The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature," owing to the fact that it was a course of lectures given




WENDELL AND THE PHILOSOPHERS


i5


in England (at Trinity College, Cambridge), took more upon
itself to make a profession of philosophic principles. The
lecturer felt that as a stranger he had to introduce himself and
his methods. He even defined literature: it was "The lasting
expression of the meaning of life."  He did not choose to consider it in what he referred to, in deference to "science," as the
orthodox way, that of inquiring what surroundings produced
this book or that. No, he had grown to think of literature,
and care for it, mostly as a temperamental fact. His train of
thought leads him to this confession: "So a literature seems
to me most interesting, and most significant when we consider
it as the unconscious expression of national temper." The
more one scrutinizes the kind of delight Professor Wendell
felt as he read the books which surrounded him, the more one
is convinced that his enjoyment came chiefly from the play
of his intellect with theories concerning them. He read
Milton in Italy,2 and was fascinated by the thought (the impression, he calls it) that Milton's images resembled the figures
and landscapes of seventeenth-century Italy.     Professor
Wendell became a philosopher from reading books, but not
from reading books on philosophy.
During the last twenty years of his life, he pondered more
and more on this puzzle, the relation of history to literature.
His lectures on American literature and on comparative literature showed his tireless interest in the subject, and the importance which he considered it to have for others is witnessed
to by his insistence that it be made a special field of study for
undergraduates at Harvard. Finally he wove his speculations
on the matter into a book, "The Traditions of European Literature," which, owing to the fact that it was his last book,
and was written under protracted suffering, bears somewhat
the relation to his life that a testament would.
x The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature (New York, 1904),
p. 3.                                 2 Ibid., p. 320.




16


i6       DANIEL SARGENT


At first sight it might be thought that the theories in the
book are few indeed. It bears the mark of being no more than
a delightfully written summary of European literature. There
is no controversial tone to it. It invites men who live in time
to think in terms of time. It points out the undisputed 'unity
of our European, Mediterranean, civilization. It emphasizes
how as a matter of fact our best things are those which have
been carried on from one generation to another. There is no
effervescence of opinion, none of the virile combativeness of
theologians. His goal is an immediate one, to teach a definite
group of people what they can in a definite amount of time
be expected to learn.
But there are philosophic implications of the book which
are not on the surface. In the first place, the author by the
very choice of his subject confessed that he could not help becoming what by remaining a specialist he need not have been
- a philosopher. A specialist who concerns himself entirely
with literature can remain complacent with theories which
consider literature as a pure self-expression. A specialist who
concerns himself entirely with positive history can remain
complacent with theories which explain literature as determined by environment. A student of history and literature
can preserve no such tranquillity, for he has- ceased to be a
specialist. He sees an inner world and an outer world. The
age-long difficulties of metaphysics are before him. What
psychologists study in man the microcosm, a student of history and literature studies in nations and in centuries. Professor Wendell did walk into a philosophical field, into a field
of perpetual conflict, and he was quite aware of it, although he
preserved that demeanor, superficially indifferent yet fundamentally concerned, which made him so memorable in his
quiet progresses through the yard at Harvard University.
Whether Professor Wendell was in small things excitable
or not, he was in great things edifyingly calm. He walked




WENDELL AND THE PHILOSOPHERS   '


17


between the opposing armies of specialists as if he were not
conscious that they were there. Nor was it that he counted
that each army would see in him a friend, that he could so
walk, for although it did give him a certain confidence to
know that no man could accuse him either of having a romantic idea of literature, or of belittling the prerogatives of the
mind, his composure was far more due to the inner good
conscience, that he had assumed a task only so great as he
was qualified to perform. He would invade no other's province. He would confine himself to a consideration of that
extraordinary influence which., exerted on history and literature, does in fact often surpass in importance the directing
power of man's judgments or his more tangible environment
- I mean those glorious intellectual phantasms, the memory
of the past. Was it not true, he asked, that, rightly or wrongly,
it was memory rather than reason or riches, that made the
European a European, the Malay a Malay., or even the wise
wise or the fool a fool? Owing to the fact of the impropriety
in so doing, he would not have applied this theory to his own
particular case; but if he had, I am of the opinion that he
would have attributed his discretion in large measure to the
constant sight which he experienced of those ancestors whose
pictures he so liked to range upon his wall. It was not that
he had inherited great brains from them., nor that he was in
intellectual agreement with them; it was that he was unceasingly aware of them. That word "aware" is to him
deeply significant. He uses it time and time again. How
much he makes of it, for instance., that fifth-century Greece
like twentieth-'century America was aware of Homer, that
modern historians are aware of Thucydides, that the orator
of to-day by his tricks of appeal and denunciation is aware of
Demosthenes. In his reflections on Dante he emphasizes
particularly that the " Divine Comedy" implies, with various
degrees of certainty and precision, almost everything on which




18


i8       DANIEL SARGENT


we have touched since we first began to collect the traditions
of European literature from among the relics of pre-historic
Greece.  He attributed   Dante's greatness to Dante's
awareness.
Professor Wendell did not feel himself obliged to confront
any such problem as: What is memory? To what extent is it
passive? To what extent intellectual? Nor in the phantasms
which his memory presented did he care generally to distinguish between what was historically or traditionally true.
Under either aspect the past was irrevocable. Traditions
were what interested him. He would specialize in them. The
truth or falsity of them should concern other specialists. But
he was a philosopher in that he insisted on and defended the
task which he took upon himself as quite as legitimate as that
assumed by the historians often called "scientific." In doing
this he performed a service for which, it seems to me, he has
not been wholly thanked. In the manner of a positive -scientist he laid emphasis on a part of our environment which those
who like most to talk about environment most often neglect,
and of determining factors which determinists temperamentally avoid. That there were many who considered that he
was pursuing mere phantoms, he well knew, and he pleasantly
accepted their disdain. I remember, on the other hand, how
disappointed he became in a certain young man who, presuming to be his follower, said to him: "But we Americans have
no traditions." If the sense of the remark had been to the
effect that Americans should not respect traditions, that he
could have borne. The offence of the young man lay in his
failure to realize that no man can help having traditions, and
also in the indirect affront cast at the quality of American
traditions. Professor Wendell took a very definite attitude
in regard to American traditions. That he did not himself
believe in the Calvinistic dogmas could not blind him to the
fact that the settlement of New England by those who con



WENDELL AND THE PHILOSOPHERS


19


sidered it a New Canaan was part of a tremendous drama,
and that the ideas of those people taken as a tradition were
more important as a determining factor in American history
than were geographic conditions, or the variety of political
and military events.
It can be held, on the other hand, that this very method of
Professor Wendell's did tend to make him exaggerate the influence which literature, when it is considered merely as literature, and not as representative of the truth, has exerted upon
history. He tells a story in "The Temper of the Seventeenth
Century in English Literature" (page 340), which reveals the
habit of his own mind: "A few years ago, in an elaborately
classified American library, I chanced to look for the 'Pilgrim's Progress' on the shelves appropriated to English
literature. Finding no trace of it there, I was driven to search
for it in the catalogue, where it presently appeared duly recorded under the heading 'Dogmatic Theology.' After the
combined amusement and vexation which accompanied this
discovery, I found myself rather disposed to think the classification defensible." The point of the story lies not in the
final reluctance to find fault with the catalogue, but in the
initial impulse to be amused by it. He had grown so used to
thinking of Saint Thomas Aquinas, of Plato, and Aristotle,
not as men who had failed or succeeded in quest for immortal
truth, but as supremely great manifestations of enduring
traditions, that he was in danger of underrating what the most
virile generations would find as noteworthy in them. The
conscious or unconscious imitation of past literary forms may
have a great importance in history and literature, but in history as well as in literature it is indubitably the height of what
is considered immortal truth that sends the streams of energy
flowing. It is emphatically the contemplation of what is
loyally believed that has disciplined the poetic imagination of
man. It has been, is, and will be, nothing other than the de



20


20        DANIEL SARGENT


lighted making incarnate of theological principles, that gives
us our poetry and, indeed, our fine arts.
Yet it cannot be denied that the times in which Professor
Wendell lived did seem to justify his emphasis on literature as
literature. Whatever,- one may think of Matthew Arnold's
notion that what is noblest in European literature should replace dogma, it cannot be doubted that during the last hundred years among an important group of people that very
thing has tended to happen. One might say that it would
have happened if possibly 'it could have happened. The story
of the process among English-speaking people has been
roughly this. Some talented man of letters, owing to alove
and envy for aesthetic qualities in ancient English literature.,
transported into modern English literature a mysticism and
supernaturalism, without carrying with them the philosophy
and theology that had made them intelligible. The result was,
of course, to divorce poetry from reality, and to praise as
poetry's chief charm the escape that it provided from the
harshness of truth. The consequence to our civilization of
this segregation was certainly not what most men would have
expected. The pseudo-mysticism and so-called romance,
leaving their refuge in poetry, spread through the minds of
the nineteenth century with the thoroughness of a plague
through people who have acquired no immunity. The reaction
on literature would have been logical and complete if literature had either become literature about other literature, or
unintelligible. That such is not wholly the case simply shows
that what was a tendency was no more than a tendency,
though a pervading one. One of its effects as such was not
to destroy but to put everything in its wrong place. Many
men, for instance, who should have been philosophers became
poets, and many men who should have been poets became
philosophers. One of these latter was Professor Wendell.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?








WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?
By OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL
I
T HE term comparative literature generally provokes emotion. The dilettante greets it effusively. A study with
so ample a descriptive title will provide him, he expects, with
a short and easy road to an appreciative understanding of all
the important modern literatures. The scholar is likely to
regard the term with severe disapproval. He suspects that
the profession of an interest in comparative literature is a
form of intellectual presumption; and he believes the peculiar
virtues claimed for its methods and its aims to be identical
with those inherent in all scientific studies of literature.
Each of these attitudes is the result, I believe, of certain
misconceptions which have naturally arisen from the loose
way in which the term has been employed. The inaccurate
use of critical terms of all sorts is one of the sources of the confusion at present existing in the entire field of humanistic
study. Professor Manly calls this field a " maze without a
plan," and believes that " great benefits would apparently
result if the different types of investigation and the aims
which control them could be more clearly defined."'I This
paper is an attempt to rescue the term " comparative literature " from the confusion which has beset it and to define
with some precision that type of literary investigation to which
the term is properly applied.
There are several persistent misuses of the term. In catalogues of American universities it is frequently employed to
IJ. M. Manly,!1ihe Outlook: the Presidential Speech for 1922-23 before the
Modern Humanities Research Association, P. 9.




4                      O0. J. CAMPBELL
describe almost any aspect of foreign literature, from Greek
drama to Russian fiction, which is studied in English translations. It has also been used to designate a general survey
of the masterpieces of European literature, a rapid journey
made under expert guidance, from Homer's "Iliad" to George
Meredith's "The Egoist." The employment of the term to
describe this valuable undergraduate course, instead of the
well-established and more accurate terms, "General Literature," or "World Literature,"' is a source of much unnecessary confusion. This misuse of the term is not confined to
America. Frederic Loliee, in his "L'Histoire de Litteratures
Comparees des Origines au XXe Siecle," published in 1903,
writes a history of world literature. His view is that of a
cosmopolitan. His narrative is throughout controlled by the
conception of a single harmonious world-wide civilization.
Professor George E. Woodberry, in his introductory editorial to the short-lived "Journal of Comparative Literature,"
definitely adopts this cosmopolitan ideal for his subject. He
says: "The study will run its course, and together with other
converging elements goes to its goal in the unity of mankind
found in the spiritual unities of science, art and love." 2 This
noble ideal, not unlike that held by Goethe and his spiritual
contemporaries, may produce zeal for the study of comparative
literature; it may even be a necessary result of devotion to it;
James Montgomery's Lectures on General Literature (I833) is both a discussion
of the general laws of poetry and a "Retrospect of Literature from the Earliest
Period to the Twelfth Century of the Christian Era." Robert Blakey in i861
used the title The History of General Literature to describe a summary of literature
from the earliest times to the seventeenth century. Hallam's Introduction to the
Literature of Europe, in the zrth, r6th, and 17th Centuries (I838-I839), followed by
the series edited by George Saintsbury on The Periods of European Literature,
which the editor describes (vol. ii, p. vi) as "something like a new 'Hallam,' which
should take account of all the simultaneous and contemporary developments and
their interactions" - these works have given general currency to this second term.
Moulton's World Literature and its Place in General Culture has established this
term securely in the vocabulary of modern literary criticism.
2 The 7ournal of Comparative Literature (New York, 1903), i, 4.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?


25


but it is not definite enough to serve as the professed aim of a
form of scientific study.
Finally, the term must not be used as a synonym for any
sort of mere literary comparison. The indication of likeness
and difference between works of art vaguely similar, may be a
useful logical and imaginative exercise. As such, it is but a
particular manifestation of a universal mode of thought. A
comparison of the novels of Jane Austen with those of Maria
Edgeworth may be a convenient method of applying aesthetic
standards and may lead to clarity of judgment and felicity in
expression. Obviously, however, even the systematic employment of this essentially rhetorical device has nothing in
common with a scientific method of criticism.
II
Comparative literature' is an infelicitous equivalent of
"litterature compar&e."   In French, as in the critical vocabulary of other languages, the term clearly indicates that the
method, or the history, is comparative, and not the literature.
In German the phrase is "vergleichende Literaturgeschichte";
in Danish, "sammenlignende Literaturhistorie"; in Italian,
"storia comparata delle letteratura," or simply "letteratura
comparata"; and in Spanish, "literatura comparada." Each
one of these phrases shows beyond doubt that comparative
literature is in no sense an independent subject for investigation, but merely one of the scientific methods of studying
literature.
M. Baldensperger says that the essence of this method is
"la recherche des vivants rapports qui unissent les diverses
litteratures."  It is generally agreed, as this definition indicates, that the application of the method involves two or more
x The best historical account of the use of the term is Fernando Baldensperger's
"Litterature Comparee: le mot et la chose," in La Revue de Littgrature Comparee,
Janvier (Mars, 1921), vol. i, no. I, pp. 5-29.




26


o. J. CAMPBELL


literatures. Professor Woodberry, to be sure, who uses the
term sometimes as a loose equivalent for any scientific study of
literature, says: "Literary history could not be written, the
traditions of literature could not be traced without it...
The comparative method is the method of all classicism. It
is used within the limits of a single literature, as for example
the English, where coherence from Caedmon to Milton, from
Cynewulf to Longfellow, from Malory to Tennyson, depends
upon it."  If comparative literature is nothing more than
this, - the application of scientific methods of study to literature, - the term is superfluous and a source of critical confusion. It ought in that case never to have been invented and
never to be employed.
The term was devised and the science'established on the
analogy of the comparative biological sciences developed in the
early nineteenth century, such as comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and comparative embryology. If, therefore, it possesses any virtues as a distinctive literary method,
they ought to be similar to those existing in the abovementioned sciences and in certain modern ones formed on
their analogy. The comparison in all these sciences is between
the structure and the growth of representatives of different species. A comparison of the bones of the human head with those
of the human foot might conceivably be called comparative
anatomy, but it is not. Furthermore, the comparison of different species is significant only on the assumption that the
life of each animal is a part of a widely diffused single process.
The purpose of the comparative study based upon these postulates is to discover the morphological explanation of form met
with in the animal body, and also to reveal the relations of
affinity within the various divisions of the animal kingdom by
pointing out what is like and what is unlike. Moreover, in
this way facts which are in themselves incomprehensible are,
through the methods of comparative anatomy, brought into




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?


27


connection with the known phenomena of other organisms
and are thereby rendered explicable phylogenetically.'
Comparative literature by similar methods seeks similar
results. It endeavors, in the first place, to discover general
laws which transcend any one literature, such as the development of types and forms under the progressive relationships
of different literatures. In the second place, it seeks to reveal
relations of affinity within two or more literatures. Finally,
through the discovery of similarities and differences by means
of comparison, it endeavors to explain the inception and
growth of individual works. That is, like all scientific studies
of literature, our methods are primarily investigations of the
process by which a work has come into being and appraisals
of the forces which produced this result. In other words, the
methods of comparative literature do not seek to produce or
enhance aesthetic delight, but rather to create new modes of
understanding.
Now, corresponding to the separate species which form the
units in the comparative biological sciences are the individual
or national literatures of our science. The assumption that
a literature, because of its being German, French, or English,
possesses certain distinctive qualities is absolutely essential for
our method. Therefore, the further assumption must be made
that the various racial, political, social, psychological, and
linguistic facts which go to the making of a nation go in a
different, but analogous fashion, to the making of the literature
produced by that nation. Gaston Paris asserts that only in
literature is the national life and its spirit made articulate.
Ce n'est que par la litterature qu'il s'exprime, se precise et se
fait reconnaitre de tous avec enchantement.2 The explanation, then, of likenesses and differences revealed by the comI The substance of this exposition is found in Karl Gegenbauer, T'he Elements of
Comparative Anatomy. Translated by F. Jeffrey Bell. Translation revised and
preface supplied by E. Ray Lankaster, London, 1878.
2 La Poesie du Moyen Age (Paris, 1885), p. 99.




28


0. J. CAMPBELL


parative method must be presented in the terms enumerated
above, or in others of like import.
The second assumption which the science makes is that all
literature is the expression of a common life of the human
spirit. This idea was enunciated first by Vico,1 elucidated by
Herder, and has been almost universally adopted since the
latter's day. The mentality of all peoples from his time has
been regarded as a unity of some sort and literature as one
aspect of this universal life. The courses of this common spiritual force have been regarded as continuously modified by
circumstances of the sort enumerated above, which can be determined both in their essential nature and in their action.
The significance of this conception is not necessarily wedded
to the notion that literature is a kind of organic growth with
a law of development analogous to that of various species of
beings.2 As a matter of fact it is just as closely allied to the
more recent theories which Professor Manly describes as
"treating language and literature as products and implements
of man as a social animal.3"
III
An investigation, then, of the living relationships between
literatures involves the assumption of the existence of such
entities as English, French, and German literatures. However, a nation, in the modern sense of the word, is an essentially recent phenomenon, hardly older than five or six hundred
years. The literature of a nation, then, is only the latest example of a relationship which ought to prove as persistent
and universal as the existence of literary art. A study of
fundamental importance to comparative literature is the investigation of the relation of humane letters to every sort of
i In his Principii di Scienza Nuova, 1725.  3 Manly, op. cit., p. 4.
2 An hypothesis advanced by F. Brunetiere in his L'Evolution des Genres dans
l'Histoire de la Litterature, Paris, 1900.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?


29


social fact in those centuries before nations existed. This is
an examination of the validity of those relationships upon
which the entire structure of the comparative study of literature is built.
The first study of this sort, both in point of time and in importance, is the investigation of the origins of poetry. Professor Gummere, in the standard work on this subject,' not
only establishes some of the laws of literary origins, but, in
his search for them, uses a modification of the methods of
comparative literature. He compares the early forms of
rhythmic utterance of savage tribes widely separated in time
and place, substituting primitive social groups for the nations
employed in the completed method. When he discovers that
certain facts and relationships remain stable in the midst of
all the differences discovered in his process, he believes that
they can safely be pronounced to be established laws of the
genesis of literature.
The conclusions reached by Professor Gummere, moreover,
are of great importance for the study. If, as he believes,
poetry in its origin is a form of communal consent, a signalization of social cohesion, - if it is, in other words, a form of
spontaneous expression, springing from a homogeneous body of
people, - then it is a fair assumption that literature, whatever
changes it may undergo, is an aspect of social life, and without
some form of social organization it would never come into
being. Literature, in this case, whatever its character, like religion, law, and custom, must continue to be, in a measure, the
product of the ideas and emotions of the nation and the epoch
from which it springs. One need not assert with Taine that
a work of modern literature is a sort of automatic register of
"race, milieu, and moment," to believe that no man of letters
can emancipate himself from the influence of his social environment and the spirit of his age.
I Francis B. Gummere, q'he Beginnings of Poetry, New York, 1901.




30


O. J. CAMPBELL


Nor do the cogent objections of Miss Louise Pound to the
theories of the communal composition of primitive song militate against the conceptions of the relations of art to society,
which the student of comparative literature must accept.
She seeks to recreate the primitive artist and to disentangle
him from the festal dancing throng, which in turn is relieved
of its supposed spontaneous improvisation. Yet she writes:
"The general social inspiration of song is not to be denied.
In a broad sense, all art is a social phenomenon - the romanticists to the contrary."'
On the other hand, the theories of art of M. Tarde,2 when
vigorously applied to literature, destroy the proper field for
the exercise of the methods of comparative literature. He
believes that all forms of social activity, of which literature is
one, are the result of imitation. Rhythmic utterance, to him,
is not the instinctive expression of a common emotion, but
the invention of some man of genius. This man's work the
crowd eagerly imitates. Men act alike, not from any instinct equally diffused among all the members of a crowd, but
because they have all imitated the same inventive genius.
Social evolution of all sorts, including that of literature, is
from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous. Genius of a
race, of a nation, of a time, as a formative element of any
work of art is, to such a theorist, simply non-existent.
This individualistic theory of artistic origins has been applied to literature by Emile Hennequin in his "Critique Scientifique."3 After presenting a number of authors of completely
different sorts living in the same nation at the same time,
such as Swinburne, Browning, and Tennyson, he comes to
the following conclusion: "On voit qu'il est impossible
d'6tablir un rapport entre une societ6 et les artistes qui l'ilI Poetic Origins and the Ballad (New York, 1912), p. 2.
2 Developed in Les Lois d'Imitation, 1890, and Les Lois Sociales, 1898.
3 La Critique Scientifique, 3d ed., Paris, 1894. Cf. particularly the chapter on
"Analyse Sociologique," pp. 93 ff.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?


31


lustrent." True to M. Tarde's theories of imitation, he says:
"Une litterature exprime une nation, non parce-que celle-cil'a produite, mais parce-que celle-ci l'a adoptee et admir&e." '
Therefore the relation of a work of literature to society can
be studied only through the popularity of a book. The degree
to which society accepts a work of literature is a measure of
the extent to which it imitates the work and of the degree
of similarity between the ideals of a society and those of the
work in question. The individual, however, creates literature
according to laws of his own mind, the nature of which must
remain largely obscure.
These social theories and their application to literature
make futile any study of the growth of a work of art. They
are, therefore, largely destructive, not only of the methods of
comparative literature, but also of all scientific study of art.
These conflicting views show of how great importance to comparative literature is the study of literary origins. It is an
investigation of the validity of the principles and relationships
upon which the entire science is founded.
IV
Of similar significance to comparative literature is the
study of folk-lore, mythography, and comparative mythology.
In investigating primitive belief, superstition, taboo, or jest,
one is dealing with the material out of which early literature
is constructed. Professor Gummere says picturesquely that
one of the first tasks of comparative literature was " to follow
the fortunes of a primitive bagman's jest, carried on the old
trading routes from land to land and starting up at last as
conte or schwank in a hundred scattered communities in
cloister, school, and court." 2 Professor Woodberry says that
I Hennequin, op. cit., p. 162. M. Baldensperger, in La Littgrature (Paris, 1913),
adopts, in substance, this point of view. He quotes this second sentence with approval, and adds: "Si les litteratures ne sont pas nationales, elles le deviennent."
2 YThe Beginnings of Poetry, p. 352.




32


0. J. CAMPBELL


one of the principal objects inviting the attention of our
science is "the common matter of literature either in simple
forms, as in the ballad, or in complex forms, as in the socalled matter of Britain, matter of France, matter of Troy,
with a view to displaying parallel developments of the same
substance in different ages and countries." '
Doubt has often been expressed whether this material could
properly be called literature. Baldensperger admits that it
"deborde hors de la litterature proprement dite." 2 Brunetiere says: "Entre le Petit Poucet et la Divine Comedie, par
exemple, ou le Petit Chaperon Rouge et le Faust de Goethe,
ou meme celui de Marlowe, n'y a-t-il vraiment qu' une difference de degr6s." 3 However, this question has no bearing
on the importance of a study of folk-lore to comparative
literature. In the first place, through an application of the
comparative method to this material, we are able to estimate
the relation of social superstition and communal reactions
toward the facts of nature to primitive literary forms. Professor Kittredge has illustrated the value of this phase of the
study in his "Gawain and the Green Knight." By tracing
the story back to its simplest form, and comparing that to
the best artistic version, he is able to discover that of its two
principal constituents, one is a form of primitive belief, the
other one of primitive custom. The first is a belief that a
serpent is not killed when its head is severed, but that, if it
can effect a union with its body, it will resume its life; the
second, the custom of exchanging buffets. Such an investigation is of fundamental importance for our scientific method
because it shows that this romance, at least, did not have its
origin in the brain of an inventive story-teller, but in the
customs and superstitions of the folk.
S7ournal of Comparative Literature, i, 4.
2 Revue de Littgrature Comparee, p. 22.
3 "La Litterature Europeenne," in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept., I900, vol.
373, P. 328.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?


33


Folk themes can furthermore serve as the stable element in
works of different literatures under comparison. Bruneti're
defines this phase of the study as follows: "Si le Petit Poucet,
par exemple, nous est venu de l'Inde, comme les uns le
veulent, il y a lieu de rechercher comment, par quelles voies,
il est arrive jusqu'a nous et comment, en quel sens, tout le
long de sa route, le genie des races qui se l'appropriaient successivement en a modifie les d6tails, ou peut-etre meme le
fond." ' So in Professor Kittredge's book, by comparing the
story of the champion's bargain as it appears (a) in the primitive folk-lore, (b) in the crude Irish tale, and (c) in the sophisticated romance of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,"
we are able to discover the differences in the successive forms
of the theme and to explain them in the terms which comparative literature has made its own.
These two sorts of studies, dealing with the social origins
of literature and with the constituent elements of its simplest
forms, are in a sense preliminary to the main and central
method of comparative literature. This presupposes the existence of nations and of an ascertainable relationship between
a nation and its literature. It then proceeds to the comparison of two works of literature, or the entire work of two
authors belonging to different nations or races. The two
parts of this comparison must obviously possess some common element. This may be of various sorts. One work or
one author may show the direct influence of the other, for
example, or both may embody the same theme, and so forth.
V
Such a comparison may be undertaken for various reasons:
first, to discover differences, which can be explained in terms
of age, race, nation, literary tradition, or literary convention.
S"La Litterature Europ6enne," in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept., 1900, vol.
373, P. 328.




34


0. J. CAMPBELL


The facile attribution of national or racial characteristics to
any author or any work of literature is, of course, in the highest degree unscientific.  Baldensperger shows this danger as
follows: "Comment voir dans Mathurin Regnier un representant absolu de l'esprit gaulois, s'il a emprunte6  l'Arioste
sa conception meme de la satire. Comment retrouver dans
le theatre de Schiller le genie allemand dans sa plus haute
incarnation d'art, si la formule dramatique dont il s'inspire
est nettement celle de Voltaire ou de Diderot." x It is precisely the comparative method which will prevent the critic
from making such ill-founded generalizations. Only after
a scientific comparison of the work in question, with its various sources or analogues in foreign literatures, is the critic
able to attribute to it distinctive characteristics, which then
invite explanation.
Mere source-hunting, however, even though it be international in character, is at its best but an incompleted exhibition of the method of comparative literature. As a preliminary to the judgments which the investigator seeks to
formulate, the determination of the extent and nature of the
borrowings of one author from others, or of his imitation of
others, is an indispensable process. However, such investigation, in the last analysis, is of value only as it leads the critic
to discover differences which seem original qualities, and similarities much more fundamental than those due to mere imitation. Yet without the many thorough and ranging investigations of sources that have been already made, the goal of
comparative literature would still be obscure.
Professor Gummere in a passage from which I have already
quoted says: "Comparative literature, as a science, is young.
The task before its followers was plain enough; they had first
of all to sift the material, to note where deep has called unto
deep in the influence of one poet upon another.... But
I La Litterature, p. 291.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?  3


35


this is not all, and the task is not done even when one has
struck a balance between the borrowings of a poet and what
one suffers to pass as his individual and original genius.
Abused as the terms have been, the genius of time, place, and
community is still a factor in the growth of any literature."
It is, then, one of the functions of comparative literature to
discover by its own clearly defined method what part these
forces have played in the formation of specific works of
literature.
The aims of this branch of the study are various. In the
first place, it may seek to determine the relation of a work of
literature or the entire work of one author to race or to nation.
This leads us, on the one hand, to the borders of a science still
in its infancy, which may be called., for want of a better term,
psychological anthropology. Anthropologists until recently
have been exclusively interested in external and thoroughly
tangible facts, such as measurements of heads and cranial
shapes. Psychologists like McDougall believe that the same
kind of scientific study can be applied to the more elusive,
but no less real and stable., psychological characteristics of
race.
Furness in his Variorum edition of "As You Like It " makes
the following characteristic utterance: "If all degrees of surprise had not been, for me., long ago exhausted concerning
Shakespeare... I should be inclined to wonder that the
students of anthropology, instead of adopting various standards, such as Facial Angles, Cranological Measurements, and
the like, had not incontinently adopted one of Shakespeare's
Comedies., as the supreme and final test in determining nationality, at least as between the Gallic, the Teutonic and the
Anglo-Saxon races."'1 The distinctive qualities in this work
which Furness would make the test of nationality could be
made to emerge most surely through the comparative method,
11As You Like It, Variorumn edition (18qo), p. vi.




36


36         0. J. CAMPBELL


for example, by comparing Shakespeare comedy with George
Sand's " Comme 11 Vous Plaira," and certain German redactions of "As You Like It."
A second object of inquiry in this phase of the subject is
to determine the effect of social facts upon the formation of a
work of literature. This sort of study assumes that the customs and ideals of the social group from which the work
springs have a positively formative influence upon it. The
word "social" is of course to be taken in its largest signification. The English nation, and French nation, as these terms
are used in literary inquiry, signify not political unities so
much as societies bound together by custom and tradition.
Qualities established as distinctive by the comparative method
may be regarded as products either of the immediate social
milieu of the composing author, or of those national traditions and conventions of thought and expression which form
what Gaston Paris calls the patrimony of any national literature.
A third object of inquiry through the scientific establishment of distinctive differences between related works in different languages is to determine the formative effect of political facts. This aspect of the subject does not need explanation.
VI
The typical comparisons of comparative literature may be
undertaken not only to detect differences, but also to discover and to explain similarities apparent only after the application of the method. The explanation of the existence
of these similarities may lead to the formulation of answers
to such questions as the following: Are there any fixed laws
of literary generation, and if so, what are they? Why do
certain types of literature appear and flourish at certain times
and not at all during other epochs? Why, for example, did
lyric poetry flourish in early Greek times, in Elizabeth's Eng



WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE                      37
land and in France of the nineteenth century? Why did
tragedy flourish at Athens in the fifth and fourth century B.C.,
in Elizabethan England, and in the France of Louis XIV?1
We may next seek to discover if there are any fixed laws
governing the life of a literary genre. Were Brunetiere and
J. A. Symonds right in asserting that the life of any artistic
movement follows a course analogous to the life-history of
any biological species? 2 In other words, is there such a phenomenon as evolution in literature, or is the phrase merely a
convenient figure of speech?
In this effort to explain similarities, we may also seek to
discover fixed laws of the relationships between literature and
various sorts of social fact. H. M. Posnett, for example, wrote
an entire book3 in an endeavor to show that there are invariable characteristics inherent in all literature emanating from
a clan group, from a city-state, from a cosmopolitan society,
and from a self-conscious nation. He attempts to prove, for
example, that whenever a man loses his sense of social personality and thereby frees himself from all clearly defined
moral and social sanctions, his literature always displays
certain identical characteristics. These same qualities appear
in the Greece of Alexander the Great, in the Rome of the
Empire, and in the Germany of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century. Such generalizations as these can be
formulated and tested only through the employment of the particular mode of comparative study now under consideration.
Still wider generalizations about the life of literature may
result from this study. Brunetiere believed that certain fixed
SThis is the branch of the subject which H. U. Routh, in a recent article, thinks
most promising. See "The Future of Comparative Literature," in the Modern
Language Review, vol. iii, no. I, pp. 1-14.
2 F. Brunetiere, L'Evolution de la potsie lyrique en France au dix-neuvieme siecle
(Paris, 1894, 2 vols.), especially vol. i, pp. 3-42; also J. A. Symonds, Essays
Speculative and Suggestive (London, 1890, 2 vols.), especially the chapter "On the
Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature."
3 Comparative Literature, 1886.




38


0. J. CAMPBELL


laws governing the growth of European literature, regarded
as a larger entity, might be discovered. He postulates the
existence of a European literature "dont les litteratures particulieres ou nationales ne seraient, dans l'histoire de notre
moderne Europe, que des manifestations locales et successives."'' He believed that the methods of comparative literature, for example, might define and, as it were, codify the
laws of mediaeval literature. Then the laws by which these
characteristics were bequeathed to the Renaissance and
transformed by its spirit into a new sort of literature might be
formulated and tested. The laws of other periods in the life
of European literature might be similarly discovered. Finally,
this particular method may lead to the discovery of invariable
spiritual qualities in man which are always revealed in his
literature. Independent of time, place, and circumstance,
these qualities reach out in sympathy across less fundamental
differences of race and nation. The discovery of such universal
human traits seems to modern internationalists fraught with
immense significance for the future of mankind. One remembers, in this connection, Professor Woodberry's belief that
the study of comparative literature is one of the most potent
forces in the world making for the spiritual unity of man.
VII
Finally, the application of either of the methods of comparative literature which have just been described, or preferably of each in succession, will lead to a residue in every
work which constitutes its originality. Some of this precious
quality is doubtless the expression of phases of the author's
personality which can be explained by familiar methods of
biographical criticism. Something will remain, however, even
after this subtraction, which can be sensed only by an act of
"I "La Litterature Europ6enne," in the Revue des Deux Mondes (Sept., 1900),
vol. 373, PP. 326, 327.




WHAT IS COMPARATIVE LITERATURE?


39


imaginative intuition. It is this aspect of a work of literature
which critics from Hegel to Croce believe to be its essential
artistic character and the only fit subject for the attention
of the critic. To be sure, those disposed to cavil believe that
the preliminary processes of analysis render impossible the
final act of aesthetic criticism. Hennequin takes this point of
view. He says: "L'(Euvre d'art resolue dans ses effets et ses
moyens cesse d'etre une oeuvre d'art. A cet etat de d6composition... elle est un mecanisme inefficace, une machine
demont&e." ' From this view the student of comparative literature dissents. He does not believe that his analysis prevents him from feeling "the very pulse of the machine."
One need not believe in the parliament of man to see large
possibilities in the increasing application of the methods of
comparative science to literature. Much of the preliminary
work upon which its investigations depend has been completed. The historical inventories of the various national
literatures are nearly complete; the tracing of influences
across the lines of nationality has long occupied the attention
of many scholars. Moreover, such sciences as anthropology,
sociology, and social psychology are reaching a point of development where they can contribute necessary facts to the
comparative critic and furnish him with suggestive methods
of investigation. The time seems ripe for some synthesis of
this material made under the control of rigorous scientific
method.
Against the dangers of error in these methods the student
must be constantly on his guard. He may be tempted to
make speedy and ill-supported generalizations, to enunciate
theses too sweeping or too tenuous to be established by any
sort of evidence. Yet to fear these errors is partially to avoid
them; and premature generalization and wild assertion need
not bring into disrepute the sort of strictly scientific and
I Op. cit., pp. 166 and 167.




40                 0. J. CAMPBELL
copiously supported generalization that the critic hopes to
make at the end of a long comparative study of facts. The
method demands a wide knowledge of languages and acquain..
tance with many literatures, as well as familiarity with some
of the contributory sciences. These difficulties ought to issue
a healthful challenge to the ambitious student, because the
laborers in the field are as yet comparatively few, and the
harvest seems to be very great.




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE








THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE
By HA. W. L. DANA
W ITHIN the sombre tranquillity of the Boston Athenoeum, sitting in the little room kept there as a memorial
to Barrett Wendell, and looking out of the window over the
old Granary Burying Ground below, I find my thoughts
almost inevitably wandering back across the literature of
those centuries that Mr. Wendell had been genially and
serenely surveying in this very room so shortly before his
death.
For during the last years of his life, Mr. Wendell had turned
more and more away from those specified fields of literary
study which he had earlier made his own, - Elizabethan
Literature or American Literature, for example, - and had
declared that he found a larger satisfaction in that general
outlook over world literature as a whole which he came to
give as a course of lectures at Harvard University. This
much-discussed course, gradually developed from 1904 to
1917, was officially known by the various designations:
" Comparative Literature i," " Comp. Lit. i," "or C. L. i,"
but was sometimes irreverently dubbed "Seeing Literature,"
as if the students were being conducted on a sight-seeing car
rapidly across the centuries while Professor Wendell chatted
amiably about the monuments of literature they were passing
on the way: " Here you can see Homer... we are now
coming to Virgil," and so forth. As a matter of fact, the
course ultimately came to something much more significant
than the disjointed comment that this crude simile suggests.
It became an opportunity of gathering together such scattered bits of information on European culture as we students
might chance to possess or to have acquired from other courses




44


H. WT. L. DANA


and of viewing them in perspective as a whole, or, as Mr.
Wendell used to say, of "thinking things together instead of
scrutinising them apart." He shrewdly saw our need in the
broken, staccato world of to-day for some sort of synthesis.
In an age of growing specialization, Mr. Wendell came more
and more to specialize in generalization.
After his retirement, in 1918, from college teaching, Mr.
Wendell set to work, for the most part in this little room in
the corner of the library of the Boston Athenaeum which had
been handed over to him for the purpose, turning the material which he had given as lectures into the more permanent
form of a book. In November, 1920, just three months before
his death, the first part of this book, corresponding to the
first half-year of Comparative Literature I, was published,
under the title, "The Traditions of European Literature,"
with the subtitle, "Homer to Dante." It was the year in
which had appeared H. G. Wells's "Outline of History" - an
appeal to the post-war love of generalization, so largely emphasizing the place of science in the history of civilization but
so sadly deficient in treating the place of literature. Mr. Wendell's book more than supplemented that deficiency. From
the eighth century B.C. to the thirteenth century A.D. he has
linked literary traditions with historical traditions. He was
a man of letters and acquainted with life. His book has helped
to make the humanities human.
No sooner was this first volume published than Mr. Wendell, with increasing courage in his struggle against decreasing
strength, bravely began work on the second volume, which
was to have corresponded to the second half-year of Comparative Literature i, and to have continued the survey of European literature from the death of Dante until to-day. He had
begun with Petrarch, and here there still lie on the table where
he was writing, two large vellum-bound volumes of Petrarch,
the edition of 1581, upon which he had been working.




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE


45


Then came Mr. Wendell's death on February 8, I92I - the
very year when we were celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante. The first volume of his book,
which had carried the story of world literature down to the
time of Dante, had ended with one of those illuminating
phrases characteristic of Mr. Wendell, anticipating the centuries of transition from Dante to the present to be covered in
the concluding volume, and at the same time opening a sort of
cosmic vista upon a more distant future: "The world from
which our world has emerged into what for the while we call
modernity."
Hitting upon that last word as a key, he had, on beginning
the forever unfinished volume which would have included the
six hundred years since Dante's death, jotted down for it a
tentative subtitle: "Six Centuries of Modernity." It is a
survey of these centuries that I have rashly ventured to take
as the subject of this paper: "Six Centuries of Modernity."
For the bulk of this projected volume there remain only the
barest headings on those manila cards which Mr. Wendell
used to shuffle on the desk before him as he lectured. All the
substance could have been filled in only by Mr. Wendell himself. For anyone else to attempt to complete the work would
be the height of indiscretion - though perhaps this need not
check a follower of one who used to say that whatever success
he had had as a teacher was the result of his indiscretions.
Without attempting the impertinence of venturing to survey these six centuries since the death of Dante from all
points of view, it is tempting to glance over them from a single
aspect, from the way in which they have departed more and
more from that world of Dante which Mr. Wendell sums up
at the end of the first part of his book. In surveying the six
centuries of modernity from this limited angle, some phrases,
some suggestions have no doubt lingered as echoes from Mr.
Wendell's unpublished lectures. Other ideas, however, and




46


46H. W. L. DANA


the phrasing of them, he would no doubt have completely
repudiated as expressions of his own views, though I believe
he might have generously welcomed them as expressions of
another, and perhaps diametrically opposite, point of view.
For where Mr. Wendell may elegiacally lament the gradual
loss of the nobler traditions of the past, some of us may more
eagerly welcome the coming of the new. Yet none can deny
how completely the world of Dante which Mr. Wendell depicts
has been changed.
In taking Dante, then, as the point of departure and glancing rapidly over the six centuries of the modern world since
his death one fact at least seems clear. For better or worse,
all those things which Dante held dear have been challenged.
His idealized love of woman;- his twofold world government,
temporal and spiritual, of Emperor and Pope; his threefold
crystallization of the other world into Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise; his faith in the existence of a soul apart from the
body; even his belief in the freedom of the will - all these
have, one by one, during these six centuries been called into
question.
Already in the fourteenth century and in Italy itself we
find a change. The two other Italian writers, Petrarch and
Boccaccio, who with Dante form the great triumvirate of the
Trecento, serve to illustrate this transition. Both born before the death of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio mark before
their own deaths how far Europe has already progressedor should we say declined - toward "modernity."
In the first place, what is their attitude toward the love of
woman? In the "Divine Comedy" Dante had written of
Beatrice what had never been written of any woman. Compared to this ethereally spiritualized love, poor Petrarch's
troubled love for Laura seems mixed with all manner of
worldly considerations, and Boccaccio's impatient love for




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE


47


Fiammetta frankly carnal in its passion. As Mr. Wendell
used to say, where Dante's love was heavenly, Petrarch's
seems worldly, and Boccaccio's of the earth earthy. The very
names of the women seem symbols of this difference. "Beatrice" seems to signify the giver of blessing, of blessedness,
of beatitude. "Laura" seems an emblem of the laurel, of
the wreath of worldly fame longed for by the poet "laureate."
"Fiammetta," alas, seems to suggest a "little flame," a spark
soon extinguished. Dante's Beatrice stands out against a
golden background like some saint painted by Giotto. Petrarch's Laura walks lightly across a background of "chiare,
fresche e dolci acque," like Botticelli's Spring. Boccaccio's
Fiammetta sits upon the balcony with her pets, like the courtesans depicted by Carpaccio.
Unlike Beatrice, who lifts Dante toward God, Laura seems
to draw Petrarch away from God. He is forever torn asunder
and in his sonnets and canzone "the first modern man"
analyzes - or, should we say, psycho-analyzes? - his neurotic and erotic emotions. Still further removed from the hold
of religion, Boccaccio gives himself over to his passion,
troubled only by Fiammetta's fickleness - and his own.
The significant historical fact is that Petrarch and Boccaccio, far more than Dante, seem to have set the stamp for our
centuries of modernity. While no one has successfully imitated the "Divina Commedia," think of the thousands and
thousands of sonnets in every land built on the Petrarchan
model. It was not Dante's "terza rima" but Boccaccio's
"ottava rima" which became the characteristic metre of
Ariosto, of Tasso, of Byron. And what was true of the form
was true of the substance. It was the prose stories of the
"Decameron" which became the great storehouse from which
Renaissance, Elizabethan, and modern story-tellers, dramatists, and poets were to draw their plots.
Apart from their better-known work, Petrarch and Boc



48


H. W. L. DANA


caccio, to be sure, have both written works in "terza rima"
imitating the "Divine Comedy," but in both cases the resemblance merely serves to emphasize the differences. In
Petrarch's "Trionfi," the triumph of Laura over Love, of Fame
over Death, and of Divinity over Time, show us once more
Petrarch divided between his mediaeval love of religion, his
Renaissance love of fame, and his modern love of woman.
In Boccaccio's "Amorosa Visione," the fair lady who guides
him to the castle, urges him to enter a narrow door leading
to the way of life. But Boccaccio catches sight of a larger door
to the left, from which sounds of festivity are issuing, and instead of obeying his guide implicitly, as Dante had, he insists on entering through this broad door. "Let us go and see
the false gods first," he argues; "the desire for the true will
then be all the dearer." It is significant, however, that
though the vision describes in great detail the Hall of Love
and the Garden of Pleasure, Boccaccio never reaches the
strait and narrow gate. This vision seems to mark the turningpoint. In Boccaccio's amiable defiance of his guide we already
feel the note of modernity.
A further indication of the break from medixeval tradition,
if any were needed, could be found in the changed attitude
toward the classical and the biblical, the Hellenic and the
Hebraic, traditions. Dante, who was the voice of ten silent
centuries, the centuries without Greek, though he did not
hesitate to spoil the Egyptians as best he could, kept the pagan
element still duly subservient to the Christian. Familiar as
he was with Latin, he was, of course, ignorant of Greek.
Petrarch caught more of the pagan spirit and held as his proudest possession the manuscripts of Homer and of Plato, which
he would gaze on with rapture even if he could not unaided
read them in the original. Finally Boccaccio, mastering some
Greek, ventured to write even in his Italian works on Greek
subjects, Troilus and Theseus, for example, and to give to his




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE  4


49


Italian writings would-be Greek titles - " Filocolo," " Fibostrato.," " Decamerone." The revival of the classics was serving
to weaken the hold of the biblical tradition.
With the coming of the fifteenth century and the Italian
humanists this tendency increases. Even before the fall of
Constantinople, the flood of Greek scholars and their "brown
Greek manuscripts" has waxed, and the undisputed predominance of the church is waning. The handmaid of theology assumes the manners of the mistress. By the middle of the
century the invention of printing seemed to help the revival
of the classics more than it did the survival of the church. As
Victor Hugo said of the printing press and the cathedral:
"Ceci tuera cela!" 3
By the end of the century the discovery of the new world,
quite as much as this rediscovery of the old world, seemed to
lead us still further from Dante and nearer to modernity.
Already Dante had imagined his Ulysses as sailing beyond the
Pillars of Hercules for five months over the sea, till he came
in sight of an island on the other side of the world. For Dante
this was no other than the island where was situated the
mountain of Purgatory. Now, nearly two centuries after
Dante, another Italian, inspired by this and other passages.,
actually sails across the Atlantic; but the land Columbus discovers is not Purgatory but America - unless you wish to feel
that America is to-day a sort of Dantesque Purgatory.
This and subsequent explorations in the western hemisphere seem to dispose of a literal belief in the presence there
of either a mountain of Purgatory or an earthly Paradise. Now
you may say, what matter if the exact geographical location of Purgatory is upset, so long as the doctrine itself, the
central part of Dante's scheme of the universe, remains unchallenged? But at the beginning of the next century., the




50


H. W. L. DANA


sixteenth, with the growing Protestant revolt, it is precisely
this belief in the intermediate state that is, among other things,
rejected by Protestantism.
The other things were equally devastating to Dante's unified scheme. In his eagerness to see the world united in one
faith, Dante had praised the zeal with which a Saint Dominic
and his "dogs of the Lord" had hounded out the Albigensian
heresy. But now Germany, England, almost the whole of
northern Europe were breaking away from the authority of
the Pope, and the world was as sadly torn asunder in its
spiritual dominion as Dante had already found it in its political dominion. The hope of a united Christendom seemed
further than ever away.
Even in Catholic Italy itself, the prevailing spirit seems
diametrically opposed to that of Dante two centuries earlier.
Even the Medici Pope himself, Leo X, seems more intent on
reiestablishing the reign of Apollo and Minerva than that of
Christ and his saints, and in an expedition to the near east is
more interested in the finding of Greek manuscripts than in
the discovery of the Holy Sepulchre.
If this seems far from Dante's ideal of the head of the
Church, Machiavelli's "Prince" of the same period is equally
far from Dante's conception of the head of the State. Instead of its being love that moves the sun and the other stars,
Machiavelli assures us that in the modern world of affairs
it is not love but fear which is the moving force over other
men. It is not necessary actually to have the seven Christian
virtues: it is necessary only to appear to have them. This
realism of "II Principe," far more than the idealism of the
"De Monarchia," has been the guiding principle of the succeeding centuries of modernity.
The popular court poet of early sixteenth-century Italy,
Ariosto, seems to take a special delight in ridiculing Dante's
Inferno and Paradiso. In "Orlando Furioso," the grotesque




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE


5I


knight, Astolfo, in search of Orlando's lost wits, timidly enters
Hell. There, in place of the souls of carnal sinners who had
yielded to the temptations of the flesh, he finds those prudes
and ingrates who had refused to yield. Instead of passing all
through Hell like Dante, Astolfo reaches only this first circle
and flees from this with a motion more like running than
walking. Similarly, instead of ascending through all the ten
spheres of Dante's Paradise, Astolfo gets no further than the
first - that on the moon. Here, according to Ariosto, all
things lost on earth have fled, which gives him a chance to
indulge in a quite modern satire on politicians' broken promises, on treaties that are only scraps of paper, on the lost wits
of lunatic poets, and so forth, and so forth.
In France at this same time, Rabelais' point of view is still
more a reversal of Dante's. The whole Abbaye de Theleme,
with its motto over the gate, "Fay ce que tu vouldras," is the
monastic world of Dante's day turned topsy-turvy. The
imaginary journey culminates not in the empyrean and the
harmonies of Heaven, but in the Oracle of the Bottle and the
voice crying "Trinc." Rabelais makes the dead soldier
Epistemon, when his head is sewed on and his throat loosened
with drink, give us an account of the realm of the dead to
which he had gone; but instead of representing their fate as
a perpetuation of the life they had led on earth, he pictures
the dead as finding in the afterworld the exact opposite of
what we might expect. A ne'er-do-well scapegrace like Villon
is there clad as a mighty lord, while a world conqueror like
Alexander is patching old clothes. Brutus and Cassius are
surveying land, while Julius Caesar is caulking ships.
In England a young dramatist takes a similar delight in
fancying how Alexander looked and smelt after death and in
imagining "imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay." For
Dante, Caesar as the founder of empire was sacred, and the
conspirators who put him to death were fitly doomed to the




52


52          H. W. L. DANA


lowest pit of Hell, there to be munched to all eternity in the
jaws of Satan. But now, some three centuries later., comes
this English playwright who dares so far to reverse the
judgment of time as to make of Brutus the hero of a play
and to have it said of him: "This was the noblest Roman of
them all."
These reversals of judgment, you may argue, concern only
Dante's earthly plans, only things on the surface of our world.
Out beyond, men still believed in the existence of that great
crystal universe, concentric sphere in sphere enfolding the
earth. Even Shakespeare hears the music of the spheres.
But soon this too was to go. In Dante's own native Florence,
three centuries after his death., Galileo., searching the planets
and the fixed stars through his telescope, reverses the whole
geocentric conception of the universe which Dante held. Instead of the stationary earth being the centre about which
the sun and the other stars revolve-, the earth is now looked
upon as but one of many planets circling about the sun which
in turn is but one of many suns. Dante's closed concentric
crystal universe is shattered into bits, and our globe becomes
but a bit of star dust far flung in infinite space. As Columbus
by his voyage to the other side of the world seemed to have
shaken men's faith in the presence of Dante's Purgatory
there,, so Galileo, voyaging in his mind through the sky,
seemed to shake men's faith in the existence then of Dante's
ten heavens. The conception of the universe which had substantially held its own from Aristotle to Dante gives place to
that of modernity, the Ptolemaic to the Copernican. For it
is practically the universe as we conceive it to-day which
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening, from the top of Fesole'.
The English poet who wrote those verses had, when in Italy,
visited the aged Galileo, land now, himself grown old and blind




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE              53
and fallen on evil days, had built in "Paradise Lost" a poem
which some have felt in its high seriousness a return across the
literature of Ariosto and Rabelais to the conceptions of Dante
himself. But a close comparison merely tends to show how
wide the breach has become. It is not only that Milton accepts, at least in part, the cosmogony of Galileo, but in eliminating all Purgatory and placing his Hell outside our unives, below it as Heaven is above it, with typical Puritan
dualism he makes mankind a battle-ground between Heaven
and Hell, between God and Satan, and makes virtue consist
not so much in love as in obedience. Instead of a forward
vision toward the ultimate results of good and evil,, he looks
back at the origin of evil and at "Man's first disobedience."
But there are other respects in which Milton's divergence
from Dante is greater still. Milton is a double rebel against
both heads of Dante's two-headed eagle of power, Papacy
and Monarchy. Against the Pope his revolt as a Puritan is
the "dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion." Against the king, he is an active rebel and
the great apologist of rebellion. If he does not make of a
Brutus the hero of a tragedy, he gives all his strength, his
learning, his eyesight to the cause of the regicides. We have
come far already from the days of Dante, but we are to come
farther still.
The eighteenth century, the age of prose and reason, was
to see the ideas for which Dante had striven assailed from
many angles and in many different ways. Dante in Paradise
was catechized by Saint Peter on the one and indivisible faith.
Swift in "The Tale of the Tub " distributes the coats of religion
to Martin and Jack as well as to Peter - to Lutheran and
Calvinist as well as to Catholic. Dante's imaginary journey
ended with the beatific vision of the great rose where the souls
of redeemed mankind are enthroned. "Gulliver's Travels"




54


H. WV. ]L. DANA


ends with the most bitter picture ever penned of unredeemed
and unredeemable mankind - the Yahoos. Alexander Pope
turns deliberately away from the other world - "presume not
God to scan"-- and tells us that our proper study is precisely
this high-heeled, periwigged, patched and powdered thing
called man. Gibbon, "sapping a solemn creed with solemn
sneer," smiles down from the Alps upon the ruins of Rome and,
pretending to aim at the Roman Empire, hits the Roman
Church. Not far away the patriarch of Ferney, Voltaire, in
the name of toleration was muttering, "fcrasez l'infame! "Jean
Jacques Rousseau, far from agreeing that man was born in sin
and redeemed only through the institution of the church, was
alluringly asserting that man was born free and was naturally
good, and that it was only through our institutions that he
degenerates. The French philosophes were tearing down the
world of faith only to build up an equally rigid world of reason.
The "Encyclopedie" was to be the new Bible. The French
Revolution, just at the time it became most unreasonable,
turned "'la Raison" into a goddess - and an actress into
"la Raison." Monarch, Pope, Hell, Purgatory, Paradise -
all that Dante cared for -seemed to have been swept into
the dust-bin. What remained?
Whatever remained of Dante's universe after the French
Revolution, the nineteenth century was soon to poetize or
analyze away. Shelley, hearing "the voice which is contagion to the world," arouses the sleeping Demogorgon to
hurl the monarch-god from his throne, and Prometheus is
unbound. Byron, assuming a Satanic pose, champions the
very characters - Satan, Cain, the Corsair, Manfred, Don
Juan - whom Dante doomed, or would have doomed, to Hell.
Goethe cries: "Drive far from you the greenish smoke of
Dante's Hell!" If it seems to you that his Mephistopheles
has some of that same greenish smoke about him, note the




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE


55


difference. In the scriptures it is the voice of the Almighty
which says, "Thou Shalt Not!" Here it is Mephistopheles
who is "der Geist der stets verneint" - who gives us the
Everlasting Nay. On account of its scope, "Faust" has been
called a "Modern Divine Comedy," but the emphasis should
perhaps be more on the Modern than on the Divine. It seems
at times as if Goethe were intentionally turning things about.
While Dante passes from Hell, through Purgatory on the
surface of the world, up to Heaven, Goethe begins with a Prologue in Heaven and tells us that his drama is to proceed in
precisely the reverse order:
Vom Himmel, durch die Welt, zur Holle.
If Faust ultimately redeems himself from Hell and is allowed
instead to enter Heaven, it is not by humbly submitting his
will to that of God and muttering, "E la sua voluntade e
nostra pace." On the contrary, it is his stubborn unwillingness to yield, his divine discontent, his ceaseless, ever-unsatisfied striving which is the best hope he has. His ultimate
redemption comes not from a beatific vision of "the splendor
of the living light eternal," but from a constructive vision of
a reclaimed bit of this earth where many millions are ever
working to earn afresh the freedom they have won,
Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.
It is not the harmony of Heaven that makes music in Faust's
dying ears, but the sound of the picks and the shovels of nineteenth-century industrialism.
The mid-nineteenth-century work which by its very title
most suggests comparison, or rather contrast, with Dante's
"Divine Comedy" is Balzac's "Human Comedy." But
Balzac did not need to journey to the other world. For him
Paris is Hell, the Provinces Purgatory, and there is no Paradise. In his characters, tortured by their present sufferings
as Dante's are by their future punishments, we find ourselves.




56                 H. W. L. DANA
Between "La Divina Commedia" and "La Com6die Humaine" lies the evolution of the modern world. If much has
been lost in divinity, may not something have been gained in
humanity?
For Zola the comedy seems no longer even human. It is
the inhuman comedy, the bestial comedy, of "La B&te Humaine." In the heaven of the fixed stars Dante discourses on
the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. Zola
sees their wretched counterparts in "Les Trois Villes": in
"Lourdes," faith founded on fraud; in "Rome," hope based
on despair; in "Paris," charity grounded in hatred. In place
of the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, "Les
Quatre fvangiles" for Zola are "Fecondite," "Travail,"
"Verite," and "Justice."
One feels the same changed mood everywhere. From far-off
Russia comes the trembling voice of Dostoievski asking: "Is
there a God?" Wagner's trilogy, in contrast to Dante's,
crashes to its end with a "Gotterdammerung" - a twilight
of the gods. Neitzsche's lonely Zarathustra mutters: "Gott
ist todt... todt sind alle Gotter." Must the soul of Ibsen's
Peer Gynt go back at death into the ladle of the buttonmoulder?
The tide of faith, which was at the full with Dante, had
begun to retreat six centuries ago, and to-day we only hear
"its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar... down the vast
edges drear and naked shingles of the world."
Could Dante have understood the grim jests of a Thomas
Hardy about the "Vast Imbecility," "the President of the
Immortals," who has His sport with life's little ironies, or the
merry jests of a Bernard Shaw turning, in the interlude of
"Man and Superman," Dante's Heaven and Hell upside
down?
What would Dante have thought of that gentle ironist,
Anatole France, who has surely intentionally entitled his




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE              57
-grotesque counterpart to Dante's "Divine Comedy" the
"Human Tragedy." Here the guide who leads the pious Era
Giovanni and shows him the whirling many-colored scrolls of
the Truth, and saves his soul., is none other than the Devil.
To Dante himself, Anatole France pays his respects in "L'tle
des Pingouins."' There in his imaginary account of the descent
of Marbode into hell, he represents Virgil as complaining of a
certain Italian poet who had lyingly pretended that Virgil had
guided him through the other world and - worse still - had
falsely reported Virgil as abandoning the gods of Rome and
acknowledging the supremacy of " le dieu des Juifs "I
A recent impertinent book entitled " Dante and Other Waning Classics," gives this unexpected coup-de-grdce to Dante:
" He was hopelessly behind his own time in philosophy and
religion." In support of this, the fact that Dante still clung
to the dogmas of the learned doctors of his day, Thomas
Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, is offered as proof by this
" modern " author - as if he - and we - did not cling to
the dogmas of the learned doctors of our day, Doctor Freud
and Doctor Einstein.
Is there nothing then of Dante which survives in the midst
of our modernity? You may say that our modern critics
destroy only the externals. What matter if a Columbus
shake our faith in a transatlantic Purgatory? What matter if
a Galileo break up our belief in Dante's interstellar paradise?
What matter if some future Jules Verne, explorer of the inside
of the earth, disprove our acceptance of Dante's subterranean
Hell? Even if the " Divine Comedy" is of no value as a revelation of the other world., it is still of value as an allegory of
this world. Even if the existence of Hell, Purgatory, and
Heaven is shown to be a physical falsehood, you may argue
that they still contain a great moral truth: the truth of the
soul on fire caught in the hell of its own habitual sin, of the
soul undergoing purgation through the practice of the remedial




H. W. L. DANA


virtues, of the soul blessed in the paradise of fulfilled desire.
Even if a literal Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are taken
from us, you may maintain that our belief in the soul remains
unshaken. But does it? As the explorer finds no place in the
universe for Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise, so the modern
physiologist tells us he finds no place in the body for the soul.
Our faith in the existence of a soul apart from the body is
challenged just as much as our faith in the existence of another
world apart from this world. What then remains?
You may say that Dante's fundamental ethical conception
remains - the freedom of the will, the power of choice which
is for him the basis of good and evil, of punishment and reward.
But strict determinism finds no room for the freedom of the
will. Virtues and vices are products, just like sugar and vitriol. As the modern materialist robs us of our soul, the modern
determinist robs us of our will.
It seems then as if our modern radical were crying: "I care
for nothing. All shall go!"
One thing remains, and that, after all, the most important
thing in a poet - the poetry. Yet there are, in these days of
modernity, critics who would tell us that nothing is further
from our modern free verse than the tightly interwoven
"terza rima" of the "Divine Comedy" and nothing more distasteful to modern poetic vogue than the classical similes, the
involved mythological and astronomical allusions, the elaborate allegorical personifications of Dante's poetry.
Little by little, then, during these six hundred years since
Dante's death, almost all, if not all the things for which he
stood have been undermined. To the conservative-minded,
regretting sadly the loss of faith and the loss of beauty, such
reflections as these may give pause, may give ground for
question whether, instead of progress, the period from the
Renaissance to the present may not have been one of decline.
The radical-minded, on the other hand, might, I suppose, view




THE SIX CENTURIES SINCE DANTE


59


this falling off with equanimity if not with positive delight,
and focus his attention on what has been gained to more than
offset any loss - a realm too vast even to be glanced at here,
but one which must some day be fully charted if the challenge
of Mr. Wendell's point of view is ever to be adequately
answered.
With views so divergent as to the whole trend of the centuries and to the whole problem of the past and the future, how
can the extreme conservative and the extreme radical ever hope
to understand each other? Yet just here is the strange paradox. Sometimes these two minorities - at the right and the
left, if you wish - are better understood by each other than
either is understood by the majority who stand between.
Many, for example, have expressed surprise that such a man as
Barrett Wendell, who has been called "the last of the Tories,"
should have cared to preserve friendships with those who were
called radicals. And many have wondered that they in turn
should have had so much respect for a man who is said to
have thanked God that he had never uttered a liberal sentiment. It is perhaps for this very reason. There was no pretence. They agreed to disagree, and respected each other's
honest convictions. Extremes meet, and these two defeated
minorities were united by their common differences from the
democratic protestations of a muddled middle that would
reject them both.
At the end of John Galsworthy's play called "Strife," across
the successful group of compromisers between them, Roberts,
the unflinching leader of the workers, turns with something
akin to sympathy toward Mr. Anthony, the unflinching reactionary, and cries: "For the love o' God, I reckoned on ye.
S.. So - they've done us both down, Mr. Anthony!"
Across an intervening world of indifference, there was a
strange bond that united some of the younger radicals with
Mr. Wendell.




6o


6o          H. W. L. DANA


At the end of Mr. Wendell's life he wrote to a former student:
"After all., the difference between a reactionary and a radical,
at heart, is only that one longs to retain whatever is good and
the other to destroy whatever is evil." Of course, the progressive might phrase this the other way about, and looking constructively at the future and not at the past, have said that the
conservative, if not " one who never believes in doing anything for the first time," is one who fears changes that may
prove evil, while the radical is one who longs for changes that
he is confident will prove good. This, too, Mr. Wendell might
have accepted; for he wrote me, just before his death, "May
the world grow better! You will agree to that phrase, however
diverse our honest glosses."
The aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige, of living up to the
best of what has survived as fittest through the ordeal of time,
is not necessarily incompatible with that fierce fire of rebellion
which burns with longing for a better world. A few rare men
like Dante have combined both points of view: have wished
to conserve what was noblest in the older civilizations and yet
have been aglow with the vision of a new heaven and a new
earth. The "many too many" seem to be moved by neither
passion. To this majority in power, Mr. Wendell's minority
of honest conservatives on the one hand, and the minority of
honest radicals on the other, can at least join in flinging this
double challenge: "What fine traditions of the past are you
living up to? What fair vision of the future are you striving
for?."
Such are some of the thoughts that have come to me, thinking over these six centuries since Dante's death, as I sit here
in elegiac, "ubi sunt..." mood in this "Wendell Room" of
the Athenaeum, overlooking the old cemetery in Boston.,



THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY








THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


BY JEFFERSON B. FLETCHER
"Go on, my friend, and fear nothing; you carry Casar and his fortunes
in your boat." - PLUTARCH.
I
T    HE crux of Dante's Comedy is the "hard riddle "        in
which Beatrice announces to Dante a Deliverer. By this
instrument of providence, as I conceive, also Dante himself
will be vindicated and brought back to felicity in a happier
Florence. His life-story will be thus a double comedy, of fortunate outcome here on earth as well as hereafter in heaven.
As "rhetoric" prescribed, his title implies the crucial issue -
Comedy of Dante /Alighieri, Florentine by nation not by character.2 That moral breach, if naught else, must bar him from
his native place.3 The Florentines, not he, must change. He
has changed already - from likeness, to them back to that
onetime self in which every right disposition gave of itself
proof marvellous.4 "Eadem mutata resurgo," he might say.s
His spiritual crisis is safely past. His soul looks to felicity.
Far different is his human plight. Who might work the
miracle of changing the Florentine heart? Not he in his present helplessness. "Wolves" are not moved by fair words;
nor would he stoop to move them so. Nay, the Florentines
were worse than wolves. Satan himself had entered into that
"ingrate folk malignant," and made their city his stronghold.6 To reduce it, to humble them, called for one stronger
than Satan. "Master" Horace had warned that no "god,"
no deus ex machina, should enter into a comedy unless the
I Purgatorio, xxxiii, 34 ff.  4 Purg., xxx, 109-117.
"2 Epist., x, 188-190.      s Paradiso, xiv, 125; xv, 28-30.
3 Inferno, xv, 55-78.       6 Ibid., ix, 124 ff.




64


J. B. FLETCHER


knot were worthy of the deliverer., Assuredly, Dante's
"knot" was such.
Darkly Beatrice promised the divine intervention. But
"facts," she had also said, would solve her hard riddle. Facts
indeed were showing a mighty champion of justice at work in
Italy. The young Lord of Verona, Can Grande della Scala,
had already brought the Roman peace of justice to town after
town of Lombardy. Vicar Imperial of Christ's Vicar Imperial, the late Henry VII, Beatrice might truly call him
"sent by God." Who then might cancel Can Grande's warrant? "Another Moses," 2 Henry had been cut off in sight
of the promised land; but he had committed his sacred mission to one younger and more favored of fortune. Italy,
"garden of the Empire," had shown herself indisposed to
welcome her rightful lord, Henry.3 So be it: Henry's Vicar
and Captain, the Lord Can, should force her as Joshua had
forced Canaan. Especially, he should humble arrogant Florence, sower of the seed of disaffection,4 as Joshua had humbled Jericho.
Although in a right comedy the distressed hero needs a
god's intervention, yet he too must do his part. Dante's part
in the exorcising of the devil-possessed city will be as theirs
who compassed Jericho, blowing upon their trumpets of rams'
horns 5 so that its wall fell down flat.6 His poem, his trumpet,
the savior-poet will be welcomed by the loyal few - those
of the house of Rahab - who shall be spared.7 He and they
will be acceptable, each to the other - one in nation and in
character. Safe with that "fairest daughter of noble Rome,"
he - redeemed son of Adam in Eden regained - may prepare
for his call to the celestial Rome of Beatrice.8
1 Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus Inciderit.
2 Epist.,, 19.          6 Joshua, vi, 20.
3 Par., xxx, 137, 138.   7 Par., xxv, 1-12. Josh., vi, 17.
4 Ibid., ix, 127-132.    8 Purg., xxxii, 1oo00- 2.
s Cf. Ibid., xxv, 7.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


II
So Dante's title unfolds into a comedy. Its end, he said,
is "to remove those living in this life from a state of misery,
and to bring them into a state of felicity."' But this end, he
also said, is "multiple, near and remote." The near end, he
explains,2 is peace on earth for men of good-will. To that
earthly paradise a just emperor should lead them. The remote end is peace in heaven for them that love God. To this
heavenly paradise a God-loving Pope should lead them. No
thanks indeed to present recreant Pope, Dante's feet have
been set in the right way to the remote end, the heavenly
paradise. Almost miraculously his God-loving lady Beatrice
has given guidance. Of eternal felicity his hope is sure,3 and
in despite of evil men. But while these prevail, neither for
him nor for any other is there peace on earth. His good is
with the common good bound in. To establish that common
good --a commonwealth of justice - calls not for crook but
for sword. Assurance that Christ's avenging sword is even
now in the hand of a proved champion is the inspiring motive
of Dante's Comedy, is what makes it his comedy.
Current interpretations of the Comedy, while naturally not
ignoring these temporal interests of Dante, yet regard them
as something incidental and secondary. The primary motive
of the poem is said to be religious --with an amatory coloring. Thus the best among present-day critics of Dante sums
up his judgment: "In substance it [the poem] is a spiritual
autobiography, a record of the soul's awakening and successful quest of God, like the Confessions of St. Augustine. In
purpose it is a monument to the idealized Beatrice, fulfilling
the author's early promise to say of her what never had been
said of woman."4 I recognize the partial and concurrent
truth - and the poetry - of this verdict. Beatrice is still,
S Epist., x, par. i.  2 De Monarchia, M, xvi.  3 Par., xxv, 52-54.
4 C. H. Grandgent, Dante (Boston, 1916), p. 351.




66


J. B. FLETCHER


in the Comedy, the saving "power behind the throne" of God;
but the throne her influence enlists for Dante's present need
is that of Cxesar. In many things indeed the Comedy is like
the Confessions; but Dante's shifting of the crucial issue from
the next world to this, from the religious to the political plane,
makes a radical difference. Augustine wrote as a converted
sinner to convert sinners. Like all zealous evangelists, he
stresses - morbidly at times - his past wickedness. If such
as he could be saved, none need despair. Through two thirds
of his book he pictures himself for thirty years still "sticking
in the same mire, greedy of enjoying things present, which
passed away and wasted my soul."' Briefly, indeed, Dante
confesses the same sin.2 But he so humbles himself before
God - or God's representative - only to exalt himself before
men. Sages and saints of the past, demons of hell and angels
of heaven attest his singular preieminence. He speaks not as
a sinner to sinners, offering meek example, but as one having
authority, not to be imitated but obeyed.
Augustine's story is a spiritual comedy. Beginning in the
misery of sin, by intervention of a "god" -- the true God -
he is ending in the felicity of virtue. God's agent, his Beatrice,
is Monica. His spiritual "knot" was cut at that moment
when he saw himself for what he had become. "Thou, O
Lord, didst turn me round towards myself, taking me from
behind my back, where I had placed me, unwilling to observe
myself; and setting me before my face, that I might see how
foul I was, how crooked and defiled, bespotted and ulcerous.
And I beheld and stood aghast; and whither to flee from myself I found not..... Thou again didst set me over against
myself, and thrustedst me before mine eyes, that I might
find out mine iniquity, and hate it." 3 So finding out himself, he refound hinself-- the true self he had so nearly lost.
St. Augustine, Confessions, vI, xviii (Pusey's transl.).
2 Purg., xxxi, 34, 35.  3 Confessions, viii, xvi.




"THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


67


Midway in life, Dante also found out himself, and stood
aghast, and knew not whither to flee from the beastlike vices
that compassed him about. But with this experience his
Comedy begins. It is the beginning of the happy ending of
Augustine's. Conviction of sin is bitter, but salutary. "I was
healthfully distracted," writes Augustine, "and dying, to live;
knowing what evil thing I was, and not knowing what good
thing I was shortly to become." ' Dante too, finding out
himself, refound himself. "Mi ritrovai," he says.2
But by definition a right comedy cannot so begin prosperously.3 There is no "knot" to cut. A "god" may be needed
to sustain and strengthen Dante, but his spiritual peril is
already past.
Dante cited the precedent of Augustine's Confessions not
alone or first, but after Boethius's Consolations.4 The order
is not casual. Boethius sought vindication from men's injustice; Augustine, mitigation of God's justice. Boethius
serenely asserted his merit; Augustine miserably confessed
his guilt. Boethius demanded justice; Augustine craved mercy.
Dante has done both. But as he begins his Comedy, he has
already won divine mercy, but not human justice. Against
the outrageous wrong men have done - and do - him, he
will, like Boethius, protest his right. Modesty must give way.
Then, too, to exact justice from one's fellow men is for their
good also; since to render justice they must themselves be
made just!
Dante's hope, however, differs from Boethius's no less than
from Augustine's. At best, Boethius might look for only
posthumous vindication, rehabilitation by posterity. To his
death, I think, Dante confidently expected vindication and
rehabilitation in this life.
I Confessions, viii, xix.  3 Epist., x, par. 1o.
2 Inf., i, 2.            4 Convita, I, ii.




68


J. B. FLETCHER


III
It was in April, 1300, that Dante, dreaming, came to himself in the dark jungle, and found escape cut off by three wild
beasts. His first need was to get away from that perilous
place. And the spirit of Virgil got him away.
This is literal fact, not allegorical fiction. Through his
writings Virgil called to Dante across the ages, and saved him
from the false position in which he stood. In his fourth
Eclogue, as was believed, Virgil unwittingly prophesied the
Messiah; in his lEneid, the imperial destiny of Rome. He
converted Christian Dante to Roman imperialism as he had
converted Roman Statius to Christianity.' And a Roman
imperialist could not remain where Dante was --in rebel
Florence.
Virgil's message had weight with Dante for the same reason
that it had with Statius. Virgil's predictions came true.
Statius recognized the Child of the Eclogue in the Babe of
Bethlehem; Dante recognized the Empire of the Eneid in the
authority to which Christ submitted himself.
Fear of the pagans about him, however, kept Statius long a
"secret Christian." And for the lukewarmness he paid penance in Purgatory through over four hundred years of aimless
unrest. 2 Then, to expiate a sin of prodigality, through over
five hundred more he had lain face downward in the dust.3
He wins freedom to rise only now, at the moment when
Dante passes, following Virgil.
Statius's careful figures challenge attention. Whatever the
scale in Purgatory, one thousand years, or nearly, seem a
stiff sentence for the sins imputed-- apparently on Dante's
sole authority-- to the Roman poet. Early Christians had
to choose between dissimulation and martyrdom - and if
martyrdom were not recognized as extraordinary heroism
S Purg., xxii, 64 ff.  2 Ibid., xxii, 88-93; xviii, 88 ff.  3 Ibid., xxi, 67-69.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


69


above and beyond the call of duty, it would not have been
rewarded by a special "crown." And unthrift is not a heinous vice. Again, the nearly one thousand years still leave
over two hundred unaccounted for, since Statius died before
one hundred A.D. Such things are not accidental with Dante.
The punishment, excessive for the real Statius, may not be so
for the symbolic Statius of the allegory. If the almost one
thousand years do not count back to Statius's death, they
do to a date of capital importance in human history. Early
in the fourth century, according to the legend, the Roman
Emperor Constantine, made like Statius Christian, proved
himself also unfaithful and prodigal. Ceding to Pope Sylvester his dominions in the West, he gave away what was
not his to give, not the spiritual Father's right to receive.
The sin was expiated by world-ruin., For "over four hundred years" -until Charlemagne restored      Rome's dominion - Christians strayed leaderless in aimless unrest.
Five hundred years more they have been left face downward
in the dust of "present things" by the Church, herself fallen
in the mire under her double load." Her one "sun" has
eclipsed the other.3 She is left in darkness, a blind leader of
the blind - and the wildest part (parte piA selvaggia) of the
wildwood (selva selvaggia) Christendom has become. Statius,
then, is representative and type of the Christian so misguided,
and suffering for the sins of his "fathers" temporal and
spiritual.4
Dante has been another Statius. But the Mother of Mercies, Mary,5 had sent Beatrice to fill for him the place of the
recreant Church. Still like Statius, weak of faith, he had
denied her to serve the Siren of things present.6 He had
prodigally wasted his heritage from nature and from God, and
T Par., xx, 60; Inf., xix, II5-117; et al. 4 Ibid., 103-105.
2 Purg., xvi, 127-130.       s Inf., ii, 94 ff.
3 Ibid., 16-114.             6 Purg.,xxx, 124-126; xxxi, 34-36, 45.




70


J. B. FLETCHER


himself become a "wildwood," a selva selvaggia,' instead of a
fruitful garden.2  And the price of his sin had been " ten years
thirst" of his blessedness, Beatrice.3 His punishment is proportionable to Statius's, if the latter be taken as symbol of
mankind's punishment for Constantine's fault. Ten years
are a seventh of a man's allotted seventy; one thousand, a
seventh of mankind's allotted seven thousand.4
But now Dante has repented, and refound himself. Beatrice descends into the Car of holy Church, departed from
earth, to confess and absolve him.5        His spiritual "thirst"
is promised appeasement. But like Statius, "after God" -
in Beatrice - he needs Virgil's ministration to make him a
complete Christian,6 obedient to both Christ's commandments.7
He must serve not only God but neighbor. The light Virgil
cast behind him shows the way. Dante must not for fear,
like Statius, hide his light. He must not be a "secret Christian" in temporal faith any more than in spiritual. He must
publicly acknowledge the Holy Roman Empire as fully as
the Holy Roman Church.
Charity begins at home. His fellow countrymen hold his
Virgil in scorn.8 Dante they heed not.9 Into their city, which
is a dark jungle, a "wildwood" (selva selvaggia),Io no light
can penetrate. In it, parted against itself, a "citta partita,""
darkest and wildest part is that backwoods party, parte selvaggia,
in which Dante finds himself, and which shall presently
SInf., i, 5.     2 Purg., xxx, 109-120.    3 Ibid., xxxii, 2.
4 Cf. St. Isidore, Defide Cathol., ii, xv, 6 (Migne, Patrol., lxxxiii, 523): "In opere
enim sex dierum sex millium annorum opera demonstratur. Mille enim apud Deum
uni diei comparantur (Psalm Ixxxix, 4)." An extra "day" of grace - or one thousand years - was supposed to be granted mankind through Christ, so fulfilling in
New Dispensation Joshua's miracle of repeating a day in the Old. Cf. Rabanus the
Maurus, Comment. in lib. Jos. ii, iii (Migne, cviii, 1045); St. Augustine, De mirabilibus sacr. Script., ii, iv( Migne, xxxv, 2175, 2176). The second Saturday gained by
Dante represents the notion. Inf., xxxiv, 104, 105.
s Purg., xxix-xxxi.   6 Ibid., xxii, 66.  7 Ibid., xxxii, Io6-io8.
8 Inf., x, 63. Guido is type of the most enlightened among Florentine Guelphs.
9 Ibid., vi, 73-.       Ibid., i, 5. o     Ibid., vi, 61.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY                       71
dominate. "Within, three suns," however, he with it shall
be cast out,' and by the contrivance of the Impostor of Rome,
Boniface VIII.2 Against Dante, the false Pope's grudge was
special and personal. Boniface had forced "Mother" Rome
to play "stepmother" to Caesar.3 Dante had publicly protested. In hatred and fear, therefore, Boniface forced Florence to play "stepmother" to her loyal son.4        For, unlike
Statius, Dante had not kept secret his Christian political
faith."  Choosing not dissimulation, but martyrdom, he was
meriting his "crown" s- like Boethius who dared denounce
this world's ill governance,6 like the forbear who followed his
Csesar "against the iniquity of that Law whose folk usurp, by
fault of the Shepherd, justice." 7
The experience of those last "three suns," or solar years, in
Florence - after he had refound himself - is the allegory of
the Hell, first act of his Comedy. "Within three suns" - of
Friday and the double Saturday 8_- he gains "experience"
of Satan's City, true counterpart of Florence.9 Virgil's shade
shields him from its guilt "o as Virgil's teaching had saved him
from the apostasy of Guelph Florence. Virgil used Satan, the
arch-enemy, as "ladder" of escape.       "Virgil" -   professed
by Dante - made Boniface, Satan's Vicar and Dante's archenemy, get Dante out of Florence. It is the biter bit! Dante's
exile proved the ironic justice, the chastening mercy, of God.
Dante could not remain a wild woodman, a silvano selvaggio,
and yet be a right citizen."    But the woodcraft meanwhile
learned will enable him     later -  a right "forester"" 12-  to
clear the "wildwood" itself. That "good" at least he finds
in the evil place.13
1 Inf., vi, 64 ff.           6 Ibid., x, 124-129.
2 Cf. Par., xvii, 49-51.      7 Ibid., xv, 139-148.
3 Ibid., xvi, 58-60.          8 Inf., xxxiv, 104, 105.
4 Ibid., xvii, 46-48.        9 Par., ix, 127-132. Cf. Inf., viii-ix.
s Ibid., xxv, 8-io.         "I Inf., xxviii, 46-50.
z1 Par., viii, 115-117. Cf. St. Isidore, Etymol., ix, iv, 2 (Oxford, 1911): "Cives
vocati, quod in unum coeuntes vivant, ut vita communis et ornatior fiat et tutior."
12 Purg., xxxii, 10oo.         3 Inf., i, 8.




72


J. B. FLETCHER


Now plainly Virgil's guidance of Dante is not, as currently
asserted, guidance of Reason. For Dante the "master and
guide of human reason" was Aristotle,' and to him as such
Virgil frankly defers.' But human reason unaided by revelation led even Aristotle--not to say Virgil, Plato and
many others - to damnation.3 Only when Christianized did
Aristotle's reasoning become "Catholic opinion." 4
By Christ alone are men saved. He is the one way to
earthly and heavenly felicity. But he is two in one, human
and divine, distinct but not separate - like the two-natured
Griffin of the Comedy. The Griffin's head and body would not
function cut apart. Coesar with Peter, justice with charity,
reason with revelation, must work together. Reason without
revelation leads to the Limbo of lost hope.5 Revelation, unless brought down to the sense-bound language of reason, is
meaningless for man.6
Dante, like Statius, had faith in the Virgil who in his
Eclogue foretold the Messiah that should bring justice to
earth, and in his zEneid assigned to Rome administration of
the Messiah's justice.7 Virgil's reason had so little share in
this prophecy that he himself neither understood it, nor profited by it.8 He was "God's mouthpiece." 9 Statius recognized that Virgil's words were "consonant" with the "new
preachers";10 Dante that they were so with Christ's own,
sanctioning Rome's supremacy."
Dante's allegorical action carries the same argument.
Courteously, Dante lays to his own unworthiness his hesitancy to follow Virgil.12 Yet he might well have misdoubted
this strange proposer of a stranger plan. To elude wild beasts
I Cony., iv, vi, 71, 72.       7 Inf., ii, 10-27.
2 Inf., xi, 79, 8o, 101-1o5.   8 Purg., xxii, 67-69.
3 Purg., iii, 34,45.           9 Cony., iv, iv, 115, 116.
4 Cony., Iv, vi, 150.         'o Purg., xxii, 76-81.
s Inf., iv, 42; iii, 9.       " Mon., U, xii-xiii.
6 Par., iv, 40-48.             "2 Inf., ii, 31-36.




"THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


73


on earth by descending among fiends in hell was like jumping
from frying-pan into fire! And might not this pagan be tool
of the "false and lying gods" he had confessedly lived under?1
By an equally courteous gesture, Virgil reproves Dante's
doubt - of Dante. His calmly reassuring words, however,
also attest his own credentials. Not of his devising is the way
of rescue. In fact, his writings are as a "lantern" carried
behind him in the darkness and so showing only to those who
follow the light of justice Roman and Christian alike.2
So Dante is convinced. Not by Reason, but by Revelation
of Christ through Virgil, he is led to take up his cross of
martyrdom.3 At bottom, the crux of Dante's double comedy,
temporal and spiritual, is Crux Christi, Christ's Cross. To
him, as to Constantine, the sign is given - Hoc signo vinces.4
IV
The Hell, first act of Dante's personal comedy, ends with
miraculous rescue from damning environment - from that
wild part, or party, lair of wild beasts, set over the infernal
city, Florence. The just man is freed from service of sin.
But he is now alone, a party by himself,s in a better sense,
therefore, still a "parte selvaggia," a "sylvan" and no citizen
as he should be.6 The second act of his comedy, the Purgatory, symbolizes the recovery of his citizenship.
Cast adrift even from his fellow exiles, proscribed, poor,
homeless, Dante is at the very nadir of his fortunes. Now, if
ever, the knot of disastrous circumstance is to be cut, the deus
ex machina should appear. And so, having reached this
crisis in his kinsman's destiny, Cacciaguida, with dramatic
suddenness, announces the providential succor:
SInf., i, 70-73.
2 Purg., xxii, 67-69; i, 43-45. Rome's justice is "parcere subiectis et debellare
superbos" (AEn., vi, 853). Cf..7ames, iv, 6; also, Ps. xviii, 27, 28 - where the same
justice is conceived as illumining the Psalmist's "lantern" (lucerna).
3 Cf. Par., xiv, 88-io8.       s Ibid., xvii, 61-69.
4 Cf. Ibid., xiv, 125.         6 Purg., xxxii, ioo. Cf. note 6, p. 71.




74


J. B. FLETCHER


For thee first refuge and first hostelry
Shall be his courtesy, the great Lombard's,
Who on the ladder bears the sacred bird.,
The "first refuge" gives promise of the final haven.          For
there shall appear Can Grande, youth of destiny so glorious
that discretion forbids full disclosure." Men would not believe - besides, we may infer, enemies would be forewarned.
Yet the veil of caution is thin.3 We can read between the
lines reported. The younger and truly "great Lombard,"
Can Grande, will later be for Dante securer port and refuge:
Look thou to him and to his benefits;
By him shall be transmuted many folk,
Exchanging their conditions rich and poor. 4
So Rome's justice, as Anchises foretold and Dante cited,5
shall "uplift the humble and abase the proud." Rome's
courtesy was "port and refuge of kings, peoples and nations."6
Rome's emblem, the "pubblico segno," 7 is the Eagle. As if
by preestablished harmony, Can's escutcheon shows him the
della Scala, "of the Ladder," bearing the "sacred bird."       He
is declared free from the greed and sloth 8 presently disqualifying Emperor and imperialist, or Ghibelline, party.9
His deeds shall be "magnificences,"o1 gifts proportioned to
the need great or small." To only three others the poet of the
Comedy attributes this virtue - Christ and his Mother, and
Beatrice, Dante's spiritual mother.12       To mankind's need
Christ gave himself; Mary, her Son. For Dante's need Beatrice, imitating Christ, left her footprints in hell. There her
x Par., xvii, 70-72.           2 Ibid., 91-93.
3 Cf. Purg., viii, 19-21.      4 Par., xvii, 87-90.
s Mon., 11, vii, 71-78. Cf. above, note 2, p. 73.
6 Ibid., In, v, 60, 61. Rifugio, Italian form of refugium, occurs only this once
in Dante's writings.
7 Par., vi, 100.               8 Ibid., xvii, 82-84.
9 Purg., vi, 97-105; vii, 91, 96; Par., vi, 97-105. Note correspondence of
canto and verse.
1o Par., xvii, 85.            " Cony., iv, xvii, 41-43.
12 Par., vii, 97-120; xxxiii, 20; xxxi, 79-90. For Beatrice's maternal character
see Purg., xxx, 79-81; Par., i, o10-102; xxii, 1-6.




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75


love moved Virgil to lead him from "slavery to freedom,"
and Virgil led him - to the "magnificence" of Can Grande.
And Can's years, like Beatrice's, when first met, will be nine,
auspicious number.,
Virgil, I repeat, led Dante to temporal freedom. Aristotle
and Plato, not to say a host of Christian writers, gave as good
or better moral guidance. Moreover, the Christian needs no
other spiritual text than holy Scripture.2 In Virgil's inspired
word Dante read, not only the need, and therefore right of
Roman supremacy, but also a foreshadowing of "the man
and the arms" destined to meet Rome's own present need.
The wonder-working Child of the Fourth Eclogue becomes
in Anchises' later prophecy young Marcellus, fosterling of
Augustus.    "Behold him," exclaims the seer,3 "glorious in
his splendid spoils, and towering triumphant over all. The
Roman realm, when upheaved in utter confusion, he, a knight,
shall support; he shall strike down Carthaginian and insurgent
Gaul, and a third time hang up the captured arms to father
Quirinus."
But - Dis aliter visum! Young Marcellus must die, his
triumph all incomplete.4 So Virgil's story seems to Virgil a
"tragedy." s But his fallible reason misread his true inspiration.6 His Anchises presently also says that, if Fate's harsh
decree might be reversed, a "new Marcellus" should arise.
"Fate" is but God's providence.7 By the miracle of the Cross,
Fate has been, and again may be, reversed.8 There can a
"new Marcellus arise," to whom      the first would be but a
"shadowy preface."9 And now, as "father Anchises" to
1 Par., xvii, 79-81. Cf. Vita Nuova, i, 9-15; xxx.
2 Par., v, 76-78.
3 AEn. vi, 855-859 (transl. Loeb Classical Library).
4 Ibid., 882 ff.
s Inf.,xx, 113.
6 Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. II-iI, clxxxi, 6, ad 2.? Inf., vii, 67 ff.
8 Cf. Par., xxii, 94-96.  9 Cf. Ibid., xxx, 78.




76


J. B. FLETCHER


zEneas, forefather Cacciaguida names him to Dante.' Only,
Cacciaguida speaks of his own true knowledge.2 He too
points to the "confusion" of the "Roman realm" -      shown
in Rome's "daughter," Florence, so foul that was so fair.
Ex pede Herculem. But, he concludes, look thou for deliverance to Can Grande. Must not Dante - and Dante's
reader - infer in Can a "new Marcellus," who shall "strike
down Carthaginian and insurgent Gaul"? "Carthaginian,"
Dante himself calls the Papacy, covetous of Rome's earthly
dominion, 3 "harlot" and "thief," 4 against whom      a new
"Scipio" - Marcellus reincarnate - shall be sent.s      "Insurgent Gaul" is still the pride-swollen rebel "giant" of
France, envious of Caesar and therefore hating his defender
Dante, and bending the pliant and captive Papacy to foul
ends.6
In their message - one in substance - which all command
Dante to transmit, Cacciaguida, patriot of Florence, thinks
first of his desecrated home, Peter, founder of the Church,
of his polluted "seat," 7 Beatrice, spirit of charity, of the
thwarting of divine Love's "magnificent plan." 8 She evokes
first a vision of the sad story.9
From Jerusalem where he suffered, Christ, the two-natured
Griffin, has drawn the Car of his Church westward to Rome,
where is planted the Tree of Justice. And he binds the Car
by its pole, his Cross, to the Tree, so to await secure his second
coming. The pagan Eagle of the Tree strikes it in vain. The
sly Fox of False Doctrine is speedily cast out. But then, foolish in new friendliness, the Eagle moults into the Car his
golden plumes. Grateful Constantine makes the fatal gift to
1 Dante himself points out the parallel, and uses Virgil's own language and
words. Par., xv, 25-30; AEn., vi, 835.
2 Par., xv, 55-63; xvii, 13-18.  6 Purg., xxxii, 151-16o; xxxiii, 45.
3 Epist., viii, 165-172.      7 Par., xxvii, 19-26.
4 Purg., xxxii, 149; xxxiii, 44.  8 Ibid., vii, 113.
s Par., xxvii, 61.            9 Purg., xxxii, 100oo-6o.




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77


Sylvester. The Car is weighted down to earth. The Dragon
can reach it from below, and tear off part of its bottom. The
great schism of the Eastern Church happens. When Constantine carried off to the East his branch of the Tree, with
it he carried a fragment of the Car. And the riven Tree in
the West withered; and the broken Car was changed by the
Circean poison of the golden plumes into a two-natured
monster, half-bird, half-beast - a mockery of the holy Griffin.
Upon it, instead of the Holy Spirit, - represented by Beatrice, - a loose Harlot sits, beguiling and beguiled. No longer
the rotted Tree holds the Car secure. Out of the Tree's
decay has sprung a Giant, lustful and brutal, who, when his
Harlot casts a single glance towards Dante, drags her off out
of sight. "Insurgent Gaul," strong in the Empire's decay,
has dragged off the Church from Rome to Avignon. A moment Pope Clement had looked to Dante appealing for her
right protector, Henry VII, who might have succored Clement
as Charlemagne had succored Adrian.1 But the "Gascon,"
another Judas, betrayed his Saviour that might have been.2
It is the crisis of disaster for Christendom. As in Dante's
own case, the "knot" is worthy of a "god." As for Dante,
Cacciaguida, so now Beatrice for Christendom - and Dante
- announces him.3 The Church, Car of salvation, broken
by the serpent, no longer whole, - "Catholic," - is no longer
holy. And within its body still, poisonous, are those plumes
of temporal power. They are the "sop" graciously given, but
"evilly received." 4 Yet "God's vengeance fears not the
sop" -even though after it Satan enter into the betrayer.
God will send one stronger than Satan to force the Church
to disgorge, and to render again unto to Caesar the things that
are Caesar's. The Eagle's "heir" shall be again full-feathered,
I Par., vi, 94-96. Cf. Epist., v, 126-130.
2 Par., xvii, 82.           s Purg., xxxiii, 31 ff.
4.ohn, xiii, 26, 27 - as currently interpreted. Cf. St. Bonaventure, Comment.
in Joan., ad loc.




78


'78             J. B. FLETCHER


and the Church regain her natural form. I read in the stars.,
concludes Beatrice, that even now the Deliverer is at hand.
And he shall be a "Five hundred, ten, and five."
The "facts," she adds considerately, will clear up her dark
riddle. She might, it seems, have spared Dante- and
Dante's reader - the superfluous enigma of the number.
Without its dark enlightenment, all the facts, as we have
seen, pointed unmistakably to Can Grande as the man of
destiny. Visibly, year by year, triumph by triumph, he was
fulfilling her prophecy - and Virgil's and Cacciaguida's and
Peter's. By his abundant fruits Dante might know him.
But Dante would get and give assurance doubly sure. Back
of Beatrice's cabalistic number is another of more immediately
divine formulation. This is the number of the Beast - and
of the Man - set down in Revelations. St. John, "Christ's
Eagle," I'strong-sighted through love, looked deepest into the
Sun of truth. To him the dying Saviour confided his own
Mother.2 She dying, her motherhood of man passed to the
Church. So John became guardian of that vicarious Mother,
and in vision was given warning of her peril, and -like
Dante later - was commanded to publish it. Her membership, "family of the Lamb," shall be warred upon by the
"family of the Dragon."3 Through the "Mother" left exposed on earth, Antichrist will strike at Christ. At the last
and direst peril, when she seems lost, the Lamb himself shall.
descend and, slaying the Beast, lead his fellow lambs into the
heavenly fold.
Thus John's narrative is, like Dante's, a comedy in which
the distressed hero is in the nick of time rescued by a descending god. Also Dante, a "lamb" of the Lamb, is warred upon
by the " wolves " of Florence, whelps of the Beast, the " old
She-Wolf." But the "sacred poem," his "revelations," may
z Par.  xi  3            2 Ibid., xxv,  1-14
3 Cf. Aquinas, Expos. L. in Apoc., xiii.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


79


be means of overcoming their cruelty, and of winning him
return to the "dear fold" with "another voice, another
fleece," - those of the Lamb militant, - to receive a victor's
crown.' Beatrice's prophecy reveals how his personal and
earthly triumph may be brought about.
Object of John's solicitude is the holy Mother, spiritual
"centre" of Christ's Church.2 Object of Dante's solicitude is
Beatrice, his own Mother in Christ, and centre of the Church
descending to him in his vision.3 Her Car has become an
ambiguous Beast; her seat usurped by a Harlot. So John
saw the Whore of Babylon on a seven-headed Beast.
"Historically" interpreted, the Beast's seven heads are
the seven hills of degenerate Rome.4
In John's allegory there are two Beasts, one from sea and
one from land - one, that is, from princely pride and one
from priestly avarice.s The second Beast with dragon-voice
urges submission to the first, proclaiming that all who "buy
and sell" Christ must show the mark - the number or name
- of the first Beast.' And this mark is counterfeit of the
mark of the Lamb. For the craft of Antichrist is to feign
himself Christ, to hunt - like the wolf of the fable - in
sheep's clothing. "As Christ is called king, pontiff, and
prophet, so Antichrist shall pretend to be now king, now
pontiff, now prophet." 7 His number is therefore Christ's
number - 666.
By the cipher of Greek numerals, - since John wrote in
I Par., xxv, I-12.
2 Cf. Albertus Magnus, De laudibus b. Mariae, etc., II, ii, 17: "Ipsa dicitur
umbilicus Ecclesiae: quia sicut umbilicus in medio totius corporis, sic ipsa in medio
Ecclesiae."
3 Purg., xxix-xxx.
4 Aquinas, Comment. ad loc. Cf. the "parti elette" of Par., ix, 140; also Inf.,
xix, io6-x11, where "on the waters" is on the Tiber.
s Aquinas, op. cit., xiii, prin. The Veltro feeds not on "land or pelf." Inf., i,
103.
6 Aquinas, op. cit., xiii, fin. Cf. Par., xvii, 51.
7 Aquinas, loc. cit.




8o


J. B. FLETCHER


Greek, '- this number spells "Teytan," or Titan, which interpreted is "sun" or "giant." By usurpation, the Beast will
proclaim himself accordingly "sun of justice and giant of
double nature, divine and human." Likewise, by Latin
numerals, - pertinent because of the inspired Vulgate version, - DCLXVI spells "DIC-LVX," or "Say-Light," that
is, soi-disant Light of the World.
Dante adapts this symbolism. The Pope of Rome has indeed a vicarious right to call himself "Light of the World" in
things spiritual. But that spiritual light he has darkened by
claiming to be "Titan," "giant of double nature," and so
"sun of justice" temporal as well. By "theft" of its proper
power he has darkened the second "sun of Rome," justice of
the Emperor, also.2 Betraying the true, the "pacific Titan," 3
set beside him for his earthly protection, he has fallen into
the abusive clutches of a pretended "giant," in reality only
big with pride.
Beatrice's promised Deliverer is to restore the dispossessed
true Titan, to let the eclipsed sun of temporal justice shine
again. He is not the "two-natured giant," Christ himself, nor
yet vicar of both natures, but of authority solely human and
temporal. His number is therefore lesser-- to wit, "515,"
6, unit of John's number, expresses God's perfection; since
as the factors of 6 are 3, 2, and I, so there are 3 Persons, 2
natures in Christ, i essence of God.4 Unit of the Deliverer's
number is 5 - Ioo, 2, and i times 5. His perfection, whose
number it is, will be of Justice executive and commutative.
For he will be another Cacciaguida, going "against the iniquity of that law whose folk, by fault of the shepherd, usurp
justice." 5 He will be another Joshua, Maccabaeus,6 Scipio,
Marcellus.7 The natal influence shaping his nature as theirs -: Aquinas stresses this point.  s Par., xv, 142-144.
2 Purg., xvi, 10o6-112.         6 Ibid., xviii, 37 ff.
3 Epist., v, Io; vii, 19; Par., xvii, 82.  7 See above, p. 75.
4 Aquinas, loc. cit.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


as also Can Grande's' - is the stamp of Mars, fifth heaven
and heaven of the Cross. And the seal of the Cross upon the
soul is the mark of the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ.2
In them, declares St. Bonaventure,3 "glow the superabundance of divine wisdom, power and goodness," feeding on
which the Veltro, sheep-dog of the Lamb, shall so be - in
Virgil's list 4-fifth to save Italy by his "wounds."  The
Five Wounds shall serve him as the "five stones" served
young David - to slay the giant Goliath.5 Once Dante had
expected Henry VII to be the new David; 6 but the sling
had passed from his dying hand to Can's live one. By Can's
prowess, the Five Wounds shall make and be a "safe asylum,"7
larger exemplar of the one he was to offer Dante.
Against the law of the " felon folk," 8 " family of the Beast,"
the Deliverer shall array the Law of Jove's Eagle, defined in
"5 times 7 vowels and consonants." 9 After the first 3 letters,
DIL, there is pause, during which Dante appeals for understanding to the "Muse" that maketh to be glorious and longlived men and cities and kingdoms. Then is spelled out
Christ's Law of Justice: Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram.
Thus separately presented, the first three letters - number
of the Trinity - serve as superscription to the Law, by recognized cipher initialling Domini Iesu Lex. Also, product of
the numerals D, I, L - 500 times I times 50 - equals that
of D, X, V - 500 times 10 times 5 - of the Deliverer's number. His product will be Christ's Law, the Law of the Roman
Eagle.
For this product he must possess the authority implied in
the thirty-fifth and last letter of the Law - the M of terram -
monarchy of earth. In the M, Jove's sphere appears "silver
Par., xvii, 76-78.           o Epist., vii, 176-183.
2 Cf. Par., xi, 107.         7 Bonaventure, xii, 659.
3 Opera, Paris, I871, XIII, 193.  8 Par., xv, 145.
4 Inf., i, o16-o8.           9 Ibid., xviii, 88, 89.
s Bonaventure, xiii, 20, 55, 68.




82


J. B. FLETCHER


distinct from gold" - the power of the universal Monarchy
is temporal, distinct from the spiritual Papacy. To reach its
perfection, its entelechy, the M develops from national
monarchy to international, from "Lily" to "Eagle." ' Five
nations have striven towards this self-fulfilment - Assyrian,
Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman. Thefifth, or Roman,
alone succeeded.2
The Veltro feeds on "wisdom and love and virtue." The
virtue is fortitude, heritage from the imperial fifth race and
gift of the fifth heaven. The wisdom is of the Law temporal
inscribed on Moses' two tablets, the twicefive Commandments.3
The love is the "ardor of sacrifice" 4 of the Cross expressed in
the 5 Wounds multiplied a hundredfold by divine Charity,
since "Charity is signified by Ioo." 5
This "500, 1io, and 5" shall slay the "Thief" and the
"Giant," the recreant Papacy and her pride-swollen paramour,
or Monarch of the Lily, usurpers of the power of Rome,
counterfeiters of the "Number of the Man." But false Rome
has a false daughter, Florence, city of the "five thieves." 6
herself a giantfivefold swollen in pride.7 She is another Pentapolis, City of Five, once in obedience to the Law of the Five
Books, the Pentateuch, an earthly paradise, but now sunk to
a Dead Sea, unstable and fetid, of Pride.8 Her wisdom is
blindness;9 her love malignity; 10 her power the "accursed
flower" of Circe, her florin, feeding on which the shepherd
turns wolf," and her Lily, which severed from the Eagle, its
natural "head," is shamed and bloody.12
SPar., xviii, 97- 114.           Mon., ii, ix.
3 Aquinas so explains the factor io of the second numeral 60 of the number of
the Beast.
4 Par., xiv, 93.
s Aquinas, loc. cit.: "Charitas, quae significatur per centenarium."
6 Inf., xxvi, 1-6.             X0 Ibid., 61.
7 Par., xvi, 46-48.            " Par., ix, 127 ff.
8 Aquinas, loc. cit.            Ibid., xvi, 15I-I 54.
9 Inf., xv, 67.




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83


Spoken only in the tongue of the "Latins," Beatrice's number should carry only the cipher of Latin characters. By
anagram, these, DXV, reveal the Deliverer as a DJ7X. In
Roman usage, Dux is a military commander. The title would
fit the new "Scipio" predicted by St. Peter, but not -
naturally-- an Imperator, or Emperor.,  The "infallible"P)
Lady should not falsify facts, or contradict the "apostolic
light" of her Church! But there is absolutely no basis for
the common identification of her champion with the "heir of
the Eagle," a coming right emperor. On the contrary, she
says plainly that some time in the future there will be an "heir,"
but that her champion is now at hand. This champion, sherifflike, may, however, forcibly seize the stolen property, and
hold it in trust for the "heir" to come. "The facts," she says,
will solve her "hard riddle" of the champion's identity. The
facts showed Dante no prospect, in any near future, of a right
emperor. After "exalted Harry's" death, the two squabbling
pretenders --"German" Frederick and Louis--were worse
than even "German Albert." He at least could, if he would,
have made himself a true Caesar and a peace-maker for Italy.3
Frederick and Louis were - during Dante's lifetime--impotent even against each other. They brought not peace but
war. The imperial "saddle" was empty, and likely to remain
so indefinitely, though Justinian had "patched the bridle."'4
He however, true Imperator et Dux, had pointed the way out.
Called to higher things himself, he made Belisarius, with whom
manifestly was heaven's right hand,5 vicarious Dux. Alsoand more literally --called to higher things, confident in Can
Grande's "star," Henry had named him Vicar ImperialDux "pro imperio sacrosancto Romano."'6
By currently used cipher, the champion's number implies
SA Cesar's full title was "Imperator et Dux."
"2 Par., vii, 19.  3 Purg., vi, 76-Ii7.  4 Ibid., 88-90.
s Par., vi, 22-27. Note the correspondence in canto-number.
6Aqua et terra, xxiv, 3,4; Epist., x, superscript.




84


J. B. FLETCHER


Can Grande's name. Can Grande was understood to mean
"Great Khan," Tartar title equivalent to the Roman Dux.1
In mediaeval Latin, again, the characters X (for Ch, Greek X),
C and K are interchangeable.2 D, X, V, therefore, do actually initial Dante's own title for Can - Dominus Kanis
Victoriosissimus.3
Commentators have long recognized the obvious pun on
Can Grande, "Great Dog," in Virgil's Feltro. It is not to
smile. Puns are serious things for Dante and his age. Nomina
sunt consequentia rerum.4 A preeistablished harmony was
recognized in names.5 But there is also correspondence between the Veltro and Beatrice's Dux. The Veltro is to chase
back to hell the greedy Lupa. The Dux is to send to hell the
greedy Puttana, or Harlot. A puttana is a lupa.6
When the "She-Wolf" couples, mankind troubles.7         That
her double Beast - monstrous commixion of spiritual and
temporal power-     "may not be taken away from her," 8 the
Papacy whores with princes of the earth, cajoling these to
rebel against the Emperor, their lord and her prey. Other
"sons of earth," the Giants, once rebelled against their lord,
high Jove. But with his children - the "Thymbroean," Pallas
and Mars - he overthrew them.9
On this legend Dante bases complicated symbolic analogies,
of which my space permits only barest hints. It was Thymbraean Apollo who bade iEneas return to the land of his
I Even two centuries later, Paolo Giovio still so explains, suggesting that some
crusading ancestor of Can's may have assumed it in token of triumph. Elog. viror.
bellica virt. illust. (ed. Basil, 1596), i, 42.
2 Du Cange, Gloss., s. n. K.
3 Epist., x, superscript.
4 V. N., xiii, 20, 21.
5 Aquinas, S. 7!., nx, xxxvii, 2. Cf. Par., xi, 52-54; xii, 67-70.
6 Cf. Isidore, Etymol. (ed. Oxford, 1911), xviii, xlii, 2: "Lupae meretrices sunt
a rapacitate vocatae, quod ad se rapiant miseros et adprehendant." Cf. lupanar.
7 The punning connection between amm6glia of Inf., i, 100 and ammdlia of Par.,
xxx, 139 is patent.
8 Purg., xxxii, 151.         9 Purg., xii, 31-33.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


ancestors, the "soil that sent him forth." '  Apollo likewise
inspires Dante, and to like enterprise.2 Since Apollo has
"entered into" him, Dante himself enacts the "Thymbraean."
Pallas - the Roman Minerva and the Holy Roman Virgin
Mary -   has set her "leaves" of wisdom on Beatrice's head.3
Her r6le, therefore, Beatrice enacts. Can Grande, another
Romulus and son of Mars.4 enacts in service of the Cross the
deity of his paternal heaven. United, these three - Dante,
Beatrice, Can Grande, or Love, Wisdom, Power - shall overthrow  the "Giants," and redeem     the soil that sent Dante
forth.s
This is Dante's personal and nearer goal. Also, he conceived the humbling of Florence to be Can's next strategic
objective. The Florentine "flower"-- both florin and Lily
- was potent against the Roman peace. Florentine money
power corrupted, and also gave the "sinews of war"; her
standard of the Lily was raised against the Empire. Moreover, she was next neighbor to Lombardy, nearly pacified
already by Can. Tuscany humbled would form with Lombardy a state under Can's Eagle such as that Cacciaguida had
lived in under the vegis of the just and valiant Countess Matilda. For the loyal remnant it would be an earthly paradise,
even though outside there stretched a desert of "thorns and
thistles," haunt of beast-like men, Circe's changelings. After
all, was not the first Eden so? "If it be asked," wrote Aquinas, "why God made not all earth man's paradise, it may be
replied that a large part of earth had to be set aside for the
I eEn., iii, 85 ff.  2 Par., i, 19-21; xxv, 1-12.  3 Purg., xxx, 68.
4 Par., xvii, 76-78. Cf. Par., viii, 131.
s Variant of this symbolism appears in Par., ii, 7-9. The two "Bears," guides
of the mariner on life's sea, I conceive to be Pope and Emperor. The Great Bear
(or Wain, or Car of the Church) is lost behind a cloud of sin. Also, the present
Papacy - typified by Nicholas (Inf., xix, 67-123) - is "son of the Bear" of
Cupidity. Hence, whereas the true Great Bear, Helice, is mother to the Lesser
Bear, Areas (Par., xxxi, 31-33), the Papacy is murderous "step-mother" to Caesar.
Both Bears are so lost to mankind; but, aided as before, Dante shall rediscover
them.




86


J. B. FLETCHER


other animals to abide in with their kind. For man, however,
as noblest part and end of creation, the noblest part of earth
was reserved."'    North Italy, at least, now   a "desert,""
might become again a "garden" under the Tree of Justice.
Such a garden it had been under Matilda's rule. She too
had defended her realm against a "giant," defying Henry IV
as Cato Julius Caesar. For Cato, the imperial office that
Casar founded and first filled was sacred. For assaulting it,
Brutus and Cassius writhe in the mouths of Satan.3 The man
Julius, however, was no Eagle, but a predatory "hawk." 4
The right Caesar should rule as a freeman over freemen.5
Julius was a slave to appetite, to feed which he made his subjects slaves.6 By like distinction, Dante condemned and resisted Boniface VIII, even while rebuking the impiety of
Anagni.7 And one and the same principle justified his siding
against Pope Boniface and Matilda's siding with Pope Gregory. To Peter, no less than to Casar, must be rendered the
things that are his. Boniface had usurped Casar's prerogatives; Henry IV, Peter's. Against just protest, Henry had
insisted on appointing Church officials. Also, he was not
reverent but insolent to the holy Father.8 It should be remembered that Dante was no hard-shell Ghibelline, but a
party by himself.
Cato's spirit pervades and rules the purgatorial Mount,9
rejecting the unfit,10 spurring on the laggard."  So in life he
had urged the remnant of Pompey's army across the Libyan
desert.12  And it is his freedom-thirsting spirit that spurs
Dante to follow Virgil, the imperial ideal, up the mount of
chastening torment, the sandy desert outside the garden of
SExpos. in Genesim, ii, meo.  7 Purg., xx, 85-96.
2 Purg., vi, 103-I05.        8 Cf. Mon., IIi, xvi, 134-140.
3 Inf., xxxiv, 55-67.        9 Purg., i, 65, 66.
4 Ibid., iv, 123.           "o Ibid., 28 ff.
5 Mon., i, xi.               " Ibid., ii, I 18 ff.
6 Ibid., xI, v, 132-170.    11 Inf., xiv, I13-115.




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87


his desire.' His own freedom the living Cato could not win.
His desire was noble, but his eyes were without light. No
more than Virgil may he enter into the earthly paradise.2
Himself entering therein, Dante sees at first the spirit of
Matilda alone. By degrees she leads him, however, to Beatrice descended again into the Car of the Church remade whole
and holy.
The allegory is clear. Dante is readmitted into the garden
of his delight, which is none other than the dark jungle he had
fled, but now lifted up from the valley of the shadow of sin to
the sun-lit heights of rectitude. The tangle of malignant
growths is pruned away. The ordered and fruitful trees make
a green shade where birds sing. Virgil is justified. Justice
has returned, and the first humane time. The age renews
itself3-of Cacciaguida's Florence "at peace within her
ancient close, sober and chaste," under her Countess Matilda.4
Matilda's springtime spirit, this long while captive, like Proserpine,5 in this other realm of Pluto, the "accursed wolf,"
has resurrection - in the Scaliger, bearer of the Ladder under
the Eagle.
Consider the interweaving of the multiple symbolism. Can
Grande, bearer of "exalted Harry's" commission, justiciary
of the Eagle, shall have made Florence fit for the abode of
just men. By his friendly "ladder" (Scala),6 Dante will
climb back to the city, exalted because humbled, as from it,
debased to hell, he had climbed by the enemy "ladder" of the
fallen Eagle, Lucifer. Now safe under the Eagle as unfallen
Adam under the sacred Tree, he may train himself to climb
the spiritual "ladder" from earth to heaven,7 from Caesar's
eagle-nest to the nest of the "Eagle of Christ" - and not: Purg., i, 71.
2 By imputed faith he shall, it seems, be admitted into the heavenly paradise
- and Virgil also, if Beatrice's grateful intercession avail. Inf., ii, 73, 74.
3 Purg., xxii, 70-73.  4 Par., xv, 97 ff.  s Purg., xxviii, 49-51.
6 Epist., x, par. 2.  7 Par., xxi, 25 ff.




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J. B. FLETCHER


only to Christ's "best beloved," but to his own also. For
Beatrice is the "Eagle" that first plumed him for flight with
her own plumage of love,' and trained his eagle-eyes to look
upon the "Sun of the angels."2       She it is, as Adam    tells
Dante, who has "disposed" him to the long ladder to be
climbed.3 And Dante, as he climbs, reads the signs of his
destiny writ large upon the heavens themselves. First,
against the Sun, light-giver that "guideth aright everyone in
every way," 4 glows the triple Circle of Prudence, weighing
things past, present and future. True prudence may counsel
seeming imprudence. Within the Circle forms the Cross of
Mars. "Arise again, and conquer!" its spirits urge Dante.5
His house was founded on the rock of Cacciaguida's martyrdom. He shall take his own stand thereon. To him, then,
"Jove's Bird" takes gradual shape, issuing from the sacred
Law.6 Its right he must maintain against the "felon folk"
who, scorning it, martyred his kinsman - aye, and his kinsman's home and his. And in gratitude, borne by his prince
Can Grande, that Eagle will shed its plumes on Florence, to
make for him therein a nest of peace. Another Ladder then
will be let down from heaven - that which Jacob also saw
in dream reaching up to God's own throne,7 the triune Circle
of the Godhead.8 And up that final Ladder another Eagle
will draw him--Christ's own "Eagle," Love.9
Thus by Ladder and Eagle man is drawn from Circle to
Circle. The first Circle bears Christ's Cross; the second his
SPar., xv, 52-54; Inf., ii, 72.
2 Ibid., i, 46-54; xxi, 1-12; xxii, 124-126; xxiii, 46-48; xxvi, 1-12; xxxiii, 49 -57.
3 Ibid., xxvi, 109-111i. Cf. Par., x, 82-87. Adam appears fitly after Dante's
successful examination in the three holy virtues, for these shall bring him to Adam's
double paradise, earthly and heavenly.
4 Inf., i, I7-I8.          s Par., xiv, 121-126.
6 Ibid., xviii, 70 ff.
7 Ibid., xxi, 25-30; xxii, 61-72.
8 Ibid., xxxiii, i002 ff.
9 Ibid., xxii, ioo-IO2; xxxi, 65, 66, 94-IO2.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


89


Countenance.' By the Ladder of his Cross man climbs to his
presence. That dolorous effort is the merit in which man is
sustained by his grace through the vicarious double Eagle,
Emperor and Pope.
Dante's hope, therefore, requires these two factors of merit
and grace, Ladder and Eagle.2 Because he feels them assured,
he may call his autobiographical narrative a Comedy. Christ,
the divine "Eagle," has sent his "family" of lesser Eagles to
sustain him against the "family of the Beast": loving Beatrice to be for him wing-giver and vision-strengthener; Virgil,
"Eagle" of poets and prophet - voice of the Eagle of Rome;
Can Grande, the Scaliger, bearer of the Ladder under the
Eagle by which Dante himself shall climb back into his Florence of the Lily made perfect under the heaiship of the Roman
Eagle.
V
With the exile's symbolic return ends the Purgatory, second
act of the Comedy. In the third act, the Paradise, he rises
with Beatrice altogether away from earth, even from Matilda's
lofty realm. But he goes only to return. The experience he
shall have gathered on high - as previously in hell below -
is for the good of Florence as well as for his own. By Can
Grande's right and might she will have been made again what
she was under Matilda - a city of freemen under a free lord.
But true freedom is service of justice. The Florentine "remnant," entered again into this freedom, must walk and work
in it. They must fit them to climb the Ladder to the final
"freedom of eternal glory." 3 Himself, the now full-fledged
Eagle, will train them as he has been trained. He will make
over his people into likeness to that "people just and sound"
of the heavenly city - antithesis of the City of Dis - that
Par., xiv, 100-102; xxxiii, 130-132.
2 Ibid., xxv, 67-69.  3 Epist., x, 154, 155.




90


J. B. FLETCHER


he has seen in his dream., His Hell mirrors Florence as she
now - as he writes - is; his Paradise mirrors what his hope
would make her.
The poet in exile can only picture his hope. But if his hope
of return were realized; if with       "another voice, another
fleece," he should assume at his baptismal font the cappello;
if Peter's true representative should therewith "encircle his
brow," 2 might he not make his dream       reality?  Knowing as
we do his premature death, we are apt to think of Dante's
career as ended with his great poem. He had no reason to
think so.3 For him, still in vigorous middle life, conscious of
his genius, much-experienced in affairs, rehabilitation in a
Florence purged of enemies could not mean a leisured retirement. His "friend" Can Grande must still need his aid and
counsel. Was it not written that "to rule well and perfectly,
philosophical authority must be conjoined with imperial"?4
Moreover, the still youthful prince must need a mentor.5
Dante would have been to him another "Romeo"; but from
Can's "magnificence" Romeo's "ill requital" was no wise to
be feared.6 Nor would the loyalist Florentines, saved through
him, enact the envious Provengalese. Had he not served as
Rahab, by whose aid Joshua had won Jericho, and whose
household therefore Joshua had spared? 7 To the victory he
had helped "by one and other palm" - palm of poet and of
statesman, Virgil's twofold pupil, autore by both derivations,
author and authority.8 II cappello--meaning both chaplet
x Par., xxxi, 37-39.      3 Cf. Inf., xxxi, 127-129; Par., xxii, 14, 15.
2 Ibid., xxv, 1-12.       4 Cony., Iv, vi, 157 ff.
s Ibid., Iv, xxiv. Can was born in 1291.
6 Par., vi, 127-142. The logic of Justinian's whole discourse is: the Roman
Eagle's progress has been halted; another Romeo is needed to guide onward the
sacred bird. Also, Dante is a "romeo" in a figurative sense - a seeker of the true
Rome. To that end he had been a "palmer," bearing his palm of grace across the
sea of sin (Par., xxvi, 55-66) - and a "pilgrim," wandering perforce far from his
native land to the shrine of hope (Par., xxv, 17, I8, 82-87). Vita Nuova, xli, 34-52.
7 Joshua, vi, 17. Par., ix, 115 ff.
S Inf., i, 85. Cf. Conv., iv, vi, 14-37.




THE CRUX OF DANTE'S COMEDY


9i


of poet and cap of authority - would fitly recognize his
double claim. There would be poetic justice, too, in the conferring of the cap at his baptismal font, seeing that the amnesty
once offered him required him to wear thither a fool's-cap written over with his name and shame.'
Instrumental in freeing his city from servitude of sin, he will
be given authority to train her, so purged, in service of justice.
He will be the silvano, the forester,2 of that once Dark Wood,
now set in a high place near unto heaven. It will be a pleasant
arbor, shaded like Eden from the too burning rays of the sun.3
Mortality cannot withstand the direct glory of God's face.4
But Dante has seen a garden fairer still, all of roses and lilies
in full sunlight; s and at last a single Rose, upon whose petals
are enthroned, triumphant, the soldiery of Christ.6 It is the
Rose of Charity, central in the heavenly paradise, as was the
Tree of Justice in the earthly. As far as may be, Dante the
forester will bring his wooded city nearer to that beatific garden, letting in the sun of divine truth as the vision of his
charges strengthens - until naught need be interposed save
the veil of mortality itself.
Thus he will have lifted up his people from the depths to
the heights. He will have served Matilda and Beatrice, as
Jacob served Leah and Rachel. Through both he has begotten
good works. For this must be a double service, a priestly task
besides a political. Peter's seat is empty, as well as Caesar's
throne. Until they are filled again, he must in humility take
upon himself their double guidance. Into the earthly paradise
he leads both Virgil and Statius.7 The neighborly task done,
Dante, like aged Jacob, aged Marcia,8 will turn himself
x Cf. Paget Toynbee, Dantis Epistolae, Oxford, 1920, p. 154, n. 4.
a Purg., xxxii, 100o.
3 Ibid., xxviii, 1-3. Cf. Aquinas, Expos. in Gen., ii.
4 Cf. Par., xxi, 1-12.          s Ibid., xxiii, 70 ff.
6 Ibid., xxx, 124-126; xxxi, 1-3, et seq.
7 Purg., xxviii, 82.           8 Conv., iv, xxviii, 97-163.




92


J. B. FLETCHER


wholly to God in the joy of contemplation long deferred. The
Virtues will no longer forbid.' And for guide, Beatrice, modestly withdrawn into her heaven, will send him Bernard," in
whom, as in Virgil, symbol and reality meet. St. Bernard is
no mere personification of Contemplation, rapture of the lonely
soul to God. His life offers not merely high example of this
rapture. In his writings,3 he actually taught Dante the way
of the mystic, as Virgil actually the way of the statesman.
Also, there is another real, if remoter, influence. Bernard as
monk preached the crusade in which Dante's forbear Cacciaguida bore his Cross, and so bade Dante take up his. Finally,
Bernard was Mary's best beloved,4 Eagle-messenger of the
Mother as John of the Son. She, to whom Dante daily prays,s
is alpha and omega of all his mercies. Her handmaid Beatrice
she sent for his justification; from her servant Bernard she
receives him, justified; and herself intercedes for his reward.
Yet behind and above these "magnificences" is her gift of
her Son, whose Cross is the true crux of Dante's personal
comedy, and of whatso other shall have happy issue here or
hereafter.
I Purg., xxxii, 1-9.   4 Par., xxxi, 100-102; xxxii, 106-o08.
2Par., xxxi, 94-98.    s Ibid., xxiii, 88, 89.
3 Cf. Epist., x, 554, 555.




CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE








CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE
By HOWARD R. PATCH
C HIVALRY., we are told, received its deathblow from
the rise of the merchant class-a theory which seems
to rest on the popular notion that industrialism is always to be
blamed for a collapse of ideals. Some historians, however,
point out that chivalry waned contemporaneously with the
Crusades. Still others recall the fact that in warfare the
knight became impractical when the unmounted yeoman
grew in prestige. Many are the causes that lead to changes of
this kind. Whatever may be the truth in this case, it is safe
to say that when Chaucer was alive and hale fully one hundred and fifty years had passed since the time when men
rescued fair ladies from famished dragons. To Chre'tien de
Troyes and other minstrels of his period there was doubtless
an element of stout realism in the recovery of Guinivere, or in
the quest of the Grail.' The twelfth century still had the lure
of the Holy Land to draw its fervor, and the magic of the
Far East to make it believe that nothing is but what is
not. Through the numberless romances the knights became
familiar figures; and the very quantity of romantic literature
tended to reduce the quantity, if not the quality, of romance.
Realism becomes difficult with distance, however, and in the
fourteenth century it was rather to the imagination which
found special glamor in the remote or impossible that these
stories offered an appeal. Perhaps this is another 'instance of
an old idealism becoming transmuted into poetry, the religion
of chivalry giving place to its mythology.
ICf. J. D. Bruce,!The Evolution of d~rthurian Romance (G~ttingen and Baltimore,
1923), i, 120 if.




96


H. R. PATCH


Without question there were some excellent stories written
under the impulse of the alliterative revival, but these seem
to have been mostly translations or revisions of old material.
To "olde bokes" one had to go for the original, - "as men
may in thise olde gestes rede," - for in Chaucer's day Gawain
"with his olde curtesye" has gone forever to fairye, and Lancelot, who knew so well of "subtil loking and dissimulinges" and
all the form of courtliness, he, alas! is dead! With the romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the case is
somewhat different. Occasionally, it is true, an author strives
to give the impression that he has found his source in some
ancient manuscript; for what writer in the Middle Ages did
not prefer to call up authorities from the vasty deep, if possible? But, often as not, the beginnings are abrupt, with no
apology except that the tale is a good one.
Considering the multitude of romances in the earlier period,
then, it seems likely that one reason for the number of competent or artistic productions in the late fourteenth century,
including the Constance group and Syr Gawayn and the Grene
Knyght, which show a power that depends on more than a survival of interest, is that they already offered the charm of the
antique. The use of alliteration seems to support this idea.
In relation to the whole field, therefore, Chaucer is in a position similar to that of Malory and Spenser.
From this point of view it is worth fresh inquiry to discover
what is Chaucer's response to the thoroughly romantic appeal
of this subject-matter, which any well-read man of his day
could hardly escape knowing pretty extensively. The term
"romantic" in such a connection deserves an explanation,
perhaps, and yet it seems natural and fitting for the word to
mean "whatever has to do with romances." In that sense
the implications are, for a while at least, clear, and thus it
may stand for the course of this discussion. To what extent
does the romantic quality (or the quality of the romances) ap



CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE


97


pear in Chaucer's work? By glancing over the five hundred
years of criticism and allusion which Miss Spurgeon has collected for us, one may learn from various angles the nature
of Chaucer's realism; and it is essential to continue to enrich
our interpretation of this side of his nature. But what is he
as a romanticist? Is he so steadily the realist that he never
lives in Arcady? By his time the oaks were old in Sherwood
forest and probably in Arden too!
As a matter of fact, the critic in a scientific age may become
almost depressed in spirit when he observes the quantity of
Chaucer's poetry which, in some way or another, seems to belong to the category of romance. This is no realist, whose
reading was so one-sided. Even his speech echoes the romantic
language. A collection of interesting examples has been made,
and here may be found such figures as: "ful lyk a fiers leoun,"
"as freshe as is the brighte someres day," "freshe as faucon
comen out of muwe," "whyt as foom"--figures that the
casual reader might think were taken from a fine observation
of real life,which a realist's inquiring eye could make. Furthermore, in all his works there are allusions to romantic material.
The Book of the Duchesse refers to the cycles of Troy, Alexander, and Charlemagne, and includes an entirely unnecessary
borrowing from Octovian Imperator. The poem called Against
Women Unconstant brings in Candace and Criseyde. The
House of Fame, packed with properties from the romantic
storehouse, adds Arthurian sources in the allusions to English
Geoffrey and to Isolde. The Parlement of Foules, Anelida and
Arcite, and the Knight's T'ale owe a substantial debt to the
Cycle of Thebes. The 'Troilus calls up Troy for the space of
a love-affair. The Legende of Good Women gives us Trojan
material. The Man of Law's T'ale belongs to the Constance
group. The Monk's Tale presents the story of Alexander.
The Nun's Priests 'Tale alludes to Lancelot and Ganilon. Sir
Thopas is a parody of romance. The Wife of Bath's Tale gives




98


H. R. PATCH


us the Loathly Lady; the Clerk's T'ale belongs to the Griselda
cycle and the Lai le Freine group; the Squire's Tale is of true
romance all compact-- as far as it goes; the Merchant's Tale
alludes to the "paradys terrestre," to Wade's boat, and to
Pluto, King of Fairye, who, the footnotes tell us, comes from
Sir Orpheo; the Franklin's Tale is a lay, and the Manciple's
Tiale might just as well be as not.
Such a summary as this is pardonable in view of the total
effect, to recall with some vividness the pertinent fact that
subject-matter, which in some way or other is related to romance, is widely used in Chaucer's works. One might go
further and observe that romance-reading in a book was as
characteristic of Chaucer's maturity as of his youth, and that,
if frequency of allusion counts for anything, the matter of
Troy appears most largely. We might go on to add that,
except for an occasional moral lapse into the didactic or pious,
Chaucer never quite got away from the spell of the romantic;
that the realistic forms of literature, such as the satires or
debats, do not seem to have caught his interest much, unless
you bother with the fabliaux, which, being human, he could
hardly avoid.
But most of these inferences, and, indeed, much of this
material, vanish on closer examination.
He clapte his handes two
And farewel! al our revel was ago.
In all the works many of the allusions come second-hand from
the Roman de la Rose. Many of the similes and metaphors
which are found in general use in Chaucer and in the romances
were probably also current in the ordinary speech of the day
("whyt as foom" depends neither on romantic imagination
nor acute powers of observation). Or, in some cases, the
stories come from works which are anything but romantic in
nature. Thus Chaucer may have taken his material on Alexander partly from Quintus Curtius or from the tale in the




CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE


99


Gesta Romanorum; and that on Constance from the AngloNorman Chronicle and Gower; that on Griselda from Petrarch's treatise. Even references like that to Octovien in the
Book of the Duchesse, and that to Pluto, King of Fairye, in
the Merchant's I'ale, are of dubious origin. Perhaps Octovien
is brought in, not by way of romance at all, but as the emperor
of the Golden Age, which, the poet thus implies, obtained during the happy reign of Edward the Third. It is similarly that
Deschamps several times refers to him. "Quant verray je le
temps Octovien," he asks, "Que toute paix fut au monde
afferm6e?" And, as it happens, Pluto is mentioned neither
in Sir Orpheo nor in King Orfeo as the King of Fairye, but
as an ancestor of Orpheo's father. Even in the TIroilus, when
the ladies are listening to the "Sege of Thebes" (an episode
which is not in the Filostrato), what they hear is apparently
the "geste" of Statius, and not a romance at all.
So one might continue. The mention of a "romaunce" in the
Book of the Duchesse may refer to Ovid, or more likely to the
Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse. One scholar has suggested that
the poet seems to have taken prose romances rather lightly.
After thoroughly going over the whole ground of Chaucer's
"learning," Miss Hammond made an even more extreme
statement. "Were it not for the full knowledge of the English metrical romances displayed in the Time of Sir Thopas,"
she remarks, "we might have assumed that Chaucer had done
no reading in that field, and had picked up the allusions to
Gawain as courteous, Tristram and Lancelot as typical lovers,
and Arthur's court as the centre of chivalry, from the literary
commonplace of his time."
But surely exception should be made for the works which
borrow most liberally from documents of this kind - namely,
in the case of the Iroilus from II Filostrato and the Knight's
TIale from La Teseide? Long ago, however, with an acumen
which has been common property ever since, Professor Ker




100


100           LI. R. PATCH


observed that " Chaucer's T'roi/us and Criseyde is the poem in
which medieval romance passes out of itself into the form
of the modern novel." If he found his plot in a romance,
therefore (although I am not sure that the Fi/ostrato,, if
"graceful," is quite so "superficial" as Ker seems to imply),
he straightway changed the tone and quality of his story and
produced something else. It is a tragedy, is it not? - in
which the youthful characters introduce the saving presence
of humor! What then of La!teseide and Chaucer's transformation -of it for the purposes of his knight? This Italian poem,
which., according to Ker, is " the first of the solemn row of
modern epics," becomes, he thought, " a complete and perfect version of a medieval romance., worked out with all the
resources of Chaucer's literary study and refiexion." Here,
we may suppose., is his most perfect expression of the romantic
spirit.
But when we stop to think of -the nature of true romance, as
it has endeared itself to readers, and obtained a permanency in
literature as a special type, does this observation seem quite
satisfactory? In the first place, it is hardly profitable, for
critical purposes at least, to classify as romance every sort
of literary production in the Middle Ages which will not fit
in with the religious, didactic, or dramatic or satiric writings.
Nor is the proper criterion to be based on such treatments of
subject-matter as the use of adventure or the emphasis on
love; for while romance persists in later periods in a duly
recognizable form, adventure and love are found useful, not
only here but elsewhere, among realists and even allegorists.
The characteristic which marks romance and defines its quality
is rather the appeal,. through the nature or the manipulation of
the subject-matter, to the imagination. Remote or mysterious
or fanciful the stuff of which it is made may be, or again, the
things it presents may not be so very far off or unhappy, nor
the battles those of so very long ago; but in either case the




CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE


IOI


imagination is touched, follows readily, and comprehends,
while one's reason is mystified or held in abeyance. The use
of creatures only to be seen at twilight, a special absense of
explanations, a departure from that air of verisimilitude where
the reader is tempted to check up the veracity of the author,
these traits are what we delight in when we read the stories
of the French Vulgate, or the late and essentially romantic
stories of Charlemagne, or such tales as the Awntyrs of Arthure
at the YTerne Wathelyn. Not that realism is never used; but
that when it is, romance, for the while, is less evident. When
the table of food appears without even a wicked steward to
account for it, or when Persifal fails to ask the question
which will relieve the stricken king - then, call it the mood
of wonder, if you like, the artistic satisfaction comes by way
of the imagination. This, let it be understood, is no attempt
to define the meaning of nineteenth-century romanticism,
which introduces enough and differently baffling problems of
its own. This refers rather to what is strictly within the fold
of mediaeval romance, and perhaps it is only another way of
indicating what one critic has called the "incredible" nature
of the material.
Whatever be the terms used to describe it, the quality itself
is clear, I think, and this quality hardly predominates in the
Knight's Tale. Professor Ker had in mind, obviously, the
historical rather than a critical use of the word "romance,"
and, on that ground, his dictum is valid. Yet in Epic and Romance, where the discussion in question occurs, his task is
mainly to give a critical meaning to this expression, and so he
challenges fresh criticism with the effort.
In revising Boccaccio's story it does not appear that Chaucer
made any changes in the general direction of what we have
described as romantic. Among other modification he quite
deliberately introduced the following important ones: First,
the long warfare at the beginning is omitted, and the emphasis




102


H. R. PATCH


falls at once, on the relationship of the three characters -
Palamon, Arcite, and Emelye. Secondly, the element of
chance, often so vital to romantic literature, is diminished by
the development in some respects of what Professor Ker called
the "classical panoply." Thirdly, the irony of the story,
based in part on the parallelism of the two lovers, is greatly
magnified in importance, and, by the omission of Arcite's long
complaint and the substitution for it of his speech, "Allas, why
pleynen folk so in commune," the sentimentality of the original is much reduced.
In regard to the second of these points, one cannot fail to
observe the humor which is included when Saturn is called
upon to settle the controversy between Venus and Mars. It
seems, these deities have too promptly answered the prayers
addressed to them, without consultation as to the merits of
those who have prayed. As to Dame Fortune, although she is
constantly blamed in Boccaccio for the action of the tragedy,
Chaucer tends to ignore her and adds a passage from Boethius
in which Destiny is described as the servant of God. Chaucer
speaks of:
The destinee, ministre general,
That executeth in the world overal
The purveyaunce that God hath seyn biforn. (A. 1663-65.)
This passage strengthens the plot at the moment of its greatest
weakness, the moment when Theseus happens to come upon
the two fighters. Instead of ascribing the coincidence to the
workings of Fortune, Chaucer explains that it is only one of
the strange episodes which Destiny has brought to pass, not
through caprice, but as part of the Divine plan. Boccaccio
refers elsewhere to "l'alta ministra del mondo Fortuna," and
thus in the Knight's TI'ale we find a reminiscence of this line
in the T'eseide and also of Dante's "general ministra e duce"
where Fortune herself is represented as God's handmaid. The
control of Chaucer's story is, therefore, rational rather than




CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE


103


casual, a point which may explain why the merits of the heroes
are more nearly taken into account, and why Palamon rather
than Arcite, as in the Teseide, is the first to see Emelye (since
the plot requires that he be the hero ultimately to win her).
This does not obviate the condition that Arcite's fate is still
something of a sentimental tragedy; but it is certainly true
that the emphasis on this side of the story is lightened. Enjoyment of the characters outweighs paradoxically our concern for them. In the loss of Arcite we are not inconsolable
for:
'Certeinly a man hath most honour
To dyen in his excellence and flour.' (A. 3047-48.)
Character is enriched in Chaucer's version even at the expense of the splendor of the tournament and the excitement of
combat. Thus there is no intention here of creating a romance
of chivalry, if in such literature passages at arms are of chief
importance. Nor is the love-affair stressed for its own sake
so much as for the humor it reflects upon the heroes. With
remarkably simple technique Chaucer's story gives us the
irony of youth, the irony of young men in their tremendous
concern for a young lady; and the opportunity for dramatic
reflections of that kind is what, I think, originally commended
the plot to the special interest of the English poet. In this
quality the story closely resembles froilus and Criseyde, to
which it probably stands closest in time of composition.
Notice that hardly a moment is lost before we come to the
two young knights lying "by and by" "bothe in oon armes"Of whiche two, Arcita hight that oon,
And that other knight hight Palamon, (A. 1013-14.)
which gains in effect if you fall into a slight singsong as you
read it. Both of them become pale "as asshen colde" under
stress of their experiences within and without the prison wall;
and of their retinue in the tournament we are told:
So even withouten variacioun
Ther nere swiche companyes tweye. (A. 2588-89.)




104


H. R. PATCH


Their parallelism might be compared, without offence, to that
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and their battle - not to
be profane -might evoke memories of Tweedledum and
Tweedledee; but the very exaggeration involved in the comparison ruins its critical meaning and should not be toleratedafter it is once said. Besides, Chaucer has made the heroes so
much alive, and we are so sympathetic with their desperate
case, that any observation of their similarity is clumsy. Arcite
is the more manly figure, a true knight; Palamon is steadfastly the lover, who is willing to turn state's evidence to win
his game. "Palamon is much more passionate and jealous,"
remarked ten Brink, "much less magnanimous than the corresponding character in Boccaccio, and Arcite also becomes
much more positive and violent in [Chaucer's] hands."
In many ways the humor of the poem turns on the characterization. There is nothing in the T'eseide to match the
intense youth of Palamon's speech to Theseus. "Slay me,"
he cries, but quickly adds,
'Or slee him first; for though thou knowe it lyte
This is thy mortal fo, this is Arcyte.' (A. 1723-24.)
Nor is there anything to match the flavor of the sentimentalism into which Theseus falls in discoursing on his ancient
loves:
'A man mot been a fool, or yong or old;
I woot it by myself ful yore agoon:
For in my tyme a servant was I oon.' (A. 1812-14.)
This is a whole world different from "Ma perche gia innamorato fui," which is pretty cold logic. Take the very speech
already cited, in which Arcite bursts forth:
'Allas, why pleynen folk so in commune
Of purveyaunce of God and of Fortune.' (A. I251-52.)
While he thus complains that he is now out of prison (at a
time when Palamon is lamenting that he himself has not been
able to get free), Arcite is unaware that this is his first step




CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE


105


in the process of actually obtaining a sight of Emelye. But
the points of irony in the Knight's I'ale have been often listed.
It is hardly necessary to recall that one knight wins the
tournament but fails to get the lady, while the other loses in
the joust but gets her. Nor must I observe here that, although there is pathos in the death of Arcite, genuine as it
is, even that receives a new touch in such a passage as,
"Why woldestow be deed,' thise wommen crye,
'And haddest gold y-nough, and Emelye?' (A. 2835-36.)
We do not dwell too long on the funeral or follow his soul
through the spheres. Nor must I mention the fact that
Chaucer provides us with the "delicious Egeus," and with the
speech of his son, who seems to have something in his blood
from "these tedious old fools." Nor must I add that in his
description of the funeral pyre and the funeral, Chaucer uses
that quite familiar formula of abbreviators -  "I do not need
to tell you," "I need not observe," "nor do I need to recall" -
which serves so often as an underhanded device for setting
forth old material, and that he then gives an interminable list
of details of supposed solemnity:
But how the fyr was maked up on highte,
And eek the names how the trees highte,
As ook, firr, birch, asp, alder, holm, popler,
Wilow, elm, plane, ash, box, chasteyn, lind, laurer,
Mapul, thorn, beech, hasel, ew, whippeltree,
How they weren feld, shal nat be told for me;
Ne how the goddes ronnen up and doun
Disherited of hir habitacioun,
In which they woneden in reste and pees,
Nymphes, Faunes, and Amadrides;
Ne how the bestes and the briddes alle
Fledden for fere, whan the wode was falle;
Ne how the ground agast was of the light - (A. 2919-31.)
and so on, for thirty lines and more.
One critic has observed the changes that the poet makes for
the sake of realism, especially in the feudal elements of the
story; and another has pointed out that in the garden scene




io6


H. R. PATCH


we feel a clear impulse from the vernal wood. But obviously
that is not all. It is the tone of something rather like levity
which is most surprising in this tale. The Knight seems to
have cared less for the mysterious and the uncanny than for
some other things, and, above all, he has a sense of humor.
With a sympathy the more wholesome for this grace, he gives
us the tragedy of youth, by means of a characterization which
is not over-individualized but sure.
All this bears directly on Professor Ker's definitions. "The
success of epic poetry," he said, "depends on the author's
power of imagining and representing characters.... Without dramatic representation of the characters, epic is mere
history or romance." "The history of the early heroic literature of the Teutonic tongues, and of the epics of old France,
comes to an end in the victory of various romantic schools.... From within and without, from the resources of native
mythology and superstition and from the fascination of
Welsh and Arabian stories, there came the temptation to forget the study of character." These passages in their own
context in Epic and Romance show that character is the main
interest of the epic. But, while it would be absurd to argue
that the Knight's T'ale belongs to that type, the changes that
Chaucer made in his material are certainly not pointed the
other way.
On the other hand, I would not try to maintain that humor
and dramatic irony are absent in the romances. We find good
dramatic irony in that burly production, Havelok, where the
hero and Goldborough are loathe to wed because they both
think that Havelok's station is too low for such a union. In
King Horn there is irony where Athulf longs for Horn's arrival - when as a matter of fact he is present all the time.
The many recognition scenes in other poems involve in some
cases the same implication. If the Knight's T'ale must be a
romance, I would say that it is after the manner of the English




CHAUCER AND MEDIAEVAL ROMANCE     10


107


Cycle. Characterization too is not foreign to romance. One
thinks of the tradition of Sir Kay and of Gawain, or of such
figures as the butcher in Octovian. You can go even further,
and say that not all of the known romances are purely romantic. But the distinguishing quality of this kind of literature, that expression of the imagination "that possesses"Ker himself put it thus - "the mystery and the spell of everything remote and unattainable," is not what Chaucer contri~buted, any more than it is what he found in his source.
One may question whether humor creates a healthy atmosphere for such a quality, and whether, if the Knight's T'a/e
be classified as romance, such pigeon-holing tells anything
about the romantic temper in Chaucer.
Yet no one is likely to say, with Lowell, that in Sir T'hopas
Chaucer gives the coup de grdce to chivalry. The Squire's T'ale
is an answer to that. Unfinished as it is', and drawn, not from
the traditional cycles but from Oriental material received,
probably, at second hand, it shows a conscious effort at a sustained performance in the romantic vein, and it seems to have
sprung from the poet's ripest years. Grant that the Wife of
Bath's T'ale is mainly satiric, and the Franklin's T'ale domestic,
and you still have a residue -of isolated passages which show
the same spirit.
Indeed it is possible to make out a good case for the theory
that the House of Fame was written for the appeal of romantic
adventure. This is not to say that no allegorical intention was
implied, or that personal allusions were totally absent (or
were to be in the finished product). But the wealth of material, borrowed for this poem from romantic sources, or related to interests of that kind, leads one to suspect that
Chaucer meant to go beyond the machinery of the Court of
Love; at least one can be sure that he was not content with
that alone. In the Alexander Cycle, only to cite one group of
parallels, we find the same desolate wastes and extraordinary




Io8


H. R. PATCH


mountains, as well as the flight up into the skies which Chaucer
knew and mentions. The alliterative Wars, which tells of
Alexander's flight with the griffons, also describes a "wilsom
waste and wild and wondirly cold," and a valley "where
flakes of snow fall from heaven" and "sparks of fire fall like
rain," recalling distinctly the desert scene in the Inferno,
which Chaucer himself remembered. With such descriptions
at hand one may ask why Chaucer failed to write an actual
romance. Perhaps he was more concerned with his search for
tidings. Perhaps, as in the case of the Knight, his humor was
far too mischievous when he told this story.
The fact remains that there seem to have been odd moments
when he, too, held Lancelot de Lake in full great reverence,
or had, at least, a glimpse of things romantic of which the
spell still lingers here and there in his poetry. Any creature
of the land-beyond-the-mist would testify to the "authentic
note" sounded in such a description as that of the scene
Under a forest, syde -
Wher - as he saugh upon a daunce go
Of ladyes foure and twenty and yet mo,
Toward the whiche daunce he drow ful yerne,
In hope that som wisdom sholde he lerne.
But certeinly, er he came fully there,
Vanisshed was this daunce, he niste where. (D. 990-96.)
One reason that definitions of romance have been so difficult
to agree upon is that a prime essential of the romantic is its
elusiveness. Is it pedantic to hint that this is what marks the
hovering quality in such passages in Chaucer's verse? At any
rate it is no disparagement to claim that Chaucer, like many
another, opened magic casements in his day, and that his
realism was none the worse for it.




THE QUESTION OF MEDIAEVALISM








THE QUESTION OF MEDIAEVALISM
BY T. LAWRASON RIGGS
INTEREST in the Middle Ages has steadily grown since
its naif stirrings in the eighteenth century. It was for
some time not distinguished by accurate research or genuine
comprehension. Indeed it cared little for these things, being
chiefly in search for relief from neo-classic stiltedness. The
architectural inadequacy of Strawberry Hill as a mediaeval
manor house would not have disturbed Horace Walpole, had
Pugin been there to point it out, nor were the entranced readers of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic romances bothered by questions
of historical accuracy. Scott's portrayal of the Middle Ages,
though he did not seek meticulous exactness, was, like those
of Goethe and Victor Hugo, far truer than the earlier efforts.
Yet the medisevalism of the Romantic School, accurate or
not, looked on its favorite period primarily as a pageant.
Beauty and adventure and mystery were the objects of its
quest. It revelled in dim cathedral twilights and tournaments
of plumed knights. Of the fundamentals of mediaeval thought
it was entirely ignorant.
After the first Romantic enthusiasm for the mise-en-scene,
mediaevalism continues to gain in popularity while becoming
highly educated. The literature, history, art, and architecture
of the Middle Ages are exhaustively rediscovered. Texts are
edited and courses dealing with the period multiply in the universities. Dante takes his unquestioned place with Homer
and Shakespeare, the cathedrals have ample vengeance on an
age that dubbed them "Gothic." Mediaeval sources are
ransacked for literary inspiration and there is frequent imitation of their manner. Architectural principles are assimilated




II2


T. L. RIGGS


with results that are often more than merely imitative. Victorian medievalists were, in short, much more scholarly than
their Romantic predecessors; but enthusiasm, where such
existed, was still in general confined to asthetic spheres. In
the Catholic Church, a revival of the best traditions of mediaeval thought, the neo-scholastic movement, was beginning.
But even among philosophic specialists, only a few took the
trouble to do more than talk about outworn props to dogma.
Mediaeval ideas and ideals, as distinct from medixeval history, art, and literature, remained a virtually closed book to
the non-Catholic world of culture, with the exception of such
figures as Ruskin and Morris, whose mingled moral and cesthetic fervor led them into realms of industrial theorizing along
more or less genuinely mediaeval lines.
No very startling change in the intellectual world's attitude
towards the thought of the Middle Ages has taken place in the
past few decades. Economic descendants of the pioneers just
mentioned, basing their programmes on the guilds, form a not
inconspicuous group of social reformers. A few neo-scholastics, notably De Wulf of Louvain, have gained a wider hearing, and more popular mediamvalists, brilliant if intemperate,
Belloc, Chesterton, and Cram, are read with interest by many.
Yet a systematic grasp of medieval principles is still rare,
and the overworked clichl about angels dancing on the point
of a pin still passes for a summary of scholasticism in many a
college course.
There is unconscious approach to the Middle Ages, nevertheless, in various fields of modern thought. Driesch and the
neo-vitalists in biology, however different their terminology,
are expressing views akin to those of the scholastics. The same
may be said of William McDougall's soul-theory as developed
on purely empirical grounds in his Body and Mind. Moreover,
the dogma of nineteenth-century chemistry concerning the
absolute separateness of the elements has been modified since




THE QUESTION OF MEDIAEVALISM


"I13


the discovery of radium, and the alchemists' aim seems to have
been without inherent impossibility after all. By unconscious approach in several fields, therefore, as well as by the
conscious discipleship of limited groups, the thinking world
shows its readiness for an increasingly general assimilation of
mediaeval ideas.
What fundamental characteristics of these ideas are likely
to constitute their widest appeal to our times? The supernatural theology which the Middle Ages accepted (the crown,
and not, as many imagine, the basis of their thought) will be
left out of the present discussion. Be it noted, also, that if
certain mediaeval concepts are of permanent value, the question how successfully they were put into practice is largely
irrelevant. The "spotted actuality" of which Henry Osborn
Taylor treats in his Mediaval Mind may have been very
spotted at best, and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were
certainly periods of intellectual and social decline. But such
historical considerations cannot condemn the ideals striving
for fulfilment in the best mediaeval period, if these ideals were
in themselves sound. Nor, on the other hand, if we accept
the most roseately Chestertonian picture of mediaeval conditions, can we further the ideals of the period by advocating
an impossibly wholesale return to those conditions.' Nationalism and machinery have come to stay, or at least cannot
be destroyed without destroying Western civilization. The
question is whether there are certain mediaeval concepts
whose value is unimpaired by the passage of time and which
can be profitably applied to a world that has in many ways
permanently changed.
Let us look for suggestions at a sentence from the greatest
"" "It is positively distressing to see historians, under the spell of special sympathies, proclaim the thirteenth century the best of all centuries of human history,
and prefer its institutions to our own. Such laudatores temporis acti really injure
the cause which they intend to serve." De Wulf: Philosophy and Civilization in the
Middle Ages, p. 6.




I14


T. L. RIGGS


thinker of the Middle Ages. "Human nature," says Thomas
Aquinas,' "is subject in the first place to the order of its own
reason; secondly to the order of human government, spiritual
or temporal, political or domestic; thirdly to the general order
of divine government." The scheme of presentation is characteristic. A threefold order is emphasized, individual, social,
cosmic. What were the essentials of the mediaeval attitude
toward man as a psychological unit, as a member of society,
as an element in the universe?
In the first place, as to their conception of the human individual, the Middle Ages distinguished between material and
non-material or spiritual elements. Adopting and developing the Aristotelian psychology, they insisted that thought
and volition could not be mere products of sensation. They
recognized, on the other hand, the completely intimate welding of spirit and matter in man, and the dependence of thought
on sensation for its necessary data. "Nothing is in the intellect which has not first been in the senses, "was an axiom. Thus
they rejected the innate ideas of Plato and the theory of a
soul accidentally attached to the body. Modern experimental
psychology, which has no difficulty in destroying the Platonic
and Cartesian souls, has made no discoveries that are not entirely congenial to the true scholastic doctrine, and welcomed
by its modern exponents. To sum up, this doctrine means a
perception of unity in variety reached by a method of analysis
followed by synthesis. By analysis, it avoids the lop-sidedness
of materialism or of an exaggerated spiritualism, by synthesis,
it avoids that failure to recognize the essential unity of the
ego which has made psychological parallelism such an unsatisfactory halfway house.
In the social sphere, the medieval approach is by a similar
method. Social life is necessary for man. If a man be too base
to share it, he is ess than man, quasi bestia; if he does not need
x Summa!rheologiKe, Prima Secundce, qu. 87, art. I.




THE QUESTION OF MEDIAEVALISM


II5


it, he is more, quasi quidem Deus!' Yet he does not exist for
the sake of society, but society for him. He has inalienable
rights, "to preserve his life, to marry and to bring up children; to develop his intelligence, to be instructed, to hold to
the truth, to live in Society." 2 And society must help him
"not merely to live, but to live well." 3 In return, he owes
allegiance to governmental authority, which comes from God
as the Author of nature. This authority is transmitted by the
people to their ruler, who should be carefully chosen and can
be deposed if he becomes tyrannical. Aquinas prefers a mixed
system of elective monarchy, but adds that circumstances
must decide the best form of government.4 As to property,
the individual has the right to acquire and dispense it, but
its use should be for the common good. "Temporal goods,"
says St. Thomas, "should belong, as to use, not only to their
owner but also to others." s Of course social unity is not, in
the mediaeval conception, as close as the "substantial unity"
of the individual. Men do not coalesce to form one thing, one
"substance." There is nevertheless a real synthesis, involving rights and duties, and here as in the psychological sphere,
what the French call solutions simplistes are avoided. The
absolute state, monarchical or otherwise, is rejected on the
one hand, and unbridled individualism on the other.
Finally, when they considered Man in his relations to the
Universe, the scholastics arrived, by several lines of a posteriori
reasoning, at God, the First Cause, the necessary and perfect
Being, distinct from the Universe of creatures. Everything
St. Thomas, De Regimine Principum, Liber I, cap. i.
2 Summa frheol. Ia, IIae, qu. 94, art. 2.
3 St. Thomas, Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle, lect. I, cap. I.
4 For an admirable treatment of the whole subject, to which these remarks are
much indebted, see Chap. XV of De Wulf's Mediaeval Philosophy, Harvard University
Press, 1922.
s Summa J'heol., IIa, IIae, qu. 32, art. 5, and elsewhere. The principle is well
illustrated by a series of papal laws, allowing all who wished to cultivate privately
owned and idle lands on the Roman Campagna. See Garriguet, Le Regime de la
Propridt, pp. 258 ff.




116             T. L. RIGGS
predicated of God is either negative or to be understood in an
analogous sense. This is above all true'of God's Being. He is
in a sense infinitely fuller than that in which creatures are.
They owe to Him their origin and their preservation. Yet
their existence, though dependent and finite, is not illusory
but real. Man, moreover., being a rational creature, can come
into conscious relationship with God, even in the natural
sphere. He can know something of God by his reason, indirectly and inadequately but none the less truly. And by
that same reason he can learn much of the moral law whose
author is the Author of nature. It should again be noted that
the supernatural theology which presented a much more elaborate scheme of Man's relations with God., need not here
concern us. It presupposed a natural theology, a philosophic
conception of the Universe of the sort described, avoiding the
Scylla of Monism and the Charybdis of a Gnostic God,' remote, inaccessible and unknowable.
Of the thought of the Middle Ages as a whole, Jacques
Maritain, a leader of French neo-scholasticism., has written as
follows: 2 "Truth cannot indeed be' found in a philosophy
which occupies a middle ground between contrary errors by
mediocrity and by falling below them., that is to say, by being
made up of borrowings from both of them, by balancing one
agish te, and by mingling them in an unenlightened
selection - eclecticism; but truth must be found in a philosophy which occupies a middle ground between contrary errors.
by superiority and by dominating them, so that they appear
to be fragments detached from its unity. For evidently this
philosophy, if true, must see clearly what error sees only in a
partial and biassed way, and must also judge and preserve,
by its own principles and its own light., whatever truth error
includes without being able to discern it."
IRecently revived by Mr. H. G. Wells as the " Veiled Being," and furnished
with a finite demiurge!
2 Introduction gentrale d la philosophie, p. 194.




THE QUESTION OF MEDIAEVALISM


iI7


The author of this passage ingeniously illustrates his point
by habitually printing a summary of the various scholastic
theses in the middle of the page, flanked on either side by the
views of those who carried to extremes one or the other aspect
of the problem in question. This paper has tried to suggest
similar comparisons in regard to certain very broad conceptions of mediaeval thought.
Reflection will show that these conceptions, these syntheses
following analyses, concerning Man, Society, the Universe,
far from being merely abstract, can be made of great practical
value. Our educational methods, for instance, are sorely in
need of a psychology which recognizes the reality of both
spirit and matter in man, and their mutual interaction, which
refuses to treat humans as brutes, as machines, or as discarnate
spirits, but which deals with their composite yet unified nature
as it is. Our politics need to avoid the idea of the Absolute
State. We are not menaced by the divine right of kings, that
Renaissance doctrine wrongly supposed to be characteristic
of the Middle Ages, but we are most obviously menaced by
the Rousseauistic idea of a majority creating right and wrong,
and having unlimited power over the individual and the family. Nor is mere individualism a solution of the problem any
more than, in the economic realm, the laissez-faire principles
of the nineteenth century are an answer to Socialism. Finally,
in the sphere of natural religion, Man needs an object of worship that the various forms of Monism fail to provide. To
tell us that Matter and Energy are God is to make the Universe darker than that of the crudest polytheist; to tell us
thatwe are all part of God may flatter our pride for awhile, but
must leave us mentally unconvinced and spiritually desolate
at last. Nor can Theism do much more unless it emphasizes
God's immanence as well as His transcendence, unless it
finds Him in nature and allows human reason a glimpse of Him.
And those who accept the claims of a revelation ought to




II8


T. L. RIGGS


realize that supernatural religion can never dispense with
natural, that Christianity must wane if philosophic Theism
on a rational basis be ignored.
In psychology, in the social sciences, in natural religion and
ethics the world has much to learn from the Middle Ages.
The study of their principles should be free alike from "inverted Utopianism" and from anti-mediaeval prejudice. In
the neo-scholastic movement these principles are being exhaustively studied and reapplied in the light of modern discoveries. "If anything was investigated by the scholastic
doctors with too great subtlety," wrote Leo XIII in I879,
"or handed down with insufficient consideration, or is incompatible with the proven teachings of a later age, it is by no
means our purpose to propose such things to our age for imitation." If men of other training keep insisting that neoscholasticism's only object has been "to make intelligible to
reason the dogmas that faith already accepted," that there
is small danger of the movement "suspecting that there might
be things in heaven and earth undreamt of in its philosophy," '
and so forth, they will be depriving themselves of much that
might be useful to the world at large. But an open-minded
investigation of mediaeval principles, in their applicability to
modern conditions, by scientists, educators, statesmen, and
philosophers, might well result in important gains to civilization.
I Lord St. Cyres's grotesque paragraph on the Neo-Scholastic movement in the
article Roman Catholic Church in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is worthy to rank with the diarist Evelyn's remarks on Gothic architecture:
"A certain licentious and fantastical manner of building: congestions of heavy,
dark, melancholy, monkish piles, without any just proportion, use, or beauty."




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST








CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST
By H. W. HERRINGTON
N a study, undertaken a few years ago by the present
writer, of magic, witchcraft, and related themes in the
Elizabethan drama,' a striking phenomenon observed was the
broadly varying attitude toward the occult in all its phases
on the part of the several dramatists of the period. Analysis
of the works of these promised to be particularly rewarding
in the case of Christopher Marlowe because of his reputation
as a radical in religion and an intellectual rationalist. The
present investigation was undertaken, primarily, to see if any
light could be thrown on Marlowe's state of mind by an examination of the manner in which he employs the supernatural in his works, and, secondarily, to determine if evidence
could be found in this study for or against his alleged authorship of some dozen plays, not in the accepted canon, which
have on various grounds been attributed to him.
I
As a point of departure, it is well to review the opinion of
Marlowe's rationalism held by his contemporaries. The
original documents have been reprinted in such modern accounts as Dyce's and Bullen's introductions, Ingram's
Christopher Marlowe and his dssociates, Boas's Introduction
to the Works of Kyd, Danchin's articles in the Revue Germanique (0913-14), Sir Sidney Lee's life in the Dictionary of
National Biography, and most recently and inclusively in
Tucker Brooke's article on T'he Reputation of Christopher Marlowe in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts
and Sciences (xxv, 347-408, June, 1922).
I 7ournal of Amer. Folk-lore, Vol. XXXII, No. cxxvi, 447-485 (Oct.-Dec., 1g919).




122


H. W. HERRINGTON


Modern admiration of Marlowe, as man and poet, has
frequently sought to lift from his reputation the stigma of
"atheism" which was heavily laid upon it in his own time.
The efforts of the apologists are inconclusive, for the epithet
in question is coupled with his name by a variety of allusions,
much more definite in statement, and much stronger in cumulative effect, than have served to establish generally accepted
biographical facts about other men of the sixteenth century.
There were accusations against Marlowe even before his
death, and several others within the first decade thereafter,
when his life, presenting as it did sensational elements, might
seem, according to a reasonable presumption, to be familiar
to the men of his time. Robert Greene as early as 1588, a year
after Marlowe had been admitted M. A. at Cambridge and
had seen the production of the first part of his T'amburlaine,
speaks in disapproval of a style "daring God out of heaven
with that atheist qiamburlan" and of "impious instances of
intollerable poetry." Marlowe is undoubtedly the "famous
gracer of Tragedians" who in the Groatsworth of Wit of 1592,
the year before the poet's death, is bidden reform by "Greene,
who hath said with thee like the foole in his heart, There is no
God," and who, unlike the person addressed, has shaken off
the influence of the now dead "brother of this Diabolicall
Atheisme." Henry Chettle would seem to be referring in
terms of moral disapprobation to Marlowe in his Kind-Harts
Dreame (December, 1592). Gabriel Harvey in his New Letter
of Notable Contents (September 16, 1593, a few months after
Marlowe's death) speaks of the poet as a "Lucian," and in
Pierce's Supererogation (1593) refers to "no Religion, but
precise Marlowisme." Thomas Kyd, the dramatist, writing
apparently, like Harvey, shortly after Marlowe had been
buried at Deptford, in the letter to Sir John Puckering by
which he endeavors to vindicate the blamelessness of his own
religion, denies that he "shold love to be familer frend with




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST                   123
one so irreligious," adding that "he was intemp[er]ate & of
a cruel hart," and in another letter speaking of his "rash
talk."
Three accounts, appearing within a few years of Marlowe's
decease, but written by men who were doubtless strangers to
him, show that the report of his irreligion was widely current
at the close of the sixteenth century, and that his death was
used habitually as a horrible example, especially by moralists of a puritanical turn. The most circumstantial of these
accounts is that of Richard Beard, who in the Theatre of
Gods ludgements (1597) gives a harrowing account of Marlowe's murder (incorrectly reported as occurring "in London
streets"), and of his final blasphemies, and states, concerning
his opinions, "that hee denied God and his sonne Christ, and
not only in word blasphemed the trinitie, but also (as it is
credibly reported) wrote bookes against it, affirming our
Sauiour to be but a deceiuer, and Moses to be but a coniurer
and seducer of the people, and the holy Bible to be but vaine
and idle stories, and all religion but a deuice of pollicie."
William Vaughan's Golden Grove (16oo) tells a similar story,
but disposes of Marlowe correctly at Deptford. Meanwhile
Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia (1598), famous for its
listing of Shakespeare's plays, gives another account of Marlowe's murder, refers to Beard, and states that "As lodelle, a
French tragicall poet beeing an Epicure, and an Atheist, made
a pitifull end: so our tragicall poet Marlow for his Epicurisme
and Atheisme had a tragicall death."
The number of these diatribes could be extended with
seventeenth-century accounts, which, however, have obviously not the same evidential value. The statements here
set down the apologists would seek to explain or soften in a
1 Dr. J. Leslie Hotson shows that this should probably be read in the singular;
that Beard had heard of Marlowe's death as occurring in "London Street, East
Greenwich," instead of the neighboring Deptford. (Death of Christopher Marlowe,
P- 39.)




124


H. W. HERRINGTON


way to save their hero's reputation. Greene has an animus:
he cannot be shown to have been at any time friendly to Marlowe. Notorious are the scandal-mongering propensities of
Gabriel Harvey, blackly exemplified in his ghoulish gloating
over the miserable end of Greene. The authenticity of Kyd's
alleged letters is impugned, or they are discounted as the prejudiced whimpers of an unprincipled perjurer, seeking to save
his own skin by the defamation of the defenceless dead. Beard
and Vaughan are Puritan fanatics.' Meres is elegantly striving for a rhetorical parallelism. Yet even if some of these
counter-charges be true, the statements taken as a whole must
show the existence of a general belief that Marlowe held
opinions which to the theologically orthodox of his day
seemed damnable.
If the document known as the Baines Libel be genuine,2 we
may have some evidence as to the nature of the published
blasphemies from which Beard and Vaughan so shudderingly
recoil. This libel, extant in two MS. versions, purports to
be the affidavit of one Richard Bome or Baine concerning
Marlowe's religious views. Its statements are sufficiently
startling to-day; in Marlowe's time they must have sounded
like the unspeakable utterances of Anti-Christ. The libel,
which is available in full in Danchin's articles, and somewhat
Bowdlerized in Professor Boas's edition of Kyd and in Ingram's Christopher Marlowe and his Associates, rejects the
approved chronology of 6000 years since Adam, discredits
Moses as a "Juggler" and deluder of his people, calls all
Protestants "hipocriticall Asses" and expresses a preference
for formal ritual (including the ceremonies of the Papists),
I Hotson's proof that the statements of these concerning Marlowe's death are
inaccurate does not affect the value of their writings as evidence for the popular
opinion of the poet. Beard, Vaughan, and others are doubtless reporting what they
had heard.
2 The case for its genuineness is much strengthened by the recent discovery of a
letter, apparently of Kyd's, which corroborates many of its statements. (Ford K.
Brown in Lond. Times Lit. Supp., June 2, 1921.)




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST              125
repudiates all the apostles except Paul as "fishermen and base
fellows," utters a scurrilous word about St. John the Evangelist, the Women of Samaria, and even Christ, denies the virgin
birth, defends the Jews for the crucifixion, and contains these
general remarks on religion: "That the firste beginnynge of
Religion was only to keep men in awe.... That, yf he
were put to write a new religion, he wolde undertake a more
excellent and more admirable methode." Baines then affirms
concerning these opinions that "this Marloe doth not only
holde them himself, but almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Atheisme, willinge them not to be
afrayed of bugbeares and hobgoblins and utterly scornynge
both God and his ministers."
In spite of much that would be disturbing to a pious Christian of any period, the liberal of to-day will find some things
that will seem to him surprisingly modern: the items, for
instance, concerning Adamistic chronology, the praise of St.
Paul, the origins of religion, the virgin birth, and the rejection of the religion of fear. The document certainly represents
the views of one who anticipated much that theological progress has slowly arrived at in the centuries since his time.
The fragments, conveniently reprinted by Boas, purporting
to have been found among the papers of Thomas Kyd, responsibility for which the author of The Spanish Tragedy was
so frantically trying to remove from his head by dropping
the bundle into Marlowe's grave, are much less sensational.
Their position is heretical, but rather that of a unitarian or
deist than of an atheist. Mr. W. D. Briggs, by recently identifying the source of these notes, has shown that they are not
of Marlowe's composition, though, if Kyd is telling the truth,
he must have been interested in their stand, and may have
at one time held opinions not dissimilar. There seems little
S A heretic's utterances, quoted in Ihe Fal of the Late Arrian, by John Proctor
(1549). (Stud. in Philol., xx, 153-159, April, 1923.)




126


126H. W, HERRINGTON


in their mildly Arianistic views that would have held much
meaning for the bold infidel and scoffer who maintained the
tenets of the Baines libel. We can., of course, consider either
that Marlowe's opinion sharpened into an extreme radicalism
in the years before his death, or else that the more blasphemous utterances of the latter document were the defiant
"bravados" of which Harvey speaks, and therefore not the
sincere and measured utterances of a sober judgment.
The case for the belief of Marlowe's contemporaries in what
they called his "atheism" is practically irrefutable. It is folly
to deny all the allusions as forgery or slander, as Ingram would
seek to do. The cumulative evidence of a pack of proved
liars is, to be sure, worth nothing. The cumulative evidence,
on the other hand, of a number of witnesses concerning each
of whom there is only a reasonable doubt has, as mankind has
accepted evidence, a considerable probative value. The
popular, uncritical opinion in Marlowe's time considered him
atheistical.
Yet the gentleness of the allusions to him by most of his
associates in the profession of letters (Greene and Kyd being
notable exceptions) and by those who perhaps knew him best,
is remarkable, and constitutes a powerful tribute to his personality and his genius. Shakespeare, Peele, Nash, Heywood,
and Drayton, all speak of him in'terms of affection and unqualified admiration. Their encomia may be found in full
in Tucker Brooke's article. These poets did not find Marlowe's
religious radicalism of so heinous a sort that they must
repudiate him and his works. They did love the man and
honor his memory.
If these tributes may seem to cast a doubt on the charges
against Marlowe, it should be remembered that he was the
known associate of men of advanced thought - Sir Thomas
Herriott, for instance, and Sir Walter Raleigh, who is mentioned by a Jesuit pamphleteer as maintaining in 1592 a




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST              127
"school of atheism," before which, presumably, Marlowe is
said to have read an "atheist lecture.'" Raleigh and his
group (among whom we must include Marlowe) were apparently engaged in bold speculations on religious conceptions
like "God" and "the soul." There are accounts of Raleigh's
opinions preserved which seem to us daring, but not at all
atheistical. Yet they were sufficient to bring against him
the charges already set down.
The examination of the question from our knowledge of
Marlowe's associates arrives at much the same place as the
several expressed opinions concerning him. Marlowe was
one of a group of speculators on religion who according to the
rigid standards of the day were suspected of being atheists
and in popular report rather generally convicted of that
capital offence. With our superior tolerance we should term
them progressive or liberal thinkers, and esteem it creditable
in the poet that he had the intelligence to examine and partially reject the fixed dogmas of his time, and the courage
frankly to utter his opinion, when utterance might mean the
stake. The only really disturbing charges, if we may judge
by our own standards, are in the Baines libel. It may, therefore, be comforting to those who are religiously orthodox and
are at the same time devotees of Marlowe, to know that the
author of this document was perhaps the "Rychard Bame"
who was hanged at Tyburn in 1594.2 Slander may have been
the least of his crimes.
II
The attempt, now to be made, to check up the charges
against Marlowe by resort to his generally acknowledged
S Boas: Works of!rhomas Kyd, pp. lxxi-lxxiii; D. N. B.; Ingram: Christopher
Marlowe and His Associates, pp. i87, v88; J. M. Stone, "Atheism under Elizabeth
and James I.," The Month, lxxxi, 174-187 (1894).
2 Bullen: Works of Marlowe,:, lxix, and Danchin, in Rev. Germ.,Jan.-Feb., 1914,
P. 59.




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H. W. HERRINGTON


works, needs perhaps a defence. Opinions expressed in any
piece of fiction are obviously to be charged, not to the writer
(unless he speaks in person), but to his puppets. Successful
fiction presents this paradox: the finer the workmanship, the
less may we learn of the writer from his creations. Axiomatically, the rash attempt to discover the personality of a writer
in the utterances of his characters is most fraught with uncertainties and negations when the work of a great dramatist
is examined. Yet even here we are not at a nonplus. There
are few who will not read in Hamlet's directions to the players the reflections of Shakespeare himself on the actor's art;
while, as President Neilson not long ago pointed out, by the
study of types which Shakespeare persistently presents, not
once but many times, in the search for tendencies in human
character which he consistently holds up as admirable or base,
in oft-repeated sentiments, may be found reflections of his
own wisdom and his own philosophy. A good case can be
made out by this method, to cite one instance, for Shakespeare's detestation of the humbug of sentimentalism.' A
writer less thoroughly dramatic, like Ben Jonson, exposes himself at every turn. Can there be any question of Ben's attitude toward astrology, alleged demoniacal possession, socalled magic, and the thousand and one "arts" of the sorcerer
and quack of his time?
Were Marlowe a supreme creator of character, we need not
despair of finding, if we proceed with caution, some reflection of himself in his plays. But our task is easier, since Marlowe never sinks himself perfectly in his characters. The
family likeness of his great heroes has been frequently pointed
out: the impassioned cravings, the towering aspirations, of
Tamburlaine, Barabas, and Faustus. In nearly all of Marlowe's plays, the characters in whom the dramatist shows interest are possessed by "that overwhelming evil ambition and
1X W. A. Neilson: Essentials of Poetry, pp. 210-213.




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST              129
malignant selfishness in which a rather curious twist of Marlowe's genius made him see the highest reach of human glory."'
To the celebrated list just named may be added young Mortimer, Guise, and the old Queen (Massacre at Paris). On the
basis of this prepossession of Marlowe's, Tucker Brooke makes
out a strong case for the poet's creation of York, Queen Margaret, and Richard, of the Contention and the True Tragedy.
Conversely, Marlowe demonstrates no ability to appreciate
simplicity, humility, gentleness, or quiet virtue. His gentle
characters are weaklings (vide Mycetes, Calyphas, Edmund in
Edward II, and Henry of Navarre). The poet "appears never
to have been able to separate virtue from mediocrity or to
portray vivid personality except in the prosecution of godless
and desperate extravagance." His women, again, are notoriously lay figures, the only show of success being with the
wicked ones. A reader peruses his plays in vain for women of
subtlety and charm, a score of whom will at once be recalled
from Shakespeare's theatre. Of humor he had none, or certainly, if some of the comics in Faustus and other works be
accepted as his, humor of a very restricted and not very
genuine quality. The tragedy of human existence he felt intensely, but in most of his plays in practically the same terms:
in the failure of man to accomplish that which his godlike
spirit had conceived, owing to the finite frailties of the body.
It would seem to be the tragedy of the poet's own life as well.
Marlowe can thus be shown to have profound limitations as
a dramatist. Both the strengths and weaknesses of his own
mind are freely exhibited in his plots, his characters, and the
sentiments stressed in his plays. The man himself is revealed
there to an extent certainly unsurpassed in the work of any
other major dramatist of the Elizabethan period. It is accordingly not idle to expect that some reflection of Marlowe's
I Tucker Brooke: "Authorship of Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI,"
in f!rans. Conn. Acad. of Arts and Sciences, xvii (July, 1912), 156-159.




130


H. W. HERRINGTON


own thought may be found in the theological concepts of his
various characters.
If this be true, there is little ground for a belief in his absolute atheism: that is, in the categorical denial of the existence of a God. Tamburlaine believes
There is a God, full of revenging wrath
From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.'
The story of Dr. Faustus depends utterly upon a faith in God.
Mephistophilis is one of the angels who fought against God and
fell with Lucifer. Faustus in his contract abjures God, promising never to name Him or pray to Him; yearns, nevertheless,
in fits of contrition, to turn to God. The Good and Evil Angels
debate His mercy. In the powerful final soliloquy, Faustus's
tortured imagination sees "where God Stretcheth out his arm
and bends his ireful brows!" The fervor of this great speechthe most impassioned that Marlowe ever wrote--makes us
wonder if it could possibly be the utterance of a purely
dramatic conception. In the Jew of Malta, God is not once
invoked by Jew or gentile, churchman or layman. Dido, with
its classical atmosphere, presents no evidence, Edward II
practically none. In The Massacre at Paris, Navarre is represented as feeling that God is directing him in the justice of
his cause.2 There are some half-dozen invocations by this
hero. Marlowe conceived him a devout person, of deep faith.
Navarre's consistency on this point testifies to a firmer dramatic conception on Marlowe's part than usual. His faith
should not accordingly be interpreted too narrowly as the
poet's.
If the references to God are fairly numerous, and not of the
kind which imply a genuine and militant atheism, those to
Christ and to Christian dogmas are, on the other hand, exI Tucker Brooke: Works of Marlowe, ramburlaine, pt. 2, 11. 4294-4296.
2 Ibid., Massacre, 11. 42, 43, 547, 604, 714, 795, 934, ioi6, 0o80, io88.




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST                    13 1
tremely few. In The Massacre occurs a bit of anti-Papism
when Mountsorrell, one of the agents of the massacre, interposes to one praying by Christ, the Saviour,
Christ, villain!
Why, darest thou presume to call on Christ
Without the intercession of some saint?!
In the second part of T'amburlaine, Christ responds, so the
Mahometans think, to their just prayers, giving them victory
over the recreant Christians.2 Faustus, although based on a
Christian theology, seldom mentions Christ (as distinct from
God). The most important allusions are Faustus's appeal,
after being solicited by the Good Angel,
Ah, Christ, my Saviour,
Seek to save distressed Faustus' soul!
followed by Lucifer's admonishment,
Thou talk'st of Christ, contrary to thy promise,
and the tortured outcries of the last great soliloquy, including
the famous
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop.
It should be said that a theological distinction between God
and Christ may not be clearly drawn; and God the Son is
doubtless often in mind when the former is named.
Though the mention of Christ is rare, and the references to
God neither numerous nor (on the whole) illuminating, allusions
to devil and hell are much more striking. Lucifer, Belzebub,
the constant attendant Mephistophilis, Baliol, Belcher, and
sundry nameless devils are of the dramatis personae of Dr.
Faustus, and they are represented, quite traditionally, as being
fallen angels, who conspired against God and are forever
damned. Only in this play do their devilships actually ap1 Brooke, op. cit., 11. 359-361.
2 Ethel Seaton in Lond. 'Times Lit. Supp., June 16, 1921, seeks to show that
these incidents follow directly historical accounts.




132


H. W. HERRINGTON


pear, and when elsewhere referred to, they are anonymous,
except for a strictly classical Dis, Rhadamanth, Aeacus, Cerberus, or "Gorgon, prince of Hell."''    In surprisingly few
cases are vicious characters spoken of as "devils" or "fiends";
the monstrous Barabas is not so epithetized, and even Tam.
burlaine, to those who suffer beneath his heel, seems not,
characteristically, "a fiend of hell," but rather a creature of
superhuman birth and might.2
The term   "hell" seems rather a favorite of Marlowe's.
Either so stated, or synonymously, it occurs some scores of
times in his acknowledged work. To Faustus, in his last
speech, the incessant pain of hell without end is a very real
and terrible thing, rushing with the revolution of the clock
upon him. Except for this vivid and poignant scene, hell,
though invoked often, is referred to in terms much more conventional. In some dozen striking passages, it is decidedly a
classical hell:-Avernus pool, the banks of Erebus with its
ugly ferryman, Charon's shore, Lethe, Styx, and Phlegethon,
Cocytus, Orcus' burning gulf, the abode of Cimmerian spirits.3
In these numerous cases the poet is unquestionably adding a
classical adornment rather than demonstrating his faith.
The preponderance of them is in Tamburlaine, proud exhibit
of the youthful scholar fresh from his studies at Cambridge!
Other uses of the term are of the nature of conventional curses.
Persons hated are consigned to hell or invited to experience
its everlasting torments. Such material is admitted-- indeed
demanded --by the customary violence of Marlovian language, and may have not much greater significance. than strong
language under similar circumstances to-day. In general,
the evidential value of the fairly frequent allusions to hell and
its pains is not great, with the single exception of those in
S Brooke, op. cit., 51amb., pt. I, 1. 1389, pt. 2, 11. 3846, 3974, 4209.
2 Especially r'amb., pt. 1, f!. 820-830.
3 Ibid., aramb., pt. i, 11. 1656, 2025, 2245, Pt. 2, I. 2946, 3203, 4400; 7ew of
Malta, 11. 1404, 1405; Edward II, 11. 1956, 1957.




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST                   133
Faustus. Here also, as in the case of the other theological
concepts, this play stands sharply apart.
Such important Christian dogmas as sin, repentance, and
remorse, find a place, again, almost uniquely in Faustus. The
fundamental Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul
is of course implicit in the play, especially in the several appeals of the Good Angel, and specifically in that of the Old
Man and in Faustus's frenzied final speculation,
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Tamburlaine is busied rather with this world's triumphs and
rewards, yet twice he seems to express a belief in the immortality of the soul., The other plays are less concerned with
the doctrine, but a conventional adherence to it is, as must
be expected from a poet writing for a sixteenth-century audience, a matter of course. A disbeliever could not have denied
the doctrine, even if he had wished; he could, however, have
avoided allusions to it, and this Marlowe certainly does not
do in T'amburlaine and Faustus. If these be early plays (1587 -1589), and written anterior to T'he 7ew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II, as has been generally believed,
although lately questioned by Tucker Brooke in the case of
Faustus,2 there may be surmised a growing reluctance on
Marlowe's part to discuss the dogma. The tempting conjecture has already been made that Marlowe's views may have
become more extreme, or that at least he may have become
more fearless in their expression, in the years immediately
preceding his death.
A rationalism which contradicts the conception, elsewhere
stated, of hell as a place of sulphurous flames and burning
1 Brooke, op. cit., pt. i, 1. 431, pt. 2, 11. 4619, 4620. See, however, an interesting
interpretation of a celebrated passage (pt. i, 11. 878-880), by G. A. Cole in Lond.
Times Lit. Supp., July 14, 1921.
2 Tucker Brooke: "The Marlowe Canon," P. M. L. A., xxxvii, 3, p. 384
(Sept., 1922).




134


H. W. HERR~BINGTON


marl, is found by the casual reader in two celebrated speeches
of Mephistophilis to Faustus,
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,
and
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.
Many have read here an unorthodox and modern view of hell's
torments as being experienced in this world -  a view which
they have been strongly tempted to accept as Marlowe's own;
but it should be noted that Mephistophilis is discussing the
state of devils, and not of men. A recent study is probably
right in finding here an entirely orthodox idea of the fallen
angel being attended by the pains of hell, in whatever place
he might find himself.' There is no doubt, however, about
the word of Machiavel as presenter of T'he 7ew of Malta,
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Here is an utterance which satisfyingly represents the stand
of a reputed rationalist and member of Sir Walter Raleigh's
"school of atheism."   It sounds strangely like some of the
statements of the Baines libel, if the latter be regarded as
garbled, and in part misrepresentations. On the whole, there
is little in the plays which would demonstrate the full acceptance of Christian doctrines as other than conventional,
except for the passionate outcries of Dr. Faustus. There is,
on the other hand, nothing, except possibly the speech of
Machiavel, that seems the utterance of an out-and-out infidel
and blasphemer. There seems certainly evidence here for the
epithet of "atheist" as the sixteenth century understood the
term, but none for the epithet as the twentieth century understands it.
2W. D. Briggs: "Marlowe's Faustus, 305-318, 548-570," Mod. Lang. Notes,
xxxviii, No. 7, 385-393 (Nov., I923).




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST            135
III
The intellectual history of mankind presents few developments so thorough-going and so rapidly consummated as
the progress in rationalism taking place from the seventeenth
century to the nineteenth. An illuminating account of the
phenomenon and its contributing causes may be found in
W. E. H. Lecky's History of Rationalism in Europe. Conceptions regarded for ages as fundamental were abandoned in the
relatively short period of a few generations. This progress
discredited many phases of the occult: witchcraft, magic,
conjuration, divination, all kinds of mystic quackery, went
into the scrap-heap along with the other exploded theories
and lost faiths of mankind. The turn-about was made, to be
sure, only by the cultivated, intelligent classes. The uneducated abandoned their ancient beliefs only imperfectly, or not
at all; as indeed they hold them in considerable measure
to-day.
The very complete change just sketched has so transformed
our ideas and our sympathies that we find it exceedingly
difficult to approximate the state of mind which was general,
indeed almost universal, during the Elizabethan period. The
tales of the twelfth century Friar Bacon, and in a later epoch
of Tritheim, Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus--of Dr.
Johann Faustus, indeed--seemed undoubtedly authentic,
for were not magicians of the same learned type alive and
operating? Witness Dr. John Dee, to whom Queen Elizabeth
resorted, and who, although in his own conception an earnest
and high-minded investigator of the occult, was known by the
public to be engaged in mysterious and fearful operations.1
With more vulgar conjurers, astrologers, fortune-tellers, exorcisers, and medical quacks - figures represented, typically,
by such men as Reade, Forman, Lambe, and Hartley--
T J. 0. Halliwell (ed.), Private Diary of Dr. 7ohn Dee; and Charlotte Fell Smith,
John Dee.




136


136      H. W. HERRINGTON


Elizabethan life was crowded. An active trade proved the
faith of the public. There were "wise women," who professed
minor magic arts and added a business of midwifery; there
were witches, using familiar spirits, obtained by compact with
the devil, to satisfy petty grudges, to harm or to kill neighbors. Witchcraft was almost universally believed in, by the
learned as well as the ignorant. The scholarly discussions
of the seventeenth century prove the faith of the former; the
many witch trials, with their readily accepted evidence and
their numerous convictions, establish the opinions of the
public generally.'
The attitude of Marlowe toward these various practitioners
of the occult and their several so-called " arts " is a matter of
the utmost importance in understanding his mind and the
quality of his rationalism. A contrast can here be shown
between Marlowe on the one hand and 'Most of the major
Elizabethan dramatists on the other. Selected writers, whose
attitude is clearly enough exhibited in their works to illuminate
the compar 'ison, may here be briefly touched upon -such
writers, for instance, as Shakespeare, Chapman, Middleton,
Ben Jonson, and Greene.
There is nothing in Shakespeare's work to show that he did
not accept the dogmas of his time. His handling of witch,
magician, and conjurer follows his practice generally - he
presents the conception of them current, although touching
this conception with the colors of the imagination. The
witches in Macbeth have the aspect, and perform most of the
functions., of the common village witch, although they seem
also to play the part of the Norns, or Fates. Prospero is surely
a magician of the most dignified, most scholarly and most
noble type, but he nevertheless wields his authority by virtue
of wand, book, and robe, compels spirits to do him service,
gives the customary exhibitions of his art, prepares a charmed
ISee my article in Yourn. Amlier. Folk-/ore, and references.




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST             137
banquet, and in general functions like any other powerful
practitioner of magic. The schoolmaster Pinch, in   'he
Comedy of Errors, exorcises the fiends which must be possessing Antipholus of Syracuse and his man. Joan of Arc in
I Henry VI passed through Shakespeare's reworking hand
without any alteration of her as a witch of a somewhat revolting type; nor was any significant change made in 2 Henry
VI of Margery Jordan, "the cunning witch," and Roger
Bolingbroke, the conjurer, who raise spirits for the utterance
of political prophecy. The future Richard III charges the
blasting of his arm to witchcraft. Malvolio is confined as a
madman and bound, in order to eject the evil spirit. In none
of these scenes is there any hint of skepticism. Shakespeare's
personal opinions were either those of the public for which he
wrote, or, if different, were not so strongly felt but that he
could suppress them in the interests of policy and good art.
Perhaps an even more significant test is to be found in the
incidental occurrence of words such as witch, devil, hell,
charms, incantations, et cetera. The poet is not likely to employ these terms frequently, and to make them the basis of
his imagery, unless they are on his mind, a part of the tissue of
his thought. The topics named are often mentioned by
Shakespeare; there are, for example, 236 uses of the word
"devil" in the dramatic works, 64 of witch, witchcraft, and
similar words. The significant function of ghosts and apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth, 7ulius Caesar, and elsewhere, displays his very sincere - indeed, almost reverent - attitude
toward related phenomena.
The dramatic works of George Chapman show considerable
use of the occult in its various phases with, again, entire absence of any note of skepticism. In the Bussy D'Ambois plays
the spirits Behemoth and Cartophylax are conjured up to
foretell the future, and there are whole batteries of ghosts. In
the Byron plays there are an astrologer and a gentleman re



138


H. W. HERRINGTON


puted to have skill in magic, who is accused by the fallen
hero a dozen times of practising witchcraft upon him. In
Ciesar and Pompey, the devil Ophioneus appears to the ruined
knave, Fronto. There is a transformation by sorcery into a
mandrake in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria. The Gentleman
Usher has an entertainment of an enchanter with spirits, and
references to crystal gazing, exorcizing, and a gypsy sorceress.'
There are few plays of Chapman's which have not scenes, or at
any rate important allusions, drawn from the occult. The
number of incidental references, although by no means overwhelming, strikes one as large. I have collected some hundred
of them in a cursory reading of Parrott's two volumes.
Middleton's interest in the occult seems even keener than
Chapman's. There is a device of a haunted chamber (Blurt),
a case of demoniacal possession, duly exorcized (Phoenix),
magic quacks and mountebanks (The Widow and Family of
Love), a real succubus (Mad World, My Masters), an alchemist
and cunning man (Anything for a Quiet Life), gipsy fortunetellers (Spanish Gipsy and More Dissemblers),2 and in Middleton's full-length play of the occult, The Witch, a vast amount
of devil-lore gathered from the witch-mongers and from
popular superstition. There is a profusion of references
throughout his works to demons, devils, familiar spirits, love
philters, conjuration, conjuror's glass, crystal gazing, witches,
lycanthropi. I know of no playwright of the period who dwells
so persistently as Middleton on magic, witchcraft, and allied
themes. He manifests a curiosity which at times seems
prurient. His allusions to the supernatural have a strongly
realistic smack. They are especially concerned with the more
vulgar and sordid practices of the devotees of occult arts.
SIn Parrott's ed., Bussy D'Ambois, IV, ii, V, iii; Byron's Conspiracy, II, i,
39-50, 104-128, III, iii; Byron's ragedy, V, ii, 136-307, V, iv, 88-92; Ccesar and
Pompey, II, i; Blind Beggar, vi.
2 In Bullen's ed., Blurt, IV, ii, Phoenix, V, i, Mad World, IV, i, iv, Anything for
a Quiet Life, I, i, 92, 322, V, ii, 274 seq.




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST 139
Among all the Elizabethan dramatists the most robust and
powerfully displayed attitude toward the occult is that of
Ben Jonson. His plays are notable for the minute realism of
their portraits of astrologers, alchemists, pretended demoniacs, quacks, and fake mystics generally, and their zealous
exposure of these frauds, the rottenness of whose impostures
the poet unquestionably loathed. The most striking scenes
are in Volpone (V, viii), The Alchemist (passim), The Devil
is an Ass (V, iii, v) and the masque of i'he Fortunate Isles,
but there are speeches, allusions, and incidental references
everywhere. In the incomplete pastoral The Sad Shepherd,
and in The Masque of Queens, Ben Jonson displays the poet's
and antiquarian's impressions of witchcraft and its commonly
accepted attributes and paraphernalia. All honor to Ben
Jonson, as a man of hard sense, who refused to be deluded by
hocus-pocus. His everywhere demonstrated militant skepticism toward the false occult ranks him as one of the most
penetrating minds of his time. Yet we look in vain for any
thoroughgoing denial of the devil and his works in human
society, while we know from Ben's own word that he had been
at times an ardent churchman, and indeed for a period of
years a Papist.
If it be objected that all the writers cited above - Shakespeare, Chapman, Middleton, and Ben Jonson - lived, or
produced most of their work after the time of Marlowe, I
may cite a contemporary who nevertheless employs the supernatural freely: to wit, Robert Greene. His use of necromantic
contests, transportation on the devil's back, the brazen head,
and the perspective glass in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is
much fuller, so far as paraphernalia are concerned, than the
magic of Dr. Faustus, and there are, in addition, a whole
chorus of fairies (headed by Oberon) in 7ames IV, the enchantress Melissa in Orlando Furioso, the enchantress Medea,
not to speak of Mahomet's brazen head, spewing forth fire




140


H. W. HERRINGTON


and prophecy, in Aiphonsus, magi who work wonders, the
swallowing up of a character in a flame of fire, a devil-disguise,
a hand from the heavens brandishing a burning sword, Jonah
and the whale, and other marvels in A Looking Glass for
London and England (written with Thomas Lodge). With
characteristic lack of restraint Greene spreads the supernatural
in much profusion through his several plays. He seems mostly
interested in its possibilities for spectacle. Middletonian
vulgar realism and Jonsonian satire are alike absent. There
is no hint of anything except full credence of the premises on
which these supernatural acts and happenings are based.
The writers who have been mentioned all display, then, a
lively interest in the supernatural, although they are concerned with various manifestations thereof and place their
emphasis variously. How is it with Marlowe? Doctor Faustus
at once springs to mind as one of the most notable Elizabethan plays of magic. A brief resum6 of the plot will fix
the magic content of the play in mind: Faustus rejects the
learned professions one by one and settles on magic as being
the only study whose dominion
Stretcheth as far as does the mind of man.
After receiving instructions from Valdes and Cornelius, he
summons Mephistophilis with full Latin formula, has him garb
himself like a friar, disputes with him concerning problems of
the soul and of hell; signs with his blood a deed of his soul to
Lucifer after a period of twenty-four years during which
Mephistophilis shall serve him; questions further with
Mephistophilis; is dissuaded from marriage by means of a
she-devil with fireworks; receives books of magic; is presented with a show of the seven deadly sins; boxes the Pope's
ear and snatches away his banquet (for which he is cursed
with bell, book, and candle); raises for the Emperor a vision
of Alexander and his paramour and plays a trick on a scoffing




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST            141
knight; sells a horse-courser a horse which changes, on his
driving it into the water, into a bottle of hay; plays another
trick on the latter, who is confounded to find he has snatched
off the doctor's leg; fetches for the Duchess of Vanholt ripe
grapes from India; raises for his scholars a vision of Helen of
Troy, summons the fair vision a second time; bids farewell to
his scholars, and then in great anguish of spirit gives up his
soul to the fiend. Four times the Good and Evil Angels appear, and contend over him, and near the end the Old Man
takes up the function of the former. Faustus is wavering
and frequently repentant; on one occasion he is rebuked and
punished for calling on the name of Christ. Yet on each occasion he eventually yields to the evil solicitations, is convinced that he must carry through his bargain, and that he
must be damned soul and body, as he is at the catastrophe of
the play. There are also several scenes (all comic) in which
Faustus does not figure: one in which Faustus's servant,
Wagner, makes merry with the Clown by means of the devils
Baliol and Belcher; one in which Robin the Ostler steals the
Vintner's goblet and conjures clumsily with one of Dr.
Faustus's books, for which presumption he and his companion,
Rafe, are chased by Mephistophilis about the stage with
squibs and crackers, and are to be transformed into an ape
and a dog. Some of these comics are under vehement suspicion of being by other hands than Marlowe's, but he cannot, I fear, be acquitted of all of them.
This epitome presents the material of Dr. Faustus; it does
not, I think, interpret its purport and spirit. Considered in
its bare outlines - the stark formulae and stage business of
devils, devil's compact, magician, magician's shows and tricks,
yes, even to its squibs and firecrackers - it would seem to
present no problem to one familiar with the sixteenth-century
belief in the occult and with sixteenth-century dramatic
practice. Its thought and its machinery are alike normal and




142


H. W. HERRINGTON


conventional, orthodox and ordinary. It is just what we
might expect from a child of the sixteenth century who had
decided to write on a magic theme. Observe, I am here speaking of the material only.
When we turn from Dr. Faustus to the other plays of Marlowe, we at once see it in its true light as an anomaly in
Marlowe's theatre, unique among all his works. One searches
in vain among the six other plays accepted as his, and indeed
(except in his translations) among his non-dramatic work, for
a single scene which presents magician, witch, devil, ghost,
or any agency of the supernatural whatever. This record
is unparalleled in the work of any other of the greater Elizabethan dramatists (unless it be Peele). In every other case
with which I am familiar, an interest in the supernatural has
been attested, not by one character, scene, or play, but by
many. Marlowe has one play to offer (full and rich of its
kind to be sure). The testimony of the rest of his plays is
silence.
One may go further, and apply the test of individual allusions and imagery. In these Marlowe's lines are povertystricken to the last degree. The only categories at all numerous are "devil" and "hell," the general significance of which
has been already estimated. There is a certain passive acceptance of astrology, one or two conventional uses of the
terms " charm," "enchantment," " spirits," and the like - indeed, who can avoid them even to-day? By a figure of speech!Jamburlaine is in the Prologue considered a "tragic glass."
But Olympia's mention of the magic ointment to protect her
skin from the steel's point is only her tragic trick to make
Theridamas stab her; the old wives' tales of spirits and ghosts
which Barabas mentions he himself does not believe; and the
common outburst against Tamburlaine and Barabas does not
consider them devils or devil-aided, but rather men of superhuman powers or of inhuman cruelty. There is an allusion




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST               143
to the classical Circe, and her changing of shapes; one disgusted sneer by Catherine at her weakling son Henry,
Thou art a changeling, not my son;
the hurling of the perfectly natural epithet "cursed hag," by
Dido at the nurse who brings her ill tidings, followed by the
more pointed
Traitress too keend and cursed sorceress.
The allusion to the woman "famoused for arts" is merely
Aeneid, iv, 483-493, much reduced. Quite amusingly, the
only time in Marlowe's plays that a character is called an
"old witch" is in Dido, where the words are addressed to
Juno by Venus.' The passages and allusions just mentioned
are not merely representative, as in the case of writers previously discussed, but the only passages and allusions of
significance in the Marlovian canon, Faustus being excepted.
The list seems incredibly meagre, when one comes to Marlowe after extensive reading among other Elizabethan dramatists.
Additions to and continuations of Marlowe's works - to
wit, in the late quartos of Dr. Faustus and in the third, fourth,
fifth, and sixth sestiads of Hero andLeander - show significant
differences from Marlowe's practice in the treatment of the
material we have been considering. The Faustus quartos
from 1616 to 1663 enlarge with gusto the allusions to devils
and the pangs of hell. At 11. 1422-23 they make Faustus
assert,
0 thou bewitching fiend, 't was thy temptation
Hath rob'd me of eternal happiness -
a statement which palliates the guilt that in the 1604
quarto is squarely laid upon the protagonist's shoulders.
Added charms in the late quartos are clearly not of the auI Brooke's Works of Marlowe, Tamb., pt. 2, 11. 3940 seq., Jew of Malta, 11. 663 -669, Edw. II, 1. 468, Massacre, 1. io86, Dido, 11. 835, 842, 1624-1629, 1683-168;.




144


H. W. HERRINGTON


thentic kind. They are Englished and trivialized, containing
inconsistent ornamental allusions to Hecate and Pluto's love
of Proserpine; they are indeed so innocuous that one is surprised to find that the devils rise at them from their "sooty
palace." At the end of the play "hell is discovered," while
the Bad Angel gloats on the physical tortures with which he
seems on very familiar terms:
Now Faustus let thine eyes with horror stare
Into that vast perpetual torture-house.
There are the furies tossing damned souls
On burning forks: their bodies broil in lead.
There are live quarters broiling on the coals,
That ne'er can die: this ever-burning chair
Is for o'er-tortured souls to rest them in.
These, that are fed with sops of flaming fire,
Were gluttons, and lov'd only delicates,
And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates:
But yet all these are nothing, thou shalt see
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be.
The tortures of hell, according to Marlowe's authentic text,
are not specified in concrete terms, and indeed are only feared
in Faustus's tormented imagination. The inserted passage
shows very clearly the difference between Marlowe's practice
and that of his more normal continuer.
A few lines in Chapman's conclusion of Hero and Leander
are likewise illuminating. Chapman's strong interest in the
occult --an interest which made it serve constantly for incidental allusions and for imagery - has previously been
stated. In Marlowe's beginning of the poem (the first two
sestiads), there are no allusions whatever to the topics considered in this paper. Chapman's part has, as we should
expect, a number:
his late inriched arms,
In whose white circle Love writ all his charms.
A rich disparent Pentacle she weares,
Drawn full of circles and strange characters.
One hand a mathematic crystal sways.




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST                   145
Of Hero, fearing the operation of sympathetic magic -
similar to the case of a waxen image - as she embroiders
Leander's picture on her scarf:
but in her strength of thought,
She feared she pricked Leander as she wrought:
And then as she was working of his eye,
She thought to prick it out to quench her ill:
But as she pricked, it grew more perfect still.
The virgin tapers that on th' altar stood,
When she inflamed them, burned as red as blood:
All sad ostents of that too near success;
but when she looks at his picture, love's joys are renewed:
The odors sweetned, and the fires burned clear,
Leander's form left no ill object there.
In every drop a torturing Spirit flew,
It pierced so deeply, and it burned so blue.
But pleasing to th' infernall Empery,
Under whose ensigns Wars and Discords fight.
And one, which may have some topical significance, where the
poet speaks of the lover worshiping his love instead of the
gods:
And rail the brain-bald world at what it will,
That's the grand atheism that reigns in it still.:
In place of two unmodified uses of "hell" on the part of Marlowe (i, 468, ii, 334), uses more than matched on Chapman's
part, we find also "Hell's blackest dart" (v, 494), "Hell's
blackest reign" (vi, 170); there is "the devil Venus (vi, 290),
"there are "charmed lips" and "charmed skips" (v, 75, vi, 25).
Nothing is to be made of these slight references, except that
they are more numerous and more elaborate than Marlowe's;
but the contrast between the negative record of the first two
sestiads of Hero and Leander and the by no means inconsiderable demonology of the last four establishes very strikingly
I Hero and Leander, iii, 97, 98, 123, 124, 131, iv, 58-67, 128-139, 155-165, 343,
344, v, 330, 331, vi, 190, 191.




146


H. W. HERRINGTON


the difference in the thought on these matters between Marlowe, the radical and rationalist, and Chapman, the more
typical man of his time.
The review just made of Marlowe's work has demonstrated
that all of it except Faustus exhibits a mind that had no interest in the occult, not even to the extent of drawing on it
for random illustration and occasional imagery. One is led,
then, to speculate on the apparent incongruity, in Marlowe's
product, of Faustus with its magic formulae, machinery, and
business. Yet the incongruity seems to vanish as one reads
and rereads the play. The magic then recedes until it becomes incidental and mechanical, a mere background; the
scenes remembered, the ones which stirred the poet, and on
which he lavished his power, are the fierce contentions of
Faustus's divided spirit and the last supreme agony. Marlowe
found the magic in the Faustbuch, and he used it as he found
it, reducing instead of expanding, putting nothing of himself
into this material; without magic, there could be no Faustus
story, and the Faustus story was just such a one as to kindle
Marlowe's imagination, and leave him no rest till it had
driven him on to composition. When we consider the negative record of Marlowe everywhere else, we must conclude
that no interest in magic per se drew him to Faustus. What
attracted him is not difficult to infer when we recall what we
know of his other plays and of his own personality. Faustus
has Marlowe's hunger, and the hunger of Marlowe's heroes,
for experience and power; his soul "still climbing after knowledge infinite, and always moving as the restless spheres."
The terrible catastrophe of the legend stirred Marlowe as well:
for him the great tragedy of existence lay in man's utter inability to make real the infinite aspirations toward which his
spirit climbed. Thus it appears that the character of Faustus
and his spiritual struggle were to Marlowe incentive enough
for the writing of the play; and the incongruity of a play of




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE-- RATIONALIST 147
magic in the work of the everywhere exhibited rationalist at
once vanishes.
Marlowe's life and works are mutually consistent, and the
evidence of the latter confirms the poet's reputation for radicalism in the religious and intellectual spheres. The man
whose attitude toward the supernatural, and especially the
various manifestations of the occult, was for his time so
abnormal, was clearly such a one as to draw upon himself the
cry of "atheism" attested by contemporary accounts. The
works of the poet, it is hoped, are shown through the analysis
here undertaken to be of very considerable importance in
helping us to understand the mind of that enlightened thinker
and brave man whom the Genius of progressive thought must
ever recognize as one of her sons.
IV
In the analyses of the preceding pages, I have limited myself to the plays which have attained an established place in
the Marlowe canon, to wit, T'amburlaine (Parts I and II),
Doctor Faustus, rhe 7ew of Malta, Edward II, Dido, and T'he
Massacre at Paris. There are in addition thirteen plays
which have on various grounds at one time or other been attributed to him. These are z Henry VI (in part or in earlier
form), The First Part of the Contention between York and
Lancaster, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, T7he
Troublesome Reign of King 7ohn, /rden of Feversham, Titus
/lndronicus, Richard III, The Traming of a Shrew (the earlier
play, not Shakespeare's), Selimus, Edward III, A Larum for
London, The Maiden's Holiday (non-extant), and Lust's Dominion.' Without going into any of the other evidence, I
now propose to see whether our knowledge of Marlowe's
attitude toward the occult can lead us to any presumptions
concerning his alleged part in these plays. Such an examinaI See Brooke's article on the Marlowe canon. I omit some recent conjectures.




148


H. W. HERRINGTON


tion can of course arrive at no precise conclusions; it can be
only of the nature of general evidence, yet, I think, is not
destitute of value if made with caution. It is obviously of
little weight in plays which are felt to be only in part Marlowe's, unless the conceptions of the supernatural are fundamental, or unless the contributions of our poet can be pretty
well arrived at.
I have no remarks of any interest to offer in connection with
9'he J'rue J'ragedy, ['itus Andronicus, T'he iaming of a Shrew,
Edward III, and ALarum for London. On the others I append brief comments.
(i) I Henry VI. I agree with Mr. Tucker Brooke and Mr.
H. D. Gray that Marlowe was not the author of r Henry VI
(conjectural earlier form). The conception of Joan of Arc
as a witch is fundamental in the play, and expressed with
vehemence in scene after scene. She employs and rewards
familiar spirits, confesses (like many another witch), to a lewd
life, curses and blasphemes. The later scenes dealing with
Joan present witch lore of a sordidness, with a revolting
realism, unmatched, indeed not even suggested, in the known
work of Marlowe. I do not believe he could have had any
part in them.
(2) Ihe First Part of the Contention has fundamental to its
plot the utterance of an incantation by Margery Jordan, "the
cunning witch of Ely," and Roger Bolingbroke, "the conjurer," the raising of the spirit Askalon, his prophecies concerning the great ones of the state, the punishment of Eleanor,
Duchess of Gloster, who instigated the conjuration, and the
eventual fulfillment of the ambiguous prophecies. These plot
incidents are suspicious, yet since they are not invention, but
only a rather close following of the chronicle, I see no reason
why they may not have been written by even so thoroughgoing a skeptic as Marlowe, provided he had been commissioned to write a play on the period covered by the Conten



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST                 149
tion. It should be noted that the incidental allusions are
somewhat more numerous than usual with Marlowe.
(3) 'The 'Troublesome Reign of King 7ohn. Marlovian language is rather free in its use of terms like "devil" and "hell,"
but it does not in any play approach the strong speech of 7The
T'roublesome Reign. Witches and devils are said to delude;
characters are called witches, wizards, and devils; hell's horrors, plagues, rages, thralls, fiends are frequently mentioned.,
Marlowe exhibits nowhere, not even in Tamburlaine, such a
succession of infernal epithets. It is not conceivable that his
habit of thought and his diction at any time changed so
radically.
(4) Arden of Feversham presents no pointed evidence, although the accusations of witchcraft are disturbingly repeated.2
(5) Richard III contains Gloucester's charge of witchcraft
as causing the blasting of his arm (III, iv), the prophecy of
"G" which so disturbed Clarence (I, i), portentous and accusing dreams - Clarence's (I, iv), Stanley's (III, ii), and
Richard's on the battlefield, with its trooping throng of the
murdered (V, iii). It has also in the speeches of Anne, Queen
Margaret, and others (especially I, ii, and iii, and IV, iv), the
most thorough-going set of hellish epithets, save one, with
which I am familiar. Richard is a "fiend conjured by a black
magician," a "devil" (many times), a "devilish slave," a
"monster of hell," a "son of hell," a "hell-hound," "hell's
black intelligencer," a "cacodemon." Gloucester gives the
Queen as good. She is a "foul wrinkled witch," a "hateful
wither'd hag." A pleasant war of words! Marlowe showers
us nowhere with such a pelting rain of "hells" and "devils."
It would be quite contrary to his habit of mind to do so. HowStudor Facs. 7exts, First Part, C2v4, D2r29, E4v8-2o, Fv 5-34, F3r8, 16, 17,
F3v4, 8, 9, Io, 12, F4rL 16-19, G2v, G3r, G3vi, 3, 9, G4rI, 12, 13, 26, G4v6, 8, I1,
20; Sec. Part, A4v, B, B2r20, Cr7, C2rI2-2I, Dv, 14, 16, E2r27, 28, 33, E2viI-I6.
2 Tucker Brooke: Shakespeare Apocrypha, III, v, 78, 79, 93-95, IV, iv, 104,
152, 153.




15I


H. W. HERRINGTON


ever much Richard III may imitate Marlowe, it cannot in its
extant form be his handiwork.
(6) I do not think that Selimus is by Marlowe; yet it is
interesting as containing a passage giving a rationalistic view
of religion which may very well have been similar to Marlowe's; lines which, indeed, recall some of the phrases of the
Baines libel:
SELIMUS. Then some sage man, above the vulgar wise,
Knowing that laws could not in quiet dwell,
Unless they were observed: did first devise
The names of Gods, religion, heaven, and hell,
And gan of pains, and fained rewards to tell:
Pains for those men which did neglect the law,
Rewards for those that liv'd in quiet awe.
Whereas indeed they were mere fictions,
And if they were not, Selim thinks they were:
And these religions observations,
Only bugbears to keep the world in fear,
And make men quietly a yoke to bear.
So that religion of itself a Babel,
Was only found to make us peaceable.
SINAM. Oh yet my Lord after your Highness' death,
There is a hell and a revenging God.
SELIMUS. Tush, Sinam, these are school conditions,
To fear the devil or his cursed dam:
Thinkst thou I care for apparitions
Of Sisiphus and of his backward stone,
And poor Ixions lamentable moan?
Now I think the cave of damned ghosts
Is but a tale to terrify young babes:
Like devils' faces scor'd on painted posts,
Or fained circles in our astrolabes.
Why there's no difference when we are dead,
And death once come, then all alike are sped.
Or if there were, as I can scarce believe,
A heaven of joy, and hell of endless pain:
Yet by my soul it never should me grieve,
So I might on the Turkish empire reign,
To enter hell, and lean on fair heaven's gain.
An empire, Sinam, is so sweet a thing,
As I could be a devil to be a king.
(Malone Society reprint, 1908, 11. 326-436)




CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - RATIONALIST            15I
Even if Marlowe did not write the play, he may of course have
contributed these lines; or are they the work of one of Marlowe's converts (mentioned in the Baines libel), or of some
other bold young dramatist addicted to the tenets of Sir Walter
Raleigh's school of atheism? A case has been made for Greene
as the author of this play. I cannot make the sentiments expressed sound like the Greene of the plays generally or of the
penitential pamphlets; yet Greene, according to his own
statement, had once said "like the fool in his heart, 'There is
no God.'" The rationalism of Selimus is consistently maintained. Perhaps we have here a strong dramatic conception
on some playwright's part.'
(7) The text of Lust's Dominion as it now stands (reprinted
in Pickering's edition of Trhe Works of Christopher Marlowe,
1826, volume 3), totally disagrees with Marlowe's practice in
the use of hellish epithets and occult allusions. I do not know
of any play which is fuller and more violent in the use of these.
Richard III is conservative by the side of it. "Damned"
and similar words occur 32 times, "hell" 38 times, "devil" 31
times. There is every variety of compound and variation: hellhound, mould of hell, prince and son of hell, hell gates, helltortured, hell-begotten; the devil's dam is not omitted; there
is mention of monster, fiend, fury, hedge-hog, Lucifer, Pluto's
kingdom, and sulphury wrath. People avow themselves enticed and bewitched; they threaten to conjure; they speak
of magic circles (four times), of magic spells and charms
(seven times), of witchcraft. The ministers of hell do not appear in propria persona, but we do have Oberon and a troop
of fairies, who dance most incongruously in a tragic scene.
The use of this material is so thoroughly consistent that page
references are valueless: the reader will find one or more allusions on almost every page. There are 141 clear cases in, Danchin would seem to consider this speech Marlowe's (Rev. Germ., Jan.Feb., 1914, p. 61).




152             H. W. HERRINGTON
the io9 pages of the tragedy, as printed by Pickering. I am
inclined to think that this profusion is unparalleled in the
Elizabethan drama. It far out-Kyds Kyd, whose Spanish
YT'ragedy is by no means deficient in these respects. I agree
with Professor Brooke that the tone of the play sounds more
like Kyd than any other Elizabethan dramatist. Its inception may owe something to him.




THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"








THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"
By ROBERT WITHINGTON
T is generally recognized that the "parasite" came to the
English drama from Latin comedy through the Tudor
schoolmasters who modelled their plays on the classic masterpieces they knew so well. This "dynamic" character was,
however, not unknown in the earlier English comedy; and
doubtless many in the audience which greeted Merygreke's
appearance on the school stage recognized a fellow and kindred spirit to the Tityvillus of the morality.
The suggestion has been made that the Vice owes his name
to the mask (vis, visage) which perhaps at one time he wore.
Chalmers, cited by Laing in his edition of Sir David Lyndsay's
poems, seems to adopt Steevens's explanation: "... The
vycis of Lyndsay's Satyre [of the!T'hree Estates] were more
knaves than fools. This character was always acted in a mask,
and probably had its name, saith Steevens, from the old
French word vis, for which they now use visage." On the
other hand, Webster's Dictionary derives "the buffoon of
old English moralities, often named from some particular
vice," from the Latin vitium, through the French.
However much of a knave the old Vice was, he had a good
deal of the buffoon in his composition, and must inevitably
have received such sympathy as we give to the comedian who,
to-day, makes us laugh. Yet the audiences who heard the
moralities at their height did not sympathize with the Vice
to such an extent that they lost their joy in his discomfiture;
and the authors of these plays were careful to keep the sympathies of the audience away from the evil characters whose
mode of life led to their ruin. With these characters, the Vice




156


156     ROBERT WITHINGTON


was usually associated; it was often he who led them astray
in the first place; and we must not forget that he was a compound of fool and knave. If his buffoonery gave rise to amusement - even to a mild sympathy - his roguery killed it.
But, before the Vice, the Devil of the miracle-'play aroused
the mirth of the audience. Dr. Whitmore has remarked, in
Trhe Supernatural in Tragedy, that, in the Towneley fudgment
Day, the scenes in which the devils figure are of a markedly
satirical character. "It is to be noted," he continues, "(that
the satirical element in these scenes does not make them
comic in the sense of being intended merely to provoke laughter.. 0. There is always a serious background behind the
satirical touches. Moreover., we must remember that to the
medixeval mind, very conscious of the intellectual character
of sin as an obscuration of the inner light of thought., there
was always a certain misshapenness about sinners and devils,
especially the latter, which provoked scornful laughter. The
distorted moral nature of the devil results in certain physical
malformations of body and speech which are an essential part
of his nature. Yet if these characteristics move us to laughter,
he has others which are ground for fearing him; and so long
as he is seriously regarded he cannot become a purely comic
figure. Many traits in the mediveval devils which may appear
wholly amusing to us were so only 'in part to the spectators of
the miracle-plays; and we must beware of overlooking this
more serious aspect. In the occasional instances - chiefly in
Chester and Coventry - where the purely comic handling appears, it is so incidental and so trivial that it can be largely
neglected in a summary of the whole field."
The origin of the Vices has been studied in a recent paper
by Miss T. E. Allison'1 who suggests that the lost morality, the
Paternoster Play, was chiefly concerned with the Seven
"The Paternoster Play and the Origin of the Vices" in Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America for December, 1924,(xxxix, 4,1 PP. 789 if.).




DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"


I57


Deadly Sins. The "pageant of Viciose" in the Beverly
Cycle seems to deal with vices which were distinguished from
sins - vice (according to patristic theology) being "regarded
as a weakness in the nature of man which preceded actual sin,
and further, that it was this weakness which provoked man's
consent to sin." Miss Allison suggests that perhaps Ramsay's
surmise that this "pageant of Viciose" dealt with the temptation of mankind, and that, Man's resistance being broken, he
was made ready prey for the Seven Deadly Sins,is a sound one,
though impossible of proof, as we have no list of the characters
in the "pageant of Viciose."
Backbiter, or Detraccio, the messenger of Mundus in I'he
Castle of Perseverance, is distinctly a Vice; he introduces
Jhimlf:
All thyngis I crye a-gayn the pes
To knyt and knaue. This is my kende
Ya! dyngne dukis on her des,
In bytter balys I hem bynde;
Cryinge and care, chydynge and ches,
And sad sorwe, to hem I sende.
Ya! lowde lesyngis lachyd in les,
Of talys vn-trewe is al my mende.
Mannys bane a-bowtyn I bere,
I wyl that ye wetyn, all tho that ben here;
For I am knowyn fer and nere;
I am the Werldys messengere;
My name is Bacbytere....... In this holte I hunte here
For to spye a preuy pley;
For whanne Mankynde is clothyd clere,
Thanne schal I techyn hym the wey
To the dedly synnys seuene....
Miss Allison points out that he appears with Voluptas, Stultitia, and Veynglory (Inanis gloria) early in the play, and that
the action of all except Detraccio is completed before the entrance of the Sins. "Detraccio, who is the most important of
the four, instructs Mankind in the Seven Deadly Sins and
serves as the messenger or page of the Evil Powers.... In




158


ROBERT WITHINGTON


the Castell of Perseverance, then, we find characters bearing
the names of the Vitia: these characters are sent ahead to
win the consent of Mankind to the Seven Deadly Sins; they
are predecessors of the Sins and, with the exception of one,
they disappear from the action upon the appearance of the
Peccata Capitalia." It is noteworthy that the one who does
not disappear is the most important.
Mischief, in Mankind, is, like Detraccio, a page, and has
three "minor vices" under his control; but the chief Vice here
is, I think, rather Titivillus, whose connection with the devil
of the miracle-play we shall comment on later. The attendants of Flesh and the Devil in The Castle of Perseverance are
six of the Deadly Sins, the seventh attending World. Miss
Allison's conclusions are summed up in her final paragraph:
"Thus from an examination of patristic definitions of vice
and sin, it is evident that the distinction between the two was
fairly consistent, and that the functions of each were distinct
from those of the other. A study of moralities near to the
Paternoster Play certainly shows the existence of a group of
evil figures other than the Seven Deadly Sins, the function of
which corresponded to that of the ecclesiastical vitia, namely
the temptation of mankind in contrast to the Seven Deadly
Sins which usually appear as opponents of the Heavenly
Virtues. That these lesser evil figures may have been the
source of the comic element seems highly probable because of
their nature in the earlier moralities, because of the classes of
men to whom the pageant was assigned, and because of its
position in the cycle."
The comic character of theVice is due, I think, to the comedy
latent or developed in the devil of the miracle-play, his prototype.
Such comedy as may be found in the discomfiture of an unsympathetic figure is mingled with the tragedy involved in a
fall from high estate, when God orders Lucifer to hell, in the




DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"


159


Hegge Fall of Lucifer. Pride has carried Lucifer to the throne
of the Deity, and God orders him down:
ffor thi mekyl pryde,
I bydde the ffalle from hefne to helle;
And alle tho that holdyn on thi syde,
In my blysse nevyr more to dwelle.
At my comawndement anoon down thou slyde,
With merthe and joye nevyr more to melle.
In myschyf and manas evyr xalt thou abyde,
In byttyr brennyng and fyer so felle,
In peyn evyr to be pyht.
And Lucifer replies:
At thy byddying thi wyl I werke,
And pas fro joy to peyne smerte.
Now I am a devyl ful derke,
That was an aungelle bryht.
Now to helle the wey I take,
In endeles peyn ther to be pyht.
For fere of fyre a fart I crake;
In helle donjoone myn dene is dyth.
This is akin to the comedy furnished by the outwitted Herod
in the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and I'aylors. If
Herod is the ancestor of the melodramatic villain, as he has
been called, he has also something of the miles gloriosus and
a good deal of the buffoon in him, and his wild raging was
doubtless funny.... owt! owt! owt!
Hath those fawls traytvrs done me this ded?
I stampe! I stare! I loke all abowtt!
Myght I them take, I schuld them bren at a glede!
I rent! I rawe! and now run I wode!
A! thatt these velen trayturs hath mard this my mode!
They schalbe hangid yf I ma cum them to!
Here Erode ragis in the pagond and
in the strete also.
To the comedy of the villain foiled is added the childish behavior of a king who has lost his temper; and both must have
provoked the mirth of the spectators who could have no sym



i6o


ROBERT WITHINGTON


pathy with the regal rogue. To "out-Herod Herod" had
become proverbial by the time of Shakespeare.
Like Lucifer, and unlike Herod, the Antichrist of the Chester
play had a power of which medieval audiences may have been
in fear; but one must admit that the discomfiture of the supernatural figures must have brought as much pleasure (not unmixed with relief) to the spectators, as the outwitting, and
subsequent lack of self-control, of the proud king. Had Antichrist been human, there might have been tragedy in his end;
for his position resembles that of Tamburlaine or Doctor
Faustus. There are comic possibilities in the contrast between the pride of Satan and his fall; but if he is less comic
than the Herod of the Coventry Corpus Christi play, it is
because he is more dignified. The two demons who carry off
his soul were probably funny, even in their grief for their
master; and the Second Demon's
Thowe take hym by the tope & I by the tayle;
An soryfull song, in faythe, shall he senge,
must have made the journey to hell of this unsympathetic
figure amusing.
The "dyvel with thunder and fyre" (Belial) who "avaunts
himself," as well as the other devil "callyd Mercury" who
enters "with a fyeryng, commyng in hast, cryeng and roryng,"
in the Digby Conversion of St. Paul, may be considered comic.
Their grief at the loss of their "specyall frynd," their "chosen
Saull," must have made the audience laugh, and yet the people
may not have been able to forget the knavery beneath the
buffoonery.
Fear was surely not one of the emotions with which the contemporary public regarded the Vice of the moralities; but the
connection of Tityvillus, in Mankind, with the earlier supernatural character is suggested by the stage-direction: "Enter
Tityvillus arrayed like a devil and with a net in his hand."
One of the devils in the Towneley 7udgment was named




DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"


161


Tutivillus, - a name which suggests "totally [tutti] vile."
In Mankind, Mischief is not far from the "parasite" - a
worthless companion who leads the thoughtless characters
astray; but he is also comic: "I am cumme hedyr to make
yow game." Tityvillus is, however, the Vice; he "kan lerne
yow many praty thynges," and brings Mankind " to myscheff
& to schame." In the explanation of the allegory given by
Mercy, "propyrlly Titiuilly syngnyfieth the fend of helle,"
so that the connection between the Vice and the Devil seems
established. When Tediousness, in Wit and Science, " cumth
in with a vyser over hys hed," it is (says Collier) " to make him
look like a devil"; and he swears "by Mahowndes bones" in
the usual style of the old miracles. In the pageants, the devils
who with squibs cleared the streets for the processions, were
undoubtedly comic figures; but this was long after the period
when the public watched devils pitchfork the souls of the
damned into the fires of Hell-Mouth. Such mirth as these
antics may have provoked was mingled with fear, as Dr. Whitmore has said; and we cannot regard the devil as an entirely
comic figure as long as he was felt to be a power of evil. The
case is different with the Vice, whose machinations were frustrated by the virtues in the moralities as inevitably as ever
Lucifer or Antichrist was overcome by the power of God.
But the Vice was not always wholly knave: we find an element of the fool, or rather of the buffoon, in him. This connects him with the classic "witty page" who appeared in the
Tudor drama about the same time as the "parasite." Pikeharness, Cain's boy, in The Killing of Abel, acted by the Glovers of Wakefield, is a very early example of this figure in the
miracle-play; the scene where he wilfully miseries each line
of the proclamation recalls Merygreke's misreading of Ralph's
letter, and the "tangled chain" of Quince's prologue. In the
Digby Conversion of St. Paul, the Servant and the Stable-boy
are comic figures forecasting the Slipper, Nano, and Andrew of




162


ROBERT WITHINGTON


7ames the Fourth, as does Colle, the leech's man, in The Play
of the Sacrament, a prototype of Miles in Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay. There is almost as much comedy in the stupid
servant as in the witty page, though the humor is less intellectual. Ignorance, in Wit and Science, is aptly called "fool";
he furnishes some buffoonery, but is more nearly connected
with the stupid servant type than with the Vice; an excellent example of the developed Vice is Iniquity, in The Nice
Wanton: he is rather parasite than witty page. Sir A. W.
Ward points out that in Bale's King 7ohn, Sedition is "at
once the main agent in the conduct of the play, and its solitary
comic character.... He represents the Vice of the moralities."
Is it Jesuitical to suggest a common element in the "parasite" and the servant, witty or stupid? The latter gets paid
for the service he renders, while the former renders service for
which he hopes (and usually receives) a reward. The servant
does as he is told, or at least is supposed to; the parasite finds
not only his employer (if we may call him so) but his eniploymert - and stirs up what trouble he can, in the hope of getting some kind of benefit from it. In other words, the witty
page - or the stupid servant - focusses the buffoonery of
the Vice, while the parasite shows his roguery.
This roguery is not always a serious matter. Merygreke,
in Roister Doister, is not a disagreeable character, and certainly not vicious, although he plays tricks on Ralph. Fliigel
has pointed out that he is "Udall's own creation - a figure
in itself deserving of high praise. Undoubtedly this character
was at first conceived as a mere modern parasite... but
as the play advanced, the figure outgrew its original limits,
and although in the first scenes Merygreke is scarcely out of
the egg-shell of the parasite, he proves very soon to be a new
character: a character belonging to the class of Pandarus, a
'Friend' playing the part of kindly Fate, a Vice certainly mis



DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"


163


chievous and cruel enough, but directing everything to a good
end; as full of humor and fun as of character, and, at the
bottom of his heart, of good-nature." Ralph is an early example of the "miles gloriosus" in English - an ancestor of
Falstaff, who has also (it must be confessed) an element of the
parasite in him. If Diccon, in Gammer Gurton's Needle, is a
"dynamic" character who lives, like the parasite, by his
wits, he is also (as Ward remarks) "merely the Vice of the
old moralities slightly modified." In the same play, Hodge
suggests the stupid servant type rather than the Vice; for
the buffoonery of devil and Vice was almost never stupid. It
is rather Diccon than Hodge who is in sight of the Shakespearean "clown"-which, indeed, is the word Saintsbury used to
describe him: he is "the clown or 'vice' of the piece." Cocke,
Gammer Gurton's boy, does not play an important part in the
comedy, but may be considered the "raw material" of the
witty page. Ambidexter, the Vice in Cambises, is cleverly
attached to the plot; and if the subject (at all events) attests
the influence of classic literature upon the beginnings of English tragedy, as Ward says, the play contains a figure from the
earlier drama on which the classical parasite was grafted, as
the page - witty or stupid - was grafted on such a figure as
Pikeharness.
Ambidexter shows clearly the component parts of the Vice,
for not only is his participation in the action ingeniously
managed, "but," to quote Ward again, "room is also found
for much low fun and ribaldry between the Vice and three
ruffians, Huf, Snuf, and Ruf, and two 'country patches,'
Hob and Lob." In a note Ward calls attention to the resemblance between this scene and that in 9'he Winter's I'ale
between the peasants and Autolycus, "who is a genuine descendant of the Vice." It is interesting to connect this aspect
of the Vice with the Fool of the folk-drama; the conversation between Pickle Herring and his father in the Revesby




164


ROBERT WITHINGTON


Sword Play combines the wit and stupidity found in page and
servant.
Pasiphilo, in Gascoigne's Supposes, is obviously a parasite:
in the third scene of the first act, he tells the audience that he
has "mo pastures to passe in than one." He is "of housholde
with this scholer Erostrato (his riuale), as well as with Domine
Cleander: nowe with the one, and then with the other, according as I see their caters prouide good cheere at the market;
and I finde the meanes so to handle the matter that I am welcome too bothe. If the one see me talke with the other, I make
him beleeue it is to harken newes in the furtherance of his
cause; and thus I become a broker on bothe sides." This is
surely ambidextrous! But Dulipo sees through him, and in
the first scene of the next act characterizes him as "a very
flattering and lying knave." Cleander, in the last act, calls
him a "knave and villain," to which Pasiphilo replies: "I
know I am a knave, but no villain. I am your servant." His
final speech is not that of a rogue: "Behold the natural love
of the child to the father. For inward joy he cannot pronounce one word, instead whereof he sendeth sobs and tears
to tell the effect of his inward intention. But why do you
abide here abroad? Will it please you to go into the house,
sir?" And Damon replies: "Pasiphilo hath said well." The
parasite seems to repent; he brings good news to Damon at
the end, and is readily forgiven for a knavery that is not very
deep-seated.
In Edwards's Damon and Pithias, the parasite Carisophus
is more of a villain. "Of parasites and sycophants" he is "a
grave bencher"; and he himself admits that
Carisophus is he
Which hath long time fed Dionysius' humour.
Diligently to please, still at hand, there was never rumour
Spread in this town of any small thing but I
Brought it to the king in post by and by.




DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"


He hunts up strangers:
They were a good prey.
If happily I might meet with them, I fear not, I,
But in talk I should trip them, and that very finely.
Which thing, I assure you, I do for mine own gain, -
Or else I would not plod thus up and down, I tell you plain.
And again: "For profit I will accuse any man, hap what
shall." So the arrest of Damon is planned, the lying charge
made, and the friendship of Pithias tested. His end is not
that of Pasiphilo; for Eubulus the counsellor beats him, upbraids him --"Away, villain! Away, you flattering parasite!"-- and he goes, saying,
Yet, Eubulus, though I be gone, hereafter time shall try,
There shall be found, even in this court, as great flatterers as I.
Well, for a while I will forego the court, though to my great pain.
I doubt not but to spy a time when I may creep in again.
The moral is drawn by Eubulus:
The serpent that eats men alive-- flattery-- with all her brood,
Is whipp'd away in princes' courts, which yet did never good.
What force, what mighty power true friendship may possess,
To all the world Dionysius' court now plainly doth express.
Purged is the court of vice since friendship ent'red in.
Aristippus, the "pleasant gentleman" who supplanted the
parasite at court, may possibly be considered a parasite, too;
but he is surely not a villain, though he does not dare risk his
position to save the accused Damon. Both Aristippus and
Carisophus have "lackeys" who are "witty pages," and, as
such, have little effect on the action of the play; but they point
the way to the development of this figure in the quarter century to come.
Slipper, in 7ames the Fourth, is, of course, the "witty page"
clearly developed --he is "an excellent clown," as Ward
says. Several scenes in which Andrew, Slipper, and Nano
figure, suggest such earlier scenes as those in T'he Conversion
of St. Paul or The Play of the Sacrament, to which we have
already referred; and Slipper is a development of Pikehar



166


ROBERT WITHINGTON


ness, through the "witty page." Quite another kind of parasite is Ateukin. Ward calls him "a well-drawn character,"
but he is clearly a villain. Perhaps all parasites have the
potentialities of villainy, as the Vice is as much a rogue as
a fool; but there is no suggestion of the buffoon in this sinister
person. When Slipper becomes Ateukin's servant, not only
is the induction linked with the main plot of Greene's play,
but the development of the element of the fool in the Vice,
through the "witty page" of the Latin comedy, is joined to
the element of the rogue in the Vice, developed by the classic
"parasite." 1 When Ateukin is entrusted with the murder of
the queen, after suggesting it, he is not far removed from a
"base notorious knave."
This quick glance at sample plays will, perhaps, show sufficiently how mirth glided into folly, and folly into sin; for
once the devil became a comic figure, he was allied to the
comic side of the Vice, which drew also from the Fool of the
folk-play and the clever or stupid servant of the miracles.
Developed through the "witty page" of Roman comedy,
this aspect of the Vice led directly to the "clown" of Elizabethan comedy: the Lancelot Gobbo, the Dogberry and
Verges, the Bottom, the Quince, and the Feste of a later
theatre. But the Vice was also a "dynamic" character, and
somewhat of a rogue; and this quality, developed under the
influence of the classic "parasite" into such a figure as
Ateukin, points the way to such villains as Don John and lago,
who have lost their parasitic qualities. Comedy stresses the
one development, as tragedy stresses the other; obviously a
villain cannot be deeply dyed, if we view his rascality lightly.
Underneath the miles gloriosus in Falstaff's composition, we
I After Act II, scene ii, line 15I (cf. Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean
Drama, ii, page 366), the stage-direction reads: "Enter Gnato," and Ateukin comes
on. Gnatho was a parasite in Terence's Eunuchus, and Greene undoubtedly considered this character as a parasite. The King of Scotland addresses him as "gentle
Gnato" (line 207; see Manly, ii, p. 368); cf. also line 138 of the same scene -
"these flattering Gnatoes."




DEVELOPMENT OF THE "VICE"


167


can faintly discern traces of the parasite, perhaps a shade more
obvious in Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym; but these gentlemen,
living by their wits as parasites did, were not attached to any
master, and were rather of the kindly sort, as was Merygreke.
Was not the Vice often "an aged counsellor to youthful sin"?
- or at least a counsellor to sin; and if Prince Hal was not
corrupted, it was not the fault of Sir John.
In both comedy and tragedy, the more a character is individualized, the less obvious become the features of the type
to which he belongs. When he is so complex that he belongs
to no type exclusively, he is almost a living being. The study
of the early English drama brings us few things more interesting or more valuable than the comprehension of the growth
of this complexity from the simple types of the morality to the
individuals who crowd the stage of Shakespeare.
A figure from a foreign drama cannot become naturalized
away from home, unless there is a congenial soil in which the
transplanted element can root itself. Both the "witty page"
and the "parasite" found this congenial element in the Vice;
and is it too fantastic to imagine that Lancelot Gobbo, Falstaff, and Iago can trace their ancestry to the most human
figure of the moralities? To err is human - and the erring
ones became human on the stage long before the colder and
simpler virtues. It is due to his complexity at a time when
most figures in the drama were far from complex that we regard the Vice as the most important of the morality-play
characters, though the authors of these plays probably did
not regard him in this light. Only when we stop to analyze
him, can we find out why he is complex. Part servant, part
devil; part fool, part rogue; part buffoon, part the source of
the chief action of the play, he combined wit and villainy before the Tudor times. And when the schoolmasters brought
"witty page" and "parasite" to the English stage, he absorbed them; and when he had outgrown the type, he died.








IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES








IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES


By HENRY B. LATHROP
THIS paper is not a contribution to knowledge, or even
a novelty in criticism, but an expression of the feelings.
It is an attempt to put into words a feeling of reverence and
a sense of obligation. And however unskillful or inadeqt~,ate
it may be, it is sincere, and it is the result of long familiarity
and devotion. Of Don Quixote it is said that the children turn
its pages, the young read it, the middle-aged understand it,
the old praise it. May I take the liberty to remember a day
in my childhood? I was about eight; I was making a frank
visit at a friendly home, the kind of visit that begins at somewhat after seven in the morning, and ends when you are discovered tucked away in some corner of the house, and hauled
out and sent home.
In a heap of books in the attic was a thick dwarf volume,
with a leather cover, rounded corners, yellowed paper with a
kind of bloom on its surface, fat type, and curious little old
copperplate engravings - a gnome or cobold of a book. It
began: "At a certain village in La Mancha., of which I cannot remember the name, there lived 'not long ago one of those
old-fashioned gentlemen., who are never without a lance upon
a rack, an old target, a lean horse., and a greyhound." No
lunchbell, no dinnerbell sounded that day within my world;
I did not feel the eager hunger of childhood. No change in the
direction of the shadows was perceived by me as I sprawled
on the floor, reading from page to page; and only the darkness
which made reading impossible drew me to a realization that I.
was probably the lost child of anxious parents, one of whom
might not find a tale of a voyage of discovery in new worlds




172


H. B. LATHROP


sufficient to excuse my trespassing on the hospitality of my
good friends the Suttons.
Certainly I did not in my youth desert the high-minded
knight, though I came to know many more of his genial
tribe. I do not know whether I understood Cervantes, but I
shall not forget the period when some three or four of us,
admirers of things of Spain, came together once a week; and
each with a different translation in hand, we read aloud the
choice and massive, but free Castilian of Cervantes, and discussed the various translations into English, and, like the
translators of the authorized version of the Bible, held each
in hand an early translation or a commentary, and conned
over the text, word by word, and sentence by sentence, from
the pigeon pies at the beginning to the priest's blessing at the
end. And now I praise Cervantes! Absit omen! For I am
not so very old yet.
There is but one subject really possible for me, and that is
the impress upon English literature of Cervantes's genius:
for the definition of that debt is my best confession of gratitude to Cervantes for being and doing what he has done.
The facts of Cervantes's influence in English literature are
matters of common knowledge. One cannot say that his story
became a household word in England before it did in Spain;
but it was at once familiar and respected in England, while a
large part of the Spanish public regarded its interest as illicit
and somewhat shameful - it was read, but under the rose,
as an improper book, from ill-printed pages, and subject to
ecclesiastical censure and the disapproval of professional
critics. In England, on the contrary, Don Quixote became
promptly classic - it is one of the very few books not in Latin
or Greek having the honor to be cited in Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy, for example.
The eighteenth century in England developed two conspicuous types of realistic ptose fiction --the objectively




IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES


I73


panoramic, and the introspectively tragic. In the one there
are many characters, much incident, many changes of place,
a predominantly comic tone. The other is characterized by
the small number of characters, intensity of passion, a definite
transaction with few changes of place, a predominantly tragic
tone. Of the latter sort Richardson is the great example;
and the history of the novel carries on the tradition in George
Eliot, and the later English novel in Hardy and Meredith,
and, in a sense, in Mrs. Wharton. The other novel is the novel
of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, and of Scott, on the whole,
and of Dickens and Thackeray, absolutely. I do not know
that any writer carries on this tradition.
We know by evidence both external and internal that Cervantes shares with Le Sage the place of model and inspirer to
the genial and objective as distinguished from the grave and
introspective novel.
It is first to be remarked that the form and in some sense
the spirit of Don Quixote is in a great measure determined by
the fact that Cervantes is writing a parody of a romance of
chivalry, a parody more chivalrous in spirit than much of the
fiction he ridiculed; and hence Don Quixote must present life
as a spectacle on a great scale, with a multitude of figures,
a copious variety of incident, and ample and highly colored
impression of active energy, a profusion which may be indistinct but never thin, poor, or monotonous. Don Quixote is and
must be a big book. Indeed, the author, having at his command the inexhaustible riches of nature's energy in place of
the limited store of romantic convention - the never-ending,
ever-shifting variety of the actual detail of life in place of
Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon'd Shields,
Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds;
Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgeous Knights
At Joust and Tournament; then Marshall's Feast
Served up in Hall with Sewers and Seneschals -




174


H.B.LATHROP


is more profuse than his models. He has not only dame and
damsel, knight and squire, with a few wizards and Paynims to
fill the canvas, but all sorts and conditions of men as one sees
them on the road - Master Nicholas, the blundering barber;
the witty and clear-sighted Samson Carrasco, the vaguely
dreadful holy brotherhood, the inexhaustible tribe of innkeepers, and inn functionaries, from Juan Palomeque, the
cross-grained left-handed curmudgeon, and the fat and pacific
hypocrite who knighted Don Quixote, down to the flat-faced
Maritornes, the muleteers, ready with their clubs, ungrateful
galley-slaves, sententious runaway daughters, a youthful
soldier trolling a careless chanson, and lighting the gray landscape of La Mancha with a spot of color, a plowman at dawn
with a ballad of battles long ago, the kindly inadequate curate,
the pert niece, and the squinting rogues of the Seville beggars'
fraternity.
The book was not quickly completed; ten years elapsed
after the first part appeared before the riper, richer-minded,
and nobler, though no more splendidly inspired, second part
was published. Don Quixote is the first great modern work of
prose fiction into which a choice master spirit poured his
whole life-blood. Cervantes himself could never have made
another comic epic of reality. Another thing he might have
done, but never again this thing or anything like it; never even
a sister work to this epitome of a life.
So our elder novel was boldly big: not for it the unmanly
saying of the Alexandrian librarian Callimachus, "A big book
is as bad as the big devil himself." No. They knew that the
ample spirit of real life cannot be boxed into a petty compass.
No! For Fielding (or, indeed, for Richardson) there was the
possibility of creating one vast book,- the vehicle of the whole
vision of the tremendous and diverting panorama of human
society,- the experience of an entire life spent in active contact with the real movement of men and things, not to be




IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES'7


175


made by any but a mature and seasoned man, and by him to
be done just once, though it might be prepared for by less
satisfactory experiments, or echoed by weaker successors.
Thus Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones turned out, prepared
for by Pamela and Joseph Andrews, and succeeded not unhappily by Grandison and Amelia, but in themselves unique,
unrepeatable, unapproachable, the vast repository of the
imaginative experience - the inner life and the outer vision
of two great observers. Even Sterne has his one supreme
work of realistic experience; even Smollett does his quintessential and unique best but once.
It was reserved for Scott to shorten the novel; to make a
trade of producing stories, to fill a library shelf with novels,
and to show the way to others; to create a profession for
Bulwer and Dumas, Sr., G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth., and, I suppose, in a way, for Dickens and Trollope.
Most of our later theorists contest the legitimacy of this
vast repository type of fiction. I remember that Mr. Lewisohn
once declared without limitation or allowance that a novel
must have a single theme., resulting 'in an absolutely single
transaction, without. digression into unnecessary characters
or incidents, without unnecessary words. He made me think
the true fiction writer to be a clean, lean, fleet, eager hound
intent upon the prey before him.
But all forms are good that are good: that express a sincere
nature adequately. But the most notable of realistic geniuses,
Zola, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, have not hesitated to create books
on a vast scale and with a leisurely progress, with an eye not
only for the end of the road, but for the things to be seen along
the way; and their power is certainly one of momentum, of
massive weight inseparable from sheer bigness, of fulness of
observation on life, not to be achieved without leisurely
abundance of matter.
Even with the great writers of the Regency and the earlier




176


H. B. LATHROP


Victorian era, with Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, though
writers of novels - not of one supreme novel - the example
of the large and leisurely method, the genial fecundity of the
Spanish master is a fixed tradition, and though they wrote
shorter books and more of them, they wrote longer and more
leisurely books than the narrow and supercilious criticism of
a more recent time demands of its fiction writers.
Recently, again, the English novel dares to be pretty big,
though in a new way: Bennett's trilogy, Galsworthy's Forsyte
Saga, and Wells's best novels are not lyric or dramatic, but
have the right qualities of the fine epic, amplitude and
leisure. They are big, however, not so much with incident,
as with setting, not so much ample in invention, as in atmosphere.
Secondly, like its models and brethren, the romances, Don.Quixote is a disorderly book, loose-textured, full of incident,
but without plot. The Don, like Amadis, sets forth on adventures, and achieves them; but, as it would have affected
the story of Amadis little to have had more or fewer giants or
dungeons, or savage men, or coynesses of Oriana, so there is
almost no one incident necessary to the development of Don
Quixote, and almost no point where another delusion of the
Don's, or a new figure crossing the horizon, or a new proverb
of Sancho's might not be in place. The truth is, the unity of
Don Quixote is not of design, not of cunning pattern or proportion, but of the spirit. It is the imprint of Cervantes, the
peculiar tone of the work, that makes every incident, almost
every turn of phrase, in harmony with that living unity of
which it is a part, and not viable anywhere else. Now this
evolution of unity from within and consistency with itself I
maintain is a true unity; a fourth unity deeper than those of
time, place, and action. This last - this supposedly necessary principle - is quite inapplicable to this type of work, as
it is somewhat unfriendly to cheerful comedy always.




IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES


177


This looseness of texture and unity of spirit, the best English novels not of the tragic type share with their exemplar.
The plot of Tom 7ones, so highly praised by Coleridge, is
purely linear - Tom is pushed down or up by forces on the
opposite side of his line of adventure. We might have more
adventures or fewer, and the rule be uninjured - the systematic shaping of the story, Jones's flight, Sophia's following,
the apparent dashing of Tom's fortunes, and the final happy
settlement are quite external to the real interest. Just so,
the Don's adventures look forward to an end with the healing
of his madness, after which the only art to ease his melancholy
and wring our bosoms is to die. Of the Victorian novel,
Thomas Seccombe, in the article on English Literature in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica says, quite frankly: "Intellectually
giants, Dickens and Thackeray were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervent heat above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped
metal, caring little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of
stroke, but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their
temperaments was capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would produce their great
downright effect."
This quality I assert to be a quality, a characteristic feature
of a type, not an essential fault. It is in Scott the vivacity
of the things done,
The sense of the fate of nations,
And the romantic impressions,
that creates the true unity, not the career of his insipid hero.
It is Dickens's panorama, his tone, that gives the unity. This
emotional and if we may so call it aesthetic and impressionist
unity is a feature of English literature, as it seems to me, as
distinguished from the intellectual unity of pattern demanded
in general in French literature. In fiction Don Quixote seems
to me to have contributed to it profoundly.




178


H. B. LATHROP


Of these elements of the early novel, it is of course true that
the example of Gil Blas as of Don Quixote would both likewise encourage them; and to attempt to separate the two
streams of fiction absolutely would be a solecism in criticism.
As for the external scheme, the plan or receipt by which these
novels were written, a certain distinction may easily be noted.
In a general way all the narratives cover the whole life of a
young man (occasionally of a young woman) from birth or
even before, through the experiences of youth, and in particular through an adventurous contact with the world, to settled
manhood. They are all Odysseys of youth. This is Le Sage's
contribution. In addition, normally the hero has a companion
or attendant, whose relation with him is one of the sources of
humor and one of the means of forwarding the plot. Parson
Adams and Joseph Andrews; Jones and Partridge; Roderick
Random and Strap, Trunnion, Hatchway and Pipes; Uncle
Toby and Trim; and indeed Walter and Toby themselves;
Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller; Nicholas Nickleby and Smike
are examples. Scott and Thackeray, though they have more
in some novels of the spirit of Cervantes than Smollett or
Dickens, do not make much of this relation.
This relation is Cervantes's contribution to the scheme or
type of fable. But that spiritual unity, that permeating
uniqueness of quality belongs to him, not to Lesage. Gil Blas
is not unique, but a type capable of reproduction, the amassing of all the best of a large group of novels; and the incidents
and features of his story are transferable - the cells and
structures of his organism are viable in other media, he has
not the unity of an energizing life. So the lower inspiration
of Smollett derives from him, as the higher gift of Fielding,
and Sterne, as of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, looks back to
Cervantes.
But it is of course the spirit of Cervantes's humor that is
the most potent force from Spain in English fiction. The




IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES'7


179


process, by the way, was one of those with reference to which
the age was quite conscious. The tantalizingly attractive
theme of the nature of the comic was one of the favorite subjects of discussion by the critical theorists of the day; and
in general all the chief imaginative writers were more clearly
aware of their own literary aims than is customary 'in English
literature. The subject of the comic and laughter comes up
constantly and in really unexpected places. Dr. Campbell's
Rhetoric begins, after a few introductory definitions, with an
analysis of the cause of laughter, as a fundamental part of the
discussion of means of persuasive effort 'in oratory, and the
subject receives more ample treatment than any other topic
of the book except good usage. Echard in his Grounds for
the Contempt of the Clergy deals at length with the humor of
the pulpit, as a means of supporting the regard of the public
for the clergyman as not altogether remote from the world,
at the same time as a danger to his dignity. And these authors,
as even those on the side of the ancients in the famous controversy, maintain that in the one point of humor modern
times have surpassed the classic masters.
Thus Campbell declares-, "In all antiquity, Lucian himself
not excepted, one cannot find a match for Swift and Cervantes.
There is, perhaps, no book in any language wherein the humorous is carried to a higher pitch of perfection than in the adventures of the celebrated knight of La Mancha." Cervantes especially is the object of praise and respect. Echard
holds him up as the great model and example. I regret that
I cannot lay my hand on a copy, so that I cannot transcribe
his words. Fielding avows himself his pupil, and systematically discusses hypocrisy as an object of ridicule; Smollett
refers to his satire in his prefaces; Sterne boldly adopts his
most profound, humorous situations; and, of course, these
authors, as well as Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, directly
strive to create one or more figures of the quixotic type.




180


H. B. LATHROP


The humor of Cervantes is not to be defined in one word,
for it is very various. Cervantes had a cheerful temperament
as well as an intellect that held aloof from its object in the most
analytic penetration; and he found amusement in farce and
horseplay, in satire and irony, as well as in sympathetic and
psychological humor. There is some sheer fun in the beatings
and tossings in the blanket; there is the most pregnant of
ironical comments on sentimentalism in the incidents of
Andr6s and the galley slaver.
Andr6s, you remember, was delivered by the prowess of the
knight from the abuse of his cruel master, who, when the
knight had gone out of sight, tied the boy up again, and took
double out of his hide. The galley slaves, upon being let
loose, soon stoned their benefactor; one robbed him afterwards delicately, and the insane, murderous, and thievish
rabble, delivered from the offensive chains of the law, scattered over the face of the earth to do harm to peaceful folk.
There is a cool irony in the references to Avellaneda; but
there is above all the tenderest sympathy combined with the
most lucid of criticism in the mere conception of the characters
of the Knight and the Squire. So various is the humor, including dry, intellectual comment, sheer joviality, and the
pathetic comedy of disillusioned romance, that no formula will
well cover or exhaust its character.
But this may be remarked. As Watts-Dunton well says
in his comments on the humor of Don Quixote, in the Athenteum, Cervantes is not, like Rabelais, a cosmic humorist. He
does not see the essential relations of man and nature as in
themselves comic: he has not anything like Kipling's
Made thee a gleesome, fleasome thou,
And me a wretched me.
He has not even any such pregnant humor as Sterne, in which
the relations of brotherhood or of marriage are in themselves
comic. Man is not comic to him; it is the deviations of men,




IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES               1 81
easy but not inevitable, from a right balance of nature that
are comic, the excess of imagination in the man of thought, or
the excess of literalism in the practical man of vulgar prudential
sense.
Now it may be contended that this is a better humor than
Rabelais's; that the humor which keeps the soul apart from
nature, in a way above it, that ridicules the absurd in man,
and not man as an absurdity, is a healthy humor and indeed
the best humor; that cosmic humor lames the soul, and that
Rabelaisian humor at its best is not cosmic but human-, and
then is tonic and fortifying.
There is nothing in Rabelais better than the ridicule of war,
or the ridicule of scholastic education; there is something
monstrous in the ridicule of life as such, or the ridicule of all
education as such.
But if Cervantes does not press the sense of the ridiculous
to its utmost possible limit, dissatisfied until he has made it
an absolute philosophy, yet he is still further from making it
conventional; from turning his humor on mere deviations
from an accepted ideal, as do the authors of English Restoration Comedy, for example, for whom there is a code of humor
in the social usages of their group - the husband and the
tradesman being ipso facto ridiculous. His point of view is
human and central; not parochial or partisan or limited.
Some of his countrymen, unable to reach through their own
limitations of sympathy, have been irritated by this breadth,
and complain of Cervantes for attacking his own country's
tendencies, or for at least holding its weaknesses up to ridicule.
There has been some real espaiiolismo in the charge, which is
at bottom an honor to the humorist. Cervantes was a faithful
Catholic and a loyal Spaniard; but he was indeed an enemy
of obscurantism, of gloom, of hypocrisy, and of fine, inflated
speech, and hence no lover of Philip 11. As well charge
Mark Twain with being altogether un-American for his mor



I82


H. B. LATHROP


dant satire on popular Calvinism, or for his occasional ridicule
of American brashness.
This humor of Cervantes, then, is critical, keen, revealing
of rascality, as of irrationality and excess, whether of grossness, or dulness, or of undue exaltation. But its spirit is
characteristic again as to its temper. He had imitators and
admirers in England in plenty: Swift and the earlier Samuel
Butler, for instance; but the temper of Cervantes is not
scornful like Swift's, or contemptuously partisan like Butler's.
He loved his most contemptible figures. As is said: "There
is something Christian in them all." Sancho is devoted and
kindly tempered. The Don is a noble gentleman. Aldonza
Lorenzo, the strapping lass, who can pitch a bar like a young
fellow, is witty, too, decent, and in her way not without a
rustic charm of homeliness.
Addison presents us with an undeniably ridiculous figure
like the Don's, in Sir Roger; and Pope admired and studied
Cervantes's humor. They, too, were both benevolent, and
had a good will toward mankind, but they are superior persons. They teach us; they have the uplift spirit:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring;
or even:
Never elated when one man's oppressed;
Never dejected while another's blest;
kindly speeches, but handed out.
Addison, too, in all hisfair-sexing, is not far from contemptuous; he is at least very donnish; even as to his Roger, his
smile, if not without a certain curl of the lip, has a lifting of the
brow. The benevolently didactic humor of these two men is
not that of Cervantes.
Cervantes smiles or laughs at his personages, but as one
subject, if not to their weaknesses, to others as great or greater.
The defeat of the Don is his own disillusion; he has in him



IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES       8


183


self his share of Sancho's stupidity. He loves them in spite
of the weakness; to some degree the more for the weakness.
Observe this most triumphant and poignant touch of irony.
It'is only when the madness of the imaginative man is healed
that the man of material prudence gets the better of him.
Now it is this spirit.- this spirit of affectionate, indeed, of
pathetic humor - that is proverbially English; it does not
originate with Cervantes. It is the humor of Chaucer and of
Shakespeare. But it takes the form of Don Quixote and of
Sancho; it was embodied in the figure of the Don and the
Squire. It was consciously and imitatively essayed by Addison to the utmost of his power in his Roger and Will Wimble;
by Fielding in Parson Adams, and by Goldsmith in The Vicar
of Wakefield; by Smollett in Bowling and Trunnion; by
Sterne in Uncle Toby; by Scott in the Baron of Bradwardine
and the Antiquary; by Thackeray in Colonel Newcome; by
Dickens on principle in a hundred figures, from Pickwick to
Boffin., all alike in spirit and different in individual quality.
I cite these names merely to establish anew the known
fact that these writers are definite, conscious imitators of
Cervantes. For the real significance of his humor is not in
these grotesque but amiable beings, but in a comic spirit.,
pervasive., like light. It is a tolerant temper, a recognition
at once keenly critical of human imperfection, even of sin., or
of crime, and' of human aspiration and dignity; of the right
to be unlike; a combination of enthusiasm and moderation.,
that affects not only literature but manners and the spirit.,
and is one of the best aspects of the best part of modern English life., and one source of its practical strength; of its rubbery toughness, and capacity to get on, without everybody in
a crowded country getting on everybody else's nerves.
There is another point of view from which the work of
Cervantes and his influence in English literature might be
treated, but about which I am not sure that I can write




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H. B. LATHROP


with clearness and precision. Don Puixote is full of blood;
it has a gust; it has a zest. I do not at all mean that it is
optimistic; it certainly does not look at all things and call
them good. Gines de Pasamonte, and Juan de Palomeque,
and a good many other people are with clear vision known to
be rascals. The whole book has a profound stratum of melancholy. The Knight's chivalrous nobility is a delusion, and
the successful of this world are on the whole those least disturbed with vision and insight; the world is an unweeded
garden. To this Cervantes is not cynically indifferent. But
good and bad are looked on with something more than curious
interest. The book is full of, -
Ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine.
Compare Cervantes with Byron, a bitterly disappointed man,
who never lost his illusions; Cervantes has been often disenchanted, he has grieved and suffered much; but he is not
a disappointed man. On the contrary, his observation at
seventy years is fresher, more alert, more interested, than at
thirty. The sketch of his admirer whose ruff he rumpled with
his affectionate embrace, and who warned the old gentleman
that he had the dropsy and might eat but should beware of
drinking, is more vivid, more alert, than anything in Galatea,
for example. Only a man who had been taught by the
heavenly powers, stripping away one possession, one external
gift after another, and leaving the man naked (not to laughter, for he had his own) when the cold winds came, could see,
feel, and write like this.
His roofless corner of the world glows with his own warmth,
echoes with his own laughter. Some men turn mystics, as they
are stripped of their ideals; he turned his eyes from himself
upon the world about him. When Fielding was twenty-one,
he tried to write a play called Don 9uixote in England, but
desisted for the time, finding his years and experience insuffi



IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES


I85


cient to provide him with the necessary material for varying
the incidents. It was not until he was thirty-five that.he
published 7oseph Andrews, which is still an apprentice's work;
and not until he was over forty did he at last gain the knowledge of life, the insight into the evil as well as the good, and
the humorous and sympathetic curiosity of middle age. Scott's
most valuable part, his real Scotch types, succeeded his poetry
and romance, could not be done until he was near the grand
climacteric. Thackeray had no real success, and deserved
none, until he was in middle life. Dickens's extravagance was
marvellously precocious; but he alone of our realistic novelists
achieved a-distinguished success early.
Now to know life as the experienced man does, and to
watch it with zest and delight - to have the genial quality
of Fielding and Scott, even of Thackeray--contrast that
with Samuel Butler's or Gissing's weariness and twitching
nerves, Hardy's gloom, Meredith's asperity; our earlier men
somehow caught the tone of Cervantes; and they caught it,
I think, in their zest for the things seen and done. There is
more moral kinship in this spirit with Stevenson's irrepressible, romantic boydom and Kipling's glee in color and movement than with Mr. Galsworthy's austerely kind criticism or
Mr. Bennett's drabness. I do not know about Mr. Wells. He
has a tone or touch of the unwearied nerve of the older day.
But he only forgets to be uncomfortable because his attention is caught a moment. On principle and as a system he too
says most of the time:
The fools awake to laugh and play;
The wise awake to mourn.
These writers, too, have their quality - their excellent and
special melancholy, composed of many simples. Carry any
point of view out far enough and it becomes tremendous; and
out of this sensitiveness, we may make a new type: the colossal mood of pity. Whatever riches in the English novel we




186


H. B. LATHROP


may already have or are to receive, I am grateful that the
sunny spirit of Cervantes lives far into the mid-Victorian age.
Since the time of Thackeray, the English novel has moved
further and further from Cervantes. Cervantes is the spirit
of the novel so far as the novel is humorous, and therefore
rational, and objective. The novel of tragedy, of analysis, of
mere romantic doing, is not in the spirit of Cervantes. A
spacious atmosphere, a wide-extended scene, clear sunlight,
and healthy activity - not half-lights, the microscope, the
inner life, and the demands of the individual- are what the
older, the epic novel had its life in.
To the unreflecting mind it appears that its judgments
of right and wrong, its sense of beauty, in particular its taste
and sentiment as to the relationships between human beings
in the world, are peculiarly its own. But of course this is not
true. Our language is being made by the elaboration of what
our forefathers inherited and elaborated. So are our material
conveniences. Likewise our taste and sentiment in the most
delicate parts of life are brought into form by generation after
generation - our city of Camelot
never built at all
And therefore built for ever.
An aboriginal inventor discovers a handle, and the rest of
the world gets the idea and the thing. An idealist promulgates
the idea of monogamous marriage, and makes a new interest
in life possible, with some millions of incidental comedies and
tragedies. A painter or a poet sees a new beauty of scene or
human form; and the rest of the world sees after him, learning
from "Luini or Sir Joshua."
To be amused rightly is the fruit of a very old and thorough
civilizing process, and a good many geniuses have contributed
to the possibility of it. It has taken a long time and some
sacrifice to unlearn laughter at a dwarf or a hunchback, and
savor the comedy of life - of the shining vanities and flaming




IN PRAISE OF CERVANTES                  187
ambitions of youth settling into contented baldness and the
measuring of tape. The view of life may lead to the perception of its tragic sense or to a despair deeper than tragedy.
Swift despises, Montaigne botanizes, Pascal is lamed. Cervantes sees clearly and laughs and loves. This compound of
feelings, clear-sighted, unsentimental, and unsoured, is Cervantes's contribution to civilization. Before Cervantes there
were satires, comedies, farces, buffooneries; contes, fables,
nouvelles, apologues. He made the novel possible. This is
not the greatest form of imaginative literature, but it is the
most moral and philosophical, it has the most to do with making normal life intelligible and livable. Its gospel provides a
better equipment to meet the bitterness of this hard life than
Goethe's wisdom, or Byron's force, or Wordsworth's "power
to put it by."








HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS








HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


By PAUL KAUFMAN
With regard to the moral world, conscience - with regard to the intellectual world, genius - is that god within. Genius can set us right in'
composition without the rules of the learned, as conscience sets us right
in life without the laws of the land. - EDWARD YOUNG.
Obey the Genius then most when his impulse is wildest. - EMERSON.,
IN 1797, at the commencement exercises of Harvard College,
"An Oration upon Genius," pronounced by Joseph Perkins,
fervidly described the beneficent, effect of political liberty
upon the development of native endowments. Inspired bya "theme so truly noble" if not "entirely novel," the speaker
declared with patriotic pride that under the conditions of
such "singular felicity, which separate the United States from
the rest of the world, surely genius must be an exotic too deli-.
cate for our climate -.. or it cannot but flourish 'in a soil,
like ours." For the first time in history, he affirmed, "'in a
country 'where all men are born free and equal' - emancipated from the chains of despotism,'the eagle genius is at full.
liberty to expand her vigorous-wings.. to build her nest'
among the stars." And he glowingly prophesied "the not far
distant era., when the United States of America, the asylum
of liberty.9. shall become the nursery of Geniuis, the seat
of the Muses, the Athens of the age, and the admiration of the
world." The expression of such ardent conviction was, by
virtue of its date, more novel than its spokesman apparently,
realized, for it was an early, if not -the first, American description of genius as the natural consequence of political freedom.*
Before the close of the century which conceived and established
the foundations of the modern belief in human liberty, this.




192


192IPAUL KAUFMAN


Harvard orator' asserted the intimate relation between the
freedom of the individual and the free expression of genius.
Forty years later, in 1837-, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College., another orator revealed a vision of
"The American Scholar" in particular and the supremacy of
the individual self in general, such as the earlier speaker and
his audience could scarcely have conceived. For in that address - a new spiritual declaration of independence, both
for America and every man - Emerson exalted "everything
which tends to insulate the individual... so that each man
shall feel the world as his, and man shall treat with man as a
sovereign state with a sovereign state." When each man, he
declared, finds the world of truth in "his own bosom alone"
and utters that truth "   in this action he is a genius";
and this is not the "privilege of here and there a favorite, but
the sound estate of every man." Into such terms did Emerson
translate for America the pervading belief in the rights of the
individual which, since the earlier Harvard oration, had more
completely established the new modern re-gime both in the
thought and in the forms of European society.
In the four decades which intervened, romanticism had
triumphed in the old world; the doctrine of the freedom of
the individual had been enthroned in every sphere of human
interest. In the four preceding decades, from 1757 to 1797, the
period of the first actual realization of the doctrine in political
revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic, the various ideas
which combine to achieve the liberation of the individual were
for the first time formulated in full, systematic, and compelling
form. Among these one of the most important not only for a
new theory of creative freedom in the arts, but also for the
whole new view of the rights and possibilities of human nature,
was the conception of original genius.
Familiar as we may be with these main facts we have not
possessed the evidence to show the nature and the influence of




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


193


this conception. So absorbed in the expressions, the processes,
and the nature of genius has been our interest that we have
given scant attention to the question, What have succeeding
generations conceived genius to be? And what has been the
influence of their conceptions of its nature?
We have tacitly assumed for the most part that the eighteenth-century English conception of genius and inspiration
had come down as a traditional inheritance for over two
thousand years, that neo-classicism merely subordinated and
conventionalized these ideas, and that the second half of
the century restored their original force and accorded to them
a more dominant r6le. But perhaps we have unconsciously
endowed these traditional conceptions with more recently
formulated elements which we have read into them. Our
only appeal is to the evidence revealed by the history of the
conception. We must ask, therefore, What were the origins
and nature of this conception? How did it incorporate emerging convictions of the supremacy of individual imagination
and emotion over reason and taste, the rights of free original
expression over the authority of traditional models and standards? And how, in turn, did it radiate effective ideas of the
natural rights of the individual self and so lend its force to
the individualistic tendencies which have since triumphed?)
I
Whatever light may here be cast upon the development of
the idea of genius, we know at the outset that England shared
the common European inheritance of the word itself, with its
specific meanings, as transmitted without change from classical antiquity. From the Roman "Genius," the innate essential self of the individual, evolved out of the vague figure of
the Greek demon, an inner voice or guardian spirit, and concretely personified as one's controlling or protecting spirit,
sprang the meanings which persist obviously to the present




194.LI-UL KAUFM~AN


day. Although the term by natural extension sometimes
denoted, without personification, native propensity, intelligence, or ability, the idea of native endowments of the mind,
of talent, or even of exceptional intellectual power, was conveyed rather by the different form of the same root word,
ingenium. This expression, which has been commonly translated genius, may possibly have signified to the Romans at
times the supreme creative gift, but the best English equivalent is talent: the distinction between the two is not apparent
in Latin. Those qualities with which we invest genius, the
mysteriously original, spontaneous, phenomenal power of
creation which seems the most superhuman faculty of man,
were comprehended in neither the Genius nor the ingenium
of the Romans. The existence of these qualities, however, is
definitely recognized by the separate and distinct theory of
inspiration or "divine madness," first formulated for European
thought by Plato, echoed by Aristotle and Longinus, and
transmitted as a traditional belief through the more conventionalized doctrine of the Latin furor poeticus. Occasionally Latin thinkers combine the two supplementary ideas,
as when Seneca says, "nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit," and when Cicero asserts that there is
"nemo vir magnus sine aliquo divino-afflatu." But they remain distinct and are never fused into a single supreme and
independent creative faculty. Ingenium is rational, intellectual; furor poeticus is mysterious, irrational, emotional,
irresponsible. The native human ability is conceived as
functioning creatively within the limits of established modes
and forms, while originality or individual expression springs
from some mysterious divine source. But however "divine,"
the irrational and spontaneous must function also within the
limits of these laws and forms. Even the inspired ingenium is
not lord but steward of the rules of creation.
Essentially  unaltered, these formulations carry down




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


i95


through more than two thousand years the parallel conceptions of intellectual ability and of inspiration. Through the
middle ages, according to prevailing dogma at least, individual
"genius" is submerged in a strictly ordered institutionalism
controlling both the inner and the outer life. The artist did
actually create many new original works because the creative
spirit can never be wholly suppressed, but in theory he was
only a scribe or a skilful adapter, not an inventor. Chaucer
and Dante did not know that they were original geniuses because the idea was impossible to them. In the dawn of the
Renaissance Petrarch's assertion of the quiddam suum ac
proprium seems to be a unique harbinger of our modern recognition of individual peculiarity and the validity of its expressions. /But, rather strangely, the Renaissance, while achieving a momentous liberation of individual thought and creative
imagination, appears never to have distinguished between
genius in our sense and mere learning and acquired technical
skill. The literary law-giver Vida concluded, amid all his
professions of admiration for invention and elaborate descriptions of the process of inspiration, that the highest originality
was the most ingenious imitation of the ancients. As representative of those less conventional spirits who were groping
for our modern conception, DuBellay speaks of "ceste energie
et je ne sgay quel esprit... que les Latins appelleroint
Genius," but such interesting attempts are rare.
An Renaissance England genius retains its original meaning
of controlling spirit, in a literal or figurative sense, and of
distinguishing characteristic. A standard collection of twentyfive Elizabethan critical essays contains only two occurrences
of the word which would imply any further content. Sidney
says, "A poet no industrie can make, if his own genius be not
carried into it"- a use which might convey the idea of
peculiar mental power. And Chapman attacks Scaliger with
the words, "thou... never... writest anything of thine




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PAUL KAUFMAN


owne impotent brain (which I may swear was the absolute
inspiration of thine owne ridiculous genius)" - an interesting, though perhaps only remote anticipation of the eighteenth-century notion that genius could be the capricious, even
freakish faculty in an individual. To express high intellectual
power the Elizabethans employed ingenium, or their usual
translation, wit. Four times in his critical cento, the "Discoveries," does Ben Jonson grapple with a definition of the
Latin word, revealing in the most important one the farthest
limits of the ideas of his age. "A goodness of natural wit,"
he avers, a poet must possess; he must "be able by nature
and by instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind." The
combination of all the essentials to genuine creative achievement is most perfectly described, however, by Spenser when
he relates the various elements in the process thus: "Poetry
is a divine instinct and unnatural rage, passing the reach of
common reason... not to be gotten by labour and learning,
but adorned with both; and poured into the wit by a certain
enthusiasmos and celestial inspiration." Into this engaging
statement he has "poured all the wit" of his age about genius.
The seventeenth century turns noticeably away from the
Elizabethan emphasis upon inspiration, and critics begin to
centre their attention upon the nature of what James VI
called "your own engine of invention." Together with a
marked increase in the use of the term genius, comes the perceptible development of its modern sense of exceptional native
gifts. The word begins to assume the largest meaning of wit
and gradually to supplant this term, absorbing ingenium in the
process. By the end of the century it has come to absorb also
the traditional elements of furor poeticus: when Robert
Wolseley declares "true genius...a spirit that blows where
it lists," and Temple distinguishes between "high flights of
wit" and "the pure native force or spirit of genius,"! we find
the evidence that the two parallel conceptions of unusual in



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197


born talent and of mysterious, spontaneous influence from
without have at last been fused into the idea of an extraordinary creative faculty. The age-long theory of inspiration persists as it does to this day in conventional phrase, but having as it were descended to earth and lifted genius to a higher
human level by the force of its divine sanctions, it loses its own
independent power. Genius, in turn, as indicated in the two
descriptions just quoted, begins for the first time, I believe,
to signify more than talent. Still it is difficult to determine
with assurance whether the distinction is really made in the
thought of the time, since no discussion of such an important
difference has come down to us. When Dryden uses the
unusual phrase " transcendent Genius," it is probable that
he means "transcendent talent" and that his expression
voices our idea of "real Genius." But he and his contemporaries could not have made Lowell's familiar contrast: "Talent
is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose
power a man is."
Up to this time the history of these conceptions 'is common
to the thought of Western Europe. From now on, however,
certain peculiarly English ideas, a recently developed recognition of the marked congenital differences among individuals
and the related development of the theory of the humours,
conspire to introduce into the conception of genius elements
which have since determined its nature. In the famous passage echoed innumerable times in the following century,
Temple observes that "The English have more humour [than
other peoples] because every man follows his own and takes a
pleasure, perhaps a pride to show it 0 0. [thus] we come to
have more originals." And that there is some relation,
though not specifically expressed, between "humour," "coriginals," and genius Temple shows by his remark in the same
discussion that he has not "observed among any peoples"




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PAUL KAUFMAN


so much true genius as among the English. In this recognition of the idea of originals thus emerges precisely the element and the very word which the eighteenth century was to
adopt and elevate to the new modern level of original genius. 4
AMore basic in influence, however, is the pervading theory of
the humours which at the same time was developing into more
modern meanings and shaping itself as a psychological description of temperament. From a large mass of comment the
outline can be seen of three characteristics of the humours:
innate individual peculiarity, instinctive or emotional quality,
and difficulty or impossibility of control. Here are all the
essentials for glorification of individual temperament which
was a fundamental impulse of the romantic movement and
which has since dominated our whole conception of human
nature and particularly its rights of expression. If the history
of individualism ever comes to be written, the account of this
growth of the idea of humours will prove one of the most
fascinating and important chapters.
Our concern here is the discovery of the immediate influence
upon the idea of genius and the nature of its contribution in
this final stage of our survey. Through the first half of the
eighteenth century we find humour and genius definitely related for the first time. No. 144 of "The Guardian" (1713)
remarks significantly, "There is scarce an Englishman of any
life and spirit that has not some odd cast of thought, some
original humour that distinguishes him from his neighbor. It
is to this great freedom of temper and this unconstrained
manner of living, that we owe in great measure the number of
shining geniuses which rise up amongst us from time to time."
In the same year a writer in "The Lay Monastery" offers the
view that "A great and admirable genius will be allow'd to
result from some curious structure of the brain... from the
different dispositions of the humours."  Not a few other
passages attest the recognition of this influence. But still




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199


-more powerful is the quickening effect of a new conception
formulated just before the opening of the century. A definite
relationship discloses itself in the suggestive couplet of the
Earl of Roscommon's "Essay on Translated Verse" of 1684:
Examine how your humour is inclin'd,
And which the ruling passion of your mind.
Here is the formula taken over bodily from the French "passion dominante " and needed to express the expanding vitality
of the theory of the humours. This phrase "ruling passion"
comprehends the three characteristics of the humours - innate individuality, instinctive or emotional quality, and difficulty or impossibility of control, and focuses the imperious
and even fatalistic nature of individual temperament. The
best-known and most influential descriptions are in Pope's
lines:
one master-passion in the breast,
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.
Each vital humor, which should feed the whole,
Soon flows to this, in body and in soul.
Nature its mother, habit is its nurse;
Wit, spirit, facul 'ties but make it worse;
Reason itself but gives it edge and power.
Elaborated with such startling and unsuspected implications
in other well-known passages in Pope and echoed as accepted
belief by many prominent eighteen th-cen tury writers, this new
theory of the ruling passion becomes a powerful instrument of
thought in vitalizing and probably hastening the final formulation of original geni~us., Reinforced by the idea of originality
it leavens the existing conception of genius as exceptional
talent with the new emphasis on a fatalistic, temperamental
independence of each individual.
During this final stage of the evolution of the humours and
ruling passion in the closing years of the seventeenth and the




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PAUL KAUFMAN


first half of the eighteenth century, the mere frequency of
reference to genius must impress us as significant. In contrast to previous periods it has become a common term and
it almost seems to become more common every year. The age
is unconscious of the fact, however, and among English writers
only one discussion of its nature beyond a sentence or two
comes to light. This notable exception, Addison's well-known
"Spectator" paper No. 16o, asserts significantly in its introduction that although "There is no character more frequently
given a writer than that of being a genius," he desires to
"throw some thoughts together on so uncommon a subject."
In the ensuing discussion he throws his weight rather surprisingly on the side of "these great natural geniuses" who
are "hurried on by a natural fire and impetuosity to vast conceptions and noble sallies of imagination"; and he quite
heretically asserts at the end that "An imitation of the best
authors is not to compare with a good original." He has
nothing to say, it should be noted, about inspiration, and his
silence indicates the shift of emphasis, noted in the seventeenth century and maintained consistently in the eighteenth,
from the supernatural to the human level in the explanation of
exceptional powers.
After Addison's pioneer and unquestionably influential defence of the superiority of genius and originality, nothing
comparable in extent or emphasis appears for nearly half a
century. The recognition of genius is conventional; while
admired as the highest faculty, it must according to the prevailing doctrine remain subject to the reason, to judgment, to
good taste, and to the established rules. It is conventionally
recognized as distinguished by power of invention but its inventiveness-- its originality--is strictly limited to details
of execution. No one in that age would have dreamed of suggesting that it is genius which dictates new forms, new rules
of art. Occasional protests are voiced by a few persons, such




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


201


as John Dennis, in an occasional mood of uneasiness over such
dogmas of the closed circle of artistic creation, but the weight
of opinion is overwhelmingly against them.
III
Meanwhile, new conceptions of individuality must have been
taking shape largely unrealized, without exerting a transforming influence upon the conception of genius. Then, just
after the middle of the century, the new interest bursts into
articulate expression with unheralded vigor. In 1755 William
Sharpe's "Dissertation on Genius," the first separate volume
on the subject, forms a natural transition from the traditional
belief in the supreme value of learning and labor to the exaltation of natural untrained powers. For he stresses the necessity of assiduous schooling of genius by every means. In any
case to him goes the credit for directing attention to'the importance of his theme and of inaugurating the long succession
of volumes which recognize genius as one of the engrossing
problems of human nature.
Four years later, in 1759, not only genius but original genius
at last came into its own with the appearance of Edward
Young's "Conjectures on Original Composition." Of this
manifesto, the most complete and sweeping assertion of the
sovereignty of this native faculty up to his time, at once enthusiastic yet incisive in exposition of the issues, it is difficult
to speak with moderation. What Burns, Blake, and the
"Lyrical Ballads" accomplished in opening new vistas for
poetry, Young achieved in declaring the rights of the genius
which produces such poetry. As the "Lyrical Ballads" inspired in Hazlitt "the effect that arises from the turning up
of the fresh soil, or the first welcome breath of spring," so
Young impresses the student of criticism who toils through the
arid stretches of neo-classicism's conventional praises of imitation. Although one of the few surviving veterans of the




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~O2       PAUL KAUFMAN


Augustan circle, he broke through what he called the "frozen
obstructions of age" in his seventy-sixth year to show genius
the way out through the obstructions of Augustan dogma.
In accomplishing this liberation he asserts, with significance
which he could not wholly grasp but which we can now appreciate, that he opens up a subject which was "(original"
to him at least for he had "seen nothing hitherto written
upon it."
In the light of this avowal and of our own perspective we
can realize the force of his antitheses, elaborated with many
a brilliant figure, between unrestricted expression of one's
own creative impulse and imitation of models, between natural., inborn powers and acquired learning, between reliance
upon one's individual self and subservience to authority or
conventional standards. The conception of human character upon which he builds his case is that " [nature] brings
us into the world all originals. No two faces, no two minds,
are just alike; but all bear nature's evident mark of separation on them." Yet., "Born originals, how comes it to pass
that we die copies?" "Not because the writer's harvest is
over., the great reapers of antiquity having left nothing to be
gleaned after them; nor because the human mind's teeming
time is past, or because it is incapable of putting forth births;
but because illustrious examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate." Hence, "That meddling ape imitation, as soon
as we come to years of indiscretion (so let me speak), snatches
the pen and blots out nature's mark of separation, cancels her
kind intention, destroys all mental individuality." But by
such servility - Young would say in our age that the world
suffered from an inferiority complex - we do nothing less
than "counteract nature and thwart her design."
The very constitution of "nature" and her very purposes
then in Young's words demand reliance not on learning but
on eour own native powers"; not on rules -which "like




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


203,crutches are a needful aid to the lame, though an impediment
to the strong" - but on our own "natural strength." Not
reason or taste, but original genius, he maintains, is the supreme arbiter of the creative mind. "Genius can set us right
in compositions without rules of the learned, as conscience can
set us right in life without the laws of the land." This natural
power creates not by the process of "manufacture" through
the agency of "those mechanics, arts and labour," but
"spontaneously from the vital root" of our individual natures.
In full reliance, then, upon the resources of our irrational,
"spontaneous" powers, Young declares that "it is high time
that we restore in ourselves confidence in our own genius and
abandon this abject prostration" before tradition and the
works of others. The whole secret of original creation he
sums up in the fervid injunction: "Dive deep into thy bosom;
learn the depth, extent, bias and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee; and excite
and cherish every spark... however scattered through the
dull, dark mass of common thoughts... and let thy genius
rise... as the sun from chaos; and if I should then say, like
an Indian 'Worship it' yet should I say little more than...
'Reverence thyself.'... For nothing original can rise, nothing
immortal can ripen in any other sun."
How fully prophetic of the dawning era of individualism was
this vision of each man's independence Young could have little
realized. But that the modestly named "Conjectures" have
been confirmed as the fundamental belief in genius and in selfreliance since his time we cannot doubt. With enthusiastic
literalness he drafts the charter of liberties which makes genius
no longer slave but master in the stronghold of tradition. For
the first time in English thought he makes "that god within"
lord of all creation in art.
Within a few years after this declaration of rights the appearance of the first formal and extensive analyses of genius




204


2PAUL KAUFMAN


which had ever been formulated reveals the rapidly spreading
and crystallizing interest in the subject. In the very year
in which the "Conjectures" appear, Alexander Gerard s "Essay on Taste" contains in a section of several pages 'ý6n the
Connexion of Taste with Genius" the conventional characterization of genius as "the grand architect" and the orthodox
doctrine that it needs taste to control it. Fifteen years later
in 1774 his "Essay on Genius" takes to itself the credit of
being the first book to examine systematically this "leading
faculty of the mind." But the author betrays only genuine
or pretended ignorance of a similar work which antedates his
by seven years, the "Essay on Original Genius and its Various
Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, particularly in Poetry," by a fellow Scot, William Duff. This was,
indeed, the first separate, formal treatment and the first in
any language to bear openly the significant title of "Original
Genius."
How much Duff may have owed to previous analysis is now
difficult to determine, but so far as we can tell, his exposition
is much more thorough than any earlier discussions. 'Certainly we know of nothing so detailed and fundamental as the
inquiry of Book I into the "natures, properties, indications of
genius, and of its various modes of exertion." Beginning with
the new insistence upon originality, he stresses the radical distinction between genius and that which had been for more than
a century conventionally identified as much the same faculty.
This significant distinction he illustrates by the equally significant antithesis between Pope and Ossian - as perfect an indication of emerging revolts as could be desired. An this first
book also he brings out an element which I have suggested to
be of highest importance in the formulation of the idea of original genius, that is, the influence of a man' "ruling passion"
upon the nature of his peculiar genius.  ut a much greater
contribution is the emphasis, in the discussion of "Original




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


205


Genius" in Book II, upon its "irregular, vehement, and enthusiastic" nature, upon its irresistible spontaneity when
within the empire of the imagination, "altogether absolute
and unconfined," new images and sentiments "pour forth subject to no restraints and no rules." Thus the poet - to suggest the influence of such products of original genius - raises
us to the same "pitch of ecstasy" which he himself enjoys.
Happy is such a poet if he lives in a primitive society where
"exemption from rules and restraints of criticism" allows the
ecstasy of his original genius untrammeled freedom.  pon
this note of primitivistic exaltation of genius, elaborated in
unprecedented detail, he concludes this first systematic analysis of the "dominant faculty of invention."
Less "original" even in title and far less spirited than
Duff's, Alexander Gerard's "Essay on Genius" (1774) is more
psychologically thorough. Xionceiving genius according to
the traditional definition as the "faculty of invention" Gerard
makes his principal contribution in the relationships which he
finds between this faculty and the new prominent theory of
association: genius being the power which utilizes this association of ideas and images for the creation of new forms or combinations. In his recognition of the distinctiveness of each
individual as shaped by disposition, environment, and training in its individual method of embodying the laws of association, he shows himself in the new progressive current of his
time. Kn voicing the praise of invention when it is "wild,
irregular, and undisciplined" and in emphasizing the r6le of
the passions as necessary to artistic creation, also, he belongs
to new movements..-But toward the end he disconcertingly retreats to conservative positions when he maintains the.subordination of genius to taste and even the r6le of taste in supplying impulse to creation. His Scotch caution apparently
submerges any tentative gleams of such enthusiasm as we
find in the more ardent Duff. He shares with the latter, how



,2o6


206        PAUL KAUFMAN


ever, the credit of making the first systematic efforts to analyze
genius.
Besides these three separate volumes a considerable number of separate essays shows a rapidly focusing interest in the
fresh points of view. One of the most significant in revealing
a new recognition of genius and even an outbreak of one of
those epidemics of egotistical presumption which were to
become so striking in the romantic period, is George Colman's
series of fifteen, papers called "The Genius " in "The St. James
Chronicle" Of 1761-62. In introducing his subject the author
avers that "A genius is a character, purely modern, and of so
late an origin, that it has never yet been described or defined in
any treatise, essay, lexicon, or dictionary. It is now, however,
become almost universal." He then goes on to show how
everybody in 1761 is suddenly setting up as a "cgenius "!I
"The ancients, according to their wonted narrowness of
soul., honoured a very small portion of the human race with
this appellation. He, who to extraordinary talents had added
extraordinary application, after the most arduous efforts
towards excellence in some one art or science, was perhaps
at last fortunate enough to extort this distinction. The more
generous moderns demanded only the first requisites; and
even those... may be supplied by substitutes. Vanity or
assurance may pass. 0. for superior faculties. The Genius,
endowed with them, needs neither diligence nor assiduity.
Supported by confidence, he disdains to halt along on the
crutches of application.... Knowledge is rained down on
his head like manna from heaven, and he has no care but to
gather it as it falls. Almost every man... acquires learning without study;... writes without reading; and, being
full as well acquainted with one thing as another, or, what is
more extraordinary, without even pretending/to know anything at all., is an unquestionable Genius." /Coming from a
man unusually sensitive to current sentiment, such a full




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


207


recognition of an extreme reaction toward egotistical reliance
on untutored spontaneity as opposed to the neo-classicism's
dependence on learning and labor alone, shows how far a new
faith in native human powers was, in certain quarters at least,
taking shape in both theory and practice.
Another aspect of fundamental import, just being definitely
formulated, comes to light in an essay in "The Trifler" of
1788 "On the Influence of Liberty on Genius." In answer to
Montesquieu's famous argument postulating climate as a
predominant influence in the determination of character, the
anonymous writer contends that it is not the natural so much
as political environment which is an all-powerful shaping force;
that, specifically, under an oppressive government " the genius
of many is intimidated, and thereby lost," but that in free
governments genius thrives and is in fact dependent on liberty.
Such an important generalization, reminding us of Hume's
contemporary contention that "a strong genius succeeds best
in republics, a refined taste in monarchies," shows how men's
minds were turning toward all external conditions making for
freedom in individual expression. It shows, too, a scientific
as well as an emotional interest in genius and that this interest
was no longer scattered, casual or tentative, but widespread
and thoroughgoing.
Not to prolong beyond the limits of a general survey this
summary of representative analyses, we must note a final
essay of unpretentious, but refreshingly simple and precise
tone. William Jackson, the well-known organist and composer of Exeter, in his inquiry "Whether Genius be born, or
acquired" (1798) anticipates more than any previous analysts
the exact and searching method of attack upon the problem
which characterizes nineteenth century investigation./Summing up concisely the existing theories he reasserts the innate
and essentially unacquirable nature of genius in opposition
to the neo-classical emphasis upon the belief, poeta fit. BHe




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PAUL KAUFMAN


also gives the coup de grace to a persistent eighteenth-century
error which tended to confuse the elementary difference between genius and taste. Most valuable of all, however, is his
distinction here drawn definitely for the first time, between
genius and talent. "A man of genius must have talents, but
talents are possessed by many without it. i Genius, tho' possessing talents, has not always the power of shewing them, for
want of mechanical facility; and talents are frequently exercised with so much excellence as to be mistaken for genius.
However paradoxical this may appear, all difficulty vanishes,
by considering that the characteristic of genius is invention, a
creation of something not before existing; to which talents
make no pretence; and although talents and genius are sometimes united; yet they are in their nature distinct.... I
make a distinction between talents and genius, but it must
not be imagined that I wish to set them at variance; for the
nearer talents can be brought to resemble genius, the stronger
will be their effect; and the more genius possesses the ability
of making its creation manifest, the less will its powers be
confined to that mind in which they were originally conceived." 'ihis difference had been felt, of course, since ancient times, and many efforts to express it had been made; but
Jackson first uses the terms now familiar to us, and so he
marks the beginning of what to us is the ordinary modern idea
of the transcendence of genius above other abilities. He also
marks the end of this epoch of formulation of the rapidly developing conception, and just at the close of the century lays
a definite foundation for the universal interest of the nineteenth.
Apart from these representative analytical efforts, other
rhapsodists besides Young were exalting genius, usually in
terms of violent revolt against imitation. Among these must
be recorded a Scotchman of well-known stormy temper, John
Pinkerton, and William Blake. The former's extreme in



HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


209


transigence, as expressed in "Letters of Literature" of 1785,
betrayed him into ill-concealed contempt and even truculence.
"All kinds of imitation, all imitations whatever, sink into that
class of poetry which we read to ladies at a tea-table; and
then give to the servant, that he may not burn his hands in
carrying off the tea-urn." No man "of real genius," he adds,
"can be an imitator... originality is coessential with
genius, as Milton tells us that light is coeternal with the deity."
Apparently he would abolish schools for the guidance even
of the young and inexperienced, for he attacks " the complete
folly of instituting Academies of Painting, or any other art,
or science; that is, Schools of Imitation. Did ever any one
good painter arise from an academy? Never; not even one
of the slightest reputation.... In our academy, as in
others, all imitate, none invent: the art is of course at a stand,
soon to fall, if other means do not foster it.... It is to be
hoped some future prince will just have sense enough to dissolve this lump of regal folly; and to say to art and science,
'Be free.'" Shall they receive no suggestion or guidance from
past performance? No. "To young writers especially, Imitation cannot be held out in too just, in too contemptible, a
light. They ought even to be told that there is more applause
due to a bad original, than to the best of copies. By these
means they will at least endeavour to be original."
In his most extravagant tirade he exclaims "Poetry knows
no rules. The code of laws which genius prescribes to his subjects, will ever rest in their own bosoms." Nor are there even
any rules of criticism! The ones we profess to follow "are
drawn from Homer, Sophocles, and Pindar: what these
masters do, say the critics, is right, and everything else is
wrong."   But, "Poor judges! Ye slaves who judge of your
masters! Is not Nature greater than Homer, Sophocles, or
Pindar? Is not genius the supreme arbiter and lord of Nature's
whole domain; her superior, her king, her god? Bring out




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your candle then and teach the sun how to exert his meridian
power!"
These spring freshets of blind rebellion which would sweep
away all precedents and all principles were reinforced for
Pinkerton as for so many others by rhapsodic primitivism.
His first letter "On Barbaric Poetry" exalts the "tempestuous
passions" of early society which call forth "a poetry warm,
rapid, and tempestuous, that, like a large river swelling from
a bleak mountain, carries the reader along in the barge of
fancy, now by vales fragrant with wild flowers, now thro
woods resounding with untaught melody, but most generally
thro deser/s replete with romantic and with dreadful prospects.". /Thus Pinkerton makes a vital contribution to the
emerging doctrine of the supreme emotional and lawless nature
of genius, illustrating by his own intemperance of expression
the very quality of genius which he so fanatically deifies.
A still more striking illustration of insurgent genius, not
only in theory and in method of expression, but in every
manifestation of personality, is *illiam Blake, the most extreme embodiment of original genius in the eighteenth century. From him, of course, we expect no coherent utterance
and little development of a theory, but his fragmentary outbursts are unmistakable in import, and when we assemble his
many separate utterances on genius we find a consistent and
pervasive belief of fundamental character. For Blake, in a
more literal manner perhaps than anyone since Plato and the
Hebrew prophets, identifies the expressions of genius with
divine inspiration. 'he poetic genius for him is the true man;
"it was the first principle," for "it is the Holy Ghost in man.
This conviction that genius is the organ of expressing the
divine must be regarded as one of his controlling beliefs -
if emphatic reiteration be any test, for in great variety of
forms it pervades his prose writings. He expounds it in
a form which we may characterize as the physiology of
inspiration:




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


21I


Daughter of Beulah!...
Come into my hand
By your mild power descending down the nerves of my right arm
From out the portals of my brain.
By this divine afflatus he explains in a dozen passages his own
rhapsodic work in both literature and visual designs, as when
he declares that "he is under the direction of messengers from
heaven, daily and nightly," which function through his "genius
or Angel." Hence he derives sanction for the confession of
faith: "I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel
than the liberty both of body and of mind to exercise the
Divine Arts of the Imagination." And hence we must "cast
aside from Poetry all that is not inspiration."
/Thus Blake becomes the most specific violent exponent of
the spontaneous, impulsive elements of genius in opposition
to all restraints of convention or the guidance of reason.
"The Reasoning Power in Man... is a false body, an incrustation over my immortal Spirit." But "Jesus was all
virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules." In rather
startling Freudian phrase, he declares that we should "sooner
murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
So, also, he says, "Damn braces. Bless relaxes... No
bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings." This
suggestive figure he relates definitely to our subject in his
injunction: "When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion
of Genius; lift up thy head." In such rhapsodic, often mystic
accents does he represent the nature of genius as subject to
no human restraints, obeying no laws but the dic ates of
spontaneous feeling and "divine inspiration."   qhus his
vision of the supreme claims of genius, imperious because
divine, imparts to his mystic outbursts the oracular tone of




212


PAUL KAUFMAN


the seer, and the intense literalness of his assertions make
him the most consummate prophet of genius in his century
and one of its most notable prophets in any age. As the incarnation of genius of eccentric originality, moreover, he
provides both in his life and writing, a practical demonstration
of his beliefs.
IV
Ain Blake, the rhapsodist, a developing recognition of genius
inaugurated in the manifesto of the early rhapsodist, Edward
Young, reaches culmination and closes an epoch. The survey
of the formulation here made is representative, not in any
degree complete. AWithin less than half a century many
separate discussions and unnumbered passages, often in
anonymous reviews, disclose an awakened appreciation and
often enthusiasm for the subject and the issues which emerging beliefs in genius necessarily creates. After 1750 poets, too,
are inspired - in their didactic eighteenth-century fashion -
to celebrate the superior claims of the original, spontaneous
creative power, as may be illustrated by the mere title of
Richard Jago's "Labour and Genius: or, The Mill-Stream
and the Cascade," (1762), or (I choose the best of a half
dozen examples) byrfohn Jennings's lines from his "Ode to
Genius" appearing in the "Gentlemen's Magazine" of 1767:
Ethereal nature's darling child
With fiery eyes and spirit wild,
Genius, young eagle of the soul,
Aspiring, bold, above controul:
On rapid wing, 't is thine to rove
Creation's various blossom'd grove;
Where, crowding em'lous on thy view
The scenes of beauties, grand and new:
You seize, with living rapture warm,
Instantaneous every charm.
Intrinsically worthless as such verses may be and bearing the
imprint of still prevailing convention, they do serve to celebrate the power "above control" which by "spirit wild" was




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS


213


rapidly liberating expression from the conventions. Deservedly forgotten as they are indeed, they show that the "cascade" springs from a higher source than the "mill-stream"
which it creates.
Obscure, also, with the exception of Young and Blake, are
these prose writers whom we have surveyed; apparently they
gained little recognition or influence among their contemporaries, at least in England. Nor did all of them emphasize
originality in express terms. But the mere number of separate volumes, essays, and other discussions of genius in the
second half of the century in contrast with the silence or with
scant conventional notice of the conception up to that time
is in itself eloquent testimony of a distinct movement. Of
this movement these representative figures, however unrecognized in their own and later times, were the real heralds.
7tFrom their pronouncements certain facts stand forth. The
"first, obviously, is the fact that the numerous discussions make
articulate a new consciousness of genius and direct general
attention to the subject. The'next is the fact of the revival
restoration with literal force of certain elements in the traditional doctrine of inspiration, to which the homage of lipservice had been paid since antiquity, but which had been
consistently subordinated in active theory by the overlordship of precedent and dogma. Since Seneca criticism had
docilely repeated the belief, "deus nobis inest," and then proceeded to confine the "gods," as in the old tale, within the
bottle of rules and established forms. The exponents of
genius liberated, as it were, the "genius," making its expression now independent o restraints; only they do not, with
the exception of Blaketevive the theory of divine inspiration
so much as rationalize it on the human level and give it effective mastery.,Critical theory, to be sure, professed traditionally to praise inventiveness and the spontaneous graces
beyond the reach of art and labor, which only inspiration and




214


PAUL KAUFMAN


genius can achieve, but so formidably limited the range of free
ceativeness as to reduce its activities to minor variations.
he exponents of genius, on the contrary, more or less explicitly, with varying emphasis, make the individual creative
power really free from traditional limitations and master over
authority and rules. Thus they reverse the respective r6les
which law and creative impulse had played in the creation of
art, and for the first time open up limitless opportunities to
the expression of genius. -The third and final fact which
stands out from our survey is the emphasis placed upon the
unique individuality of each genius by the peculiar English
developments of the belief in the humours and the ruling passion. Reinforced by the related English conception of "originals" the aspects of temperament involved in this theory -
native individual peculiarity, emotional or -instinctive character, and impossibility or difficulty of control - lend their
force to the existing idea of genius. /So based upon the accepted explanation of temperament, genius now becomes conceived as the imperious power of the individual self, receiving
its sanction from the innate uniqueness and independence of
every personality. As it is the supreme expression of human
personality, moreover, not only its right but its very obligation is to be as original as possible. When this conception is
wrought out, as it is in all essentials in the last few decades
of the eighteenth century, it awaits only the universal recognition in both theory and practical expression in the century
to follow.
V
In the process of formulation this new belief in genius received important if not essential aid from several vigorous
ideas which were developing simultaneously. ' Most fundamental was the triumph of the historical point of view, which
maintained the potential equality of the ancient and the
moderns, with some recognition of the possible superiority




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS     25


2is


of the moderns - a view which necessarily upheld the equality
of genius in all ages and therefore its freedom from servile de-.
pendence upon models and standards. Such a conception of
the rights of genius is naturally based on the growing faith
in universal human rights, with the democratic emphasis on
the worth of the individual and his liberty of expression. Hence
it is held that genius should receive enthusiastic encouragement as the supreme example of individual powers. This
emphasis on the individual, as seen in the development of the
theory of the humours and of the ruling passion, is based on
the belief in the individual's right to peculiarities of feeling,
which make one different from all other men. So the exaltation of emotion over reason found natural expression in the
belief that genius finds its highest sanction in free play of
emotion. So also the increasingly prominent position accorded to the imagination, as the creative faculty working in
a unique way in each individual, supports the doctrine that
genius must function spontaneously, unhampered by learning,
relieved of the necessity of toilsome effort. But a*s emotion
and imagination find themselves inevitably limited by all
the traditional and conventional environments of civilization
they should turn for inspiration to the example of the primitive state, in which human nature could express its genius in
perfect liberty - with ideal abandon.
Drawing thus into itself the vitality of these ancillary
ideas, the conception of original genius fuses their strength
with its own new power and in this transition period becomes
one of the most important animating forces of the romantic
movement. Like the magnetic core of a dynamo it generates
power and like the electric plant it transmits current in all
directions. Embodying all the forces of revolt, it gives validity to individual expression of emotion and imagination in art
and in life. Philosophically considered, it makes the will of
the individual ego final law, and in the developments of Ger



216


PAUL KAUFMAN


man thought gives powerful stimulus to the interpretation of
the world in terms of the individual self.
VI
Little could our English analysts and rhapsodists of genius
have dreamed that their conception would radiate into every
area of human interest. Yet their doctrine does far more
than to inaugurate a new era of freedom of expression in the
various realms of the arts. 4t*he doctrine focuses all the necessary elements of the belief in what we now call individualism.
Embodied in its most extreme incarnations it becomes "Titanism" or even "Satanism." Further developed in more direct
descent, the original genius becomes Carlyle's hero and culminates in Nietzsche's superman. Applied to the general human
level, the faith in genius as one's essential self, and hence the
complete reliance upon that self, is the pervasive teaching of
Emerson and Whitman. "Temperament is fate" and "Obey
that impulse" have become commonplace shibboleths, and
recently a new psychology bids us not to suppress the desires
which surge up from the subconscious - our most "vital"
self. For as William Blake declared in his own "unique" way,
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
Into such familiar belief our modern faith in individualism
has expanded with well-nigh irresistible energy. But this
faith received no uncertain impetus from the doctrine first
formulated by that group in the eighteenth century which
deserve the name of heralds of original genius. It was not
Emerson or Nietzsche, Bergson or Freud, but Edward Young
who said: "Dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy
with the stranger within thee; and excite and cherish every




HERALDS OF ORIGINAL GENIUS              217
spark. a 0 however scattered through the dull, dark mass
of common thoughts. 0. and let thy genius rise. &. as
the sun from chaos; and if I should then say, like an Indian
'Worship it' yet should I say little more than. 0. 'Rever.
ence thyself.'... For nothing original can rise, nothing
immortal can ripen in any other sun."








IVANHOE AND ITS LITERARY
CONSEQUENCES








IVA4NHOE AND ITS LITERARY
CONSEQUENCES
By G. H. MAYNADIER
A LITTLE more than six years ago there was a literary.Lanniversary which, it has seemed to me, passed without
due notice - the centennial of Ivanhoe., Despite the date of
1820 on the title-page, it was in the year i8i9, on the eighteenth of December, that this famous romance was put on sale,
and in all Scott's literary career, no. event had more si~gni~fi-.
cance. It not only brought Scott to the climax of his popular-.
ity, which had been growing steadily ever since T'he Lay of
the Last Minstrel appeared in 1805; -but likewise for European
literature as a whole, it has been important. With the series
of Scott's romances which begins with Ivanhoe, comes the
full flowering of the historical novel. The seeds scattered by
the breezes of its popularity fell not alone on the soil of fiction,
to produce in continual succession and in many lands rich
crops to the present day. In history likewise they germinated,
and a crop of great romantic historians spring directly from
Scott. Here, to be sure, he has not affected foreign literature
so much as in the novel; but on historical writing in English
his influence has been enormous. Nobody would place Scott
high among historians because of actual history from his pen,
such as his Life of Napoleon; yet singularly enough, with the
exception of Gibbon, who has cast his mighty spell on all who
since his day have written history in the English tongue., it
is doubtful if any one man has so influenced English historical
writing as Sir Walter Scott.
Among his novels in their effect on historians, Ivanhoe may
not have been so much of an immediate influence as several




2.22


G. H. MAYNADIER


others. It is something of an undeserved glory, after all, that
clusters round Ivanhoe as historical fiction, for this most
famous work of Scott's is more successful as a typical romance
than as an historical novel proper. Of course the two are not
synonymous. Every historical novel is likely to be a romance,
but the majority of romances are not historical. And Ivanhoe
is best on its non-historical side. Lockhart observes truly
that "as a work of art, Ivanhoe is perhaps the first of all Scott's
efforts...; nor have the strength and splendor of his
imagination been displayed to higher advantage than in
some of the scenes of this romance. But I believe that no
reader who is capable of thoroughly comprehending the
author's Scotch character and Scotch dialogue will ever place
Ivanhoe, as a work of genius, on the same level with Waverley,
Guy Mannering, or The Heart of Mid-Lothian." With equal
justice Lockhart might have named some novels that rise
above Ivanhoe for their presentation of history. Are the royal
brothers, Richard and John, so very much alive? And how
about Robin Hood and his merry men? Not historical, to be
sure, they have nevertheless been so well known in popular
story as to impose on a novelist who would make use of them
the same sort of limitation in treatment as characters that
are historical. Already in Waverley, "bonny Prince Charley"
-"a prince to live and die under," as young Edward Waverley
called him in fine enthusiasm after first being presented to
him - had been more alive than any of the historical personages of Ivanhoe. So to most readers are Mary Stuart in Y'he
Abbot, Elizabeth in Kenilworth, Louis XI of France in 52uentin
Durward, and Saladin and likewise Richard in T'he Iralisman.
And the pictures of Highland life in A Legend of Monlrose
are more vivid and more skilfully introduced than those of
English domestic life in the twelfth century as shown in the
household of Cedric the Saxon.
No, not on the historical side is Ivanhoe deservedly so fa..




IVANHOE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES


223


mous, and as Lockhart says, on its human side it has been surpassed; but on its romantic side, one can hardly praise it too
highly. The tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche; the disguise of Ivanhoe, penetrated when the marshals unhelm him
before Rowena, that he may receive the Chaplet of Honor
from her hands; the disguise of Richard Cceur-de-Lion and
his revelation of himself in the forest to Robin Hood; the
truly great character of Rebecca, her subjection to test by
combat, and the appearance of the young Saxon knight as her
champion; the natural kindness and real nobility of Ivanhoe,
and the grateful return for them from Isaac and Rebecca - a
very living Isaac, too, even if reminiscent somewhat of Shylock in his anxiety about his ducats and his daughter; and
above all, the storming of Front-de-Bceuf's castle of Torquilstone --could anything in fiction be more effectively romantic?
I remember talking with an old lady, gifted, alert, and
charming - I have the honor to claim her a kinswoman of
mine - who died well past ninety some years ago in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was telling me of her childhood
in Exeter, where she grew up in a large household circle, for
her grandfather, a distinguished physician of his day, lived
in patriarchal style, with children of his children frequently
under his roof. One of the vivid recollections of her girlhood
was the reading aloud, by an aunt of hers, while the family
sat round the fire in the evening, of the Waverley novels as
they came out; and as she looked back, no fiction had ever
seemed to this lady in her long life more engrossing. "Above
all," she exclaimed, "how well I remember that first reading
of Ivanhoe when I was hardly more than ten years old! The
pictures that it made! I shall never forget Ulrica on the burning tower."
She was right in her enthusiasm. As that last tower of
Torquilstone crashes down into the flames, with the old Saxon




224


G. H. MAYNADIER


dame on it, waving her arms and chanting her wild old heathen
war-songs, there you have one of the lasting pictures of fiction
- melodramatic, to be sure, but so highly romantic and so
vividly painted as, once seen, to be unforgettable. It is the
unsurpassed melodramatic medieval pictures which have
created the peculiar power of Ivanhoe. The non-historical but
great romantic in it, rather than the introduction of actual
history, has given it its name as a great historical novel.
And verily it has been a great novel with great consequences.
It was more popular outside of Scotland than any of the Scottish novels; for after all, those who, in Lockhart's phrase, were
"capable of thoroughly comprehending the author's Scotch
character and Scotch dialogue," were mostly themselves
Scotch; Ivanhoe, on the contrary, could be comprehended just
as well by an American or an Englishman as by a Scotchman.
Here, moreover, it was evident for the first time that Scotland
itself was not necessary to give "the author of Waverley" success as a novelist. Once he had taken his story across the
Tweed, there was no reason why he should not confidently do
so again. Also this was a more daring excursion into the
past than any which had preceded it. In prose, Scott had
never ventured into the Middle Ages before. Waverley,
published in 1814, and the novels of the five following years,
had gone nowhere farther back into history than Old Mortality, which went back to 1679. The success of Ivanhoe gave
Scott confidence for further departures into remote periods,
which in the matter of actual history, were generally better
than Ivanhoe itself. So there came the splendid series which
included The Abbot in 1820, Kenilworth in '21, the next year
q'he Fortunes of Nigel, and in successive years Quentin Durward, Redgauntlet, The T'alisman, Woodstock, and in 1829
Anne of Geierstein. It was by the bolder expeditions into the
historical past which most of these were, even more than by
those which preceded Ivanhoe, that Scott raised the historical




IVANHOE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES


225


novel to a position of the highest honor in literature, and so
made possible some of the most famous characters of fiction -
Leatherstocking, d'Artagnan, and Athos, Porthos, and Aramis,
Henry Esmond, and many, many others.
Yet the historical novel is very far from beginning with
Scott. It begins, in our literature, fifty-two years before
Waverley and fifty-seven before Ivanhoe, with Longsword,
Earl of Salisbury, An Historical Romance, by the Rev. Dr.
Thomas Leland of Dublin. This, so far as is known, is the
first novel of its kind in English. Defoe's Memoires of a
Cavalier has neither the interest of a well-constructed plot nor
the reality of character which we expect in a good historical
novel. And nothing else before Longsword makes even the
faintest approach to such a work.
Not that Longsword is a romance which would attract many
readers to-day. It has, to be sure, a good enough plot concerning the adventures, during wars in France in the reign
of Henry III, of the natural son of Henry II, William, Earl
of Salisbury, surnamed Longsword, whose tomb you may
still see in Salisbury Cathedral. There is a secondary love
story, not unskilfully introduced, of a young French girl of
noble birth, disguised like Elizabethan heroines in doublet
and hose, and the young gentleman whom she marries. But
the characters are wooden, mere puppets in expressing emotion. The story is utterly lifeless.
Yet despite its crude workmanship, here in the history of
literature is an important novel, for Dr. Leland in his modest
way aims to do what Scott and others after him have done in
a great way. In his preface- "advertisement," he calls ithe says that he seeks to entertain by relating facts of history,
which he may alter slightly for the better effect of his story.
"If too great liberties have been taken," he continues, "in
altering historical accounts, those who look for amusement will
forgive, while the learned and critical... will deem it...




226               G. H. MAYNADIER
of too little consequence. *. for. 0. censure." The doc-.
trine absolutely of all the great historical novelists.
From Leland to Scott, though, was a long road and one
slowly travelled. The romantic novel of the eighteenth century was more inclined to imitate the material of Walpole's
Castle of Otranto, two years later than Longsword, which made
use of the merely melodramatic and picturesque in mediaeval
life rather than events of history. But the romantic storytellers, however slowly, made steadily increasing use of history. Scott himself used it effectively in his metrical romances; and Jane Porter in her Scottish Chiefs, four years
before Waverley, brought the prose historical romance closer
than it ever had been before to what Scott was to make it.
Then came the " Wizard " himself., incomparably trained for his
work by all the accidents of fate - his birth in one of the most
romantically picturesque cities of the world, family traditions,
the places he visited both in his search for health as a child
and in his early legal work, his own taste in reading, and
the friends that he made. So after the preliminary training
of ~1fhe Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of
the Lake, he came to the novels which still more have made his
fame, that marvellous series whose culmination, for the various reasons which we have seen, may be said to be Ivanhoe;
for Ivanhoe is probably, even though not the best, nevertheless
the best-known historical novel in English. The seed of Longsword had come to rich fruition., from which in turn have come
the many who have tried their hands, with varying ability and
success, at historical fiction all the way from Cooper through
Harrison Ainsworth and G. P. R. James, Dickens, Thackeray,
Kingsley, Reade, George Eliot, Blackmore, and Mark Twain,
to Mr. Winston Churchill and others of our own day.
This influence of Scott on the novel has of course long been
realized, but what is not so generally realized is his effect on
historical writing. Yet the six historians of the English race




IVANHOE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES  22


227


in the nineteenth century who have won the greatest favor
as men of letters were all deeply affected by Scott. The three
older f them it is true, felt first the spell of earlie* oac
than his, but still they were all young enough to be impressionable when Waverley appeared. Thomas Carlyle was then
eighteen and a half years old; William Hickling Prescott was
five months younger; and Macaulay lacked three months of
being fourteen. Of the others, Motley was only three months
old, and Froude and Parkman were still unborn; so these
three came into the world late enough to be brought up on
Scott's novels, and they were. All six, early impressed by him,
made a conscious attempt to popularize history, to give it -
so far as an historian might - the same sort of interest that
Scott did in his novels. Thus they set the dominant fashion
for historical writing in English from the thirties to the eighties
of the nineteenth century.
Macaulay was the first to express the new theory of historical writing, which he did in his essay, "History," published in
the Edinburgh Review in 18!28. It was inspired- at least nomi*nally - by Henry Neele's Romance of History, England - a
work consisting of three volumes of short stories " illustrating"'1 the reigns of English monarchs from William I to
Charles I. The author, who killed himself that same year
for reasons not certainly known, was a young lawyer, the son
of an heraldic engraver, with a deep interest in literature and
history both. He had had some poems published, and also
some lectures on English literature which he had delivered.
His stories in the Romance of History have at their best, which
is not very often, a suggestion of Hawthorne's historical short
stories, such as Trhe Gray Champion and Endicott and the Red
Cross. At their worst, their people are unreal and the situations forced. All in all, it is surprising that Macaulay should
have considered the work seriously enough to take it even as
ICf. Neele's Preface.




228


G. H. MAYNADIER


a starting-point for an essay in the Edinburgh. True, it can
be called hardly even that. Macaulay here surpasses his usual
peculiar fashion of scarcely mentioning the work which is his
nominal subject, except on the first page; his only reference
to Henry Neele's book is a footnote, at the beginning of the
essay, referring to the title, History. But the full and clear
expression of Macaulay's doctrine shows that in him Neele's
idea of emphasizing the "Romance of History" met with a
sympathetic response.
When the perfect historian writes, says Macaulay, while
he "relates no fact... which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony," at the same time, "by judicious selection,
rejection, and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction.... Men will
not merely be described, but will be made intimately known
to us. The changes of manners will be indicated, not merely
by a few general phrases, or a few extracts from statistical
documents, but by appropriate images present in every line."
And then comes that well-known paragraph: "If a man,
such as we are supposing, should write the history of England,
he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these
he would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. At Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful
painted window, which was made by an apprentice out of the
pieces of glass which had been rejected by his master. It is so
far superior to every other in the church, that, according to the
tradition, the vanquished artist killed himself from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same manner, has used those
fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown
behind them, in a manner which may well excite their envy.
He has constructed out of their gleanings works which, even
considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than theirs.
But a truly great historian would reclaim those materials




IVANHOE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES


229


which the novelist has appropriated. The history of the
government and the history of the people would be exhibited
in that mode in which alone they can be exhibited justly, in
inseparable conjunction and intermixture. We should not
then have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in
Clarendon, and for their phraseology in Old Mortality; for
one half of King James in Hume, and for the other half in the
Fortunes of Nigel."
Previously,' in reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History,
Macaulay had come near preaching the same doctrine.
"Good histories," he said, "in the proper sense of the word,
we have not. But we have good historical romances, and
good historical essays. The imagination and the reason...
have made partition of a province of literature... and now
they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of
holding the whole in common." He goes on to compare "the
two kinds of composition into which history has been thus
divided" to a "map" and a "painted landscape. The picture, though it places the object before us, does not enable us
to ascertain with accuracy the form and dimensions of its
component parts.... The map... presents no scene to
the imagination; but it gives us exact information as to the
bearings of the various points, and is a more useful companion
to the traveller or the general than the painting could be.. "
Again he says, "Sir Walter Scott gives us a novel; Mr. Hallam, a critical and argumentative history." The inference is
plain that already Macaulay believed that in a truly great
history the reader should find, combined with accurate information, the interest which Scott was able to impart to his
romances. The significance of Macaulay's specific references
to the great romancer is still more apparent.
Carlyle, as an historian, produces such a different effect
from Macaulay that one would never think they held identi' In 1827.




2,30


G. H. MAYNADIER


cally the same theory of the way history should be written.
Yet that they did, Carlyle shows in his essay on Scott,' published ten years after Macaulay's essay on History. Carlyle's
judgment, often at fault, is here almost consistently so. In
the whole remarkable essay is nothing but mistaken criticism,
except when Carlyle touches on the marvellous range of
Scott's characters - "from Davie Deans up to Richard
Coeur-de-Lion; from Meg Merrilies to Die Vernon and Queen
Elizabeth" -and when he speaks of what Scott has done
for history. For his historical novels "have taught all men
this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as
unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that
the by-gone ages of the world were actually filled by living
men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they... but men
in buff or other coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks,
with passions in their stomachs, and the idioms, features, and
vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive of a
great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought
of it."
So history did. Already Carlyle had applied the new theory
in his own work. 7'he French Revolution appeared in 1837,
and who can read the story of the royal flight to Varennes,
in that shortest night of the year in i79i, without being held
as by the most absorbing romance ever penned? And a few
months after Jhe French Revolution, there had been published
in Boston, on Christmas Day,2 Ferdinand and Isabella, the
first of Prescott's histories. Prescott was not so big a man as
Carlyle; none of his histories engrosses you like The French
Revolution; but again you have the very thrill of romance as
you read of the hopes and fears of the Spanish sovereigns, of
the treasures beyond belief of the Peruvian king, and still more
"Sir Walter Scott," London and Westminster Review, 1838.
2 1837.




IVANHOE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES


231


as you accompany Cortez from the coast on his daring march
up by snow-capped Popocatepetl to the City of Mexico.
History again took thought of Scott in the History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. Froude, as different in effect from Carlyle as Carlyle
is from Macaulay, was nevertheless his devoted disciple, and
he accepted entirely his master's theory of writing history.
As he expounds it at length in the last volume of his Life of
Carlyle, he finds the chief task of the historian to bring back
to life "dead things and dead people"; to bring them back by
producing all of a novelist's or a dramatist's reality of character and scene. Applying this doctrine, Froude makes his
Mary Stuart - whatever you may think of the accuracy of
his conception of her - as real as Scott's in The Abbot; and
no less interesting is his account of the escape from Lochleven
than that of the novel. Motley, another disciple of Carlyle,
shows his indebtedness to the master in two ways - imitation
of phrase and other detail, and general method. Indebted
solely to Carlyle for the first, the latter he probably developed
independently, for in childhood and youth he was an untiring
reader of Scott and Cooper. With less power than Carlyle
and Froude of making his people real, he, a born "colorist in
language," spent his romantic energy in historical 'composition rather in painting pictures, "sumptuous and glowing,"
which Dr. Holmes 2justly compares to those of Rubens, that
Motley so much admired. Such is that gorgeous canvas at
the beginning of The Rise of the Dutch Republic, of the abdication of Charles V at Brussels. And the spirit which created
those pictures, however stimulated in maturity, was nourished
in its infancy on the romances of which Ivanhoe is the most
famous.
Macaulay, who by his theory of historical writing already
SCarlyle in London, ii, pp. 200 ff.
"2.ohn Lothrop Motley, a Memoir (Boston, 1878), p. 73.




232


232      G.H. MAYNADIER


quoted should best have incorporated Scott's methods in history proper, by the limitations of his brilliant genius fell short
of his great contemporary, Carlyle, in doing so. But his attention. to detail, which is of the novelist, goes far toward
creating the marvellous power of his exposition, and sometimes
in narrative he attains the high standard he sets for his ideal
historian. Witness his account of the Battle of the Boyne,
the story of the death of Charles 11, and that of the growing
defection from James 11 as the Revolution of 1688 hurries on.
Little as Macaulay likes that king, he makes him after all a
human being from whom you cannot withhold your sympathy,
when, one after another, friends and family abandon him,
till, on hearing that his daughter Anne has gone over to the
Prince of Orange, he cries, "~God help me! My own children
have deserted me." Of this James you do not have to look
for one half in a romance and the other in a history. Both
halves are there in Macaulay.
Finally Parkman, from his youth, like these others-, a lover
of poetry and novels, unites in his France and England in
North America, to which he gives significantly the sub-title, A
Series of Historical Narratives, the accuracy of the historian
and the charm of the romancer. He is second to none in waking the dead past to the magic of immediate life, in transporting
his reader to scenes and events hundreds or thousands of miles
and two or three centuries away. And so, thanks to Francis
Paka, even the lazyct idler can feel his muscles play
in exuberant strength, as he paddles his canoe with La Salle
or Father Marquette, and their swarthy Indian guides, along
some river or lake hitherto unknown to Europeans. He
breathes all the freshness of the woods and within his four
walls has all the sense of illimitable freedom that came to the
early explorers when they gazed for the first time on those
fresh-water seas, the Great Lakes, or struck out into pathless
forest or prairie in those "realms of solitude where the Mis



IVANHOE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES              233
sissippi rolled its sullen tide, and the Ohio wound its belt of
silver through the verdant woodlands."', And when the final
act in the conflict of so many years is come, he partakes of
Montcalm's determination to win or die, and of Wolfe's
anxious expectancy as his boat drifts in the darkness with the
St. Lawrence tide to the path which shall lead to the Heights
of Abraham, he himself repeating in a low voice Gray's Elegy,
and then saying to the officers with him, "Gentlemen, I
would rather have written those lines than take Quebec."
Yes, Ivanhoe has helped, directly or indirectly, to build great
histories as well as great novels.
I Montcalm and Wolfe, Chapter i.








THE ASIAN LYRIC AND ENGLISH
LITERATURE








THE ASIAN LYRIC AND ENGLISH
LITERATURE
By H. L. SEAVER
F ITZGERALD'S Omar is the only translation from Asian
lyric verse, apart from the poetry of the Old Testament,
which is really a part of English literature. To explain his
unique success by attributing it to poetic genius, though substantially the truth, is largely to admit that it is inexplicable.
Certain circumstances, however, which may be noted as contributory to that success bear interestingly on the question:
what chance is there that other Asian lyrics may be transplanted into the English garden?
The decade of the 'So's was already interested in the Levant
and, not unsympathetically, through coo-peration with the
Turk in the Crimean War, in Islam. It is the decade of Burton's amazing account of his Pilgrimage to 1/-Medinah and of
final editions of the A.rabian Nights and Manners and Customs
of the Egyptians of E. W. Lane. Far more significant, however, among English books is the disconcerting Origin of
Species, published in the same year (1859) as the Rubaiyat,
whose fatalistic and wistful Epicureanism fell in so opportunely with the mood of a disillusioned half-century. Of the
translator it i's to be noted that he was not a scholar but a
whimsical idler from the country gentry who moved but as
an amateur among the Cambridge pundits of Levantine
tongues and culture; scruples of scholarship, consequently,
did not frighten him from some freedom in adapting his material to his sensitive poetic feeling. He took over from his
original, furthermore, a novel and memorable verse form, the
quatrain, whose fourth line makes an acquiescent and pensive




238


H. L. SEAVER


return to the rhyme sound which seems momentarily, after
the first couplet, to have been abandoned.
Since prolonged contacts with Asian culture have been
developing a more intelligent, consequently a more sympathetic interest among English readers, who presumably are
now more receptive than the Victorians to the expression of
any yet untranslated Asian lyric moods. Recently, too,
poets of distinction have turned to Asiatic material.
I
The decade of the eighties produced a notable body of descriptive literature about Asia, ranging from painstaking and
now invaluable record, like Mr. Edward Morse's in Japan,
through the splashing journalism of Mr. Kipling (Plain Tales,
1887), to the sensitive if somewhat superficial impressionism
of Pierre Loti.
The decade of the nineties heard finer and profounder report. A new approach to Indian culture, necessary to correct the prejudices and antagonisms of Mr. Kipling's picture,
dates from 1896, when Mr. Havell, entering India to import
European art traditions, recognized the noble integrity of
native art and reorganized the Calcutta museum and art school
in the intent of saving the esthetic inheritance of India from
degradation through imitation of Europe. To the more discriminating observation of this decade America contributed
Mr. La Farge, whose voyage to Japan and the South Seas
inspired his Artist's Letters from  tapan (1897); and Lafcadio
Hearn, who, reaching Japan in I891, continued thereafter
his interpretation of the spiritual life of the Island Kingdom.
With the first decade of the new century came a group of
scholars' books on the literatures of Asian peoples: Aston's
7apanese Literature (1899), Giles' Chinese Literature (1901o),
Huart's Arabic Literature (1903), in one series; in the series
to which Mr. Wendell contributed his brilliant Literary His



THE ASIAN LYRIC                239
tory of A4merica, Frazer's Literary History of India (1898),
Browne's standard Literary History of Persia (2 v., 1902,
1906), Nicholson's Literary History of the. Arabs (1907); and
the gigantic Ottoman Poetry of Gibb (5 V., 1900-1907). Though
these works have a wealth of versions, it is safe to say that
scarce a lyric among them will ever enter any anthology of
English poetry.
In the decade 19io0-20 appeared many volumes of versions
by poets, trusting, probably, that a generation of Asian studies
has developed a public which would not allow fine rendering
of Asiatic verse to come so near as did Fitzgerald's to perishing unnoticed. To what degree have these contemporary
poets given really poetic expression to the material accessible,
though unattractively, in the work of scholars?
11
Among all the Asian peoples the erotic note is insistent in
that lyric verse which may be called popular in the sense that,
in some examples at least, it is anonymous and traditional,
and even in the examples composed by the cultured poet is
addressed to the populace and has currency among them,
usually in some simple musical. setting. English tradition,
though very rich in love poetry in its own key, has till the
present been indisposed to the erotic note. That tradition,
however, has been in the field of fiction undergoing revolutionary change, and a feature of many recent poetic movements has been the venture into the erotic field, frequently
veiling its audacity under exotic associations of a foreign culture. Of the actual love poetry of Asia, from the ferocious
note of the Afghan to the fastidious and nostalgic note of
China, none has attained any currency in English.
In Coloured Stars (1918) and A4 Garden of Bright Waters
(1 920), little volumes not of erudition but intended "primarily
as a book of poems," Mr. E. Powys Mathers rendered some




240


H. L. SEAVER


hundred of these popular Asian lyrics. His versions, occasionally metrical but mostly in cadenced verse, attained through
poetic diction and imagery (what verse is more gorgeously
imaged than the Asian?) some of the brilliance of contemporary Imagist verse, with its preferences for "always the exact
word," its avoidance of "vague generalities however magnificent and sonorous," and its concentration, which "is the very
essence of poetry." So closely indeed do these versions realise
Imagist ideals that one wonders if all the pieces are from genuine originals.' Has Miss Lowell ventured into Levantine
tongues that this flower should spring "from the Arabic":
A mole shows black
Between her mouth and cheek,
As if a negro,
Coming into a garden,
Wavered between a purple rose
And a scarlet camomile.2
SHis versions rest mainly on a collection of 140 lyrics, 73 of which he translates,
made by M. Adolphe Thalasso for his Revue Orientale, Constantinople, the harvest
of twenty years' study of Asian popular poetry, Anthologie de l'Amour Asiatique
(1906). Without asking a work of erudition, one regrets that the English books
lack the orderly and scholarly manner of the French. The modern matter from
an Arabised Scot and an Americanised Chinese seems uncharacteristic and unworthy; and, though Mr. Mathers's paraphrase rarely exceeds a reasonable freedom, one is taken aback to find 'des lueurs des vers luisants' appearing as 'the rolling
and shining of love songs.' The point of the Japanese 'pivot' poems is missed:
cf. " Alone One Night " (Garden of Bright Waters, p. 82) with Aston, 7apanese
Literature, pp. 32, 33, 2oi, 202, or with C. H. Page, Japanese Poetry, p. 69.
2 One quite refuses to believe that aught but the contemporary manner inspired
stanzas (" From the modern Persian." Garden of Bright Waters, p. 92) whose picturesque ingenuity of phrasing has inevitableness for the ear rather than for the mind:
Then like a splash of saffron whey
That spills from out a bogwood bowl
Oozed from the mountain cleft the whole
Rich and reluctant light of day.
And is the visual imagery of this picture that of Asia or of Aubrey Beardsley:
And here was handiwork of Cretes
And olives grew beside a stone
And one slim phallos stood alone
Blasphemed at by the paroquets.




THE ASIAN LYRIC


24I


Even the lyric of Western Asia is diffuse and given to conventional epithet and figure; it is therefore only by condensing
or by rendering but a fragment of his original that Mr.
Mathers attains an elliptical allusiveness characteristic of
Chinese and Japanese poetry, but not of the more explicit
Asian idioms. A famous distich of Sultan Selim the Grim
reads in full:
Lions tremble under the talons of my valor; and heaven has subjected
me to the gazelle eyes of my beloved.
This Mr. Mathers, knowing that poetry, like other magic,.is a
happy compound of silence and symbol, transmutes to
Lions tremble at my claws
And I at a gazelle with eyes.
A popular song of Turkestan, diffuse, conventional, and extravagant, becomes, reduced and invigorated in phrase, this:
Not a stone from my black sling
Ever misses anything
But the arrows of your eye
Surer shoot and faster fly.
Not one creature that I hit
Lingers on to know of it;
But the game that falls to love
Lives and lingers long enough.
The last English line represents much in the original about "a
thousand deaths without death."    Shall we judge it a betrayal of the original, to reduce and invigorate? The doom
awaiting literal versions would be to remain unread till the
western reader should develop (if ever) the leisure of mind
that accounts itself well occupied in an Epicurean savoring
of even familiar imagery.
Both the Bacchic and the Priapic note in Asian poetry have
been explained away as symbolism of philosophy or religion.
The ancient sake- lyrics of Japan are allegorized like the vinous
verses of Omar. Canticles was admitted to the canon only
as allegorically interpreted. But to the popular mind the




242


H. L. SEAVER


poetry of love is the poetry of love; and one hopes it is really
the popular mind that inspired the malice of a lyric which Mr.
Mathers attributes "to the Burmese":
The night before last night
I heard that to make songs to girls
And to make prayers to God
Were of equal value in the eye of time;
Provided, that is,
That the prayers
Are sufficiently beautiful.
III
The poetry of Muslim Asia further treated love as religious
allegory. Of this Fitzgerald himself translated an example,
the Sufi mystic poem of Salaman and Absal. Such Sufi allegorizing dominated also the poetry of India written in Urdu,
mainly by Muslim Indians. Many matters widely different,
however, from love inspired poets Arabian, Persian, and Turkish. That, even after the Rubaiyat, interesting lyric verse
awaits the translator is clear from the literary remains of
Fitzgerald; didactic, satiric, or philosophic poetry may yet
come into English like those fragments which he translated
from the Persian Parliament of Fowls of the century preceding
Chaucer's. Already the Muslim field has been laboriously
exploited by erudition, but a translator must be awaited who
is a poet, who can summon up something of the blithe independence of old Fitz himself, who wrote: "It is an amusement
to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians; who
(as I think) are not poets enough to frighten one from such
excursions and who really do want a little art to shape them."
Meanwhile, English taste, in preparation for admission to
the Gardens of Fragrance of Iran, may acquaint itself with
the visible imagery of the Iranian genius. By the Paris exhibit
of 1904 a European enthusiasm was stimulated for the Persian
portrait drawings and book illustrations, which inspired charm



THE ASIAN LYRIC


243


ing developments in Western illustration, for example, in Mr.
Edmund Dulac. Those Persian miniature flowerbeds of
gorgeous color and elegant drawing should themselves become
familiar to Americans, since the Golubew and the RossCoomaraswamy collections have assembled in Boston a
wealth of the choicest examples in the world.
IV
Of the Vedic hymns, which may be called the Psalms of
classic Hindu religion, or of the later religious lyric none has
entered English literature, though all the older orthodox and
heretical religious poetry of Asia was introduced to the English reader in the great series of Sacred Books of the East
begun in 1875 by the scholar-courtier F. Max Muiller. From
this its earliest poetry down to our day, the lyric of Hindustan
has been chiefly religious, though, through the mediaeval
period, as in Islam, mystic and erotic in expression. The
Sanskrit dialogue of lyrics, Gita Govinda, a twelfth-century
parallel of Canticles, and, among the vernaculars, Hindi and
Bengali erotic lyrics expressed especially Krishna worship.
Of decorously selected portions of the Govinda, Sir Edwin
Arnold made a now forgotten metrical version (1875); and
of the Maithili Vaishnava poet, Vidyapati, Dr. Coomaraswamy prepared a scholarly version and comment; but until
an Indianist appears with the singing power of Swinburne
these lyrics are unlikely to find expression as English poetry.'
That intelligent Hindu thought considers the erotic element
not merely symbol and allegory but psychologically essential in all this poetry may appear from such discussions as
Dr. Coomaraswamy's on Sahaja and        the poet Chandidas.2
SCoomaraswamy and Sen, Vidyapati... Songs of the Loves of Radha and
Krishna... with Introduction, notes, and illustrations from Indian paintings.
London, 1915. More recent, but less significant, Kumar, Datta, and Chapman,
Vaishnava Lyrics. Oxford, 1923.
2 Tenth essay in!fhe Dance of Shiva (1918).




244


244         H. L.SEAVER


European feeling has for a generation been accustomed to the
conviction that the roots of passion and of adoration are so
deeply intertwined in the subsoil of consciousness that there
is not perhaps an essential antagonism between the mood
which produces religious lyric and that which produces the
poetry of passion. Religious effusion becomes occasionally
ardent enough to sound passionate overtones, from the raptures of medkoeval nuns down even to Christina Rossetti;
but in these the element of sex, even if subliminally potent,
does not rise into consciousness, never into the frank consciousness of the Indian erotic mood. Even if European feeling resents in no way the acknowledgment of a passionate
basis in adoration, it is likely long to feel that the erotic element, the moment it rises into consciousness, becomes incongruous with religious expression. If to such reflections there
be objected the Song of Songs, which is perhaps an example
of Asian erotic religious lyric, it must be admitted that it is
to most English readers a lovely yet alien thing, introduced
by custom intimately into our culture, yet in its essential import ignored.
As in the case of Persia., the art of India may now be included within the scope of European appreciation, as a step
toward understanding Indian literature. Rajput painting
is almost explicitly illustrative of the religious lyric; the
Boston collection has many examples of Vaishnava legendary
art, some explicitly applied to the Govinda. But sympathy
with the visible imagery of Indian feeling is probably generations away - farther than a similar education into the emotional background of China and Japan. Indian art has only
begun to appear, in noble examples, in American museums,
and is 'in many details the most alien of all the arts of Asia.
In Buddhist legend Kantaka, the steed of Gautama, dies of
grief when his master passes into Nirvana: this is within
range of European sympathy because the horse has so long




THE ASIAN LYRIC


245


been a creature of dignified and even poetic associations. In
the Chadanta Jataka, on the other hand, a white elephant is
an heroic exemplar of self-sacrifice in benevolently surrendering his tusks to the hunter: this is to Western feeling almost
ludicrous, because, though his psychic qualities perhaps entirely equal those of the horse, the associations of the elephant
are to our feeling more with the circus than with character.
It is a grim truth that to Americans in general P. T. Barnum
has been more than any other man the agent of contact with
Indian civilization. The European reader, though his mind
may accept Darwinian conceptions of the ultimate unity of all
living forms, does not yet feel this truth, which the Buddhist
accepts so that it is a real datum of poetic emotion.
If, however, the artistic expressions of Hinduism are "difficult" to European eyes, - its feminine type repellently exuberant, its architecture wearyingly lavish, its blue or manylimbed deities disconcerting, - yet Buddhism has produced
a statuary whose nobility can not escape even an indifferent
eye, unless that eye be darkened by such sectarianism as inspired a distinguished Anglican clergyman to declare that
"though he could by an intellectual effort perceive dignity
in them, his instinct as a Christian priest was to smash their
smug faces." If such sorry and irritated provincialism may be
mitigated by contact with Buddhist art and thoughtful comment such as Dr. Coomaraswamy's notable Dance of Siva,
some literary expression of the profound poetry of Buddhism
might follow.
As a system of metaphysics Buddhism is of course essentially
non-poetic, but poetic charm as unmistakably saturates the
historic and legendary record of Buddha as it does our gospels. Desire to know this poetry maintained in unaccountable
popularity for a generation Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia
(1879), a rather saccharine compound of Mahayana legend
in undistinguished blank verse bristling with exotic words.




246


H. L. SEAVER


More really, if obscurely, significant is the persisting demand
for such a book as Warren's Buddhism in T'ranslation (1896),
still the best, and authentic, source for the English reader.
Yet more attractive is the presentation of Buddhist feeling in
the work of Lafcadio Hearn; for Hearn found in Buddhism
views of life, implied in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer,
then enjoying its greatest influence, but mellowed in the atmosphere of an ancient culture which had lived them instead
of thinking them.
The religious mind of India a century ago made positive
approach to Western thought in the modern non-denominational theist movement, the Brahma Samaj. Lyric expression
of this most recent religious mood of Indianism appears in the
verse of Rabindranath Tagore, son of the second leader of the
Samaj. His poems in Bengali, the most distinguished contemporary Indian poetry, he himself turns into musical English prose. The prominence secured him by the Nobel award
has led the Western reader to expect too much in his translated work, which seems marked by a diluted amiability
rather than depth or originality of thought or feeling., Yet
Gitanjali (i909) is perhaps the only significant volume of
religious lyric written in English in our day, akin in its mystic
personifications to the older lyrics of Hinduism, but not erotic
in expression, and sounding, if a tenuous, yet a vespertinal and
authentic note of adoration.
V
Of the brief Japanese verse forms, the sanctioned and classical tanka of five lines and thirty-one syllables, and our later
hokku of three lines and seventeen syllables, our earlier
scholars were-contemptuous, believing them   precluded by
their very brevity "from being a vehicle for any but the
1 Mr. E. J. Thompson's excellent little volume indicates how inadequately the
Indian poet is represented in the English versions. (Rabindranath T'agore, PP.45 if-)




THE ASIAN      LYRIC                   247
merest atoms of poetical thought and sentiment." ' But
upon the delicate taste of Lafcadio Hearn these lyrics, especially as vehicles of traditional popular sentiment, exercised
the greatest charm and to them he devoted two essays in
Buddha Fields (1897). Since, the hokku has returned to a
considerable vogue, among both native and translating poets.
The Anglo-Japanese Noguchi praises it in paradoxical rhapsodies and writes it both in English and Japanese. Our
contemporary poets, especially the Imagists, valuing the
gem-like brilliance of the short verse forms rather than the
displayed splendor of longer poems, have felt similar fascination, and have imitated and translated the hokku as the most
characteristic note of the people whose exquisite visible arts
so frequently accomplish their miracles of observation and
design within almost microscopic proportions.
Yet how render these extremely brief originals of but three
or five lines, unrhymed, and observing only a syllabic pattern?
Hearn's versions are unrhymed, approximating the classical
elegiac distich, which has, as Chamberlain objects, something
too much of "grand resonance." In so short a poem, rhyme is
likely to lend a touch of epigrammatic smartness alien to the
poignant concentration and simplicity of the original. Noguchi suggests that the English poem nearest in effect to a Japanese is Landor's "I strove with none...," the whole of
which is like a lanka, and the closing lines of which alone
might pass as a hokku:
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
SAston, Japanese Literature (1899), p. 393. The patronizing discussions and
the stilted versions of the scholars are chiefly in the publications of the Oriental
societies. Professor B. H. Chamberlain reprinted in 1910 his more sympathetic
notice, with versions, of Basho, the seventeenth-century master of hokku. Of Mr.
W. N. Porter's charming little volumes, A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (1909,
the translated tanka of the Hiaku-nin-isshiu) is noticeably more stilted than the
365 hokku of A Year of Japanese Epigrams (1911). Professor C. H. Page's Japanese Poetry (1923) adds nothing to previous comment, but includes versions of
poetic distinction.




248


H. L. SEAVER


It is interesting to put side by side versions of a famous
tankaI from the most popular of Japanese anthologies, the thirteenth-century Hiaku-nin-isshiu; Thalasso renders it in equivalent syllables, Page in a deft rhymed verse.
Sera-t-il constant              How can one e'er be sure
Son amour? Je ne sais pas.      If true love will endure?
Mais, j'ai depuis Faube,        My thoughts this morning are
Du desordre en mes pensees      As tangled as my hair.
Ainsi qu'en mes cheveux noirs.
Such almost fragmentary forms may appear suited only to
the tremulous incoherences of affection, but it is the distinction of Chinese and Japanese poetry that its range is rather
wider than that of other Asian lands. "It came about," said
the Preface of the famous anthology, the Kokinshiu (c. 922),
"that our love of flowers, our worship of bird song, our sadness in watching the mists, our grief at sight of the dew, all
the manifold moods of man's heart found expression in varying
speech." How saturated these popular lyrics were with the
gravely pathetic assumptions of Buddhism, Hearn's essay
shows; and the mood developed especially by the Zen sect
is voiced in a handful of tiny poems from many periods." To
the impassioned contemplation of Zen Buddhism the universe
appears translucent - its present and visible phenomena dissolving, for the imagination, into a veil of mist beyond which
the manifold Purpose gleams majestically dominant over the
nearer scene. Thus to behold the daily scene under an aspect
of eternity is the vision of all philosophic poetry; in the Japanese lyric the notable circumstance is that this majestic range
ennobles such simple objects and finds expression in so brief a
form. A tanka in the Manyoshiu Professor Page renders:
Wistaria pours at last its waves of bloom
Along the lintel of my door
Planted long since for joy when one should come
Who comes no more.
No. 43.
2 This development in the visible arts is discussed in the third of Anesaki's
lectures on Buddhist Ideals in Japanese Art.




THE ASIAN LYRIC


249


The rendering is a shade sentimentalized from the more
reticent original as Aston gives it:
The rippling wistaria that I planted by my house
As a memento of thee whom I love, is at length in bloom.
The Boston Museum      has a fifteenth-century album    of ideal
portraits of the "Thirty-six Immortal Poets" ' in which the
likeness of the famous lady Komachi bears her tanka:
In the world, 't is the heart, the flower of man,
that fades unobserved.
The hokku, least, and for a while least regarded, of these lyric
forms, sometimes sounds the gravest note:
Autumn; and a cricket's shell.
Beside it the dead cricket. Well...
Life and fate.
To this version of Professor Page a sensitive taste may prefer
the almost stark austerity of the original as Chamberlain
gives it:
In autumn a cicada dead
Beside the shell that it cast off.
Earlier translations of the hokku, though often attaining
ingenious brevity, too often seem childlike or even "cunning";
to achieve reserved force and something of the poignancy of
the "lyric cry" is the aim and occasionally the attainment of
later translators. A tenth-century poetess, at death, addressed to the beloved a tanka 2 thus rendered by Porter:
My life is drawing to a close
I cannot longer stay;
A pleasant memory of thee
I fain would take away;
So visit me, I pray.
As compared with the perfunctory note of that, Mr. Mathers'
version seems impassioned:
I Reproduced entirely, with an introduction and versions by Mr. K. Tomita
in the Museum Bulletin, February, 1921.
No. 56 in the Hiaku-nin-isshiu; also in Thalasso, 246; Mathers, Coloured
Stars, 42; Page, 60.




25,0


H. L. SEAVER


One more time
Before I quit the world
I want to see you,
To carry with me down there
Your face of love, 0 my love.
For profound poetic feeling it may be that one must turn
not to translation but to the original verse of a poet who knows
and is influenced by the foreign poetry but does not translate
it. Such may be found in -an insufficiently appreciated achievement of American verse, the brief series of Cinquains (1911 -1913) by Miss Adelaide Crapsey, whose impressive erudition
in metrics included the Japanese field. A tenth-century poet
is represented in the Hiaku by a tanka thus rendered by Porter:
I hate the cold unfriendly moon
That shines at early morn
And nothing seems so sad and gray
When I am left forlorn
As day's returning dawn.
That is the unimpassioned equivalent of the cinquain,
Anguish:
Keep thou
Thy tearless watch
All night, but when blue-dawn
Breathes on the silver moon, then weep!
Then weep!
That the power and grace of the Japanese forms, with all their
deft and passionate brevity, may be attained in these lyrics
of I, 2, 3, 4, and i accents in their total of five lines, any English reader may discover from the manly and sonorous By
Zeus, on the Grand Canyon, or from the caressing gentleness
of Sthe Guarded Wound.'
VI
Translations of Chinese verse previous to 191o were exercises of sinologues, not English poetry. Poets, however, of
the earlier period of "free verse," in a mood common to experimenters, turned to the exotic East for material.
1 Crapsey, Verse (1922) pp. 40, 54.




THE ASIAN LYRIC


2SI


A few Chinese poems in Mr. Mathers' booklets are in cadenced verse; and this is the form adopted by three translators
who immediately followed, translators who themselves command or by a collaborator have access to the original: Mr.
Waley, 17o Poems and More Translations (1919); Mrs. Ayscough and Miss Lowell, Fir Flower Tablets (1920); and Mr.
Obata, Li-Po (1922).
Two misgivings arise in regard to the adequacy of cadenced
verse as a vehicle for translation from Chinese: it is not a clearcut or memorable form which, like the Omar stanza, might
easily pass into popularity, even into familiar quotation; and
the material it is expected to represent is the farthest from
"free" -   a poetry based on a rigidly exacting metrical arrangement, involving rhyme, number of syllables, and alternation of "flat" and "deflected" tones, or inflections. The
element of pattern is, one supposes, almost geometrically
pronounced to Chinese feeling, though the ideas have nothing
like the same patterned grouping, since such logical antithesis
as occurs seems intentionally vague., If translation retains
the implicit and diffused quality of this subdued expression,
what, in the absence of that orderliness so essential in the
original, will secure to it what Henry James calls " the decency
of the definite"? The subtle and moody suggestiveness of
thought or feeling in a Rossetti sonnet, - the Dark Glass or
the Monochord, - is delightful because its vaporous matter is
contained in a chalice wrought to so precise and symmetrical
a design: would not these poems largely evaporate if poured
out in the cadences of "free" verse? One may similarly question if the subtle hues of the Chinese picture do not become
too evanescent, deprived of the decorative limitation of fixed
pattern.
SMr. Fletcher in an interesting review of Miss Lowell's volume in the Dial,
February, 1920, notes a subtle antithesis which he feels is the structure of all the
Chinese poems; but I fail to find it in many.




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H. L. SEAVER


Still, to have no effect of pattern is better than to have
pattern whose suggestion is wholly wrong. Mr. Giles often
uses a metre so little subtle as to suggest "Young Lochinvar
has come out of the west," a brisk anapestic pace which is the
very butter woman's trot to market. In four versions of LiPo's famous Drinking Alone in the Moonlight' the variation
in metrical mood may be observed: the note of decorum
which in Mr. Waley condescends to oddity, is just touched in
Miss Lowell's verse with whimsicality; in Mr. Obata the
animation becomes convivial; but Mr. Giles's anapests send
it off into the mirthless rattle of the vaudeville stage.
Cadenced verse may at least, then, claim to avoid inappropriate notes. In a second respect the manner of the newer
poetry gains in appropriateness. The style of the Chinese
poem appears suggestive rather than explicit: it names, with
a characterizing attribute or two, objects seen, felt, heard, or
even smelled and leaves to the reader formulation of his emotional response. It mentions, for instance, two objects necessary for a poetic figure but refrains from expressing the simile
- an allusiveness of manner quite congenial to the modes of
the newer poets. Mr. Giles by explicitness reduces almost to
commonplace a famous poem by a contemporary of King
Alfred, on the Virtuous Wife: 2
Knowing, fair sir, my matrimonial thrall,
Two pearls thou sentest me, costly withal.
And I seeing that love thy heart possessed,
I wrapped them coldly in my silken vest.
For mine is a household of high degree,
My husband captain in the King's army;
And one with wit like thine should say,
'The troth of wives is forever and aye.'
With thy two pearls I send thee back two tears,
Tears that we did not meet in earlier years.
S Waley, More!franslations, 27; Lowell, 39; Obata, 83; Giles, 153. The metrical reflex on the dainty and childlike exuberance of the Palace Pleasures may likewise be observed in three renderings: Lowell, 12; Obata, 79; Giles, 152.
2 Chinese Literature, 176.




THE ASIAN LYRIC


253


Ignoring the banality of phrase in this, one can perceive that
there is metrical gain in Mr. Mathers' version,' which cuts
away material recorded perhaps even in an ideographic
language but which is, in its elliptical reticence, more like
other Chinese verse:
One moment I place your two bright pearls against my robe,
and the red silk mirrors a rose in each.
Why did I not meet you before I married?
See, there are two tears quivering at my lids;
I am giving you back your pearls.
No less difficult than the problem of metre is that of phrasing. How explicitly shall one phrase a similitude merely
hinted in the original? Here are three versions of Li-Po's In
the Mountains.' Mr. Obata does not seem even to juxtapose
the elements of the simile:
Why do I live among the green mountains?
I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene:
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
The peach trees are in flower and the water flows on...
The figurative parallel is faintly mirrored in Miss Lowell's
poem, Reply to an unrefined person encountered in the hills:
He asks why I perch in the green jade hills.
I smile and do not answer. My heart is comfortable and at peace.
Fallen peachflowers spread out widely, widely over the water.
It is another sky and earth, not the world of man.
The resplendent unreality of blossom suspended between a
real and a mirrored sky is made rather too explicit by Giles:
You ask what my soul does away in the sky;
I inwardly smile but I cannot reply:
Like peachblossoms carried away by the stream
I soar to a world of which you cannot dream.
Further, of the Chinese ideogram shall one translate the
commonest and most familiar prosaic significance, the meaning
which that image would suggest to the average unpoetic
Garden of Bright Waters, 71 (shortened from Thalasso, I65).
2Obata, 71; Lowell, 69; Giles, 155.




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reader, or seek in the image unusual suggestive notions wherewith to work a sort of poetic embroidery on the Chinese theme?
Shall one translate the word or the word and its connotations?
Half of poetic effect lies in connotation, but how many are
the possible connotations of an image? The modern translators, Miss Lowell especially, to whom the commonplace or
familiar is above all else anathema, have sought the exceptional, the unexpected, and always the specific and concrete.
The ideogram which to Mr. Waley means the fish's "native
pool" becomes for Miss Lowell "the whirled water of meeting streams"; to him "field and garden" represent characters
which to her image "the square enclosures of my field and
my walled garden with its quiet paths." One wonders if the
original always indicates some of the happy specificness of
the Imagist translator: "Wild bamboos slit the blue green of
the sky"; "The late autumn moon shivers along the little
ripples"; "A broken sunlight quavers over the southern
porch." Sometimes the term seems an intrusion of the wilfully recherche: "The writing of Li Po-hai... has the wide
swiftness of wind." Mr. Chang says' that the ingenuity of
the English translators often misrepresents the simple naturalness of the original: to Chinese feeling the supreme poetic
quality would seem to be that of securing from familiar material music and beauty. Shelley's semichorus, "Life may
change... " in the Revolt of Hellas contains not a word
that your Imagist poet would not shun as commonplace; but
it is one of the singing glories of English verse.
"The word or the word and its connotations"? Or even
a quite different word with the same connotations? Shall the
English poem bloom with the lan (and refer the reader to an
identifying footnote), or the 'epidendrum,' or the 'Spear
orchid'? Mr. Waley gives a haunting verse, a famous ancient


SHsin-Hai Chang, Edinburgh Review, July, 1922.




THE ASIAN LYRIC


'255


dirge sung at the burial of kings and princes, much like the
Coronach in T'he Lady of the Lake:
How swiftly it dries,
The dew on the garlic leaf.
The dew that dries so fast
To-morrow will fall again.
But he whom we carry to the grave
Will nevermore return.
Can the poetic mood survive the introduction of garlic? The
alternative is to omit specific reference and mention only the
dew on the leaf, or substitute a different leaf with poetic associations of transitory fame, the dew on the laurel. The
modern translators have taken on the whole the heroic course
of sticking to their text, which must remain "queer" and unpoetic until the familiarity of many generations may obliterate
the queerness and throw poetic associations about the word
now only exact or scientific.
What other course is possible with place names? Not one
of the strange syllables of Chinese geography has for us any
connotation whatever save oddity. Ludlow and Wenlock
almost instantly assume grave or lovely associations though
one knows actually not a place in Shropshire. Naishapur has
won its poetic aura. To other generations there may arise a
dim splendor of association in the simplest line of Chinese
verse: "The moon above the palace of Han and above the
land of Chin."
For only as one knows the same world of visual or audible
impressions that form the mentality of the poet will his words
evoke that echoing resonance of overtones which constitutes
more than half the eloquence of poetry. Till readers know
the names of Chinese geography or history-and the fauna and
flora familiarly, so that they do not seem terms of the sinologue; still more, until he commands a visual image of their
landscape, beasts, and vegetation, Chinese poetry can hardly
be rendered into English. The verses of Li-Po are full of the




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awe of cloud-crowned mountains overhanging sheer ravines
and of the grateful solemnity and loneliness of mountain outlooks. For all this the fit preparation is acquaintance with
the mystic Sung landscape painting, precious examples of
which may be seen in the museums of a land fortunate enough
to include among its citizens Weld and Fenollosa and Mr.
Charles Freer. The older poetry of the Celestial Empire is
filled with the alarms of war and peopled with war horses.'
For the ultimate service of poetic rendering that Mongolian
beastie is beginning to have reality for us, quite positive historic solidity and significance, such as was indicated in the most
suggestive chapter of the Cambridge Medieval History.' The
image of him, too, is becoming clearer. To the Kouyunjik
reliefs, on which the splendor of the war horse of the book of
Job is made visible, and to those spirited heads that rear their
roached manes from the angles of the Parthenon pediments we
now add as the third really great visual realisation of the
horse those sturdy and rotund Mongolian mounts incised in
the slate reliefs of the T'ang dynasty.3 The imagery that fills
Chinese poems with jade palaces and jade mountains and
waters and jade sky ought not, to a nation that may see the
Bishop jades in New York, finally to remain alien.
I Their neighing is a part of the imitative description of the old poets, a sound
which has defied transliteration into the language of any land, even Gulliver's. Miss
Lowell's beast appears to sneeze: "Hsiao, hsiao, the horse neighs"; which Mr.
Obata discreetly renders: "Our horses neigh softly, softly."
2 Vol. I, Chap. xii. Peisker, 'The Asiatic Background.
3 The same equine type appears in the Han slates (an example of which may be
seen in Boston) but the most beautiful is the memorial stone erected by the founder
of the T'ang (7th century) in honor of six steeds who carried him to various victories,
with their names, and their arrow wounds recorded. See Bushell, Chinese Art, I,
p. 33 and Fig. 18.




LYRIC- POETRY








LYRIC POETRY


By HAROLD DEWOLF FULLER
L YRIC poetry has in large measure been spared from the
blight of over-zealous scholarship by the difficulty to
define it. There used to be a legend at a certain university
that only two beings in the world knew what lyric poetry was,
God and Professor -; and that God would n't tell, and
Professor     could n't tell. Other forms of literature have
been searched and classified according to the well-known prescription for the study of types. But the lyric has presented
a smiling defiance to such treatment. It has a piquant quality
like life itself, springing up where least expected, a flower in a
cranny. Formerly it was thought sufficient to divide poetry
into epic, dramatic, and lyric. What was not the first two
was, generally speaking, the last. This was a good enough
working basis.
Recently scholars have taken to looking at the lyric more
narrowly. Professor E. B. Reed gives the following definition:
"All songs, all poems following classic lyric forms; all short
poems expressing the writer's moods and feelings in rhythm
that suggests music, are to be considered lyrics." Difficulty
arose when Professor Reed attempted to enforce his tests. He
accepted sonnets because some of them, notably in the days
of Elizabeth, have been set to music; yet Wordsworth's genius
was styled unlyrical because "he has not left us a single song."
And the book shows many other curious instances of selection
and exclusion. Professor F. E. Schelling's volume on "The
English Lyric" adds nothing new to the foregoing statements.
"The primary conception involved in the term 'lyric,'" he
says, "has always to do with song; and it is the song-like




260


H. DEW. FULLER


quality of the lyric that falls most conspicuously into contrast
with the epic or telling quality of narrative verse.... So,
too, the lyric is concerned with the poet, his thoughts, his
emotions, his moods, and his passions.... With the lyric
subjective poetry begins. The latest to match his skill with
this elusive type is Mr. Ernest Rhys,' the editor of Everyman's
Library: "Lyrical, it may be said, implies a form of musical
utterance in words governed by overmastering emotion and
set free by a powerfully concordant rhythm. So soon as narrator or playwright, carried out of the given medium of personal feeling, begins to dilate individually on the theme, that
moment he or she surely tends to grow lyrical." The musical
test, it will be noted, is abandoned in the second sentence,
where Mr. Rhys applies his definition; and, unless one must
infer that personal feeling in verse inevitably draws upon
music, it is of little practical use. The looseness of Mr. Rhys's
conception is quite typical of his practice. Beginning with
early forms which were certainly sung, he later accepts sonnets and certain dramatic soliloquies; but as if feeling guilty
over his small use of the musical requirement, he periodically
refers to an underlying "singing mode," "singing idiom," or
"hidden note." The early portion of the volume has to do
with metrical developments, especially the transition from
alliterative verse to rhyming schemes, and with the flexibility
bestowed on English poetry by borrowings from the French.
As the book progresses, its treatment may be described as
scarcely more than literary history.
I
I have no desire to hazard a new definition but merely wish
to consider whether the scope of lyric poetry is not immensely
different from that usually assigned to it. All may admit that
the lyric and song originated in much the same impulseSErnest Rhys, Lyric Poetry.




LYRIC POETRY


26I


the desire to express personal, often inarticulate, feeling; and
that the two may at times still be closely allied. It would
require no magic rod to strike a gush of song from the lyrics
of Burns, or from the light stanzas scattered through Shakespeare's dramas, even if the particular airs to which they were
set had been forgotten. But this is very different from implying such an accompaniment for all pieces that commonly
pass as lyrics. The discussion will be forwarded by a glance
at certain developments in music itself. Such is its present
state that critics would probably be as perplexed to agree on
what is meant by "lyric" in music as others are to say what
the word conveys as regards verse. Whereas formerly lyric
music must above all else have melody, some composers, notably
Debussy, are now depending instead on harmony, coloring.
When he wishes to describe the play of moonlight on the
water, Debussy resorts to a series of tinkles broken by syncopated glissandos and mingled with something like whispers.
His "Reflet dans l'eau" shows an entirely different treatment
from Nevin's woodland sketches. Both men have essayed to
speak for nature. The latter has made her tuneful, and in any
age would be accounted a true lyrist; Debussy, accepting certain features of nature as in themselves the embodiment of
lyric sentiment, has been content to decorate, to sophisticate.
He has replaced melody - one of the traditional marks of the
lyric--by dexterous harmony; and through this "programme variety of music has carried the lyric into close association with other musical types.
Manifestly, then, those critics who stick for a musical basis
of the lyric should distinguish the kind of music meant.
"Lycidas" suggests music no more strongly than many
portions of "Paradise Lost," or, if so, does not recall the pure
melodies which critics would still unite in terming lyrical. Nor
can much significance be extracted from the fact that the sonnet owes its form to a combination of stanzas which usually




262


H. DEW. FULLER


went with song, or that in some instances the sonnet itself
has received a musical arrangement. Certainly within the
last three centuries composers of sonnets could never have
had the thought of music in mind; and only such supersensitive ears as Mr. Rhys's could possibly discover a "hidden
note" of song at the bottom of, say, Shakespeare's lines
beginning
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
If they convey any note, it is Milton's epic organ tone. One
might go further and say that they are less lyrical as regards
pure sound than Macbeth's memorable lament after hearing
that his wife is dead. If by "musical basis" critics would
mean melodious song, they would have little difficulty in
classification, though this would exclude the majority of selections found in the "Golden Treasury."
In endeavoring to hold to a conception of the ancient Greeks
we have really confused their ideas. They recognized the
kinship of the lyric and song, though they did not use it as a
strict test, but also the more general relation of poetry and
music. If lyric verse was sung, so were the epic and large
portions of the drama, and the instrument of accompaniment
might, at least in the first two instances, be the same, the
lyre. Yet it is true that to most minds to-day the lyric appears to have a prior claim to a musical alliance. Partly this
is because it is the only one of the three poetic divisions which
continues to be set to music - a thoroughly arbitrary distinction. But more especially it is because the beginnings of poetry, like the beginnings of music, were "lyrical," in the sense
that they fell easily into the jingle of song. This must have
been the reason for the style, "lyric Apollo," to characterize
the god of poetry and music, who was rooted in their ancient
traditions. And down the centuries lyric verse and lyric music
have furnished enough examples of early uncomplicated melo



LYRIC POETRY


263


dies to keep the two, in human instincts, subtly bound together. "0 my luve's like, a red, red rose" has not advanced
far in rhythm beyond poetry, in an elementary stage, which,
of course, only heightens its homely freshness. The movement of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn" has no such implication, and though it might set an ancient Greek to chanting, it
does not so affect us moderns. In retaining, despite the inconsistencies of our practice, a musical basis exclusively for
the lyric, we are but emphasizing the stream of, as it were,
primordial poetry which still runs through it, though it also
runs through the drama and epic in less degree. It is heard
now and again in "Samson Agonistes" and in Homer's episode
of Nausicaa.
II
I have referred to a present tendency in lyrical music to
replace melody by skilful harmony playing over choice aspects
of nature. Something much akin to this has long been operative in lyric poetry. Off-hand one would not think of turning
to Petrarch for an illustration. Coming on the heels of the
troubadours, whose songs he laid under heavy contribution,
he would surely seem to give the strongest reinforcement to
the musical test. Nearly always there is music in his language,
and some of his stanzas were obviously intended to be sung.
But here again the test is not decisive, for his sonnets are no
more melodious than parts of Chaucer's narrative, such as the
lines
And smali foulIs maken melodye
That slepen al the night with open eye,
or than much of the "Divine Comedy." In the hands of all
three authors poetry of whatever type still betrayed its twinbirth with music.
Petrarch's greatest influence on others came undoubtedly
from his peculiar use of nature. It was not original with him,
but his expertness gave it the widest currency, and then and




264


264        H. DEW. FULLER


there created the nature cult which still has adherents. In
illustrating his love for Laura he connected her with nature's
treasury. Her curls were tossed by the gentlest breeze, the
laurel was instinct with her presence, the stars gained in lustre
by resembling her eyes, her footsteps consecrated the meadows., the flowers that brushed her were an inspiration henceforth, and a stream once visited by her thereafter murmured
music. Sappho had furnished charming natural settings, but
it was left to Petrarch to bring nature and love into fusion.
French and English caught up his manner until no mistress was
worthy if unattended by nature's store of tenderest fragrances,
colors, and sounds. The insincerity of many of these writers
does not remove the fact that nature was then made an almost
indispensable accompaniment of what passed as lyric poetry.
The thought of music might be absent from the poet, but
nature must in some fashion serve him. From continual use
in this way certain natural features came to have an almost
independent lyric value, especial 'ly the stars, the dawn, a
stream,, and flowers. Though the vogue of flower poems., such
as Spenser, Shakespeare., and Milton yielded to., was enhanced
by a special sentiment which each flower acquired., their main
effect was the sheer beauty bestowed by long lyric associations.
And in a more general way Spenser and later Thomson were
content to rest the value of whole lyric stanzas upon a lovely
array of sweet natural details.
Nor has the practice been neglected by more modern writers. In the case of "Fiona Macleod" it attained the proportions of a naturalistic re've. Individual details of nature had
received from centuries of poetic use (so we may suppose he
felt) such an accumulation of emotional value that merely to
pronounce their names was enough to furnish a lyric background; much after the manner of any catalogue of ships
which, ever since Homer's famous list, has been apt to start
in the mind a reminiscence of epic poetry. In not a few of his




LYRIC POETRY26


265


poems William Sharp gives little more than an enumeration of
these alleged lyric features, as in the following lines:
There is in everything an undertone...
Those clear in soul are also clear in sight,
And recognize in a white cascade's flash
The roar of mountain torrents, and the wail
Of multitudinous waves on barren sands,
The song of skylark at the flush of dawn,
A mayfield all ablaze with king-cups gold,
The clamour musical of culver wings
Beating the soft air of a dewy dusk,
The crescent moon far voyaging thro' darked skies,
And Sirius throbbing in the distant south,
A something deeper than mere audible
And visible sensations.
Sharp's tendency - which is shared by many, among them
Maeterlinck, I suspect - to see a "rainbow of feeling" in
any nosegay of nature is most similar, it must be admitted, to
Debussy's way of imputing subtle., fleeting emotions to his
formless chromatics. I have pursued this speculation to illustrate the danger of exalting a poetical accompaniment,
whether it be song or nature., to a test of type.
The other test usually employed to mark off lyric poetry is
personal, subjective emotion. Like many other words that
come trippingly from the tongue., these are meaningless unless
strictly interpreted. Taken to signify merely the language
of feeling, as they generally are, they lead nowhere. Is
Horace's pleasant quarrel with Lydia, is many a pretty trifle
by Austin Dobson, subjective emotion simply because both
poets have used words of the heart? Was Robert Herrick
subjective when he chaffered in the conventional conceits
of his day? Are we to ignore the fact that the troubadours
had a special motive for proclaiming a Blanche or a Diana to
be a nonpareil? And there is the whole class of so-called lyrics




266


H. DEW. FULLER


which retouch ancient mythology, such as the Anacreontic of
Cupid stung by a bee, whose sentiments are artificial by the
nature of the case. Are they, too, subjective?  But even
when held to denote the poet's expression of his own sincere
feeling, as I construe it, the subjective test furnishes no simple
rule of thumb; for how shall we be sure when a poet is feigning?
There is, for instance, the sonnet sequence of Thomas Watson, which he openly declared to be merely an exercise in a
fashion of the day. Now, oddly enough, it sounds in parts not
less sincere than similar works of his time: and probably
other writers, if pressed, would have had to confess that they,
too, were merely playing at a game. Nor is it reasonable to
accept, as Professor Reed would do, a sonnet as being necessarily a truer chart of an author's own sentiments than are
various lines in a play. If there was a Dark Lady, who shall
say that the views on life and death in "Hamlet" were not in
part the poet's own? If there is a ring of sincerity in the lines
of Sonnet LIV:
0! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
it appears to be present also in:
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
In attempting to reach a man through his works one has
to penetrate the veil of art, whatever the form of the poem
chosen. In any case, the author reacts poetically upon a given
theme or situation, and unless the poetical equation is clearly
understood, a critic would be rash to say that here the poet's
heart lies bare. Take an individual sonnet unconnected with
a sequence or a literary vogue. Its metrical arrangement,
especially in the Italian form, and its requirements of balance,
climax, and point are too complex, within such small compass,
to be adjusted readily to a poet's feeling without causing some




LYRIC POETRY26


267


sacrifice to art. Milton, determined to speak his mind on'the
atrocity at Piemont, in the sonnet commencing
Avenge, 0 Lord, Thy slaughtered saints,
almost broke down the sonnet structure, employing a loose
construction suggestive of Biblical utterance. Even while we
marvel at the happy result, the impression obtrudes that here
the art of the sonnet received the smallest toll on record. In
some other sonnets, Milton, supreme poet that he was, so
mastered the medium he worked in as to make his perceptions
seem spontaneous; and Keats undoubtedly had similar suc-.
cess. But this does not mean that the poetical equation is not
present for the critic to solve.
The mechanism of a sonnet may be thought of as an alembic which distils a poet's sentiments. Its effect is too subtle
to be often detected by the critic. Yet any one who has written a sonnet (as who has n't?) realizes that the mood in the
finished product is apt to differ from the original conception,
and that the transforming power of art is operative when least
we think of it. The predicament of the lyrist who would be
sincere may be illustrated by a modern tendency in the drama.
The desire to represent life on the stage exactly as it is brings
the finicky realist face to face with certain insurmountable
conditions of dramatic construction. There is the element of
time. Try as he will, he cannot make the stage square with
life. Crises do not form with the celerity of stage convention,
and in numerous other respects the dramatist of things as they
are has to admit himself balked.
This directing power of artistic form increases, naturally,
according to the intricacy of the type used. A drama or epic
may impose a large number of external conditions, and quite
conceal the author's own feelings. They are there, nevertheless, and could be sifted out if the laws of artistic construction
were accurately known. By contrast, the lyric in general puts
few restraints upon the poet. Particularly in open stanzas he




268


H. DEW. FULLER


would seem to have a good chance to express his very self.
The language of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud" is so simple and direct as to leave no doubt that it
came straight from the heart. But between the extremes represented by this poem and by such an impersonal performance
as an iEschylean play the degree of subjectivity varies so
much, whatever the literary form, as to make personal feeling
a tricky test of type. It is hard, for instance, to imagine
Wordsworth concealing his own feeling even in a drama. And
Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell" is in many portions as close an index
of his feeling as is his simplest lyric.
IV
Francis Palgrave, searching for a principle of selection for
his "Golden Treasury," held the term lyrical "to imply that
each poem shall turn upon a single thought, feeling, or situation." He ignored the tests of music and personal emotion and
included in his collection eminent poems of supposedly single
and continuous inspiration, in a word, all varieties of relatively
short poems. The soundness of his definition might be disputed on the ground that, Poe's well-known views notwithstanding, "Paradise Lost" is the embodiment of but a single
mood, albeit a huge mood. Yet if slightly arbitrary, Palgrave's distinction, which is based mainly on extent rather
than on kind, is immensely convenient in practice; and I
know of no other which would be usable for an anthology.
Looked at in the light of what has been said, the poems in
Palgrave's collection show, it is true, certain characteristics
which grow out of their brevity. Admitting that even a small
structure, like a sonnet, has its artistic alchemy, it naturally
lacks the resources of poetic works of considerable compass.
Why is it, for instance, that Desdemona's simple utterance,
"If you say so, I hope you will not kill me," is supreme poetry?
It is because these prosaic words are released from a situation




LYRIC POETRY


269


which has been long preparing and which in itself is surcharged
with imagination. Not being included in a plot, the lyric as
defined by Palgrave must depend much upon its surface value
- upon graceful conceits, poignant turns of thought, choice
of detail, and the piquancy of its seeming artlessness. It obviously has not the artistic framework to support any large
measure of sentences which, save for the metre, are prose.
So no one can conceive of a short poem including the following
passage from "All's Well that Ends Well":
O! were that all. I think not on my father;
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him: my imagination
Carries no favour in 't but Bertram's.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away.
Yet in their proper place in the play these lines are effective.
Not that the short lyric's appeal is always superficial. Though
superficial in artistry, it has in general been occupied with
ideas and feelings as old and deeply planted as life itself. Thus
the simple line, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," symbolizes a fundamental tragedy. And only the slightest poetic
heightening is absolutely required when the theme is a lyric
standby, owing to the carrying power of the implicit sentiment.
But richness of surface, though usually an essential of the
short poem, is not a safe distinction. Poets like Shelley would
never have been satisfied, even when writing drama, with
anything less than a succession of individually glowing lines;
and Milton and Shakespeare, while not given to Shelley's
excess of fancy, resorted to figures in many instances where
another might have used plain, dignified language, trusting
to the poetic structure to carry it. Shakespeare has, indeed,
many passages in his plays which bear a striking resemblance
to poems generally accepted as lyric. Take Macbeth's lament,
previously referred to:




270


270         H. DEW. FULLER


She should have died hereafter;
There would have been time for such a word.
To-morrow., and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Is this less "lyric" in effect than the following lines of similar
content in Pindar's eighth Pythian Ode?
In a little moment groweth up the delight of men; yea and in like sort
falleth it to the ground, when a doom adverse hath shaken it.
Things of a day - what are we, and what not? Man is as a dream of
shadows.
Even if we were to go back to the test of subjective emotion,
Macbeth's words would still qualify as lyric. The sharp situation in which they are uttered makes them appear to be entirely the expression of personal feeling.
It is quite possible that the lyric, except in Palgrave's
practical use of the term, means little more than a poetic
quality. It comes close to signifying what is conveyed by the
vague phrase "pure poetry." That is to say, when poetry is
manifestly functioning effectively - namely, distinguishing
itself from prose - it is lyric. This condition is not prescribed
necessarily by brevity, though it is obviously more difficult to
sustain poetry at great length. On the other hand, a plot may
at times furnish a lyric, or poetic, intensity hard to attain
in a short poem. Shakespeare and Milton, superb poets that
they were, contrived to be almost constantly lyric even while
they were, respectively, dramatic and epic.




LYRIC POETRY27


271


V
There is lyric form - in Paigrave's sense of a relatively
short poem - on the whole a natural distinction, since it describes a large body of poetic practice. And there is lyric sentiment, or coloring. The latter is so bound up with the very
nature of poetry that to isolate it is impossible.
Some such discussion of the lyric- as I have attempted here
ought,- if pursued further, to clarify opinions as to poetry in
general. Too often the complaint has been made that Pope,
for example, was not a true poet because he employed to so
great an extent the language of reason. In the first place, it
would be well for his critics to define this term " reason "; and,
secondly, to consider passages of his, not as detached units,
but as portions of large structures whose artistic effect Pope
relied upon very much. An examination of this kind would
greatly discredit the study of poetry in vacuo and the tendency
to overprize, especially in long poems, a glut of romantic
imagery.








"THE FORSAKEN MERMAN








THE FORSAKEN MERMAN


By HENRY GODDARD LEACH
R ETURNING to Harvard one autumn as a young instructor to assist Mr. Wendell in Comparative Literature 1, 1 was sauntering down Mount Auburn street trying to
look the full importance of my new office, when I was summarily arrested by a squad of exuberant sophomores, impressed only by my youth. One of them held before my eyes
a religious emblem, not a crucifix but a dainty waxen doll
provided with wings, angel's wings, and bearing a striking
resemblance to Miss Maude Adams's Peter Pan. The other
sophomores in an anxious but imperious chorus put to me the
question, "Do you believe in fairies? "
Needless to say I became an easy proselyte.
The human mind of all ages, when relieved of its critical
faculties, the folk mind, has believed implicitly in fairies. If
science succeeds in eliminating these shy co-inhabitants of our
world the human imagination will suffer keenly from the
withdrawal of its age-long solace. It may find new stimuli
in the performance of the electrons or the feeble voices cajoled
out of the ether by Sir Oliver Lodge, but there is an arid lack
of color and companionship about these new friends of man.
As children most of us have succumbed to the spell of the fair
ladies and gentlemen of the other-world, whether in the thrice
told tales of Andrew Lang, in Grimm's Mairch~n, or in those
stories of the world's greatest teller of fairy tales, that Danish
writer whose work has been translated into every civilized
tongue. This need be no cause for shame. Even in the ancient
classics, canon of sane, orthodox humanism and common sense,
we encounter the sea-creature, bright-eyed Thetis, who bore




276


276         H. G. LEACH


Peleus 's son, Achilles, swift of foot. We have all enjoyed amid
"Ccthe surge and thunder of the Odyssey" those pleasant
breathing spaces in his salty voyages when Odysseus tarries
to hold sweet converse for a while with some sea-nymph. His
sojourn on Calypso's isle has recently been celebrated in dramatic form by an English poet, Stephen Phillips. These ladies
and gentlemen of the deep were invoked even by a stern
Puritan poet., Milton, in his fairy masque Comus.
Sabrina fair, listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy cool translucent wave.
Since Milton's time, the new scholarship of Grundtvig and
Child and Kittredge has taken under its stern editorial patronage the thesaurus of mediawval fairydom in ballad and romance. One quest in particular has provoked the ardor and
competition of our young American doctors of the Science of
Modern Languages; that is the pursuit of the theme of the
fairy mistress and the fairy lover. This curiosity has been
fanned to fever heat by the publication from year to year of
the old Irish sagas. To these studies, too, Matthew Arnold's
essay on Celtic literature has been a stimulus. The Celtic
imagination, even to-day unusually buoyant, ran quite away
with itself in the Middle Ages, and few love stories were complete without the intervention of a half-mortal personage of
super-mortal power and attraction. It will be remembered
that the fifth of the eight races which invaded ancient Ireland
were the Tuatha de Danaan., who came in the year of the
world 3303 (pre-Darwinian count) or about two and a half
centuries before the Irish. These people were cunning magicians, and when at length they were conquered by the more
politically minded Irish they retired into the recesses of wild
nature and became gods and meddling fairies. The Irish hills
and the Gaelic seas were as full of fair ladies as the tempestuous waters of the Odyssey. There is a whole cycle of sagas
about voyages among them, called the Inrama, of which




THE FORSAKEN MERMAN


277


Tennyson's Voyage of Maelduin is a recollection. Fortunate
or unfortunate, as you please, was the Irish hero who was
spirited away by some lovely creature, to dwell a prisoner in
hill or isle, or even at the bottom of the sea. It was a lady
of arrestive eye who lured Connla the fair-haired overseas to
dwell with her on that blessed island of Moy Mell. On another occasion the over-king of Erin, Eochaid, saw by the edge
of a well a woman with a bright silver comb adorned with gold,
washing in a silver basin wherein were golden birds. "Etain
am I," she said, "Daughter of Etar, King of the Cavalcade
from the Elf Mound. I have been here twenty years, since
I was born in an elf mound, awaiting for you, my lover."
What orthodox Irish tradition did not know about such adventures Irish imagination was quite capable of inventing.
These glancing folk of the "Land of the Heart's Desire"
offer a welcome narcotic for the red-eyed reason of our own
day. Their lure has turned many a young American philologist from the straight path of Homer and Aristotle and the
contemplation of Tennyson and Browning to mount behind
the witch on her broomstick and to chase a fairy mistress
through the Celtic moonlight.
In British folklore, too, the fairy mistress has often appeared. Take the Scottish ballad of Thomas Rhymer and the
Queen of Elfland whom he mistook for the Virgin.
The lady rode, true Thomas ran
Until they came to a water wan;
Oh, it was night, and nae delight,
And Thomas wade aboon the knee.
It was dark night, and nae starn-light
And on they waded o'lang days three
And they heard the roaring o' a flood
And Thomas a waefou man was he.
Connected by many ramifications with all the lore of fairy
mistresses, mermaids, and mermen, is Matthew Arnold's poem,
7'he Forsaken Merman, published in the flush of his young man



278


H. G. LEACH


hood in 1849. Like some of Sappho's fragments in the Greek,
it is one of the few perfect poems in the English language. At
first thought the romantic theme of other-world love could
not have had a more unsympathetic artist than Matthew
Arnold, a man of humanistic training and exacting critical
judgment, a poet to consort with a classical muse or the genius
of melancholia, but not to take chances with an illusive merman. Arnold, apparently, like Milton and other rational
minds, believed in fairies. The poem is another proof of the
permanence of the sea creatures in artistic convention and in
popular belief.
The poem is a monologue on the part of the forsaken husband, who is represented as appearing in the surf off a whitewalled town on the coast of England, surrounded by his
children, whom he bids follow him motherless back to their
home at the bottom of the sea. His lament gives snatches of
his story. Margaret the mother, had been the Merman's
contented and faithful wife in their vaulted home in the sea,
until one day down through the water penetrated the sound
of a far-off church bell. Thereat the wife sighed and said that
she must go back to pray with her kinsfolk in the little gray
church at Easter time. He told her lovingly to go, but bade
her to return. They waited; the mother did not come back;
the father and children in anxiety rose through the surf, went
up the beach to the white-walled town, to the churchyard
where they clambered over the graves. Through the panes
they gazed up the aisle and saw where she sat by the church
pillar. The Merman called for her, "Margaret, come hither,"
but she gave them never a nod.
We read that in the British popular fancy mermaids have
always been familiar creatures; in fact several times they
have been exhibited in the shops of London. The London
mermaid of 1775 was the subject of drawings in "The Gentleman's Magazine." "This London specimen appears to have




THE FORSAKEN MERMAN27


279


been rather handsome; gifted with the face of a young woman,
it had light blue eyes, a small handsome nose, a little mouth,
with thin lips and small regular white teeth. Hands and arms
were well proportioned, but the fingers were without nails.
From the waist downward the body resembled that of a cod
fish." In Arnold's poem the mer-folk, however, are apparently not blessed with tails, but with two feet, as they are
enabled to walk on the grave stones. In London "The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers " have for supporters to
their arms a merman and mermaid, the latter of whom has
a mirror in her hand, but no comb. The Anglo-Saxon mermaid, it will be noted, is a comfortable, bulky personage,
compared to her Irish sister, radiant with Celtic glamor;
rather more like the mermaid found by our Dutch cousins at
Edam., where they make the cheeses. The famous Edam mermaid was seen struggling in the mud after an inundation in
1403, by some girls of the town of Edam, who were out in a
boat seeking their cows. She had come through a breach in
the dyke on the high tide. They pulled the strange newcomer
out of the mire, washed and cleansed her and conveyed her
to Edam., where she was clothed in their own garments. In
the course of time she was taught to dress herself, to spin, and
to make the sign of the cross. But it was found impossible
to teach her to speak, notwithstanding that she was taken to
Haarlem and placed under some learned men for that purpose.
She retained a great fondness for the sea and even for rivers
and canals, so that she had to be closely watched lest she
might plunge into them. A sober Friesland chronicler of 1 597
reasons that she was not a fish, because she could spin, and
she was not a woman, because she could live in the sea; ergo,
she must have been a mermaid.
Now the theme of Arnold's poem is in two respects somewhat rare. Here is a merman., instead of a mermaid; and,
pathetic fairydom!1 it is. the mortal who forsakes the fairy




"280


H. G. LEACH


mate. Margaret is not "a woman wailing for her demon
lover."
The tale of T'he Forsaken Merman as presented by Arnold
occurs perhaps in its simplest form not in English tradition
but far off on the borders of Russia and reappears in Slovene
and German ballads. From the German ballads about the
forsaken merman, perhaps, there developed in Denmark another version of the tradition, refined and idealized under the
subtler influence of popular Danish poetic environment. The
Danish version is more like the legend to which Arnold gives
expression, than are the Slavic and German accounts. In the
Danish and English poems the children stay home with the
merman instead of going ashore with the mother, as in the
German. He confronts her at church instead of at home.
Most of the Danish poems, like Arnold's, have lost all suggestion of violence. The merman does not win Agnete by
deceit but by the sheer charm of his personality. He does not
threaten the children, nor does Agnete return in answer to his
entreaties, but forsakes both him and her babe in the cradle of
the sea.
We miss in the Danish ballad, of course, the subtle weaving
which Arnold has shot into the narrative. Arnold begins
where the ballad leaves off. We miss climbing over the gravestones - Arnold's melancholy tombstone is an obvious heritage from English elegies - and the pensiveness of the wife
when
The spindle drops from her hand,
And the whizzing wheel stands stilla beautiful image inherited by Arnold from the classics and
related to Sappho's
Sweet mother, I can spin no more,
Nor ply the loom as heretofore
For love of him.
We miss again in the ballad the musical cadence and the
skilled manipulation of Arnold's metres. For all that, one is




THE FORSAKEN MERMAN28


281


astonished at the chastity, the restrained delicacy, the beauty
of this treatment at the hands of 'the folk,' more subtle often
than the work of the poet, subdued and also rnonochronied like
Danish character and Danish landscape. Is there anything
in Arnold's melodiously repeated complaint more affecting
than the short, sharp sting of those final verses of the Danish
ballad?
Li ke the red, red gold was his shining hair,
His eyes were full of sorrow and care.
Harken now, Agnete, harken unto me,
All thy little children are longing after thee.
Let them long as they will, yea let them long so sore
I shall return to them nevermore.
The conceptions of amorous mermen and mermaidens are
universal solvents for human grief and unsatisfied longing;
pure and clean, bathed ever by ocean floods, free from the
alloys of earth and its fret and decay, these creatures stand
out luminously, as incarnations of beauty, as ideal objects of
human love. Popular ballad and folklore may pass, but the
romantic mind will continue to employ this symbolism. The
biologist will leave his laboratory and, strolling in the moonlight along the Jersey beaches, will watch these carefree creatures disporting in the surf and envy the life of them that
neither toil nor spin, but play about at moonlight and sleep
at high noon in the sponges on the ocean floor. He will transfer to one of them his own private sorrow and experience relief.
We submit that the mer-folk still exercise their spell over
the unclouded athletic mind. Only the other day Alfred
Noyes in his Enchanted Island wrote about
The wild sea maiden
Drifting through the starlit air
With white sea-blossoms laden
And the sea scents in her hair.
Who knows but Beebe, the ornithologist, will find her fossil
remains in dragging the Sargasso Sea.




282


H. G. LEACH


Recently one of our million-edition monthlies staked its
commercial success for a season on a story which reclothed
the old myth of Wayland and his brethren who captured the
swanmaids into the remarkable adventures of shipwrecked
American athletes with the half-mermaid creatures of Angel
Isle - a tale said to be justified for its eugenic symbolism.
The fairies are not yet dead. The mermen have not all
been cast up to bleach upon desert shores. Whether or not
our minds work toward symbolism, we still find pleasure in
the pain of The Forsaken Merman, and have abundant sympathy for all lonely mermen in the sea or on dry shore who
are unfortunate enough to be jilted by the ladies of this rational world - for those who cry "with eyes full of sorrow
and care":
Here came a mortal
But faithless was she!
And alone dwell forever
The Kings of the Sea.




A NOTE ON YEATS








A NOTE ON YEATS


BY NORREYS JEPHSON O'CONOR
T   HE award of the Nobel Prize for Literature for I923 to
William Butler Yeats attracted attention to one of the
leading poets of the English-speaking world, the man who
stands in the popular imagination as the typical representative of the Celtic renaissance which began in 1889 with the
publication of Mr. Yeats's poem on an early Irish theme,
"The Wanderings of Oisin." It would be difficult to overestimate the service of Mr. Yeats to Ireland: he has reawakened enthusiasm for Irish traditions and for ancient Gaelic
literature; he has founded a distinguished national theatre
and to it contributed plays that have revived interest in
poetic drama. Yet how far he has made his writing representative of the purpose of the renaissance - a reflection of the
subject-matter, the beauty, and the characteristic style, of
the older Gaelic literature - is a question which may well be
reconsidered, now that he has recently collected and reefdited
his complete works.
The subdivisions of Later Poems bear the titles of the poet's
previous volumes of verse as published separately, from 7ihe
Wind Among the Reeds, of 1899, to Michael Robartes and the
Dancer, of 1921. In JIhe Wind Among the Reeds, which firmly
established the new movement, the opening poem deals with
the Fairies; in the group are references to "mother Eire," to
"Cathleen ni Houlihan," to "Angus," to "Cumhal"; the
distinct if not brilliant colors of Irish landscape form the background. But the rather casual verbal references and the general background scarcely provide sufficient material to make
the book really Irish. Upon the literary world of the eight



286


N. J. O'CONOR


een-nineties, such slight references to what was unfamiliar
made more impression than they do upon a public which has
learned something of Ireland's Gaelic heritage and has lived
through the Sinn Fein agitation. Stronger than the Irish
element in 1Jhe Wind Among the Reeds seems Mr. Yeats's personal predilection for the mystic and the occult; the "inviolate," the "incorruptible," Rose, the "Polar Dragon," the
"Horses of Disaster" are more emphasized than Gaelic Ireland and the heroes of Gaelic literature; to the mystic and
the decorative side of this book there is little, if any, parallel
in ancient Irish writing. The period of the publication of
T'he Wind Among the Reeds was one greatly influenced by William Morris and Walter Pater; Mr. Yeats could hardly be
expected to have escaped entirely the spirit of his time.
Since, even in 1899, the individuality of the poet was
stronger than the influence of national tradition, it is not surprising to find the preponderance of personality increasing
with Mr. Yeats's maturer powers. Ir was probably inevitable
that the original main purpose of the Irish renaissance should
have been obscured by individual poetic impulse. To restore
the old, to interpret a common ideal, is less interesting than
to express the new, the personal; poetry is stronger than
propaganda. The 1903-04 group in Later Poems includes
"The Old Age of Queen Maeve" and "Baile and Ailinn,"
poems of early Ireland; in the 1914 group "The Two Kings"
deals with one of the most lovely sagas, "The Courtship of
Etain." To compare this poem with the literal translation
in the Revue Celtique is to see how freely the poet has handled
his material; he does not attempt to reproduce the atmosphere
of old Irish civilization; he begins his story at a point after
the classic description of Etain by the spring, thus sacrificing
one of the most beautiful passages of "natural magic" in
Irish literature; with the "stag whiter than curds" and the
unicorn "In Africa on Mountain of the Moon" he goes out




ANOTE ON YEATS28


287


of his way to introduce the symbolic. A further comparison
can be made between "The Two Kings" and that earlier poem
founded on an Irish theme, "The Wanderings of Oisin."
Though Mr. Yeats in 1889 was none too close to his source,
yet he was more faithful in reproducing the spirit and the color
of Gaelic literature than in 1914: the colorful descriptions of
Fairies and Fairyland in "The Wanderings of Qisin" are a
contrast to what may be called the black and white of "The
Two Kings.''
The use of symbolism has grown with the poet's developing
personality; the Irish references are chiefly to friends and to
contemporary events, as in the memorial stanzas for Major
Robert Gregory, or "September, 1913"; this tendency produces the vagueness of the dialogues between "Robartes"
and other characters. The recrudescence of Ireland occurs
in a few poems inspired by the Dublin rebellion of 1916, but,
as everyone who has read widely in Irish literature knows,
the poetry of protest is of a different temper from that dealing with traditional themes and figures.
The evolution of Mr. Yeats's poetry is closely paralleled
by his progress as a dramatist. His first play in the new
Plays in Prose and- Verse is the early masterpiece, "Cathleen
ni Houlihan," which is more steeped in the atmosphere of the
literature of protest than in that of the older tradition. "The
Pot of Broth" is a comedy dealing with the credulity of country folk, a theme which applies as well to any other country
as to Ireland; "The Hour Glass" fully expresses Mr. Yeats's
love for the symbolic. Of the ten plays, six - seven, if
"The Shadowy Waters" be included-deal with distinctively
Irish themes, four of them being based on material from the
early Gaelic. Though the characters, and sometimes the
themes, are traditional, the playwright has modernized both:
in early Ireland the Arts did not need the defence given in
"The King's Threshold," where the ancient Irish practice of




288


N. J. O'CONOR


fasting as a means of distraint is made an element in a play
modern in tone; the Cuchulain of "On Baile's Strand" is
intellectualized as compared with the hero of the sagas; the
birds of "The Shadowy Waters" surely owe much to Mr.
Yeats's youthful friendship with that great Irish mystic,
A. E.; and "Deirdre" has a polished decorative quality prefiguring the oriental plays in which the playwright was later
to have so great an interest. Of the dramas dealing with
early Ireland, "The Green Helmet" is probably the best;
here the ruggedness and the humor have a suggestion of their
source, "The Feast of Bricriu," one of the most interesting of
the ancient tales - the element of magic introduced by the
three black hands is the most modern, and the only false,
element in the play. The verse form is also unusual, for the
dialogue is written mainly in rhymed alexandrines. The
symbolism of "The Unicorn from the Stars," in which the poet
worked in collaboration with Lady Gregory, undoubtedly is
due to Mr. Yeats, as the characterization of the country folk
is due to Lady Gregory.
Though Mr. Yeats's work both as poet and as playwright
has been less devoted to Irish subjects than might be supposed, yet it still has Irish characteristics, found in the mind
and the temperament of the author. Certainly no modern
writer of English has a greater "turn for style," which Matthew Arnold long since pointed out as a distinctive mark of the
Celt. There is pleasing fitness in the poet's cadences, which
always avoid monotony, and the vowel sounds are beautifully
modulated; no attempt to write rapidly has resulted in carelessness; Mr. Yeats has taken time to polish, to acquire the
art that conceals art. Not only his feeling for craftsmanship
but his imagination betray his heritage; his love for the
mystic and the occult is a modern expression of a love for magic
and for the grotesque that is a recurrent characteristic of the
ancient Gaelic; Cuchulain undertakes scarcely an adventure




A NOTE ON YEATS                   289
without being circumscribed by one prohibition or another,
and he is continually encountering' sorcerers and evil spirits.
Mr. Yeats's nationality is deeper than the mere use of
themes and characters; it is of the texture of his strong personality. Belonging to the company of Swift, Goldsmith,
Sheridan., he is as individual a writer as any whose work is
part of English as well as of Irish letters. To point out that
he does not owe so much of his fame to his choice of subject
as to his own genius, to show that the popular estimate of his
work is based partly upon misconception, is to do him no
injury; rather is it an indication that he is an outstanding
figure of his generation and assured of a permanent place in
literature. Though he may not be one of the great poets of
Ireland, he is a great Irish poet.








JOSEPH CONRAD, ALCHEMIST OF THE SEA








JOSEPH CONRAD, ALCHEMIST OF THE SEA'E
December 6, 1857 - Aeugust 3, 1924
By PERCY A. HUTCHISON
IT was in 1878 that there landed in the English North Sea
port of Lowestoft a lad, slight of build and rather short of
stature, who had been born in the Polish province of the
Ukraine nineteen years before. The lad's name was Teodor
Josef Konrad Korzeniowski. He was a shy boy, speaking no
English; but he was consumed with a devouring passion for
the sea and the ambition to ship before the mast under the red
ensign of the British merchant service. Masters of British
sailing ships cared little about the nationality or the speech of
those they signed; they were used to inarticulate foreigners
from the ends of the earth. If a man could keep his grip on a
bellying topsail when reefing down in a gale, and hold the
vessel on her course through the whip of a North Sea blizzard,
nothing else was of any moment; and the Polish lad already
knew something of seamanship, learned aboard French craft
in the Mediterranean and on two voyages to the West Indies.
He soon found a ship - the Lowestoft coaster, Skimmer of
the Seas. Her skipper's name has been forgotten long since,
and is scarcely to be come across unless in the yellowed pages
of some marine journal of the day, while that of Joseph Conrad
will endure so long as English literature is read. Strange
history for one of foreign birth - from forecastle to quarterdeck, and from command on the quarter-deck to a commanding position in the literature of an adopted land!
And yet this evolution, although unique, is far from inexplicable. On the contrary, it was as inevitable as is all evolu11Written at the request of the editor of "The International Book Review" for
a memorial article on Joseph Conrad, September, 1924.




294


P. A. HUTCHISON


tion. Granting, as of course must be granted, that the artistic
impulse was latent in Conrad from the first, his art and his
seafaring, instead of being the result of separate causes, will
be seen as the result of one single and all-dominating cause.
In an article which very likely will prove to have been his last
individual expression (it is understood that a work in collaboration remains), Conrad has himself furnished the key, the
master-key. The article will be found in The National Geographic Magazine for March 1924, the title being "Geography
and Some Explorers." The entire piece is significant, but
there is one passage which stands out, for it goes to the very
heart of all Conrad's psychology, all his philosophy, all his
living.
In 1888 Conrad, who had received his certificate as master
mariner a few years earlier, was in command of a sailing-ship
loading at Sydney, Australia, for Mauritius. "All of a sudden," he writes, "all the deep-lying, historic sense of the exploring adventures in the Pacific surged up to the surface of
my being. Almost without reflection I sat down and wrote a
letter to my owners, suggesting instead of the usual southern
route, I take the ship to Mauritius by way of Torres Strait.
I ought to have received a severe rap on the knuckles for submitting such an unheard-of proposition."
Dangerous waters, Torres Strait, for sailing-vessels, because
of the calms that prevail there; as dangerous, almost, as the
Sargasso Sea; and except for the Spanish explorer, Torres, for
whom the Strait is named, and James Cook, the English explorer, perhaps never traversed by any European sailing-ship.
Yet Conrad was bent on attempting the passage, and for the
reason, the sole reason, that in spirit he was one with the great
explorers who were dead; their imagination was his imagination, their courage his courage. "I was never lonely at sea,"
he writes in the same article, "because I never lacked company - the company of the great navigators."




ALCHEMIST OF THE SEA29


29S


So Conrad trimmed his sails and headed through Torres
Strait., for, instead of the expected "rap on the knuckles," his
owners gave him the permission he desired, merely adding,
somewhat plaintively, that they supposed he knew the insurance would cost them more. "It must have been a romantic day in the office of Messrs. H. Simpson & Sons," says Conrad. It must, indeed, when hardfisted owners would pay an
increase of insurance premiums that one of their captains
might take to dangerous waters merely to follow in the wake
of a navigator dead two hundred years! More probably they
thought him mad - as he was, with the madness of Columbus
and of Drake - and were already planning how they could
drop him from their service before he hatched further hare..
brained schemes. But can there be any doubt that in the
imagination which lay behind this request i 9s to be found the
master-key to Joseph Conrad? The Ulysses of Tennyson's
poem, about to set forth on his last voyage, is made to exclaim:
For my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Conrad would sail beyond the sunset; he would follow in the
wake of the great navigators, they who had marked out the
earth, and the waters thereof.
Yet, even as he entered Torres Strait he must have realized
the second-hand nature of his adventure, and that the baths of
all the western stars lay for him elsewhere. Already he had
started on his own voyages, those voyages of the mind, of
which each one of his books, each one of his short stories, is
the imperishable log. A power greater than himself, the
power of that expanding imagination which had compelled
him when a child to declare his intention of going to the Kongo,
which had compelled him, when a youth, to go to sea - this
power was already driving Conrad on to demand an ever
larger, more colorful, and freer world, the world of the crea



296


296P. A. HUTCHISON


tive artist, which for him meant the world of letters. At first
his writing had proceeded fitfully, and with many misgivings
on his part. But when he had finished 1i'he Nigger of the
Narcissus, he knew that he was done with the sea. "After
writing the last words of that book," he says in the foreword to
his American readers, "I understood that I was done with the
sea., and that henceforth I had to be a writer." And it is evident from this confession, supplemented as it is now by the
story of the incident of Torres Strait., that Conrad's evolution
was determined from the outset; and his history is seen., not
as two separated histories, but as one, the events of which,
from forecastle to pre~eminence as a writer, were necessitated
by his all-compelling imagination.
If we turn now from this larger question to a consideration
of Conrad's literary work itself, we shall find that work everywhere directly influenced by Conrad's years at sea. And this
is true not merely in so far as it relates to his selection of plot
and locale; the influence is seen also in the manner and the
method of his writing. A ship's captain is often spoken of as
being a czar; but the expression is inadequate. A ship's master has absolute power while at sea, short only of the power
over life and death; and in the old sailing days he not infrequently usurped this. But no monarch, not even the most
absolute, was ever obliged to match his cunning against the
powers of nature. The czar may have to cope with revolution - for which, in our microcosm of the ship, read mutinybut it is not laid upon him to scan through interminable hours
the inverted dome of the sky, or the restless surface of the
deep, lest he and the subjects of his care be overwhelmed.
Omnipotence, then, all but complete omnipotence within his
tiny, fload'ng world; and unremitting vigilance that that
world be not destroyed - the sea captain possesses one by the
right of command, and continued existence depends upon the
unremitting exercise of the other.




ALCHEMIST OF THE SEA                 297
Here, then, we see Conrad the master-mariner. Here also
is to be found Conrad the master-artist. No other novelist
has ever dominated more absolutely the "solidarity" (a
favorite Conradian term) of events and persons which is for
the moment the object of his literary solicitude. And no
other writer, not even excepting Stevenson, ever exercised
more unremitting vigilance. In the "supprest" preface to!~The Nigger, that preface (restored in the American edition)
which is Conrad's confession of faith, he has written: "It is
only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect
blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never discouraged care for the shape and ring of
sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to color;
and the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play
for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of
words, of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of
careless use."
Herein is the insistence on his right to power which Conrad
had learned at sea; and unfaltering vigilance. And here is
also one trait more of the seaman - unswerving devotion to
the idea of service.
Various attempts have been made to label Conrad. Some
critics have called him a romantic; others a realist. Some
have even dared the meaningless and monstrous paradox,
"romantic realist." It would seem that these critics either
have misunderstood their terms, or have failed to read Conrad with understanding. In no event can they have read the
"Preface," in which they would have found Conrad's own
words: "One can not be faithful to any one of the temporary
formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them - the truth
which each imperfectly veils - should abide with him as the
most precious of his possessions. But they all: realism, romanticism, naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism -
all of these gods must, after a short period of fellowship,




298


~98        P. A. HUTCHISON


abandon him to the stammerings of his conscience and to the
outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work."
Why should Conrad insist that no one of these formulas can
be more than a temporary guide? Again the answer is to be
found in his years at sea. Realism, romanticism, naturalism,
most of all sentimentalism - any one of these, exclusively
followed, leads in the end to falseness, to compromise, to
charlatanism. There can be no compromise with the sea; he
who navigates the oceans cannot be a charlatan and long survive. Again and again does Conrad emphasize this in his
writings. He brings the point home with sardonic humor in
T'yphoon. That story is Conrad's protest against the romantic view of the sea which prevails in popular fiction. Yet
Conrad had himself taken a romantic, even a sentimental,
attitude toward the sea in his youthful days. He admits as
much. But he felt this romantic and false worship slough
away when he came to realize the sea's cruelty. As junior
officer he had charge of one of two boats sent to rescue the
crew from a sinking bark. The incident is related in T'he
Mirror of the Sea: "On that exquisite day of gentle, breathing peace and veiled sunshine perished my romantic love for
what men's imagination had proclaimed the most august aspect of nature.... I looked with other eyes upon the sea
0 &. the true sea, the sea that plays with men's hearts until
they are broken, and wears stout ships to death."
And again, in TJhe Nigger, there are the words which
Conrad puts into the mouth of Old Singleton, one of the foremast hands: "He looked upon the immortal sea with the
awakened perception of its heartless might; he saw it unchanged, black and foaming under the eternal scrutiny of the
stars; he heard its impatient voice calling for him out of a
pitiless vastness full of unrest, of turmoil, and of terror."
Joseph Conrad lost his romantic love of the sea when his
illusions as to the sea were swept away; but he ever acknowl



ALCHEMIST OF THE SEA29


299


edged the fettering power of fascination which the sea exercised over him; the only difference being that for romantic
worship he substituted respect- that respect and humbleness
of spirit which is the deepest part of religion.
Conrad, then, is not a "romantic realist," or a "realistic
romantic," for these terms are meaningless; they are also an*
insult to the memory of one whose vision of the truth- in
life as in art - while embracing all formulas, looked through
them all to the clear light which they obscured while revealing. Yet Conrad, in his art, combined both realism and romanticism. To romance he gave the solid foundation and the
dignity of realism; his realism he shot through and irradiated
with the color and the glow of romance. In this lies the uniqueness of his literary work, which, taken in its entirety, will
probably never be equaled in gorgeousness of pageantry combined with profound knowledge of man's soul. And the secret
of Conrad's alchemy, the solvent which he applies to life and
to art, he drew from out the sea. It is the distillation of his
knowledge of the sea.








STELLIGERI
A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY








STELLIGERI
A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY
BY EDWARD EYRE HUNT
"In the class lists the names of the dead were prefixed by asterisks. In
the final summary, the number of the dead was defined thus: E vivis
cesserunt stelligeri. - They that bear the stars have passed from among
the living.... To all of us who cared for the old catalogues, the dead
men of Harvard were always stelligeri - they that bear the stars." (Stelligeri and Other Essays concerning America.)
A S a man of letters, a "rhetorician and literary critic" as
L  he called himself, Barrett Wendell might have been
expected to confine himself to literature; perhaps a few excursions into the general field of education would have been
permitted him; but what is one to think of his persistent intrusion into a wholly alien field - the field of political theory?
And as if this were not strange enough, one finds him choosing for cultivation and defence in the field of politics a topic
which one might think most antipathetic to him, namely, the
popular dogma of democracy. He first came to the defence
of the democratic creed in Stelligeri and Other Essays concerning America (1893); again at length in 1The France of To-day
(1907); at still greater length in Liberty, Union, and Democracy--the National Ideals of America (1906); yet again in
The Privileged Classes (1908); and it colored his Literary
History of America (1900oo) and The Mystery of Education
(1909).
In the first of these- Stelligeri - he makes a stirring
avowal: "We may lament as we please the follies and the
errors of the thousand-headed populace who stand for us in the
place traditionally held in history by consecrated sovereigns,
but each of us would still rather live and die a citizen than even




304


E. E. HUNT


the proudest subject. Whoever does not feel this spirit in
himself cannot know., in his inner heart, what the name Amenican means.1
Of course he deals with the democratic dogma in his own
inimitable way. He provides it with a proud ancestry, but
an ancestry that is purely American. He believes there was
something indigenous, almost spontaneous in its origins.
"By the time of the American Revolution. 0. something
like a democratic system had become traditional throughout
the colonies," he says.': And he defends the popular creed just
because it is traditional.
The language of American democracy may be radical, he
explains, but the thing in itself is conservative. " So far as
one can define the term 'democracy,' it means here, as everywhere else, the rule of the people. 0. To Europe the rule
of the people means something gloriously Utopian. To America, this rule means something immemorially familiar. " 2
"A curious fact results. When revolutionary America,
full of the enthusiasm of the later eighteenth century, -echoed
back the French philosophical declarations of the rights of
man, it used concerning liberty, terms which still sounded
radical and destructive. At the same time, the democratic
generalizations of revolutionary America really proclaimed
no unprecedented policy, hostile to the form of government
under which the revolutionists had hitherto been living.
Rather, in the case of democracy as truly as in that of liberty,
the living strength of revolutionary America lay in its determination to maintain unchanged a system of customary law
and of established government which had already proved immemorially favorable to American prosperity and American
righteousness."3
"Radical., then, as the terms of our democratic assertion
must always sound, radical as our revolutionary forefathers
Liberty, Union, and Democracy. 2Ibd 3Ii.




A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY                 305
may have believed themselves in the heat of conflict, the
fervor with which those idealistic yet orderly ancestors of
ours insisted that we must maintain a democratic system of
government was really, like so much else in their conduct, an
evidence of their political conservatism."'
In his Literary History of America, he has rephrased this
conception of our democracy in the skilful repetitive way
which never grows tiresome though he say the same thing a
dozen times. "France was... blindly developing that abstract philosophy of human rights which less than twenty
years later resulted in the tragic convulsions of the French
Revolution. The fascinating commonplaces of this philosophy
were eagerly welcomed in America, where they have been
popularly repeated ever since. From that time to this, indeed,
American talk has been so radical that comparatively few appreciate how slightly all these glittering generalities have
really distorted American conduct from the good old principle
that human rights are those which experience has proved
beneficial."
What, then, is this traditional democrary to which he renders allegiance? Mr. Wendell defines it thus: "Democracy
with us... is not the tyranny of any one class over any other,
but the consent of all classes - none secured by inflexible
privilege - to exist together under a system trusted by all
to act as guardian and agent of their common welfare....
A true democracy... must tolerantly include all manner of
men." 2
If in the pages to follow I seem to take too seriously the
political utterances of Mr. Wendell, my excuse is that another
"mere professor" of the generation to which he belongs, used
this same doctrine as a fighting slogan and by its means substantially contributed to the winning of the World War. If
the doctrine so enunciated was misunderstood; if the peoples
ILiberty, Union, and Democracy.  2!he France of 'o-day.




306


E. E. HUNT


of Europe were disheartened by the difference between the
democratic faith of the late President Woodrow Wilson and
his works, I believe that study of the writings of Mr. Wendell
might have been of more value to them than the utterances
of the President himself in understanding what an American
of the generation now passing may mean when he professes
the democratic creed.
But fascinating as this subject is, my purpose is to deal with
a very different question.
The democratic creed of tolerance and inclusiveness has
now been tested by three centuries of American history. Its
peculiar traditional and conservative character lays it open
to special weaknesses in time of stress. The development of
modern industrialism is one of these stresses. War is another.
Because of the far-flung character of the World War and the
long period of suspense before America entered the fight, that
period as well as the period of our participation was highly
important in the illumination of the democratic dogma. Hence
I have chosen to test this American credo, as enunciated by
Mr. Wendell and given world-wide prominence by President
Wilson, by contrasting with it the ideals of two of Harvard's gifted sons who died in the war. Others than these
might have been chosen who would have illustrated ideals
more nearly like those of the majority; the plain wooden
crosses in French and Belgian burial grounds cover men whose
hearts were equally warm and whose purposes were equally
high. But these two were men already marked out from the
mass of humanity. They came of old American stock; they
were educated at America's foremost university; they were
men of mark and distinction. They did not die for democracy; they did not die for America. To me it has always
seemed a matter of moment that they gave their lives for
alien principles, alien traditions, alien purposes, and alien
lands. One of them sleeps in northern France; the other, in




A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY30


307


Red Russia. Both were my friends and my classmates, and
both were pupils of Mr. Wendell.
I
Alan Seeger was conspicuous at Harvard. In thought, word,
and deed he was different from his fellows. His appearance
was striking. He made it more striking still. He was very
tall, his hair was jet black, remarkably thick and straight,
his eyes had a peculiar liquid look, and his face was a beautiful oval.
He lived in an atmosphere of mediaeva1 romance, such as
would have delighted Keats and Shelley. It was devotion to
the past so poignant that one wondered how he could ever
live in the modern work-a-day world.
One of his letters describes this period: "As you may remember., in the years when I was at college, I was a devotee of
Learning for Learning's sake.. *. I led the life of an
anchorite. At an age when the social instincts are usually
most lively I came to understand the pleasures of solitude.
My books were my friends. The opening to me of the shelves
of the college library, a rare privilege, was like opening the
gates of an earthly paradise. In those dark alleys I would
spend afternoons entire, browsing among old folios, following
lines of research that often had no connection with my
courses, following them simply for the pleasure of the explorer
discovering new countries. I never regret those years. They
made their contribution. Their pleasures were tranquil and
pure. Their desires were simple and all the means of satisfying
them were at hand.
"But my hedonism, if such it may be called, was not superficial like that of so many., to whom the emotional means only
the sexual. I was sublimely consistent. For seeing, in the
macrocosm, all Nature revolve about the twin poles of Love
and Strife, of attraction and repulsion, so no less in the micro



308


E. E. HUNT


cosm of my individual being I saw the emotional life equally
divided between those two cardinal principles. The dedication to Love alone, as Ovid prettily confesses his own in more
than one elegy, is good as far as it goes, but it only goes half
way, and my aspiration was to go all the gamut, to 'drink
life to the lees.' My interest in life was passion, my object to
experience it in all rare and refined, in all intense and violent
forms."
Such a man could not exist successfully in the modern world.
After graduation he stayed for a time in New York, and one
of the legends about him at which we laughed immoderately
was the story of his first love affair. In order to make a proper
sacrifice for the young lady, he signalized the declaration of
his love by giving up the precarious job on which he was absolutely dependent. The young lady could not appreciate
this romantic type of sacrifice; poor Alan was rejected, and
thrown on the town.
These gay rhymes describe him:
A timid footstep, - enter then the eager
KEATS-SHELLEY-SWINBURNE-MEDIAEVAL-S EEGER;
Poe's raven bang above Byronic brow,
And Dante's beak, - you have his picture now;
In fact he is, though feigning not to know it,
The popular conception of a poet.
Dreaming, his eyes are steadily alight
With splendours of a world beyond our sight;
He nothing knows of this material sphere, -
Unwilling seems, at times, to linger here;
Beauty is all his breath, his blood, he says, -
Beauty his shrine, and Love its priestesses.
Wildly he talks, with solemn, bell-like voice,
In words that might have been old Malory's choice.'
A somewhat happier period of his life came when he went
to Paris in 1913 and buried himself in that congenial city.
It was his love for Paris - personified, of course, as a woman
- which led him to enlist in the French Foreign Legion in
I John Reed, The Day in Bohemia, or Life Among the Artists, 1913, p. 42.




A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY


309


the third week of the war. His sentimental and romantic
nature here found its fulfilment. His reasons for enlisting
he explained on several occasions: always in the simple terms
of a lover fighting for his lady, or a son for his mother. And
his tolerance for the German point of view was simple and
instinctive.
But there was something else in the instinct which sent him
to the front. "People war because strife is the law of nature
and force the ultimate arbitrament among humanity no less
than in the rest of the universe," he wrote, describing the
thoughts of a sentry. "He is on the side he is fighting for,
not in the last analysis from ethical motives at all, but because destiny has set him in such a constellation." The sense
of his responsibility is strong upon him. Playing a part in the
life of nations he is taking part in the largest movement his
planet allows him.
"He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed necessary
place in the conflict of hosts, and facing the enemy's crest
above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he
feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before
known, a kind of companionship with the stars!
"This life agrees with me; there will be war for many years
to come in Europe and I shall continue to be a soldier as long
as there is war." I
I do not suppose in all the armies there was such another
paladin. The pure poetry in his makeup was never more
evident than in this. He could even write: "Perhaps historic fatality has decreed that Germany shall come out of this
struggle triumphant and that the German people shall dominate in the twentieth century as French, English, Spanish,
and Italian have in preceding centuries. To me the matter of
supreme importance is not to be on the winning side, but on
the side where my sympathies lie. Feeling no greater dignity
Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger, 1917, p. 38.




310


310          E. E. HUNT


possible for a man than that of one who makes himself the
instrument of Destiny in these tremendous moments, I
naturally ranged myself on the side to which I owed the
greatest obligation. But let it always be understood that I
never took arms out of any hatred against Germany or the
Germans, but purely out of love for France. The German
contribution to civilization is too large, and German ideals too
generally in accord with my own, to allow me to Join in the
chorus of hate against a people whom I frankly admire., It
was only that the France, and especially the Paris, that I love
should not cease to be the glory and the beauty that they are
that I engaged."
That word "glory" is also typical. In his diary he sets
down his dream of the triumphant French army entering an
ancient city of northern France, and the climax is reached
in a description of " the winged figure that her soldiers love
to picture at the head of their victorious battalions - la
Gloire!"% I do not recall in any American recruiting poster, or
appeal for war loans, or military communique'. or speech in
Congress, or note of President Wilson, one reference to
"glory." To the American people the war was not glorious.
To Alan Seeger it was.
He knew nothing and cared nothing for democracy. He
instinctively revolted from its works. In a sonnet to Sidney
he says:
I give myself some credit for the way
I have kept clean of what enslaves and lowers,
Shunned the ideals of our present day
And studied those that were esteemed in yours...
And lived in strict devotion all along
To my three idols - Love and Arms and Song.'
In his published diary and letters there is never a sign of
political emotion. The unique insulation of his poetic mind
kept him in a curious degree "unspotted from the world."
IPoems of Alan Seeger, 1916, p. 145.




A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY


311


Unlike the other soldier-poets, he did not record disappointments, doubts, despairs, rages,, horrors, self-abasements. In
the midst of strife he was at peace.
On April 2, 1917, addressing the Congress of the United
States, President Woodrow Wilson declared: "We shall fight
for the things which we have always carried nearest our
hearts - for democracy." Those ringing words would have
found no echo in the dead heart of Alan Seeger. He was killed
on July 4, 1916.
The manner of his death has been fittingly told. Two
battalions of the Foreign Legion were to attack Belloy-enSanterre. It was late afternoon. The companies forming
the first wave were deployed in the plain, Alan Seeger's one
of them. "How pale he was! His tall silhouette stood out
on the green of the cornfield. He was the tallest man in his
section. His head erect, and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed." He fell mortally wounded,
and his comrades swept by him.
They did not find his body until morning. Legend has it
that his rifle was standing with bayonet fixed in the earth.
The corpse was mother-naked. He had stripped off his
clothes, with poetic ritualism, and went from the world as he
came into it.
His citation reads in part: "Jeune legionnaire, enthousiaste
et energique, aimant passionnement la France.... Glorieusement tombe le 4 juillet, i916."
II
John Reed was a college celebrity. His virile, humorous
personality was one of the best-known in Harvard in his
undergraduate days. Born of old American strains, respectable, conservative - New England at its best - and yet
himself a product of the great Northwest; large, athletic,
exuberant, always smiling, he plunged into everything which




312


E. E. HUNT


Harvard offered. He wrote plays, poems, and humorous skits;
he swam; he "managed" college activities; he was Ibis of the
Lampoon and editor of the Monthly; his lyrics for the Hasty
Pudding show are still sung; he was a cheer-leader at football
games; he delivered the Ivy oration. There was something
Elizabethan in his huge vitality. He loved life.
And through everything he did there ran a strain of the
grotesque which turned the most serious event into laughter.
The college authorities were compelled by his pranks to revive the archaic punishment of rustication, a kind of academic
jail sentence, the first of his innumerable incarcerations.
After graduation Reed was locked up in the jails of France,
Spain, and Italy, and with each mad adventure the delighted
laughter of his friends grew louder. We always expected him
to ruin himself, but he never quite did it.
He returned to America and hurried to New York determined to make a million dollars and to marry a French girl.
In six months he had given up both the million and the fiance-e.
"Everyone" knew Jack Reed. He was the sort about whom
legends breed. He could not be ignored.
He joined the staff of a popular magazine. He roamed at
will through the various little worlds which go to make up
the universe of New York, everywhere at home, everywhere
welcomed and made much of. The world of the writers and
artists was his birthright, but he played with the Anarchists,
the Socialists, and he knew the byways of the demi-monde.
He lived in Greenwich Village and loved it. I quote from one
of his gay lyrics:
In winter the water is frigid,
In summer the water is hot;
And we're forming a club for controlling the tub
For there's only one bath to the lot.
You shave in unlathering Croton,
If there's water at all, which is rare, -
But the life is n't bad for a talented lad
At Forty-Two Washington Square!




A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY


313


And he hated pretence. This is how he describes a group of
Greenwich Villagers:
A lofty, skylit room,
Each window draped, and dusky as a tomb;
On a brass tripod Chinese punk doth smell,
And scented candles stink and fume as well;
Surely no fresh air ever enters here.
This must be the Artistic Atmosphere.
A clack of squabbling voices smites the ear.
Dim in the murk the other cranks appear;
SHAEMAS, who out-revives the Celt revival,
Considers Synge an upstart and a rival;
STREPHON, who sings of Youth, and Wind, and Flowers,
The Open Road, and Vagabonds, for hours;
Cries "Back to Nature," goes without a hat,
And - never stirs from his steam-heated flat!
Anear him CHLOE, in a pastoral dress,
Which cost at least three hundred flat, I guess,
Revolves her onyx eyes with some success;
She wields no brush, manipulates no lyre,
Her job in life is simply to Inspire...
And here's the RIcH MAN, fidgetting beside us,
Who tries to be Maecenas, - and is Midas;
And from his talk, it presently appears
That every Midas has an ass's ears!
And all about, a dozen curious females,
Who would be, and again would never be males;
The mild, the violent, the stout, the thin, -
One cup of Oolong makes the whole crowd kin.!
Of course the magazines published his poems and sketches,
and he wrote a play performed by a club of magazine men,
satirizing their venality, calling it Every Magazine --an Immorality Play. He reported the great strike in the Patterson
Silk mills, was jailed, and when released he staged a pageant
benefit with twelve-hundred strikers as the actors. He reported the Mexican revolution, and published a book about
Villa. He reported the coal strike in Colorado.       When the
World War broke out, he had already won his spurs as a correspondent and was one of the best-known and best-paid
newspaper writers in America.
John Reed,!The Day in Bohemia, or Life Among the Artists, 1913, pp. 30, 31.




314


E. E. HUNT


Along with this crescendo of reportorial success had gone a
deepening of the instinct of revolt which had led him in Harvard to join the Socialist club and to be the champion of
various unconventional movements. He was a revolutionist,
and Socialism rationalized his instinct for change. He revolted at exploitation in every form, and if his reasoning was
superficial, his feelings were not. The poet, the adventurer,
demanded life in greater and greater abundance. He wanted
worlds to conquer, but he wanted them for others as well as
for himself.
He was one of the founders of the Masses (later the Liberator), and in the midst of his lucrative work for the magazines
he always found time to send his best to this struggling publication. The creed of the Masses was Socialism. But what
Reed contributed to the paper was not propaganda; it was
art.
When the war began, he went abroad. As war correspondent
for the Metropolitan magazine he visited every battle-front
and every belligerent country in Europe. But his course as
correspondent was quickly run. Sir Philip Gibbs waited
until after the war was over to write Now it can be T'old; John
Reed could not wait. He hated the war. He found it "dull;
it was n't interesting." He wrote a book about it, and in this
book one finds a fateful reference to "the mysterious and violent spotted fever, which kills fifty per cent of its victims, and
whose bacillus no man had then discovered." It was the
spotted fever which killed him.
When America entered the war, Reed was an out-and-out
pacifist. He fought American participation. Propaganda.
took possession of his work. A sample is this:
Hip! Hip! Hurray!
New York, April I i, - Louis Feuerstein, 76 years old, was shot through
the heart and killed instantly, yesterday, by a soldier stationed at Park
Avenue and II4th Street. The old man did not obey the soldier's command to stop.




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315


"The war for democracy has begun. The first shot has
been fired, the first blood shed, in our righteous war for liberty
and the rights of small nations....
"Let us be thankful that the discipline of our soldiery left
no question in the mind of this brave soldier as to what his
duty was. If he had any doubts he suppressed them, and repeating to himself the eloquent words of President Wilson's
War Message, he raised his gun and took steady aim. 'Make
way for liberty!' he said, and pulled the trigger."
He threw himself into radical movements. When the Bolshevik revolution came, he was in Petrograd, and here he
found a congenial task. "This morning I was at the scene of
the dispersal of the junkers defending the Winter Palace by
the Soviet troops. In the afternoon I was present at the opening of the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets. In the evening I
witnessed the assault on the Winter Palace, entering with
the first Bolsheviki troops," he wrote. This was life! To him
this war had meaning. But what he was now writing was not
art; it was only propaganda. The artist was stifled.
He returned to America, to find himself in grave trouble
with the State Department and the police. The Bolsheviki
appointed him their consul-general in New York. He was
one of the organizers of the Communist Labor Party. He was
indicted, tried, and acquitted; indicted again, but not tried,
because he had already left America in another effort to get
to Russia. The war was not yet over for Russia and the
border states. In I92o the cordon sanitaire was still in force.
No medicine, surgical supplies, or food could pass, and the
sick died for want of simple things.
Reed was arrested and imprisoned in Finland. Only after
long delays he again reached Red Russia.
He returned "older and sadder and grown strangely gentle
and aesthetic." The cruel Russian winter had not yet begun,
but starvation stalked abroad, and with starvation strode that




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316          E. E. HUNT


grimmer specter, the typhus. His clothes were in rags; he
refused to be better clad than his Russian comrades; he had
reached "the pinnacle of fervor." Three months' solitary
confinement in the Finnish jail, where he had only raw fish to
eat, had wasted his athletic frame to a shadow. He fell ill.
She who was dearest to him has written that in cases of
spotted fever " the patient wastes to nothing under your eyes."
In those anguishing twenty days "his mind was full of poems
and stories and little beautiful thoughts.... He would
tell me the water he drank was full of little songs."
He had once written a poem called "Fog":
Death comes like this, I knowSnow-soft and gently cold;
Impalpable battalions of thin mist,
Light-quenching and sound-smothering and slow.
How vast your voice has grown
That was so silver-soft;
Dim dies the candle-glory of your faceThough we go hand in hand, I am alone.
Now love and all the warm
Pageant of livingness
Trouble my quiet like forgotten dreams
Of ancient thunder on the hills of storm.
How loud, how terribly
Aflame are lights and sounds!
And yet beyond the fog I know there are
But lonely bells across gray wastes of sea.'
So he died in Moscow, an outlaw., a man wanted by the
police., on October 17, 1920.
In the old cemetery under the ancient Kremlin wall, in
ground once sacred to the Romanoffs, the soldiers of the Red
Army laid him. They said to one another, "He came all
the way across the world for us." They could not know
across how many worlds he had come.
TCopyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.




A FOOTNOTE ON DEMOCRACY


317


III
In a recent volume called Civilization in the United StatesAn Inquiry by Thirty Americans, edited by a son of Harvard
who believes as ardently as Reed and Seeger that beauty and
liberty are to be found abroad but not at home, there is a call
for a general revision of our standards. The work is a symptom of a widespread feeling that neither tolerance nor inclusiveness are longer to be found here. Generous-minded
young men fly from Main Street to the boulevards, and we
do not lack apologists for Bolshevism.
But these emotional revolts are not the whole story. The
world everywhere is in rebellion against the democratic creed.
Everywhere there is skepticism and pessimism regarding the
aims, the methods and the institutions of political government. Written constitutions, elective asemblies, government
by discussion-- these are viewed with indifference if not with
contempt by inert majorities, while militant minorities
openly flout them.
In nation after nation the storm has gathered. Communism, it is true, has not spread much beyond the confines of
Russia, but the Soviet Government has maintained itself with
conspicuous strength while constitutional governments have
shifted and fallen. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" is
paralleled elsewhere by dictatorships of an equally sinister
sort, equally fatal to democratic principles. Italy has her
Mussolini; Hungary, her Horthy; Greece, her Pangalos; China,
her Chang Tso Lin; Spain her Primo de Rivera. France has
shown signs of coesarism, and Germany has only the shadow
of a democratic government. The British Empire throughout
seems in the throes of change. Our own America has been
profoundly shaken by obscurantism and reaction. Bolshevism,
Fascismo, camelots du roi, tuchuns, juntas, Ku Klux Klan -
these are names which stink in the nostrils of one who believes
in democracy.




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E. E. HUNT


IV
What the true American democracy is; what the indigenous
culture of America is to which we give our allegiance, another
has said more competently than I can do. Horace M. Kallen,
in Culture and Democracy in the United States, a book which is
dedicated to the memory of Barrett Wendell, develops the
creed of tolerance and inclusiveness. He asserts that it "is
founded upon variation of racial groups and individual character; upon spontaneous differences of social heritage, institutional habit, mental attitude, and emotional tone; upon
the continuous, free and fruitful cross-fertilization of these by
one another...
"From the days when the New England school first turned
its heart to Europe for spiritual sustenance and workmanlike
guidance to the days when all the cultural enclaves of Europe
began to make a new life upon the North American continent,
the culture of the United States has gathered volume and headway; has gathered variety, color, and significance. It has
gathered them because, regardless of the compulsions toward
uniformity that have periodically swept like tides over the
nation, the spacious continent has permitted the spontaneous
self-rooting and automatic growth of differentiated communities and the free flow, impact, compenetration and reordering
of spiritual values between them. It has gathered them because in the spaces of the continent democracy could not but
prevail, and the lives of cultural groups retain their integrities even as the lives of individual spirits.
"This democracy - in character and constitution social
and intellectual rather than political - for its principle is,
not one man one vote, but one temperment, one point of
view, one vote - is that which is to-day at stake in the
United States. It lies - as the history of culture of any land
makes amply clear - at the foundation of culture every



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319


where. It is the indispensable prerequisite to the existence
and growth of culture in the United States. In manyness,
variety, differenti~ation., lies the vitality of such oneness as they
may compose."~
This is the ideal and this is the reality, obscured and disfigured as it was by the war. To flee this America, as Reed
and Seeger did, is not to save one's soul alive. Here, if anywhere, is to be worked out the fundamental difficulty of democracy - namely, -that tolerance and inclusiveness are not only
a philosophy or a form of government, they are a way of life.
How can these things be reconciled? I do not believe that
the reconciliation is easy, but I believe that it is possible. It
implies that in the field of politics as well as of culture America
is not one but many; the tradition on which we are to build
is not single but plural. Our union is to be the stronger for
our differences, and our differences are our very life blood.
It is in our industrial life that the methods of reconciliation
and the creation of unity from variety are to-day most promising. In the clash of interests between employers and employees we are developing a technique of democratic agreement
the purpose of which is not compromise but creation; we are
learning to have a new concept of the mutuality of law, a
new respect and appreciation for science in human relationships. Compared with the relative stagnation of political
democracy, our economic democracy is stirring with life and
hope.
Science has given us in a single century more than in all
the forty centuries which have preceded, yet it has scarcely
touched the problem of politics. It is inconceivable that the
ideal activity of the Greek philosophers and of generous minds
of all ages is to remain a craft of which mankind is more than
half ashamed. Not our aims but our methods require revision. It is inconceivable that the ballot, the very symbol of
democracy, is to remain a dull device for registering our dif



320                   E. E. HUNT
ferences instead of helping to forge new bases for our agreements.
President Eliot has dared to call our day "the happiest age
the world has ever known." In spite of the debris and the
ashes of war, those words ring true. Not in a return to the
ideal of la Gloire, not in a leap forward to the chimera of
Communism, but in the working out of the problems of our
traditional democracy is the good life to be lived. For each
of us, "here is our America."