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http://www.archive.org/details/studiesofbiogr03step

Studies of a Biographer

By

Leslie Stephen

In Four Volumes
Volume III.

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G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York and London

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1907

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The follo\ring chapters are reprinted
from articles which, with three excep-
tions, appeared in the National Review.
The chapter upon "Huxley" appeared
in the Nineteenth Century; that upon
"Milton" iji the Quarterly Review; and
the chapter "In Praise of Walking"
in the Monthly Review. I have to thank
the proprietors of these periodicals for
permission to republish them.

Leslie Stephen.
September, 1902.

Contents

The Browning Letters
John Donne
John Ruskin

William Godwin's Novels
Walter Bagehot
^ Thomas Henry Huxley
James Anthony Froude
In Praise of Walking

I

34

78

III

144

175
205

237

STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

The Browning Letters

THE publication of the Browning correspond-
ence naturally calls attention to a trouble-
some section in the code of literary morality:
the section, that is, which deals with the claims
of men of genius to posthumous privacy. The
authorised version is often taken to be that we
should refrain from making public anything which
a man would have jealously guarded from public-
ity in his lifetime. It is easy to denounce the
intrusion of the "many-headed beast" and to
speak as though death made no difference in the
sanctity of the domestic sphere. Nobody would
print his own love-letters while he is alive, and
therefore nobody should print them when he has
ceased to live. That inference would take us far,
and, if it were admitted to be the law, would most
certainly have awkward consequences. We may
surely be allowed, without offence, to look even
into some love-secrets of men and women who can

VOL. III. — I. I

2 Studies of a Biographer

no longer "be wounded by our (let us hope) respect-
ful and sympathetic interest. If we did not know
something, say, of old Johnson's love for his Tetty,
we should be imperfectly aware of the sweetest
element of his character; though we should have
justified his roughest retort if we had asked im-
pertinent questions in his lifetime. I confess,
indeed, that I am rather suspicious of common-
place morality on such matters. It is easy and
flattering to one's vanity to perch one's self upon a
good round maxim which everybody will approve
in theory, and which, as we are also quite aware,
nobody will force us to apply in practice. How-
ever gravely we may speak, we shall read the
next indiscreet revelation, and our enjoyment will
only have the keener edge from our affectation
of prudery. We can atone for our enjoyment of
contraband goods by vigorously abusing the
smuggler. And then the suspicion intrudes that,
in professing to pitch our standard so high, we are
not really preaching sound morality. The danger
strikes one especially in connection with Browning.
One of his favourite themes is the conflict between
the conventional code, which is perfectly plausible
and perhaps correct in the average case, with the
highest law which is recognised by the superior
nature. A priest ought not, as a rule, to help a
married woman to run away from her husband;

The Browning Letters 3

but the Ring and the Book gives the exceptional
case in which, by breaking the rule, a man may
show the truest nobility of character. And so,
perhaps, it may be urged that, even assuming
the advantages of reticence in general, there are
cases in which it may cover a paltry regard for
conventional propriety. When we have a man
and a woman of genius, may it not be good for the
world to know, even in the fullest detail, how they
loved and revealed their love to each other, and
how the love ennobled their lives and their work?
The case, it might be added, is too rare to be drawn
into a precedent. No5ody will learn much from
the flirtations of the ordinary human being, or
even of the second rank of ephemeral celebrities.
But when we have to do with so unique a case —
with a man of undisputed pre-eminence in his art
and a woman worthy of him — must it not be
good for us to watch every heart-beat, and follow
the most minute developments of the great pas-
sion of their lives ?

Have we not precedents which show that the
system is inevitable, and, moreover, that it has
led to some very desirable results ? The best books
to read, as somebody has remarked upon such an
occasion, are the books that ought never to have
been written. In Shakespeare's time there was
nobody to investigate the Ann Hathaway busi-

4 Studies of a Biographer

ness, or to ask what was implied by the famous
"second-best bed." If there had been, we might
have been spared some of the wild hypotheses
which fill the void of authentic history. The in-
quisitorial system began, I take it, in England in
the days of Queen Anne. Curll, as Arbuthnot
told Pope, added a new terror to death. That
prototype of piratical booksellers procured and
published some of Pope's early letters; and Pope
found that the injury had its advantages. He
managed to get more of his letters "stolen" and
published by prompting the theft himself; and,
while he exhibited his modesty by protesting
against the outrage, he had also the pleasure of
knowing that "the nation" — as Johnson puts it
— "was filled with the praises of his candour, ten-
derness, and benevolence, the purity of his pur-
poses, and the fidelity of his friendship." That is
a typical case: the morbidly sensitive poet, in-
duced to connive at (or, in his case, to contrive)
the violation of his rights to privacy, and driven
to whole series of mean intrigues by the pleasure
of turning himself inside out for public inspection.
Since his time we have had similar exhibitions on
a larger scale. Rousseau said that he was making
a new experiment, and one which would have
no imitators, by exhibiting a man as he really
was, and that man himself. The exhibition, it is

The Browning Letters 5

generally agreed, was not altogether edifying; but
it is also agreed that it was singularly fascinating.
It was certainly a step beyond Pope. To call upon
mankind to admire your virtues, and even to
manufacture sham virtues for the purpose, is an
intelligible aim, but it amounted to a discovery
when your vices and your meannesses were em-
ployed for the same purpose. It is easy enough
to preach upon the morality of the criminals; it
would be proper to add in a pulpit that they were
not promoting the welfare of their souls by such
transactions. But, then, can we honestly say,
when we are out of the pulpit, that we wish that
they had not done it? Pope's contrivances at
least added to our literature one of the most in-
teresting collections of correspondence in the lan-
guage; a series of letters which puts us face to
face with some of the most brilliant of our writers
and enables us to realise as nothing else can do
the strength and the weakness, the shrewd-
ness and the hypocrisy, of the great lights of the
time. Granting that Pope should not himself
have published, and certainly that he should not
have falsified, the documents, can we deny that
they are documents of the highest interest?
Would we have burnt them if the alternative had
been possible? In speaking of Rousseau, the only
danger is that of exaggerating the importance

6 Studies of a Biographer

of his work. To suppress his writings would have
been to suppress the fullest utterance of the
contemporary spirit; and, whether that spirit was
of heaven or hell, or a strange mixture of both,
its revelation to itself and us was surely desirable.
Rousseau's prophecy that he would have no fol-
lowers in his enterprise has hardly been fulfilled,
unless in the sense that no one has been quite so
reckless in self -exposure. Byron is not the only
person who has exhibited to Europe the '' pageant
of a bleeding heart," and it need not be argued
that the practice is often injurious to the sim-
plicity and dignity of the performer. Even so,
the world may be, on the whole, the gainer. And,
if we can gel rid of the degrading part of the per-
formance, the complicity of the man exposed in
his own exposure, may we not have the benefit
without paying such a price? It is a natural, and
surely an excusable, desire which prompts us to
learn something more of the character of the
great men who have stirred the thoughts and
directed the passions of the race. A great writer,
it is said, reveals the best part of himself in his
works. But the longing for a more direct vision
of the man behind the book, of the struggles by
which he won his way to his successes, of the
strength and the weaknesses by which he was
helped and hindered, facilitates a clear apprecia-

The Browning Letters 7

tion of the works themselves. Even the greatest
literary achievement becomes "gilt o'er dusted,"
and the best way of restoring is to watch in imag-
ination the living hand which wrought it. Some
appreciation of that truth must be allowed to the
generations of Dryasdusts who have sought even
from the driest receptacles — of which Carlyle
complained so bitterly — to put together, if not a
living figure, at least a framework to which we can
adapt our more or less fanciful pictures. If the
need is felt where the means of supply are so lim-
ited, can we blame the same sort of curiosity when
it is applied to our near contemporaries? The in-
terviewer, so his victims report, is apt to be a
nuisance, impertinent and intrusive. But can we
condemn him unreservedly? Is there not some-
thing legitimate in the demand? Suppose him
to speak the truth, what harm can he be really
doing? He ought not, it may be suggested, to
reveal a great man's infirmities. What is it to us
if Coleridge took opium? The drug had, no
doubt, some share in producing Kubla Khan;
but may we not enjoy the product without con-
sidering the physiological conditions which were
implied? The answer is obvious. A man's in-
firmities are, after all, part of him ; they cannot be
put aside like his coat or his shoes ; and very often
they suggest the only excuse for his shortcomings.

8 Studies of a Biographer

To compare the estimate of Coleridge's genius
formed by his contemporaries with his actual out-
put of work achieved, to judge of the influence
which he exercised in philosophy by his frag-
mentary attempts at possible prolegomena to a
system, is to set one's self an insoluble problem,
unless we know the facts. He cannot be fairly
judged until we know how his astonishing powers
were hampered by a weakness which still left him
both lovable and capable of stimulating other
intellects. The life, no doubt, may be suppressed
altogether ; but to take only a bit of it, and such
a bit as his friends might think edifying, is to turn
the whole story into a hopeless conundrum. The
demand for such knowledge has been increased by
modern scientific tendencies. The man of science
is constantly demanding a closer and wider inti-
macy with facts. No fact can be so small or
repulsive that it may not be of use in testing or
suggesting theory. The historian follows suit.
He finds that in the masses of records which
were neglected by an earlier generation there are
materials for reconstructing history at large. By
elaborate researches into what passed for mere
rubbish-heaps, he can discover facts essential to
an intelligent appreciation of social and intellect-
ual development. What was once the pursuit of
eccentric antiquaries, animated by an unreasoning

The Brovvnine Letters

^>

love of curiosities, becomes worthy of the keenest
intellects searching for light in the dark founda-
tions of things. A fact, simply as a fact, becomes
sacred in the eyes of such inquirers. It may not
be of interest in itself; but no one can tell what
part it may not play incidentally in clearing up
some general principle. Historians of literature
catch the contagion, and employ themselves in
worrying out minute dates and infinitesimal biblio-
graphical facts with an industry which, let us hope,
will have its reward. Certainly it is not for one who
has had anything to do with biographical inquiries
to throw cold water upon such a spirit, or to deny
that it helps an intelligent study of literature.
If so, why may we not apply the same method
to contemporaries as soon as we can do so without
hurting the feelings of survivors? Undoubtedly
there are precautions to be observed. Froude's
performance in regard to Carlyle has furnished a
leading case. It is, however, necessary to remark
the precise nature of the offence. Froude, as I am
fully convinced, meant to do honour to his old
prophet. He took himself to be following the
principle which Boswell avowed when protests
were made against his revelations of Johnson's
foibles. His lion, he said, should not be made
into a cat for anybody. He w^ould not pare the
lion's claws or lessen the ferocity of his growl.

lo Studies of a Biographer

Froude thought that Carlyle deserved a portrait
in the manner of Rembrandt, vivid and full of
character, with due depth of shadow to throw out
the intensity of the lights. The aim, I take it,
was clearly right. That was precisely what a
biographer ought to do. It is another question
whether the means were justifiable. He is accused
of using Carlyle' s love-letters without due author-
ity, and, moreover, of misreading them. But
suppose, for I am not arguing the question of
Froude 's morality, that he had given an accurate
version of the facts? Had he told the story as
it really happened, and that story one essentially
honourable to both of the persons concerned,
would he not have rendered us a service ? Whether
he was right in over-riding Carlyle's wishes is, of
course, a question; but were the wishes them-
selves justifiable? Was it not a mistake to desire
the suppression of the story when it could be told
without hurting the feelings of the living? Feel-
ing, as every one must, the indecency of giving
publicity to such documents for a time, does there
not come a day when the privilege of privacy
should disappear? If such letters had been found
throwing light upon Cromwell's youth, would not
Carlyle have published them without hesitation?
Sir William Temple's love-letters of that date were
published a few years ago, and nobody, I fancy,

The Browning Letters n

complained of any violation of secrecy. At what
point does the obligation cease? How are we
to settle this point of casuistry ? Shall we say that
letters should be private for a generation or a
century : or admit rather that, as soon as there is
no living person to be affected, a full revelation is
permissible and desirable?

In the case of the Browning letters there is
happily no question of any breach of confidence.
Browning left them with full permission to his
son to do as he pleased with them. Whether
the publication was judicious or otherwise, it
was sufficiently authprised by the person most
interested. In the letters themselves, there
is an incidental discussion of a similar point.
Miss Barrett had sent to Browning a letter in
which Miss Martineau had described Wordsworth.
Browning remarks in reference to the burning of
some other correspondence that you may burn
anybody's ''real letters," they "move and live . . .
in a self-imposed circle limiting the experience of
two persons only." And he proceeds to argue,
with characteristic superabundance of metaphor,
that the presence of a third person ''lets in a
whole tract of country on the originally enclosed
spot," so that the " whole significance is lost at
once." "Clever writing," on the other hand, such
as Miss Martineau 's, gives only such an impression

12 Studies of a Biographer

as is intelligible to the world at large. An inti-
mate dialogue, if I understand him, altogether
loses its character when there is a listener; but
Miss Martineau's descriptions give only the obser-
vations open to any indifferent bystander. Miss
Barrett, in replying, goes further. She values let-
ters, she says,as the " most vital part of biography."
She is astonished that any rational human be-
ing should " put his foot on the traditions of his
kind in this particular class." We should lose, for
example, such a dehghtful book as Voltaire's cor-
respondence. She could enjoy "book after book
of such reading." Were we to accept Miss Mar-
tineau's principle (apparently that such letters
might be circulated in manuscript, but never
printed) ''death would be deader henceforth."
We ought all to be ready '' to say that if the secrets
of our daily lives and inner souls may instruct
other sorrowing souls, let them be open to men
hereafter as they are to God now. Dust to dust,
and soul secrets to humanity." And she proceeds
to say that, though she shrinks "from the idea
of publicity on any terms," and would destroy
papers of "her own, sacred to her for personal
reasons," sne would not "call this natural weak-
ness a virtue," or justify it as a general maxim for
public acceptance. If "soul secrets" belong to
humanity, if we are all entitled to look into the

The Browning Letters 13

most intimate experiences of all our predecessors,
it appears that no line can be drawn. Anything
and everything is public property; and, after our
death, the world is to be allowed to listen to what-
ever we might have been required to say in the
confessional. The natural shrinking is, if not a
sin, a regrettable weakness. That, if granted, is a
full justification by anticipation of the publicity
bestowed upon these letters. If a woman, so ex-
quisitely sensitive, condemns herself for shrinking
from a revelation of her soul secrets, how is an
outsider to say that she was wrong?

Yet, in spite of the authority which no doubt
justifies the son's action, and of the argument
which I fully admit to have its force, I have some
hesitation as to the conclusion. I felt unpleas-
antly like an unjustifiable eavesdropper while
reading these letters, and I cannot at once admit
that the feeling was simply erroneous, or due to
the illusion that the writers of letters so full of
life must still be living. Can I justify that in-
stinctive repulsion, or justify it without falling
into the mere commonplaces of respectable mo-
rality? In some respects there is obviously no
room for complaint. There is no question of a
revelation of anything painful to survivors or
discreditable to the writers. The letters can only
confirm whatever judgment we have already

1 4 Studies of a Biographer

formed of the depth and tenderness of character
of Browning and his wife. They are an ideal pair
of lovers. The question conies up several times
in these volumes whether it be possible for poets
to be good husbands and wives. Mrs. Browning's
friends seem to have been inclined to drop little
cynical maxims. They think marriage in general
is a failure ; that the more love there is at starting
the less there will be afterwards ; and that poets
in particular are apt to make very bad husbands.
A certain number of precedents might be pro-
duced in favour of the last doctrine; but these
letters prove conclusively that if too often veri-
fied it is not necessarily true. Probably one's
first reflection is that the love of poets is in sub-
stance remarkably like the love of other people;
and that is only the other side of the obvious
remark that even ordinary people are poets in so
far as they are lovers. The difference is that we
who are inarticulate owe to the poet the full
expression of all that gives the truest happiness
and beauty to our commonplace lives. Mrs.
Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese are a con-
centrated utterance of what she says in prose in
these letters ; and the letters show how the poetic
sentiment brightened every little prosaic detail in
the brief drama of the courtship. The feeling on
both sides is so pure and intense that every letter

The Browning Letters 15

increases our affection for the writers. And, in a
sense, the sentiment is as true as it is strong and
tender. I say *'in a sense," for I certainly do not
mean to affirm that the opinions expressed are to
be taken as correct. Undoubtedly there are
illusions — illusions, perhaps, as to each other's
unique excellence and the intrinsic value of cer-
tain poems. But the illusions, whatever they may
be — and one could not wish them to be less —
do not distort the perception of the essential facts.
In other cases, we are too often called upon to
forgive grave errors, to drop for the moment, per-
haps, one or two of the Ten Commandments, in
sheer admiration of the strength of passion which
has leaped very useful barriers. But here we are in
the happy position of sympathising with a devotion
which only strengthens the instinctive and instan-
taneous perception of what is right and becoming.
There seems at starting to be a little danger of
the predominance of the author over the human
being. There are certain references to " art being
a jealous God," and demanding the whole man
and woman, suggesting a possibility of a kind of
cant which always becomes absurd as soon as its
language is old-fashioned. The "artist," even in
those days when we were all (as our posterity tells
us) so stupid, liked to live in a little esoteric world
and celebrate his mysteries with due solemnity,

1 6 Studies of a Biographer

to look out with contempt upon the average
Philistine (though the phrase was not yet popu-
larised), and receive the homage of appreciative
Americans and the mild lady-authors who still
thought literary ambition a rather audacious
breach of the proprieties. There is mention in one
place of an English nobleman who ventured to
study art at Rome in a blouse and a ''flapped
hat." We, the devotees of art, are to see how
superior he was to his fellows who were playing at
the feudal baron on their estates, or perhaps even
superintending a dog-fight in St. Giles's. There is
"something fascinating," says Miss Barrett, in
that "Bohemian way of living," and we are
invited to wish well to this gallant defiance of
British prejudice. There can be no doubt that
painting is a more creditable occupation than
dog-fighting, though it seems a little unfair to
suggest such an unpleasant amusement as the
typical alternative. Still, a man may attend a
studio in a blouse without being a superior being,
and I somehow feel as if that little literary and
artistic world of 1845 had standards of excellence
before which I cannot bow the knee unreservedly.
Perhaps it is partly because the secondary liimi-
naries on this stage, Miss Mitford and Mrs. Jame-
son, and (Orion) Home and Mr. Kenyon — though
they had great merits — are already fading into

The Browning Letters \^

comparative oblivion, and it requires an effort to
allow for the effect of perspective. But it is a
charm of these letters that this element of the
situation affects only the earlier letters. Browning
and Miss Barrett began by mutual appreciation
as authors, and, of course, have to start upon the
common platform of literary communication. A
little literary talk about ^schylus and the rela-
tions of northern and Italian poets and the past
and intended works of the correspondents is, of
course, inevitable, and certainly not iminteresting.
But Browning very soon discovers the unsatis-
factory nature of mere literary work, and explains
his view by one of his characteristic parallel cases
out of Vivian Grey, A gentleman in that novel is
about to interrupt the development of the story
by reading some " brief remarks upon the charac-
teristics of the Moeso-Gothic literature." The
author, however, upon consideration, judiciously
omits the remarks, as you find upon turning the
page. You will ask, saj^s Bro waning, what this
"parallel case" means; and Miss Barrett admits
that he does talk " a little like a sphinx." Brown-
ing proceeds to "explain" in his next. The
explanation immediately lands him in a "slough
of similes," out of which he has to struggle, " never
mind with what dislocation of ankles." He only

escapes to fall into other similes and illustrations
VOL. III. — a

i8 Studies of a Biographer

of his meanings, and ends by expressing his hope
that he has " cleared up all the difficulty " and put
things quite straight. Undoubtedly he had, to
A'Tiss Barrett's apprehension, though I confess that
my own intellect remains a little befogged.

The general upshot, however, is sufficiently
clear. Browning, one fancies, takes refuge in his
parallel cases — his favourite device in poetical
arguments — because he is still a little embarrassed
in writing to a lady whom he had not yet seen.
But he wishes to get out of the region of small
talk, even in the exalted form of literary criticism,
and to speak to her of more vitally interesting
matters. And before long we find both of them
anxious to repudiate the literary sentiment as any-
thing but the mere vehicle for the purely personal
passion. Browning protests that his admiration
of Miss Barrett as an author is entirely different
from his love of herself. He held his peace about
her poetry till he had a sense of *' purely personal
obligation," and, if she were never to write
another line, or speak another ** intelligible word,"
he would love her not less but more. His " whole
life is wound up and down and over her." And
she, though she loves his poetry, agrees that it is
not *'the flower of his nature." That flower is
something nameless and mystical. She used to
fancy that she could see him in his poems; but

The Browning Letters 19

then "broken sights and forms look strange and
unlike" when she "stands by the complete idea."
She only wishes that he would reveal his person-
ality more clearly by uttering himself directly
without the dramatic apparatus which is apt to
puzzle the less intelHgent readers. And here one
must apologise for quoting scraps of sentences
which seem to lose their force and grace when de-
tached from the context. Browning to the end
has the odd tendency to put things in a quaint
and tortuous fashion, which is represented by
the "put-case" of his later poems. But no love-
letters since the days 'of Heloisa could be more
glowing with a devotion which one can only
regard with reverence. Both of them have, of
course, a pretext for exerting their ingenuity in
that old problem which is tiresome in ethical
philosophers, but infinitely delightful between a
pair of lovers. Is not "altruism" a refined self-
love? If I am so devoted to some one else that
his happiness becomes my happiness, am I not
really selfish even when I am sacrificing myself to
him? That suggests an infinite variety of tender
caressing * ' quibbles . " In loving him, as Miss Bar-
rett protests, she never thought of being happy-
through him; his good was all her idea of good.
That is unmistakably true, but then it is equally
obvious that his own happiness necessarily im-

20 Studies of a Biographer

plies her happiness, and her logic — if logic were
really concerned — would be a little difficult to un-
twist. Or, again, there is, as Browning observes,
a contest of generosity. Each wishes to be grate-
ful for the other's kindnesses; but then, from the
other's point of view, the kindness is so obviously
a matter of course that gratitude is a solecism.
You, says each, are my ideal of perfection, and
to have an ideal of perfection impHes power of
appreciating real excellence. Titania could not
love Bottom in her sober senses, and the lover
must admit, even by worshipping her, that he
is considerably superior to Bottom. Browning, in
fact, sums up the dilemma in one of his later
letters by roundly declaring that "there is no
love but from beneath, far beneath — that is the
law of its nature." But then, as he entirely
believes in her love for him, the remark would
naturally be made by the proverbial Senior
Wrangler that each of two objects cannot be
lower than the other. Miss Barrett, in fact,
takes the only possible solution when she declares
that love should have no reason or be its own
reason. The motive, she reports herself to have
said, should be in the feeling itself, and not in the
object of it; and the affection which could throw
itself out "on an idiot with a goitre would be
more admirable than Abelard's ! " Some awkvv^ard

The Browning Letters 21

deductions might follow from that principle too,
but we can, as enlightened lookers-on, supply some
very obvious reasons, not being boimd to take
either side in the play of ostensible argument
which is, in fact, merely one way of expressing
entire mutual devotion and what Browning once
calls agreement to the point of " trembhngly ex-
quisite exactness."

It would appear that on the whole, though
Browning never admits it, Miss Barrett succeeds
best in getting into the attitude of a worshipper.
The situation naturally implies it. Brought up,
as she says, in a kind of conventual seclusion,
looking at the world mainly through books, and
with her sensibilities stimulated by her invalid
life, she was even abnormally feminine, and it is
easy to understand why, as she often says, his
love for her appeared to her as a ''miracle," a
sure support coming beyond all reasonable expec-
tation, and lifting her into life and happiness.
From the very first her instinct tells her to put
absolute trust in Browning's honour and gener-
osity. That the instinct was entirely justified by
the facts does not prove that it was infallible.
It would be easy to speculate upon the results
which might have followed, had Browning shared
the weaknesses of some great poets — Coleridge or
Shelley, for example ; whether she might not have

22 Studies of a Biographer

become the heroine of a tragedy, had she trusted
to a man selfish or simply weak, or valuing her
enthusiasm only so far as it was a pleasant offering
of incense upon the altar of his genius. That Miss
Barrett was not incapable of illusions seems to be
clear from her view of that wonderful person, her
father. No one, as she assures Browning, had a
heart **loyaller, and purer, and more compelling
to gratitude and reverence, than his," as she sees
it. The proof is remarkable. The brother whom
she especially loved had been staying with her at
Torquay by her especial request, and in spite of
the father's disapproval. While they were there
the brother took a boat and was accidentally
drowned, and the father was so ''generous and
forbearing" as never once to tell her that it w^as
her fault. That must have been a tempting
remark to bestow upon a heart-broken daughter;
and would no doubt have been a relief to his
feelings. Meanwhile he has the trifling weakness
of holding that he rules by divine right; and is
entitled to suppress as altogether disgusting and
anomalous monstrosities any love affairs of his
children. If the daughters confess to such crim-
inal proceedings, he makes scenes which send one
of them into hysterics and another into a dead
faint. He would rather see Elizabeth dead at
his feet, she admits, than consent to her accep-

The Browning Letters 23

tance of Browning. Since the days of Clarissa
Harlowe there never was such a preposterous
family despot. Miss Barrett, however, believes
sincerely, and expects her lover to believe, both
that the old gentleman is not stone, and that he is
immovable as a stone. He has, as she most un-
deniably puts it, a "very peculiar nature," of
which Browning, one suspects, would have been
able to make a very effective dramatic sketch.
He resolves, however, that he will always see
these things with her eyes, and will never say any-
thing to give her pain. He has, indeed, to say,
though with characteristically tortuous phrases,
that the tyranny is intolerable, and that she is not
to sacrifice herself to the tyrant. As she was
happily clear upon that point, he is able to main-
tain a reticence which is not less honourable than
his utterance. I fancy that, in the one or two pas-
sages in the letters in which something like a con-
troversy arises, Browning is really giving vent to
an accumulated desire for plain-speaking, which
he would have liked to discharge upon the head of
Mr. Barrett. He defends duelling and capital
punishment with a vigour that gives her some
pain, and causes her to drop the subject; and he
insists upon the objections to her paying ransom
to the dog-stealers who had appropriated her
favourite Flush. There is just a momentary

24 Studies of a Biographer

glimpse of the shrewd man of the world opposing
amiable sentimentalism. The topics were harm-
less, as the practical danger of Browning fighting
a duel was of the minutest, and as he made sure
that the dog-stealers had got their money before
he entered his protest. If Mr. Barrett's behaviour
had been discussable with the same frankness,
Browning would have relieved his feelings at the
cost of inflicting real suffering upon his beloved.
He shows, however, perfect self-restraint in that
matter, and throughout maintains the most unim-
peachable attitude. He had the reward which he
deserved; and one of the great charms in the
letters is the gradual brightening of Miss Barrett's
life — the wakening to real, vivid happiness of the
poor, broken, tremulous invalid who is revealed in
the opening passages. A little sign of excessive
sensibility remains in her superfluous apologies
for apparently *' Hght words " ; for phrases in which
she has permitted herself to speak as though it
were conceivable that he might some day see
through some of his illusions about her, or that
he might doubt her readiness to agree to all his
plans; phrases in which a duller insight than
Browning's might read clearly enough only an
appeal for delightful utterances of absolute con-
fidence. It is "wonderful to me," so she sums up
the situation, "to look back on my life and my

The Browning Letters 25

old philosophy of life, made of the necessities of
sorrow and the resolution to attain to something
better than a perpetual moaning and complaint —
to that state of neutralised emotion to which I did
attain — that serenity which meant the failure of
hope! Can I look back to such things and not
thank you next to God? For you, having the
power to stoop and having the will, is it not
worthy of thanks? So I thank you and love you,
and shall always, however it may be hereafter."
Browning could, no doubt, believe with equal
sincerity that his cause for gratitude was not less ;
and one may say that- 'even he could not speak
too strongly — or strongly enough — of the blessing
which had come to him. Yet, to the outsider, the
"miraculous" nature of the reward is more pal-
pable in her case. The prison doors were thrown
open for her beyond reasonable expectation;
whereas he, as we must admit, had, in any case,
a noble though not so beautiful a career open to
him independently.

I have not attempted to do more than recall
what must be obvious to all readers of the letters.
I only wish to explain the feeling which, as I
know, is shared by more competent readers than
I can profess to be. They too have had their
scruples vanquished by the remarkable revelation
of beautiful character. The sense that so intimate

26 Studies of a Biographer

a set of letters should not be laid bare to the
public has been gradually overcome by the per-
ception of their singular charm. And, in fact,
one conclusion seems to be undeniable. Mr.
Browning tells us in his preface that he had
either to destroy these letters or to permit their
publication. It does not appear to be self-evident
that no third course was open; but if we take
that for granted, his decision was unimpeachable.
Undoubtedly it would have been a wrong to the
memory of his parents had the letters been sup-
pressed. We should have lost a story which is in
some ways more charming and impressive than
any of his poetry. People who met Browning
occasionally accepted the commonplace doctrine
that the poet and the man may be wholly differ-
ent persons. Browning, that is, could talk like
a brilliant man of the world, and the common-
place person could infer that he did not possess
the feelings which he did not care to exhibit at a
dinner-party.* It was not difficult to discover
that such a remark showed the superficiality of

1 Perhaps I may be permitted to give a small reminiscence.
I happened to meet Browning at a moment of great interest
to me. I knew little of him then, and had rather taken him
at the valuation indicated above. He spoke a few words,
showing such tenderness, insight, and sympathy, that I have
never forgotten his kindness; and from that time knew him
for what he was. I cannot say more; but I say so much by
way of expressing my gratitude.

The Browning Letters 27

the observer, not the absence of the underlying
qualities. These letters, at any rate, demonstrate
to the dullest that the intensity of passion which
makes the poet was equally present in the man.
It is worth our while to have such a demonstra-
tion to recognise the depth and purity of the
sources from which genuine poetry springs, even
at the price of some shock to our sense of decorum.
The only question is, whether the same result
might not have been achieved with a less sweeping
revelation. I will not venture to express any
distinct opinion, because I do not quite see the
force of Mr. Browning's dilemma; but I will
suggest a consideration or two which seem to me
to be relevant.

The world at large, as Miss Barrett says, has a
right to the "soul secrets" of eminent people. Is
that true? In a sense, one may fully accept the
doctrine. It is well to know the truth about the
men and w^omen who have left us intellectual
legacies ; it is well, even if the truth be not, as in
this case it certainly is, altogether gratifying.
Every such life has what we call its "lesson,"
and one not the less instructive if the career im-
plies some of the worst human quaHties. Pope
could lie enormously, and Burns could be decid-
edly coarse, and Byron was not a pattern of
domestic excellence. I should wish the essence

28 Studies of a Biographer

of the character to be revealed to me in every
case ; and should be profoundly interested by the
truth, though I might not extract a definite
moral or learn what is called a lesson. But, I
think there is a certain confusion between the
demand for truth which is perfectly justified,
and the demand for all the knowledge which has
any bearing whatever upon the history of the
person concerned. There are, after all, a great
many facts of which one may as well be ignorant.
They are irrelevant, and nobody would be the
worse if they went into the waste-paper basket.
It does not follow that because I want fact, not
fiction, I therefore want all the facts, big and
small; the poet's washing-bills, as well as his
early drafts of great works. There are purposes,
indeed, for which it is necessary to preserve every-
thing that can be known. The scientific habit of
mind demands, as I have said, the preservation
of things in general, because some day anything
may have its uses ; the lawyer may feel bound to
investigate every conceivable tittle of evidence,
however minute the chance of its having any rele-
vance; a biographer may be bound to act upon
this principle in his investigations, and to follow
out the ramifications of his hero's career as though
he were engaged in the presumptuous attempt to
find out everything about the Dreyfus case. But

The Browning Letters 29

then he need not present the whole mass to the
world. That might be desirable if the *'soul
secrets" corresponded to the discovery of a scien-
tific formula in psychology, if it were a question
of finding new laws of human nature comparable
to laws of chemistry or electricity. But such
secrets are altogether beyond our powers. We
do not study the lives of great men as scientific
psychologists, but in order to have a vivid pre-
sentation of some interesting type of character.
That may be stimulating, elevating, or saddening ;
but it is a question of art, not of science; of
giving the concentrated personal essence of the
mind, not of keeping up the greatest possible
mass of details. So far from giving all details,
no detail should be admitted which does not
more or less directly contribute to heighten the
effect of a lifelike portraiture. The antiquary's
delight in gathering together all possible scraps
and fragments is no doubt pardonable, and a
harmless recreation in its way, though when I
see the method applied to contemporaries, I am
tempted to think that it implies less genuine
admiration than a desire to prove that the admira-
tion is genuine. The lover cherishes every scrap
that reminds him of his mistress, and you there-
fore try to convince yourself that you are a lover
by gathering scraps, though perhaps really caring

30 Studies of a Biographer

for nothing else. There comes to be competition
among the idolaters who collect relics of a great
man, which proves the spread, not of a real appre-
ciation, but of the knowledge that appreciation
is the correct thing. A poet, I fancy, has often
most worthy adherents when the adherents are
few, and the spread of his fame implies the growth
of sham sentiments.

The bad results of this more or less factitious
enthusiasm are too familiar to be insisted upon.
Everybody agrees that the interviewer, contem-
porary or posthumous, is capable of becoming an
intolerable nuisance, and is a specific for the
encouragement of morbid tendencies in poets.
Literature is, in all cases, a demoralising occupa-
tion, though some people Can resist its evil influ-
ences. It is demoralising because success implies
publicity. A poet has to turn himself inside out
by the very conditions of his art, and suffers from
the incessant stimulants applied to his self-
consciousness. The temptation is inevitable, and
is, of course, the stronger and the more corrupting
as the right to satisfy a vulgar curiosity is more
generally admitted. Formerly, if a man wanted to
talk about himself, he wrote an autobiography to
be published posthumously, and there w^as there-
fore some safeguard, in so far as he was not to be
directly conscious of the effect produced. Now,

The Browning Letters 31

the autobiography is being superseded by the
"reminiscences," in which every one is invited to
explain what a genial and charming creature he
is ; how thoroughly he appreciates his contempo-
raries, and how superior he is to any desire for
popular praise. If reminiscing is not a name for
hypocritical attitudinising, it shows, as I am glad
to believe, what charming and excellent people
many of our contemporaries still are, in spite of
all the corrupting influences to which they are
exposed.

The difficulty about the Browning letters is, I
think, this: whether, in spite of their own un-
deniable merits, they will not set a precedent
eminently likely to be abused. They may be
justified as exceptional. The case is one of those
in which the total result is so impressive and
edifying that the ordinary rule may be disre-
garded. Unfortunately, when a precedent is set,
there is no way of limiting the application to be
made of it. Everybody is apt to be exceptional in
his own eyes and in the eyes of his nearest rela-
tives ; and one fears that the habit of turning out
the most private receptacles will be encouraged
without reason by the success of his particular
performance. I am, I must frankly confess, not
equal to solving this point of casuistry. Like
other such problems, it cannot be solved by any

32 Studies of a Biographer

distinct rule; and all that one can do is to recog-
nise the possibility of some bad consequences and
reserve a right to condemn the next follower.
There is, indeed, one other question: Admitting
fully that the story ought to be told, that we had a
right to be aware of this ennobling element in the
lives of two such persons, was it really necessary
that the whole correspondence should be published
or the whole destroyed? I cannot help fancying
that some one might have been found — though,
no doubt, the task would have required very
exceptional tact and insight — who could have
given the truth without publishing the corre-
spondence in mass. Undoubtedly it would have
been necessary to use the words of the writers and
to publish some of the letters completely. But the
sense of impropriety which besets one every now
and then in reading — that uncomfortable sus-
picion that one is, after all, an eavesdropper — is
purely due to the following all the little ins and
outs through so long a correspondence, and the
feeling that one is looking over the shoulders of
the writers at a moment when they would cer-
tainly have shown the door to an intruder. I
fancy that by confining the revelation to what
was strictly necessary to reveal the essence of the
situation, and by so showing a scrupulous regard
for the consideration which makes for reticence,

The Browning Letters 33

the book might have been equally and even more
impressive, and the danger of setting a precedent
diminished. But I do not know the facts well
enough to be enabled to do more than throw out
a suggestion, which, like most suggestions, is too
late to be of any use.

VOL. III.— 3.

John Donne.*

nr^HERE is something curiously and yet inter-
-^ mittently fascinating about Donne. His
fame has been fitful. After the obscuration of
the eighteenth century, Coleridge and Lamb felt
a charm which has been potent with some later
critics. Browning was drawn to him by a con-
genial subtlety of intellect, and Lowell, an equally
ardent lover of all that is quaint and witty, read
and annotated him carefully. But his poetry
seems to be for the select few. Not one of his lyrics
appears in The Golden Treasury, whether because
Palgrave disliked a style which is the antithesis
of Tennyson's, or because he thought it unfit for
the ordinary reader. To read Donne's verses is
indeed, for most people, to crack very hard nuts
on a doubtful chance of finding a sweet kernel.
Mr. Gosse, in the Life which has just appeared,

' Mr. Beeching contributed an article upon Walton's life of
Donne to the Cornhill Magazine for February, 1900. He
pointed out some blunders in this article as it appeared in the
National Review. I have endeavoured to correct the errors
indicated, and have altered a passage or two in which I seem
to have said something which I did not mean.

34

John Donne 35

professes his belief that Donne contains the quint-
essence of poetry; but even Dr. Jessopp — an en-
thusiastic admirer of the prose — honestly professes
that the poems are not to his taste. I may,
therefore, take courage to confess that I too find
them rather indigestible. They contain, I do not
doubt, the true inspiration; but I rarely get to
the end, even of the shortest, without being re-
pelled by some strange discord in form or in
substance which sets my teeth on edge. '* Donne
is full," says Lowell, ''of salient verses that would
take the rudest March winds of criticism with
their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like
charades, and then delight us with the felicity of
their solution." I fully accept Donne's poetical
merits upon the authority of men blessed with a
greater poetical sensibility than I can claim, and
perhaps less out of harmony with his whole spirit.
A charm, however, which one only recognises
when it has been pointed out to one, is a charm
of which one had better not speak. I will only
say, in fact, that I am attracted as much as re-
pelled. The man himself excites my curiosity.
What was the character and the mind that could
utter itself in so unique a fashion? Nothing less
could have been required than extraordinary tal-
ents at the service of a most peculiar idiosyn-
crasy, and exposed to some trying combination of

36 Studies of a Biographer

circumstance. For explanation one has hitherto
been referred to the admirable Izaak Walton.
His life of Donne is said to be the masterpiece of
English biography. Critic after critic labours to
show a genial appreciation of that performance.
If, indeed, the book is to be read as we read The
Vicar of Wakefield — as a prose idyl — a charming
narrative in which we have as little to do with the
reality of Donne as with the reality of Dr. Prim-
rose, I can only subscribe to the judgment of my
betters. But there are two objections to the life
if taken as a record of facts. The first is that the
framework of fact is of the flimsiest; and the
second that the portraiture has a palpably "sub-
jective ' ' element. Hagiography in general is more
attractive than trustworthy. As we read, we
imagine Walton gazing reverently from his seat
at the dean in the pulpit, dazzled by a vast learn-
ing and a majestic flow of elaborate rhetoric,
which seemed to his worthy but unlearned disciple
to come as from ''an angel in the clouds," ^ and
offering a posthumous homage as sincere and
touching as that which no doubt engaged the con-
descending kindness of the great man in life.

1 The phrase, as Mr. Beeching points out, comes from one of
Donne's own poems ('To Mr Tilman after he had taken
orders'), where it is said of preachers that they do ' as angels
out of clouds, from pulpits speak.' It surely implies that
Donne was a very good representative of the angels.

John Donne 37

The book illustrates the most attractive aspect of
the Anglicanism of those days. It recalls John
Inglesant and the holy Mr. Ferrar of Little Gid-
ding. But the real Donne — the strange complex
human being, with his weaknesses, his passions,
his remorse, his strange twists of thought and
character — has disappeared, and just enough is
revealed to make us ask for more. Our petition
has been heard. For fifty years Dr. Jessopp has
been collecting materials. He has made them
over to Mr. Gosse, who cordially acknowledges
the generosity of his ally. Mr. Gosse, already an
independent inquirer a'nd an accomplished his-
torian of literature, has given us all that cah now
be discoverable. There are still gaps — gaps which
suggest regrets that we cannot cross-examine
Donne himself, and doubts whether, if we could,
he would be a satisfactory witness. Mr. Gosse
modestly avows that, to some extent, Donne
"eludes" him. The last secret of that singular
character remains impenetrable or to be guessed
from imperfect glimpses. If Mr. Gosse hesitates
after so much study and such familiarity with
details, it is not for one who depends chiefly upon
Mr. Gosse himself to speak with confidence.
Biography, alas! even the biography of intimate
friends, involves, as soon as one tries to penetrate
the inner life, a great deal of guesswork. Donne,

38 Studies of a Biographer

with his strange facility for seeing things in unex-
pected lights, was so ingenious in discovering
reasons that he probably misunderstood his own
motives. How are we, judging from fragmen-
tary records and ambiguous utterances and rose-
coloured sophistications, at a distance of some
three centuries, to speak with any confidence?

Without over-confidence, however, one may
point out some elements of this curious psycho-
logical problem. From the outset events con-
spired to make life one long problem in casuistry
for Donne himself. He was involved in the great
religious struggles of the day, and his sympathies
were curiously distracted. He came of the
staunchest Catholic breed; no family, he said
himself, had supplied more sufferers in the cause.
An ancestress was sister of Sir Thomas More;
other relations had risen under Mary and been
exiled under Elizabeth ; his mother, w^ho survived
him, was a strong Catholic to the last ; her two
brothers were both Jesuits, and in Donne's child-
hood one of them was in an English gaol and un-
expectedly fortunate in just avoiding the gallows
to which his fellow-prisoners were sent. Donne, a
singularly precocious child, might have been ex-
pected to catch the contagion of religious zeal.
No one, we should say, had a mind or imagination
more accessible to the manifold fascinations of the

John Donne 39

Catholic system. It would have been in the na-
tural course of things had he been sent to Douay,
become a seminary priest, and either attained emi-
nence as a casuist or died as a martyr at Tyburn.
He had, however, been entered at Oxford at the
early age of eleven. He could thus avoid the
oath of allegiance, imposed only at the age of six-
teen, and his mother apparently assumed that
supplies of knowledge could be inserted at any
age. Donne, therefore, was brought up to be a
rigid Catholic, and yet encouraged to mix with a
Protestant world and attempt a secular career.
His father had left him' sufficient means, and at
nineteen he was reading law at Lincoln's Inn.
Before long his CathoHcism was certainly fading;
but how and why is not to be easily decided.
How did he come to snap the chain which bound
him so closely to a family of zealots? Was it
simple indifference to religion in general? or sac-
rifice of conscience to worldly interests ? or a gen-
uine process of intellectual change? Donne's
answer is simple. It was the force of reason.
He set to work, he says, to "survey and digest"
the whole body of controversy. He specially
studied and elaborately annotated the great
Catholic champion Bellarmine, and "about his
twentieth year" came to be, if not a decided
Protestant, yet far less than a decided Papist.

40 Studies of a Biographer

This investigation, meanwhile, was but a part of
a wide range of study. He was ''diverted from
legal studies" by the ''worst voluptuousness,
which is an hydroptic immoderate desire of human
learning and languages." Undoubtedly, Donne
"sucked at the flagon" with "a sacred thirst,"
and honestly sought for escape from an awkward
position by launching upon the boundless ocean
of controversy. It is the natural impression of a
youthful enthusiast in learning — especially the
learning of that day — that a decision can be
reached by worrying through endless disputations.
The process is more likely to land a man in scep-
ticism or rapid oscillation between different creeds
than in any definite creed; and, in fact, Donne
seems to have been left in a rather neutral posi-
tion. He " betrothed himself, ' ' says Walton rather
vaguely, "to no religion that might give him any
other denomination than Christian." Donne him-
self asserts the slowness of his decision as a proof
of his honesty. It would, that is, have been
clearly to his interest to be converted at once.
But it was also clearly to his interest to be con-
verted as soon as he could. The desire to investi-
gate implies some doubt; and what, we should
like to know, raised the doubt in a man so steeped
in the purest Catholic tradition? He was, some-
how, induced to test the strength of the intel-

John Donne 41

lectual fetters, which were obstacles to every am-
bition, but how far or with what intensity various
motives — intellectual curiosity or the promptings
of interest — operated is one of the insoluble
questions.

This wide reading did not wholly absorb him.
The eager student, while imbibing masses of law,
divinity, and "human learning" in general, was
also, it appears, seeing life after the fashion of the
young men in the later days of Elizabeth. He
left his books, divines, philosophers, and chron-
iclers, as he tells us, to keep company "with
fighting and untrussed' gallants." The strange
adventurers of the day, disbanded soldiers, and
shifty hangers-on of the nobility, broke in upon
his seclusion, and added the book of life to his
studies. He saw the plays and masques of the
great time; he joined — if a solitary indication
may be trusted — the wit-combats at the Mermaid ;
and he certainly became a friend of Ben Jonson.
It is plain, too, that he laid up causes for future
remorse. The "satires," "elegies," and many
early poems are left to indicate his state of mind ;
but the indication itself requires an interpreter.
The "satires" represent one natural outcome of
the time. By a not unnatural coincidence three
or four contemporaries, especially Joseph Hall —
whose career was closely parallel to Donne's —

J

42 Studies of a Biographer

and the dramatist Marston, were independently
writing similar satires. Brilliant young men, at
once scornful of the world and yet proud of a
premature interest in its ways, were inevitably
satirists. Their position was analogous to that of
the young Edinburgh Reviewers, showing their
superiority by contempt for the world around.
The precedent of the Roman satirists, who had
not as yet been imitated, occurred to them all as
a happy thought to determine the best form of
utterance. They all, moreover, made the blunder
of assuming that satire must be rough and un-
couth and obscure. A satirist must be a thorough
cynic, a snarling foul-mouthed Diogenes, carrying
his lantern into the slums and using coarse and
indecent language to describe ugly sights. They
had not made the simple discovery that the better
our manners the more easily we can rub in a good
caustic phrase. The movement was therefore a
failure; but, meanwhile, Donne's attitude is no
doubt significant both of his own character and
of the time. Mr. Gosse insists upon the contrast
between his poetry and the exquisite ''rose-col-
oured Elizabethan idealism." Donne represents
a change of sentiment in the rising generation
symptomatic of the domestic discords which
were to supersede the patriotic enthusiasm of the
Armada period. It may perhaps be doubtful

John Donne 43

whether Mr. Gosse does not attribute to Donne
too much of dehberate and conscious literary
revolt. Donne was not, like Wordsworth, the
deliberate prophet of a literary ''reaction." But
no doubt he was sitting in the seat of the scornful,
and despised what we now take to be the glories
of the age. The friendship with Jonson, who
represented learning, and a critical superiority to
people who had ''small Latin and less Greek," is
significant. Donne was the thoroughly trained
scholar and gentleman, who belonged therefore
to the aristocracy of the literary world, and looked
down upon the rabble 6f unlearned scribblers and
playwrights with hands subdued to what they
worked in.

Donne's poems, however, raise a far more inter-
esting personal problem. Some of them show, to
put it gently, a remarkable frankness. It is alto-
gether surprising that he thought of printing, if
not publishing, them at a period when he w^as
aspiring to preferment in the Church. Certainly,
as Mr. Gosse points out, they were calculated to
make Archbishop Abbot's hair stand on end, and
would be only too much to the taste of the court-
iers of James I. It is strange, though character-
istic, that Donne, even in his saintly days, could
not find it in his heart to destroy, though he could
not make up his mind to publish. The question

44 Studies of a Biographer

arises, how far they represent genuine autobiogra-
phy? Mr. Gosse holds that they tell a true story
of an intrigue with a married woman, which, after
a year, ended with a bitter quarrel and curses
upon the now hated mistress. If Donne were as
generally interesting as Shakespeare, his poems
might be interpreted as variously as Shakespeare's
sonnets. But I cannot think that the foundation
of fact, if any existed, is really ascertainable.
One remark must be made. The frank disregard
of decency is but too intelligible. What is strange
is Donne's insistence upon the ugly and repulsive
collateral consequences. The lady's husband had
to be injured, and the objections of her father and
mother to the suspected intimacy were inevitable.
Donne's passion might blind him to their wrongs ;
but to insist upon that aspect of the question tri-
umphantl}^ and emphasise disgusting details is, to
speak mildly, not pretty. If the poems were to be
taken in their ''first intention" as deliberate utter-
ances of his sentiments, we should have to call him
not simply immoral, but unequivocally brutal.
To me it seems that we merely have an illustration
of a morbid tendency, not peculiar to Donne. In
one of the "elegies" Donne gives a description of
another woman, only exceeded in offensiveness by
some of Swift's worst performances. Swift's
friends tell us that he was personally cleanly, even

John Donne 45

to scrupulosity, and that he contemplated filthy
images because they had a perverse fascination
for him. He was a self -torturer by nature, and
dwelt upon disgusting things precisely because
they disgusted him. Donne, I fancy, had in this
respect a real affinity to the later dean. Carried
away by his passions, he does not blind himself to
the brutality involved, but rather emphasises and
insists upon it. For the moment, his audacity in
facing and minutely analysing consequences gives
zest to his love or is a proof of the strength of
passion which makes even this ingredient tolerable.
But when the passion' declines, the feeling will
turn into remorse, and perhaps is already, though
half-consciously, remorse in disguise.

The interpretation may seem over-subtle, but
subtlety was the essence of Donne's nature. Both
the student and the wild gallant appear in the
poems of this date, and they are strangely com-
bined in the qualities which led Jonson to describe
Donne and his followers as the "metaphysical"
school. Literary critics have dwelt sufficiently
upon the far-fetched conceits which gained cur-
rency at the same time in other countries. They
are, it would seem, the natural utterances of the
schoolman coming to court. Donne was all this
time plunged in his omnivorous studies of divinity
and philosophy. The philosophy in which he had

46 Studies of a Biographer

been initiated at the universities meant, of course,
the still dominant scholastic philosophy. To
reason was to "syllogise"; to suppose that all
truth was attainable by constructing vast piles
of syllogism, defining, distinguishing, spinning
whole webs of argumentation, and becoming an
accomplished master of the art of logical fencing.
Donne had studied the application of the art to
casuistry; had a special familiarity with the
Spanish Jesuits of his time; and w^as steeped in
whole masses of scholastic controversy. The
training was calculated to produce abnormal
skill in dialectics ; to sharpen the purely logical
perceptions, but also to encourage mere quibbling
and ingenious evasions for real solutions of diffi-
culties. Now, the sophistries and tricks of intel-
lectual wrestling correspond exactly to the conceits
of the "metaphysical poets." A commentator
upon Donne's poems would have occasionally to
illustrate his author from the schoolmen. Other
poets, for example, have compared young women
to angels; but to Donne, thoroughly acquainted
with the natural history of angels, the comparison
suggests new and strange points of resemblance.
The schoolmen had taught him by syllogism that
angels make temporary bodies out of air; and
Donne makes poetical capital of this in the lyric
called Air and Angels. So his "obsequies" to

John Donne 47

Lord Harrington raise the old problem whether
angels in moving from one place to anothei pass
through all the intermediate spaces. In the
Hymn to the Saints and to Marquis Hamilton
he turns to account the scholastic doctrine that
every angel is itself a ''separate species." He
several times expounds in verse the theory of
three souls: vegetative, sensitive, and rational;
and he knows at what precise moment the soul
takes in "the poisonous tincture of original sin."
Fuller information upon all these ''tickle points
of niceness" may be found in the Summa of
Aquinas, where they are carefully argued out.
What strike us as unaccountable conceits are
simply applications of the current philosophy.
His mind is obviously full of such delicate in-
quiries, and he applies the same method to other
topics. A characteristic poem is The Will. He
supposes himself to be dying, and bequeaths
his moral and intellectual possessions. Then he
works out a problem. A gift has not the proper
virtue when the receiver is not benefited either
(i) because he has a superfluity of the thing, or
(2) because he does not know the use of it, or (3)
because it is unpleasant to him, or (4) because it
is really his own already, or (5) because accidents
make it useless. His mistress has exemplified all
these cases in her reception of him, and he con-

48 Studies of a Biographer

eludes logieally that he will die intestate. This
ingenious scheme might be stated as a theory of
the ethics of giving — When is a present not a pre-
sent? With Donne it becomes rhymed casuistry,
or a brilliant little poem in six stanzas. Mr.
Gosse quotes it as illustrating the phase in which
his passion is turning to bitterness. Mr. Gosse
may be justified ; but it is the more characteristic
that an outburst of passionate bitterness should
be thus crammed into a close logical framework,
which must, one supposes, have taken as much
hard thinking as strong feeling. It is, in fact, this
odd combination of syllogism and sentiment which
gives one peculiar flavour to Donne's poetry, and
makes him, as Coleridge put it, "wreathe iron
pokers into true-love knots. ' ' Sometimes he seems
to be merely a schoolman trying in spite of nature
to be a poet; and at times reveals himself as a
genuine poet, cramped and distorted by the train-
ing of the schools.

Donne, we are told, became a learned lawyer;
but his mind, it is clear, could not be concentrated
upon law-books. It was too discursive to confine
itself within the limits of Coke. He might have
become a divine: but his life hitherto had not
been exactly clerical ; his religious opinions were
vague; and to take orders would have been to
shock his relations by an unqualified breach \\ith

John Donne 49

their Church. For one career, however, he might
seem to be admirably qualified. Where in our
time a youth enters a public office, a youth of
those days entered the " family" of a great man.
The relation was personal as much as official. At
the age of twenty-four Donne, who had already
accompanied Essex to Cadiz and on the Islands
voyage, became secretary to the Lord Keeper
Egerton. He must have felt himself to be well
on the way to fortune. Learned and acute enough
to be eminently useful to his patron, man of the
world enough to be socially acceptable, and pos-
sessed of a special charm of manner and power
of subtle flattery which specially recommended
him to all the great ladies of the circle, the young
secretary obviously had his foot on the ladder.
And then comes the famous catastrophe which
determined his future. "His marriage," says the
worthy Walton, ''was the remarkable error of
his life." In spite of his ability in maintaining
paradoxes, he was "very far from justifying it,"
and, indeed, "would occasionally condemn him-
self for it." The phrase, no doubt, refers to the
clandestine proceedings which he had to employ;
but one could have wished that he had used his
skill in casuistry to justify the means necessary
for so good an end. To us who are at a different
point of view, it is the one passage in Donne's

VOL. III. — 4.

50 Studies of a Biographer

life which gives us an iinequivocal reason for loving
him. Whatever his early faults, he was capable
of a devoted and enduring passion. He probably
did not foresee the consequences of his rashness,
when he made his clandestine match with the girl
of sixteen, who lived in his patron's house, and
was the daughter of the rich Sir George More.
He was prepared for some difficulty, and makes a
quaint excuse for his folly. To have acted openly,
he tells his indignant and involuntary father-in-
law, "would have been to impossibilitate the
whole matter. ' ' The remark seems to show that an
acute logician does not always perceive how differ-
ent an argument looks from the other side of the
question. The matter, as More and Egerton con-
sidered, ought to have been ''impossibilitated."
Donne hoped, perhaps, that by the help of his
persuasive tongue and his distinguished friends
the matter would be smoothed over, and the
marriage become a help instead of a hindrance to
his fortunes. Egerton, however, refused to rein-
state the secretary, even at More's request; and
More, though he forgave as a Christian, declined
as a man of business to make his daughter an
allowance. Donne's ow^n fortune had disappeared.
Years of hardship and suffering followed, and it is
pleasant to find that Donne in one way took the
position as a man should. A man of baser nature

John Donne 51

might have punished the cause of his suffering by
moody ill-temper. Donne observes in the midst
of his troubles that, as he had "transplanted his
wife into a wretched pasture," he was bound to
conceal his depression from her and do all he
could to cheer her. His love is shown in a strange
poem, which, in spite of some strange incongru-
ities, made Lamb's voice tremble when he read it.
The famous story of the "thought-transference,"
which made him aware in France of her danger-
ous illness in England, may prove, even to a
sceptic, that his mind was dwelling upon her;
and all that we hear testifies to the strength of his
devotion. Poor Mrs. Donne, indeed, had a hard
time of it. In fifteen years of marriage she bore
twelve children, of whom five died in her life-
time. Her health broke down, and though she
saw the beginning of prosperity, she remains a
pathetic though a faintly-perceived image of suf-
fering and anxiety compensated by devoted love.
It is essential to keep this in mind if we are to do
bare justice to Donne. A sickly wife and a grow-
ing family imply cares which must have haunted
Donne, himself "neurotic" and often in bad
health, even when he buried himself in his books,
or was over head and ears in controversies with
learned Jesuits. His prospects depended entirely
upon his power of attracting patrons : and (taking

52 Studies of a Biographer

for granted all proper apologies about the manners
of the times) the story is not altogether attractive.
Donne flattered with a will. The great Duchess
of Bedford was praised by other poets, such as
Jonson and Daniel, and, we will hope, deserved
it. Donne was certainly not last in the race for
adequate hyperboles. To commend one's self to
the successful courtiers in the days of James I.
was a process which involved some trial of self-
respect. Lord Carlisle, the best of the race, was
apparently a real friend ; but when we find Donne
declaring that he lives upon the bounty of the
now infamous Somerset; and when, after Somer-
set's fall, he shows his courtier's instinct by
hanging on to Buckingham, the weakness becomes
unpleasant. Happily, the charge that he wrote a
certain repulsive document in support of Somerset
has been fully disproved. But with all excuses,
enough remains to show that Donne was not
above extricating himself from his difficulties
by the methods familiar to the courtiers of
the time. The most singular case was that of
Sir Robert Drury. Drury, a man of great
wealth, lost an only daughter in her fifteenth
year. Donne had never seen the girl, but hearing
of the father's grief composed a "funeral
elegy," declaring, among other things, that death
could —

John Donne 53

"Find nothing after her so great to kill,
Except the world itself so great as she."

The gratified father at once gave Donne a room
in his great house in Drury Lane, and afterwards
took him for a companion on a foreign tour.
Donne carried on his hyperboles in two successive
poems, commemorating anniversaries of the child's
death, and rashly promised an annual celebration.
His friends were scandalised by his outrageous
compliments, and Ben Jonson told him that the
poems might have been appropriate if addressed
to the Virgin Mary. Donne argued that he was
at liberty to treat Miss Drury as the ideal woman
without reference to fact. The poems may be a
warning that we must not infer genuine auto-
biography from his utterances, for, if the truth
had been unknown, injudicious critics might have
constituted a romance out of lines intended sim-
ply to attract a patron. They hardly suggest, in-
deed, real feeling, although they are very curious,
illustrations of Donne's '* metaphysical " subtleties,
and contain some of his most striking phrases.
Meanwhile, it is singular, as Mr. Gosse points out,
that Drury vanishes entirely from Donne's life,
and is hardly mentioned in his letters. Possibly,
as a cynic might observe, the explanation is to be
guessed from Drury's relation to Donne's con-
temporary Joseph Hall. Drury had patronised

54 Studies of a Biographer

Hall, and Hall, as he tells us, had given him up
because another patron offered more liberal terms.
Donne's hopes were long fixed on secular pre-
ferment. Some great man was to make him
Secretary to the Virginia Company, or Ambas-
sador at Venice; and yet, in spite of worries and
ambitions, he was still immersed in his favourite
studies. He was learning the '' Eastern tongues,"
reading Spanish divines and poets, and following
religious controversy, besides turning out an occa-
sional " epithalamium " or elegy. One occupation
suggests a problem. From 1605 "to 1607, Donne,
as Mr. Gosse thinks, was chiefly employed in
what lawyers would call "devilling" for the
learned Dr. Morton, who was arguing with the
Jesuits, and in 1607 was rewarded by the Deanery
of Gloucester. Many years afterwards, Morton,
then Bishop of Durham, reported to Walton a
conversation with Donne. Morton proposed upon
his preferment to resign to another benefice, in
order that Donne might take orders and succeed
to it. Donne refused upon the ground that ac-
cording to the casuists a man ought not to take
orders unless the glory of God were his first end.
Though he had repented of certain ''irregular-
ities," men would remember them, and think
that he was really moved by the desire for an
income. Mr. Gosse remarks that the account is

John Donne 55

*' far too circumstantial not to be in the main
correct," and mclines to think that Morton spoke
from notes taken at the time. I confess that I
cannot quite follow this. The more "circum-
stantial" an old gentleman of seventy-six (at
least) is about events a third of a century old, the
less I believe in his exactness; and, when his
statement is transmitted through a third person,
given to edifying embroidery, the evidence be-
comes exceedingly shadowy.^ Yet Mr. Gosse,
accepting the statement as Morton's, thinks that
Morton misunderstood Donne. Donne's real rea-
son must have been 'that he was still "hardly
an Anglican." I confess that I am not convinced,
though this is one of the psychological puzzles
which must remain doubtful. Anyhow, the con-
versation, authentic or not, suggests a very
natural ground for hesitation. Donne, as I read
him, was a man full of scruples, intellectual and
moral; morbidly sensitive to the opinions of his
fellows, and aware that if he had taken orders,
all the courtiers, and most of his friends, would
have given the obvious reason— Here is a man in
difficulties, taking orders in order to escape them.

» Morton was ninety-four when Walton published this story,
but, as Mr. Beeching points out, it may have been told eigh-
teen years earlier. The whole speech appears to me to be as
obviously a bit of literary composition as one of the speeches
in a classical historian. It represents a general impression.

5^ Studies of a Biographer

Mr. Gosse incidentally calls Donne a man of " stal-
wart will." The phrase strikes me as inappropri-
ate. Donne was a man of overpowering impulses
but little self-control; not with one strong will,
but with many conflicting wills. His whole career
was forced upon him, not carved out by his own
taste. His thirst for learning was crossed by a
thirst for pleasure; the impulse which led him to
marry and upset all his prospects had made him
a dependent, appealing to any patron towards
whom he was drifted, anxious to turn any of his
talents to account, and certainly in some ways
not over-scrupulous. And yet, his remorse for
irregularities and his obvious thirst for sympathy
and respect would naturally make him shrink
from a step certain to be misinterpreted — if, in-
deed, we should not rather say, to be too truly
interpreted. Donne's ordination would scarcely
have been ascribed to a geniune "vocation,"
though now, as always, profoundly interested in
dogmatic discussion. In short, if he had taken
orders, we could hardly have doubted that the
main motive was of the worldly kind, and the
belief that his other hopes would now be realised.
Donne, I suspect, saw that very clearly, and
shrank from the reproach. Moreover, the cynic
must again intrude the remark that the proposed
preferment was in Yorkshire, and would have

John Donne 57

fixed Donne to his remote country living, far
away from his great friends at Court. His writings
at this time seem to illustrate his state of mind,
for, after helping Morton, he published his Pseudo-
Martyr in 1610 — a kind of corollary from the
previous controversy. The point under debate
was the Oath of Allegiance, which Catholics
refused to take. A popular disputant might have
defended the oath on the simple ground that the
recusants were spies and traitors — if they were
hanged, it would serve them right. That, no
doubt, would not persuade Catholics, but it might
excuse Protestant zeal." Donne takes a remoter
point. The recusants, he says, were not genuine
martyrs, because, on their own principles, the Pope
had no right to suspend the law which they were
breaking. Donne's merit was acknowledged by
an Oxford degree, and his book at once recog-
nised, says Dr. Jessopp, as the ''most solid and
masterly contribution" to a controversy already
carried on by our most learned divines. It is
plain, however, that "learned divines" alone
could be much interested. Catholics would hold
that they were better judges than Donne of their
own dogmas, and Protestants care nothing for the
recusants' way of settling their own scruples.
The book might prove that Anglicans could be
as learned and logical as Papists, but for practical

58

Studies of a Biographer

purposes was mere by-play. But with this is con-
nected the curious book called Biathanatos. It
is a defence of the proposition that in some cases
suicide might be not under all circumstances sin-
ful. The doctrine seemed to be so scandalous that
Donne kept the book in manuscript and showed
it only to a few trusted friends. It has, moreover,
scandalised later critics, who have urged in exten-
uation that the argument was ''idealist only."
I fully subscribe to Mr. Gosse's view that this
implies misconception. Donne had excellent
reasons for interest in the question. If ''suicide"
means voluntary death, suicides include all the
martyrs and heroes who deserve our heartiest
admiration. How are we to draw the line be-
tween the man who prefers death by torture to
telling a lie, and the gentleman w^ho shot himself
rather than give up buttered muffins? Both
choose death, though one earns adoration and the
other contempt, and yet one case shades into the
other by imperceptible degrees. Now, Donne
was discussing exactly this point in respect of
the Jesuits. Did the sufferers in his own family, the
men of whom they had been proudest, deserve the
crown of martyrdom, or were they traitors who
had got their deserts? He was arguing against
all his early associations, and no wonder that his
argument suggested a problem. It had clearly,

John Donne 59

too, a personal application. Donne, in his trou-
bles, thought, he tells us himself, of seeking refuge
in death. It pleased him, he says, to reflect that
he had "the keys of his prison in his own hand,"
a reflection which anticipates some recent pessi-
mists. He wished, as Mr. Gosse says, to hold that
if ever he should yield to the impulse he might
still be free from deadly sin. Nothing, at any rate,
can be more characteristic than his mode of solving
the problem. It was the finest imaginable case
of casuistry. He goes to the civil law and the
canon law, and distinguishes between positive sui-
cide when you seek death, and negative suicide,
when you let death seek you, and provides a
whole armoury of subtle legal distinctions which
it would be very difficult to call up at the moment
of temptation. There was a strain of the Hamlet
in Donne, and Hamlet would have been still more
puzzled whether to be or not to be if he had been
as well crammed as Donne with whole bodies of
casuistical divinity.

This, I fancy, gives us a significant glimpse into
this most complex and perplexing character.
His early errors of morality suggest at once defi-
ance and remorse. His romantic love suggests
gratitude for the blessings and repentance for
the blunder. His poetical impulses are confused
and distorted by his philosophy. His intellect,

6o Studies of a Biographer

amazingly nimble and discursive rather than
powerful, stimulates a boundless curiosity which
tends to overwhelm his reason under vast masses
of learning. He reminds us of Bacon by his
fertility of illustration, and oddly enough seems,
as Mr. Gosse points out, to have been more recep-
tive than Bacon of the new astronomy of Kepler
and Galileo. And yet he remains hopelessly
buried in the scholastic system upon which Bacon
was pronouncing sentence. He wanders in a vast
labyrinth of speculation instead of striking at
once to the heart of the problem. Though his
early prejudices drop off, he only sidles and shifts
by slow degrees and with infinite complications
into the Anglican position, always holding to its
continuity with Catholicism. His life is as dis-
tracted and dependent as his thought. He cannot
fairly decide to be the divine, and apologises for
his want of learning while he is displaying learn-
ing enough for a whole bench of bishops. The
Court still charms and fascinates the accomplished
flatterer, and he cannot help hoping that one of
the great favourites to whom he can make himself
so acceptable will, at last, lift him out of his
troubles. All the time the poor man is '' neurotic,"
troubled by ill-health, weighed down by family
cares, and driven to speculate upon the ethics of
suicide. The knot of these tangled difficulties

John Donne 6i

was at last to be cut, and by the most appropriate
deus ex machina. Nobody was better qualified
than James I. to appreciate Donne's abilities, and
for once at least the wisdom of our vSolomon
dictated judicious action. Donne himself was
characteristically tmdecided. He had in 1612
introduced himself to Somerset by a petition.
That worthy nobleman would, be hoped, add to
his many services to religion by patronising a
new divine. Somerset, at the eve of his fall, con-
sented to recommend his client for a clerkship of
the Council. James judiciously told Donne in an
interview, reported with abundant "rose colour"
by Walton, that he was better fitted to be a
preacher. Donne consented — after some final
hesitation — and in a couple of months was or-
dained. The effect upon Donne was decisive.
Walton glows with fervour as he records the
result. The Church of England had gained "a
second St. Austin." He had a ''new calling, new
thoughts, and a new employment for his art and
eloquence; now all his earthly affections were
changed into divine love, and all the faculties of
his own soul were engaged in the conversion of
others." Donne, the wit, the poet, and the court-
ier, was sublimed into the saint, and a burning
and shining light of the Church. Are we to
reduce or qualify this ardent panegyric? That

62 Studies of a Biographer

raises a rather delicate question. Walton holds,
I take it, that Donne was already a saint poten-
tially, and, at this point, finally cast off the im-
pediments which had bound him to the world and
covered his light under a bushel. Now, I do not
doubt the continuity of Donne's development.
Even a ''conversion," which to the man himself
seems to imply a change of nature, often seems to
outsiders to imply merely a change in the direc-
tion of his energies. Yet the striking thing is often
the resemblance of the new man to the old. The
change in Donne at this crisis of his life was
certainly not a transformation of character. It
is quite impossible to doubt the sincerity of his
belief in his creed, or the depth of his religious
sentiment. That, again, is enough to justify a
good Anglican like Walton in inferring that he
was a saint. Unfortunately, this is not exactly
my position. A man, I fancy, may most sincerely
believe all the Thirty-nine Articles, and be deeply
religious, and yet be a bigot and a sour and selfish
fanatic, content to save his own soul and to resign
himself, complacently or savagely, to the damna-
tion of his fellow-creatures. He may be an as-
cetic whom we may respect for his conquest of
the lower appetites, and whom we may yet hold
to be making a dark prison-house of the world.
Or he may be a man full of the love of his fellows,

John Donne 63

and really doing his best to rouse them to the pur-
suit of higher ideals. A strong religious feeling
implies that a man is not merely frivolous or in-
different; but it may be totally misguided or may
be really composed of some very objectionable
ingredients which, without conscious hypocrisy,
may be disguised in the general result. Now,
Donne's religion, like his poetry, seems to be
singularly difficult to analyse. His sincerity does
not prove that it did not include some elements
rather repulsive than admirable. One point seems
to be implied by the obvious facts of his life.
Donne did not become one of the saints who find
it necessary to renounce altogether the career
which they have hitherto pursued. He did not
retire to a cloister. He accepted preferments,
and, though we must of course admit the normal
reference to the '* standard of the age," he does
not appear to have been more or less averse than
other clergymen of the day to a comfortable
addition to his income, involving no increase of
duty. According to one of Walton's anecdotes,
he showed a creditable reluctance to accept an
addition to his fortune when it was uncertain
whether he would live to discharge the duties of
his position. One little incident strikes one rather
disagreeably. In 1623, Donne married his eldest
daughter, then only twenty, to Edward Alley n,

64 Studies of a Biographer

the founder of Dulwich, who was fifty-eight,
and had lost his first wife just six months before.
The affair was transacted in a purely commercial
spirit, and led to some quarrelling over money
matters. One cannot avoid the reflection that
Donne had passed a little too completely out of
the state of mind in which he had committed his
own ''remarkable error." Men, however, mar-
ried their daughters in those days as they let their
farms, and it would be unfair to dwell upon such
matters. Donne, it is enough to say, was not
retiring to a hermitage, but becoming an eloquent
divine on the road to a bishopric. But a real and
serious change came over him by degrees. In
1 617, the patient, suffering wife was taken from
him; and Donne was a man to feel the whole
force of the blow. Preferments and success and
life itself, he knev^r too well, would be henceforth
sad and colourless. A dangerous illness in 1623
brought him to the brink of the grave. Mr.
Gosse has brought out the personal significance of
the "devotions" which he composed at the time.
He describes with singular idvidness the fears and
fancies which distract him as he lies unable to
sleep, listening to the clock or trying to divine the
opinion of his physicians. They are unable to
give morphia, but "apply pigeons to draw the
vapours from his head." If, however, the treat-

John Donne 65

ment was antiquated, the emotions of the patient
were modern, and, indeed, also ancient enough.
Singular conceits still occur to him: they were
strange enough and would mix well with delirious
dreams; but no one could lay bare more effec-
tively the emotions which must rise in all ages to
an exquisitely sensitive nature lying in an ante-
chamber of death. We see already the Donne
who a few years later was to rise from his death-
bed, and, standing in his shroud, to be draw^n for
the ghastly portrait which stood by his bed during
his last hours. The same figure is represented by
the statue in St. Paul's. A few weeks had then
passed since Donne, as Walton puts it, had
preached his own funeral sermon. His friends,
as they saw him in the pulpit, thought that he
could only "preach mortality by a decayed body
and a dying face." He was, however, able to
speak, though in a ''faint and hollow voice and
with many tears" ; and so ended his strange career
most characteristically. If, as Mr. Gosse observes,
there is to us just an overtouch of the dramatic
and self-conscious in that matter of the picture,
we can see at least how profoundly he impressed
Walton and his contemporaries. He was one who,
after early errors, had been chastened by long
suffering and deep repentance, and had been
finally purified from all earthly stains. Baxter,

VOL. III. — 5.

66 Studies of a Biographer

we are told, preached ''as a dying man to dying
men." Walton's description of Donne's preaching
might suggest that the phrase was applicable to
Donne. We are told how deeply he was in earnest ;
how his hearers wept with him; how some were
"carried to heaven in holy raptures," and others
enticed to amendment by " a sacred art and court-
ship"; how he made vice ugly and virtue beauti-
ful, and preached "like an angel from a cloud,"
though not in a cloud himself . We turn from this
panegyric to the sermons to verify the impression.
The tendency of oratory to fall flat when it is
read instead of heard is a commonplace, and w^e
are prepared for some disillusion. Donne tells
us himself that a good sign of the times was
the " hunger for hearing." Elsewhere he speaks
of the "murmuring and noises" made when a
preacher had "concluded a point." They often
took up, he declares, a quarter of the hour habit-
ually assigned to a sermon. Donne's own ser-
mons, as printed, stretch sometimes to nearly
three times that length; but it seems that he
spoke from notes on a carefully prepared scheme,
and afterwards expanded and revised for publi-
cation. In any case, it is clear that Donne's
audiences were prepared to be receptive of pulpit
eloquence to a degree not easy now to realise. It
is not strange if we find their raptures surpass

John Donne 67

our own; though we can share one part of their
wonder. Donne's sermons, whatever else they
may be, are astonishing intellectual feats. In
spite of ill-health and many distractions, he pub-
lished, as Dr. Jessopp counts, one hundred and
eighty sermons ; each itself rather a short treatise
than a brief flight of rhetoric; first elaborated,
then spoken, and then elaborately rewritten. As
mere exhibitions of learning they are remarkable,
and the more so because Donne does not seem
to be turning out a commonplace book, or going
out of his way to display learning. He has a
mind so full of learning that references crowd in
spontaneously. He makes, it may be noticed,
few allusions to the classics, but he is thoroughly
at home with all the Fathers and ecclesiastical
history; Augustine is at his fingers' ends, and
St. Bernard is a special favourite. Then he applies
Aquinas and the schoolmen; or shows his pro-
found familiarity with the whole Catholic theol-
ogy of his time ; or calls in the Protestant cham-
pions, Luther, and Melanchthon, and Calvin ; or is
attracted by some great writer of the day, now
forgotten, such as Collins, wiio had investigated
with untiring industry the posthumous fate of
pagan souls. Evidently his hydrqptic. thirst has
stored his mind w4th masses of anecdote, argu-
ment, and reflection, over which he can range at

6S Studies of a Biographer

will whenever he needs an apt illustration. Then,
as he quaintly remarks, the pastor must not only
distribute "manna" — ^fruits known to all — but
" quails," " meat of a stronger digestion " ; that is,
be at home in whole systems of dogmatic and
casuistical theology. The congregation is in the
mental attitude of students in a professor's lec-
ture-room. The preacher claims the authority of
an expert, and speaks as the exponent of the judg-
ments of countless learned doctors. The doctors
did not all agree, it is true; but the mere weight
of so many great names warns the ignorant that
he is not to presume an opinion of his own.

This attitude of mind, the impression that the
preacher is condescending from the vantage-
ground of mysterious learning, has become as
strange as Donne's political attitude. The King
for him is scarcely short of an earthly god. We
wonder whether he was perfectly sincere. In one
of his most elaborate performances Donne applies
a text from Proverbs, saying that the King shall
be the friend of him "that loveth pureness of
heart." In a glowing peroration this is applied
to James. ^ Donne, of course, includes purity of
doctrine, to which James might make a claim;
but nobody Icnew better than Donne what was

^ " The Court of James I.," says Hallam, " was incompar-
ably the most disgraceful scene of profligacy which this
country has ever witnessed.**

John Donne 69

the moral purity of the favourites who had been \
rewarded by James's friendship. Neither he nor
his congregation, we must presume, looked too
closely; but Donne, if he turned over a certain
satire which lay in his desk, might have remem-
bered that such a panegyric might be turned into
the bitterest irony.

But, putting this aside, we must admit another
point. Donne's learning is, after all, subsidiary to
a marvellous intellectual activity. In his poems
the dialectical subtlety seems to fetter him. The
fancy is condensed as well as constrained. He
seems to labour till he can squeeze the imaginative
impulse into a logical formula at the price of
crabbed obscurity. But in the prose the two
faculties play freely into each other's hands.
There is a crowd and rush of thoughts and illus-
trations. His subtle intellect evolves endless
distinctions and startling paradoxes and quaint
analogies so abundantly, that he might apparently
have preached for a week as easily as for an
hour. He takes up one fancy after another, and
revels in various applications till the display be-
comes astonishing. His most famous predecessor,
Andrewes, was perhaps equally learned and logi-
cally subtle; but, so far as I have been able to
get — not, I confess, very far — his desire to be
logically conv-incing overw^eights him and keeps

70 Studies of a Biographer

him to the earth. Jeremy Taylor, Donne's
greatest successor, can yield frankly to his imagi-
nation, and takes daring flights into the region
of pure poetry. Donne represents the fusion of
the two faculties. He conscientiously begins his
sermons by laying down his logical framework.
Any text on his method may serve, as he says
of one, for introducing a lecture upon grammar,
logic, ethic, rhetoric, or philosophy; though, of
course, every clause, or even single word, may
have to be strangely tortured and sublimated
in the process. The style, again, is essentially
logical, perfectly clear, and thoroughly articulate
even in the longest sentences, now that he has
not to force his words into metrical fetters. It
is thoroughly alive; never flagging, relaxed, or
clumsy, however elaborate. He is specially mas-
ter of one device. He reaches a climax, as you
suppose, and that only leads to another more
surprising, and so to a third, which eclipses its
predecessors. Or sometimes a sentence contains
an accumulation of apparent synonyms, intended
to make the idea flash new sparkles from different
facets. Donne, at least, never goes to sleep, and
the alertness and versatility indicated is constantly
surprising.

This, of course, involves the string of quibbles
and conceits which would strike a modern con-

John Donne 71

gregation sometimes as puerile and sometimes
as profane. He can take suggestions from all
manner of topics. He can at times appeal to
mathematical analogies. He has been amused by
the remark that you have only to join the ends
of a flat map to make east coincide with west,
and more than once uses it for edification. The
natural history of those days, whose animals
seem to come partly out of folk-lore and partly
from j^ sop's Fables, offers delightful suggestions.
One of his most singular passages relates to the
well-known fact (used also in his Progress of the
Soul) that the mouse is a deadly enemy of the
elephant. It creeps up the elephant's trunk and
"gnaws the life-cords." This is applied to the
relations between man and the Being who made
him out of nothing, ''which is infinitely less than
a mathematical point." Can man dare to be at
enmity with his Creator, "who is not only a mul-
tiplied elephant, millions of elephants multiplied
into one, but a multiplied world, a multiplied all,
all that can be conceived by us, infinite many
times over?" Do modern preachers regret, I
wonder, that they are not allowed such extrava-
gances, which at least would be fatal to slumbers,
or rejoice that such efforts are not expected of
them? Anyway, with so wide a field, Donne had
ample opportunities for startling his hearers and

72 Studies of a Biographer

•

stimulating their attention. Whatever the eccen-
tricities, each sermon plays round some definite
central thought, and has a certain unit}^ through
the endless ramifications of exuberant illustration.
Such performances might be amazing feats of
intellectual juggling; but could they produce
" raptures " and '' tears " ? I can manage to believe
it, though I must confess that I have to take it
rather on trust. It wants an effort to suppose that
the sense of man's littleness in the universe could
be really driven home by comparing the Creator
to a ** multiplied elephant." If a man were not
shocked by the incongruity, he might recognise a
true sentiment, which, uttered in a different dia-
lect, may still impress us all at times. But, then,
if we strip off the subtleties, we are apt to come
upon a commonplace, and at last must confess
that a good many of Donne's refinements suggest
rather a yawn than a rapture. If, however, we
deliberately make the effort, get back as well as
we can to the seventeenth century, and try to get
up a rapture, we can perhaps understand, though
it is difficult quite to sympathise. There are
passages enough in which Donne reveals his heart,
and the veil of subtlety becomes transparent.
Using a comparison generally attributed to New-
ton, he speaks of the worthlessness of mere human
wisdom, and says that men who have followed by

John Donne 73

this light "all the ways both of wisdom and of
craft, have got no further than to have walked
by the side of a tempestuous sea, and to have
gathered pebbles and speckled cockle-shells."
There, happily, his faculty for analogies stops,
within legitimate bounds, and the phrase illus-
trates the vein in which we can really imagine
Donne to have moved tears as well as wonder.
Showing here and there throughout the subtlety
and the learning and the controversy, we have
glimpses of the ghastly figure which preached liis
own funeral sermon^ Donne, indeed, represents
that strangely materialist view of death, the
dwelling upon corruption and the physically re-
pulsive, characteristic of the time. Inevitably it
leads him into queer speculations, as, for example,
into the problem how the body is to be put to-
gether after it has been assimilated by a fish or a
cannibal, and therefore become the common pro-
perty of two souls. But beneath all this is the
strong sentiment which might now be congenial
to pessimism. Donne was a saint in the eyes of
his hearers, and a saint of the ascetic type. His
conscience is still haunted by remorse, tempted to
self-torture and disillusionment with the world.
The sensual appetites have been conquered, but
at the price of constantly fixing his eyes upon the
hideous side of things; he thinks of the treachery

74 Studies of a Biographer

and the villainy which underlies the decorous
outside of the world, and checks the worship of
beauty by thoughts of what will happen to beauty
in the grave. There, again, Hamlet in the church-
yard gave pithy utterance to a theme which
Donne extends into elaborate subtleties, and con-
siders a ''little too curiously." If he has in some
sense found peace a.nd consolation, he has to be
always mortifying the flesh and scourging himself
to keep down the old man. He meditates upon
hell and the gloomy aspect of the world, which
preoccupies him and leads to his most effective
passages. To give specimens would be difficult,
if only an acccunt of the excessive luxuriance of
his rhetoric. A singularly fine passage is the
peroration to a sermon upon the text, "He that
believeth not shall be damned," where the real
torment of hell is described as the hopeless separa-
tion of the soul from God. That, perhaps, of
which a slight indication can be m^ost easily given
is an appeal to the atheist. He challenges the
"poor, intricated, perplexed, labyrinthical soul"
to stand by its creed. If I asked, he says, whether
there be a God when you are at church or in the
world or at a theatre, you might consider that
religion was an invention of priests or poets or
rulers. But, he proceeds, "I respite thee not till
the day of judgment, when thou wilt call upon the

John Donne 75

hills to cover thee; nor till the day of thine own
death, when thou shalt have evidence enough of
thy Maker by feeling hell. **I respite thee but
a few hours, but six hours, but till midnight.
Wake then, and then, dark and alone, hear God
ask thee then, and remember that I asked thee
now. Is there a God? And if thou darest, say
No!"

This passage must be enough to illustrate the
vigour with which Donne can often throw aside
his "mouse and elephant," and his elaborate re-
finements on grammatical and logical niceties,
and glow with genuine fire, though frequently we
have to exclude so much uncongenial matter that
our appreciation ceases to be spontaneous. And
there is perhaps the final interest of Donne. In
one way he has partly become obsolete because he
belonged so completely to the dying epoch. The
scholasticism in which his mind was steeped was
to become hateful and then contemptible to the
rising philosophy; the literature which he had
assimilated went to the dust-heaps; preachers
condescended to drop their doctorial robes ; down-
right common-sense came in with Tillotson and
South in the next generation; and not only the
learning but the congenial habit of thought be-
came unintelligible. Donne's poetical creed went
the same way, and if Pope and Parnell perceived

76 Studies of a Biographer

that there was some genuine ore in his verses and
tried to beat it into the coinage of their own day
they only spoilt it in trying to polish it. But on
the other side, Donne's depth of feeling, whether
tortured into short lyrics or expanding into volu-
ble rhetoric, has a charm which perhaps gains a
new charm from modern sentimentalists. His
morbid or ''neurotic" constitution has a real
affinity for latter-day pessimists. If they talk
philosophy where he had to be content with scho-
lastic theology, the substance is pretty much the
same. He has the characteristic love for getting
pungency at any price; for dwelling upon the
horrible till we cannot say whether it attracts or
repels him; and can love the "intense" and
super-sublimated as much as if he were skilled in
all the latest aesthetic canons. People sometimes
talk as if pessimism were a new invention. It is
merely a new way of saying the old things. The
good old hearty belief in the devil had certainly
one advantage: it enabled a gloomy person to
cover his misanthropical sentiments by an edify-
ing mask. The conviction that man's nature is
corrupt, and that the great majority will be
damned, enabled you to discharge your melan-
choly and yet ostensibly to believe that every-
thing was for the best. Now that the devil has
gone out of fasliion, the pessimist cannot find even

John Donne 77

a verbal excuse for his mismanagements of '' Na-
ture," and has to appear in his true character. It
is, in fact, the affinity of Donne to such teaching
which suggests a certain ambiguity in the eulogies
bestowed upon his religion. His view may be
right or wrong; but it implies something very
unlike the amiable and optimistic view of the
universe which seems to be generally taken as
religious by modern preachers.

John Ruskin

DUSKIN'S death, as we all agreed, deprived
^ ^ us of the one man of letters who had a
right to burial in Westminster Abbey. We may
rejoice that his representatives preferred Coniston.
The quiet churchyard in a still unpolluted country
was certainly more appropriate for him than the
" central roar " of what he somewhere calls ** loath-
some London." But the general consent marks
the fact that Ruskin had come to be recognised as
a compeer of the greatest writers of the age. By
many he is also revered as one who did more than
almost any contemporary to rouse the sluggish
British mind from its habitual slumber. His
career, indeed, suggests many regrets. His later
writings are too often a cry of despair and vexa-
tion of spirit. The world is out of joint, and all
his efforts to set it right have failed. To those
who cannot quite agree that we are all driving
post-haste to the devil, the pessimism may seem
to indicate the want of intellectual balance which
did much to waste surpassing abilities. But if
his vagaries are sometimes provoking, at any rate
they are always interesting. Though my intel-
lectual idols in old days were of a different school,

78

John Ruskin 79

I was nev^er so dull as to be indifferent to the
curious fascination of his books. I have been
refreshing my memory of them lately, and if I
cannot profess myself an ardent disciple, I have
at least read with renewed or increased admiration
of his literary power. One excellence is conspic-
uous at first sight. The cardinal virtue of a good
style is that every sentence should be alive to its
fingers' ends. There should be no cumbrous ver-
biage, no barren commonplace to fill the inter-
stices of thought, and no mannerism simulating
emotion by fictitious ^emphasis. Ruskin has that
virtue in the highest degree. We are everywhere
in contact with a real human being, feeling
intensely, thinking keenly, and, even when rhetori-
cal, writing, not to exhibit his style or his elo-
quence, but because his heart burns within him.
In his later moods, indeed, Ruskin held that he
had been at first too much given to the ornate :
he had been seduced by his admiration for Hooker
to indulge in elaborate long-winded sentences:
and he certainly had a weakness for very delib-
erate "purple patches." That was a venial fault
as a young man, and was sufficiently punished by
misdirected admiration. People, as he complained,
would take him for a coiner of fine phrases, in-
stead of a real philosopher and a serious critic of
art. Modern Painters, as even an artistic igno-

8o Studies of a Biographer

ramus could see, was something much more than
rhetoric. It was an intellectual feat which be-
comes more surprising the more one thinks of it.
The first volume, we remember, was not only
written when he was twenty-three, but when he
had had, in some respects, a singularly narrow
education. Ruskin, we may note, was at Oxford
during the most exciting period of the "move-
ment." His ablest contemporaries were all going
through the Newman fever. Ruskin seems never
to have been aware that such a person as Newman
existed. He amused himself with geology and
botany, and seems to have been as blind as be-
came the son o^ a sound Evangelical wine-merchant
to the very existence of any spiritual ferment.
That might seem to prove that he cared nothing
for intellectual speculations. Yet within a year
or two he was writing a book of which it may be
said that no work produced by an English author
of the same period of life has ever done so much to
set people thinking in a fresh direction. The
generous desire to do justice to Turner, which
prompted the book, led, I suppose, to the most
triumphant vindication of the kind ever published.
In any case, the argument was so forcibly put as
to fall like a charge of dynamite into the camp of
the somnolent critics of the day. The book, what-
ever its en'ors, is, I fancy, the only one in the

John Ruskin 8i

language which treats to any purpose what is
called aesthetics. It is amusing to notice what
difficulty the young critic has in finding any pre-
vious authorities to confute. He goes back to
Locke's essay, and Burke on the "Sublime and
Beautiful," and Alison on "Taste," and the
papers by Reynolds in Johnson's Idler, which have
also, as he remarks, the high sanction of their
editor. In truth, English speculation on such mat-
ters was nearly a blank. Untram_melled by any
solemn professors of aesthetics, Rusldn could be
all the fresher; and perhaps the better able to
impress readers who were neither philosophical
nor aesthetic. People who shared the indifference
to art of those dark ages (I can answer for one)
were suddenly fascinated, and found to their
amazement that they knew a book about pictures
almost by heart. They did not foresee the day in
w^hich a comfortable indifference to artistic mat-
ters, instead of being normal and respectable,
would be pitiable and almost criminal. Ruskin,
no doubt, gave the first impulse to the change.

His popular reputation was partly due to the
passages which a severe taste can only just
approve. Yet the worst one can say of such
famous bits of rhetoric as the comparison of
Claude's skies with Turner's is that they approach
Shelley's finest imagery too nearly for prose.

VOL, III. 6.

82 Studies of a Biographer

The rhetoric rests, in any case, upon some
remarkable qualities. His defence of Turner is
mainly an exposition of Turner's truthfulness to
nature, and shows that this eulogist is qualified
to judge of his fidelity. Ruskin has watched sky
and sea and mountains so closely, that he is
revolted by the old conventional portraits and
demonstrates his point with extraordinary fulness
of knowledge. He surpasses the average critic
in that respect as a scientific specialist surpasses
a mere popular observer. Ruskin, indeed, took
% himself to have a specially scientific mind. So far
as aptitude for science means power of observa-
tion, the claim, I imagine, was perfectly justified.
He came in later years to detest science '*in the
lump," and to speak of leaders of science with
unfortunate arrogance. But his power of seeing
the phenomena vividly was as remarkable as his
power, not always shared by scientific writers, of
making description interesting. I owe him a per-
sonal debt. Many people have tried their hands
upon Alpine descriptions since Saussure; but
Ruskin 's chapters seemicd to have the freshness
of a new revelation. The fourth volume of
Modern Painters infected me and other early
members of the Alpine Club with an enthusiasm
for which, I hope, we are still grateful. Our
prophet indeed ridiculed his disciples for treating

I

John Ruskin 83

Mont Blanc as a greased pole. We might well
forgive our satirist/ for he had revealed a new
pleasure, which we might mix with ingredients
which he did not fully appreciate. The power
of giving interest and fascination even to dry
geological details was no doubt due to the singu-
lar fervour of his nature- worship. One pardons
a lover for some excess of interest even in the
accessories of his mistress's charms. How Rus-
Idn's passion for nature was developed by his
surroundings may be learned from many of his
most interesting reminiscences. But the sur-
roundings worked upon innate predispositions
which must have been almost unique. He speaks
in Modern Painters of his "intense joy, mingled
with awe," when his nurse took him to Friar's
Crag on Derwentw^ater. It was " comparable only
to the joy of being near a noble and kind mistress"
— and equally inexplicable. Long afterwards he
tells us how, as a boy, he would pass entire days
rambling on "Cumberland hillsides or staring at

» I will venture to add a reminiscence. Ruskin was induced
by his friend, St, John Tyrwhitt, to attend a dinner of the
Alpine Club about 1868. He declined to speak, and at first
looked upon us, I think, as rather questionable characters;
but he rapidly thawed and became not only courteous, but
cordially appreciative of our motives. I think that he called
us " fine young men"! At any rate he joined the Club and
was a member for many years, although, of course, he could
Still speak very frankly of our frailties.

84 Studies of a Biographer

the lines of surf on a low sand," and traces his
whole power of judging in art to the habit thus
acquired. In this quality, and in this alone, he
was, he thinks, remarkable as a child. Most child-
ren have a certain taste for ponds and rocks, as
offering romantic chances of dirt and danger, and
as the habitat of things catchable, and partly,
if they are imaginative, as probable haunts of
pirates and Robinson Crusoes. Those are surely
rare who, as Ruskin tells us of himself, found a
"strange delight" in getting a "land-line cutting
against the sky." Wordsworth was another re-
corded instance, and Ruskin himself compares
this early passion to that which prompted the
famous ode. Heaven lies about us in our in-
fancy, if we happen to be Wordsworths or Rus-
kins, and till he had grown to manhood its indul-
gence gave him a pleasure infinitely greater than
he had since found in anything. This enthusiasm,
however psychologists may explain it, not only
gave charm to Ruskin's early writings, but gave
the substance of the aesthetic doctrine to which,
as he observes rather ruefully, people would pay
no attention. He set out with the intention of
systematically expounding a theory of the beau-
tiful. Unfortunately, he had one infirmity fatal
to such an attempt. He was incapable of arrang-
ing his thoughts in orderly, symmetrical pig-

John Ruskin 85

eon-holes: his mind was essentially discursive: he
could see things more vividly than any one, and
could argue acutely and ingeniously; but he had
never the patience to consider how his thoughts
should be co-ordinated and wrought into con-
sistent unity. The Modern Painters^ we know,
could never be really completed at all, because he
was attracted by all manner of irrelevant and
collateral issues. In later years his incapacity
for consecutive writing becomes bewildering.
You can never tell in reading a lecture whether
the next paragraph will take you to questions of
religion or art or social evils or autobiography.
In a letter to Carlyle in 1855 he humorously de-
clares that he is reading German metaphysics,
poetry, political economy, cookery, music, geology,
dress, agriculture, horticulture, and navigation
all at once, which, as he observes, "takes time."
No human intellect, one might add, performing
such rapid flights from topic to topic, could ever
get an}^ of them fairly worked out. A letter from
an unnamed friend, which he published in the
Fors Clavigera, suggests a partial explanation:
*'You can," said this frank critic, **see an indi-
vidual concrete fact better than any man of the
generation; but an invisible fact, an abstraction,
. . . you have, I fancy, been as incapable of
seeing as of seeing through a stone wall." With

86 Studies of a Biographer

necessary deductions from the judgment of a
candid friend there is, I fancy, much truth in
this. Ruskin was too much absorbed in the indi-
vidual and concrete to be a good system-monger.
Intellectually, he resembles a short-sighted man
to whom every detail is so abnormally vivid in
turn that he forgets the whole. He has to make
his theories — if theories he must have — not by
patient induction, but by flashes of intuition.
His theory of the beautiful simply formulates
his own c?iildish instincts. Wordsworth had seen,
we know, in his own early feelings a proof of the
soul's pre-existence ''with God, who is our home."
So Ruskin, though he somewhere calls this fanci-
ful, regards the sense of beauty as a revelation —
as something like the inner light of mystics. All
natural beauty, he says, is ''typical of the divine
attributes"; and he tries to show in detail how
the sense of beauty corresponds to a perception
of Infinity, Order, Symmetry, Unity, and so forth,
and how the external world is thus a divinely
appointed system of symbols, dimly recognised
even in childhood. This theory, no doubt, is as
good as others. Like others, indeed, which pre-
sent themselves as a direct inspiration of the
prophet, it may fail to convince opponents; and
the elaboration into a symmetrical system must
not be taken too seriously. Ruskin quaintly

John Ruskin 87

remarks how hard he found it to prevent his
Seven Lamps of Architecture from becoming eight
or nine upon his hands. No doubt his first fol-
lower, if he had found one, would have redistri-
buted his symbols, and interpreted various objects
to mean entirely different truths. It should be
taken, as we take Wordsworth's ode, not as a
prosaic argument, but as an imaginative way of
expressing his own sentiments. If disputable as
a general theory, it shows what the love of nature
meant for Ruskin. To him it seemed to be a part
of religion ; and a description is for him not a
mere catalogue of forms and colours and sensa-
tions, but a divine language to be interpreted by
the "high instincts" (if I may quote the inevi-
table ode again) before which our mortal nature
trembles like a guilty thing surprised. To read
the true meaning of these outward and visible
signs is the function of what he calls the "theo-
retic faculty"; and, parenthetically, I may add
that his theory, good or bad in itself, leads him
to very interesting literary criticisms. I do not
know whether the chapters in which he discusses
the "theoretic" faculty or imagination will pass
muster with later psychologists better than his
theory of the beautiful with the professors of
aesthetics. But I never read anything which
seemed to me to do more than these chapters to

88 Studies of a Biographer

•
make clear the true characteristics of good poetry.

Ruskin's critical judgments are certainly not
always right; no critic can always judge rightly,
unless at the cost of being thoroughly common-
place, and Ruskin is often wayward and some-
times extravagant. But his sense of what was
excellent was so keen and genuine, and he could
often analyse his impressions so subtly, that I
have seemed to myself (perhaps it was an illusion)
to have really learned something from his remarks.
Ruskin's theory suggested many difficulties —
which, indeed, is the chief use of a theory. Con-
temporary critics condemned him and his clients,
the Pre-Raphaelites, as "realists." He was taken
to hold, that is, that the merit of a w^ork of art
was measurable entirely by the quantity of
''truth" which it contained. I fancy that the
employment of the word "truth," when what is
really meant is "likeness," leads to as many fal-
lacies as any known misuse of language. It seems,
in particular, to make a moral duty of what is a
simple question of artistic method. In the Modern
Painters he is constantly struggling against this
interpretation, though he never gets the point
quite clear. There is a difficulty in carrying out
the theory consistently. The painter, it seems,
is to give the facts pure and simple, but then it is
just because the facts signify ideas. The greater

John Ruskin 89

the realism, though it may sound paradoxical,
the greater the ideaHsm. If, indeed, the "love of
nature" — the intense joy and awe which Ruskin
and Wordsworth felt in their early days — be
interpreted to mean that the natural scenery
which Turner painted is symbolic of divine truths,
the closer the imitation the fuller will be the
revelation. But when Ruskin is showing the
marvellous accuracy of Turner's perceptions, he
seems to become simply scientific or prosaic.
Turner's merit is explained to be that he instinc-
tively grasped the laws of mountain structure and
saw what later geologists tried to explain. It is
only by a kind of after-thought that the scenery
is made to be somehow edifying and symbolic.
There is a greater difficulty behind. After all, is
the "love of nature" so clearly a religious or moral
sentiment ? In a chapter of Modern Painters upon
the " Moral of Landscape," Ruskin tries, with
great ingenuity, to show that the passion is at any
rate congenial to the highest moral feelings. Yet
he betrays some doubt. With Byron, the "love
of nature" — if we are to take his word for it —
was a corollary of his misanthropy. He loved the
deep and dark blue ocean precisely because it has
a pleasant way of sending man shivering and
howling to his gods. Is not that the logical view.^
To love rock and stream precisely for their wild-

90 Studies of a Biographer

ness surely means that you dislike the garden and
the field which are useful to human beings. The
love of nature, as interpreted by Rousseau and
his followers, meant, in fact, a condemnation of
civilised man; not misanthropy, indeed, but a
conviction of the thorough corruption of men as
they are — whatever we may hope for men as they
are to be.

When, in the Modern Painters, Ruskin tried to
extend his theory from the beauty of inanimate
nature to the beauty of organised beings, he felt
this difficulty. Some animals, and many men, are
undoubtedly ugly. If they are symbolic of any-
thing, it is of something the very opposite of
divine — of sensuality, greed, and cruelty. In the
language of his Evangelical days, Ruskin regards
this as a result of the "Adamite fall." As the
love of nature is essentially a part of religion,
he naturally comes to a theory w^hich identifies
the " aesthetic " with the moral or religious instinct,
and scandalised many people who did not wish
their love of art to be trammelled by any crotchets
of morality. The change from the Ruskin of the
Modern Painters to the Ruskin of the later days
is, of course, marked by the development of this
feeling. The vileness of man, instead of the
beauties of nature, becomes his chief preoccupa-
tion. In the early volumes he is not only enthu-

John Ruskin 91

siastic, but seems to count upon the enthusiasm
of his readers. He is exultingly smiting the
Philistine hip and thigh with a certain compla-
cency; and the good time is coming in which
Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites will be duly hon-
oured. The fervid rhetoric is the natural lan-
guage of one who is leading a band of followers
to the promised land. Something gradually
changed ; not his character, but his habitual tone
of feeling. In his natural temper, he tells us, he
had most sympathy with Marmontel;^ in his
"enforced and accidental temper," with Swift.
If any one asks how Swift was soured, there is no
want of sufficient explanation. We cannot say of
Ruskin that he ever became " soured" : the genial
and generous qualities which suggest the com-
parison to Marmontel were always there; but
certainly, his ''enforced and accidental temper"
became only too like Swift's. The modem
Englishman was, for him, painfully like the
Yahoo. A man hardly becomes a pessimist out
of simple logic, and Ruskin had personal sorrows
and sufferings, and an exquisitely sensitive and
affectionate nature. The intellectual change was
perhaps rather effect than cause, but it was, at

^ So Mill tells us in his Autobiography that a passage in
Marmontel's Memoirs gave him the first help in rousing him
from his youthful fit of melancholy.

92 Studies of a Biographer

any rate, characteristic. He was distracted from
the Modern Painters by the keen interest in archi-
tecture which produced the Stones of Venice and
the Seven Lamps. The study gave prominence to
a new point of view. In his early work he might
pass for a believer in progress. The ''love of
nature" is, in some sense, a product of the last
century or two ; and the modern painters of whom
he wrote, with Turner at their head, were, he
thought, incomparably superior to Claude or
Salvator. But in architecture he saw decay in-
stead of progress. The ancient buildings, whose
glory he set forth, were being recklessly destroyed
or "restored," and the art of building itself was
a thing of the past. Great architecture presup-
poses continuous traditions and a certain social
harmony. The mediaeval cathedrals were the
product of a spontaneous instinct, in which each
man took his part as naturally as the bee in the
honeycomb, and thought as little of his separate
interests. We have lost the power because society
has been disintegrated; instead of a common
ideal, we have a dozen conflicting fashions, and
depend upon self-seeking architects, and greedy
contractors and demoralised workmen. Whatever
may be the true way of stating the relation be-
tween art and morals, there is a close connection
between good art and sound social conditions. If

John Ruskin 93

a people become selfish and brutalised, no national
art, at least, can flourish. Far be it from me to
attempt an accurate statement; but I cannot
doubt that Ruskin 's vehement assertions were at
least approximations to a most important truth.
He was thus in face of a dilemma. Delicate and
refined natures, indeed, might shut themselves up
in a Tennysonian "palace of art," and cultivate
ideals as remote as possible from the prosaic ugli-
ness of the modern world. Ruskin 's sympathies
and moral feelings were too strong. Even in his
early writings, he objected to use the word " aes-
thetic" because it suggested the effeminate taste
which "ministers to morbid sensibilities." Like
William Morris, on the same grounds, he held
that art as a social product could only be renewed
by regenerating society itself. That was a toler-
ably large enterprise, into which he threw himself
with, perhaps, more energy than reflection; but
which led, at least, to the utterance of some very
pungent and much-needed truths.

About i860 he began his warfare against the
creed of the modern w^orld, which for him was
represented by the Political Economists. He
was taken to be a dangerous heretic. Readers
were so much outraged that Thackeray had to
stop Unto this Last in the Cornhill, and Froude
to decline Munera Pulveris for Eraser. The

94 Studies of a Biographer

strength of the popular prejudice surprises later
readers. For some years we have been flouting
the old Political Economists with a scorn as un-
qualified as the respect with which they were
formerly greeted. Ruskin, indeed, had precedents
enough for identifying political economy with the
degrading and materialising tendencies of modern
society. The doctrine had been denounced from
its very birth by Conservatives, Socialists, and
Radicals of many types as heartily as Ruskin
could wish. He declared himself to be an inter-
\.' preter of Carlyle, to whom, as he said, he owed
more than to any one, and who had spoken
the whole truth about the matter in Past and
Present. No one could acknowledge an intellect-
ual debt more loyally and heartily, and Carlyle 's
philosophy in general, as well as his special denun-
ciations of the ''dismal science," had clearly a
potent influence upon his disciple. The Christian
Socialists, too, with whom Ruskin associated,
were protesting against the old orthodox doc-
trine in the same spirit — to say nothing of other
ciritcs who arose within the ranks of the Econo-
mists themselves. There was nothing new in the
simple fact of a revolt. Carlyle, however, to the
ordinary Briton, passed for an eccentric old
Diogenes— a railer at things in general, or perhaps
a humourist whose misanthropy was half affecta-

John Ruskin 95

tion. The Christian Socialists might be treated
as amiable and excellent crotchet-mongers, whose
philanthropy wanted common-sense. And un-
doubtedly there was a vulgar version of political
economy, which used the orthodox phrases igno-
rantly and blatantly enough, preached an abso-
lute and selfish "individualism," and discovered
that every scheme of social reform was somehow
condemned by inexorable scientific law. Ruskin ,
therefore, resolved, he tells us, to come to close
quarters with pseudo-science ; and to make it the
" central work of his life to write an exhaustive
treatise upon Political Economy." He began,
apparently, by reading Ricardo and Mill and such
other authorities with attention; though with a
strong impression that they would turn out to be
humbugs. One result was that he attributed to
some of his opponents, to J. S. Mill in particular,
a complicity with a vulgar version of their doc-
trines which they altogether repudiated. He
should have recognised that Mill could speak as
emphatically as himself of the injustice of the act-
ual social order and sympathised quite as much
with the Socialist aspiration, if not with the
Socialist solution. There was, undoubtedly, a
radical antagonism of principle; but Ruskin was
too passionately eager to distinguish between
the stupid and selfish opponents, and men

9^ Studies of a Biographer

whose ability and genuine zeal he ought to have
appreciated.^

Rusldn struck some sharp blows. The crafts-
men still believed implicitly in their Diana of the
Ephesians. Carlyle's huge growls had passed over
men's heads like distant thunder, too vague to be
effective. Ruskin meant to be the lightning,
striking distinct and tangible points. He had, as
he had showed in his other works, a singular power
of putting nasty questions, of hitting weak points,
exposing loose and wordy phrases, and generally
making himself disagreeable to self-complacent
phrasemongeis. He succeeded in irritating, if
not in convincing. For the time the respectable
world shut its ears and kept him out of correct
periodicals. Naturally, he has now the credit
which comes to the earlier mouthpieces of a rising
sentiment. I cannot believe, indeed, that those
"arrows of the chace" — to adopt his title for his
occasional letters — really advanced economics.
He could make special points, but not construct
a mere scientific theory. His moral sense was in
too great a hurry to step in. He could not look
at the facts quietly before fulminating his spirit-

> See Time and Tide, p. 167, for an assault upon Mill's
" wilful equivocations," Ruskin's wrath prevented him from
seeing that Mill, as was shown by his approval of "land
nationalisation," was attacking " landlordism " as sincerely
as his critic.

John Ruskin 97

ual censures. When, for example, he convinced
himself that usury was wicked, he jumped —
most generously but most impatiently — to rash
and, as I think, absurd conclusions. To tell him
that his theory would be fatal to the whole struc-
ture of modern industry might convince him that
it must be true, for modern industry is one mass
of corruption. To me, I confess, his doctrine
seems to show that one's conscience may be a dan-
gerous guide unless it condescends to be enlight-
ened by patient and impartial inquiry. We
cannot honour too cordially Ruskin 's sensibility
to social evils, and the vehement hatred of base-
ness and brutality which inspired his headlong
assault. But one result of his errors w^as that
they gave some apparent excuse to the infinitely
commoner fault of cultivating indifference.

Ruskin 's righteous indignation took, it must be
admitted, some very queer forms. " I will put up
with this state of things not an hour longer," he
says in the first letter of the Fors Clavigera. The
singular series which followed must always be one
of the curiosities of literature. No man of genius,
in the first place, ever treated his public with such
unceremonious frankness. One is often inclined
to accept his own view that his style had improved
by increased directness and sacrifice of rhetorical
ornament. On the other hand, the incapacity for

VOL. III. 7.

98 Studies of a Biographer

keeping to any line of thought has reached its
highest point. The twenty- fifth letter begins,
a propos to nothing, with a famous receipt for
a "Yorkshire Goosepie," a Brobdingnagian pie,
which engulfs also a turkey, ducks, woodcocks,
a hare, and any quantity of spices and butter. He
proceeds at once to a description of the British
penny, diverges into heraldry, and ends by an
account of Edward III.'s fight with the French at
Calais. Amazed correspondents, he tells us, in-
quired into the meaning of this pie, and his
answer, though it manages to introduce an assault
upon Darwinism, hardly clears the point. One
can hardly doubt that the discursiveness and
eccentricity were indicative of a morbid irrita-
bility of brain which was to cloud his intellect,
and which is the best apology for certain utter-
ances which offended his readers. When a corre-
spondent complained of his speaking of Mill and
Mr. Herbert Spencer as "geese," he replied that
he said so simply because he " knew a goose when
he saw one." Other phrases show a rudeness
strange in one who in personal intercourse was
the most courteous of men. When, indeed, he
has said something specially sharp, he generally
proceeds to insist upon the extreme care and
moderation of his language. "Whatever is set
down for you in Fors/' he says, " is assuredly true.

John Ruskin 99

inevitable, trustworthy to the uttermost, however
strange." He quaintly admits in a note that he
may make a mistake or two upon merely " acces-
sory points." Such extravagancies, and there are
plenty of them, shocked the critic of well-regulated
mind. Matthew Arnold, if I remember rightly,
refers to some of them, as instances of British
crudity. We may forgive them if we take them
as due to a physical cause. No doubt, however,
he had a tendency to such escapades: he took a
pleasure, as he admits somewhere, in a " freakish"
exaggeration of his natural humour. Carlyle
used often to qualify his extravagant remarks by
a huge guffaw, which implied that he was only
half serious; and Ruskin 's sharp sayings were
entitled to the same allowance. He is partly
soothing himself by equivalents for a good
"mouth-filling" oath, and partly amusing himself
by the neatness with which he can hit a weak
point.

The Fors, however, shows feeling deep and
genuine enough. It fully explains his enforced
resemblance to Swift. He is as vehement, if
neither so coarse nor so pithy. ** I perceive," he
says, "that I live in the midst of a nation of
thieves and murderers; that everybody around
me is trying to rob everybody else, and that not
bravely and strongly, but in the most cowardly

loo Studies of a Biographer

>
and loathsome way of lying trade ; that ' English-
man' is now merely another word for blackleg
and swindler, and English honour and courtesy
changed to the sneaking and the smiles of a
whipped pedlar, an inarticulate Autolycus, with a
steam hurdy-gurdy instead of a voice." He only
hopes to '* pluck up some drowned honour by the
locks out of this festering mass of scum of the
earth and miserable coagulation of frog-spawn
soaked in ditch-water." He follows an equally
bitter passage elsewhere by observing that his
words are "temperate and accurate — except in
shortcoming of blame." Our great teachers, he
tells us, even Carlyle and Emerson, accept too
easily the comforting belief that right will speedily
become might. That is not the ordinary view of
Carlyle, who was gloomy enough for most of us.
Ruskin, in passages like the above, seems to be
trying to surpass his master. We are worse, he
assures us, than Eccelin of Padua, who slew two
thousand innocent persons to maintain his power,
whereas we lately slew in cold blood five hundred
thousand persons by slow starvation — that is, as
he explains, did not prevent a famine in Orissa.
The cases are not strictly parallel. In spite of
such feats of logic, Ruskin's bitter utterances con-
stantly made you wince. His attacks on modem
society might be caricatures, but clearly there

John Ruskin loi

were very ugly things to caricature. Whether
he bewailed the invasion of country solitudes by
railways and suburban villas, or the mean and
narrow life of the dwellers in villas, or went
further and produced hideous stories of gross
brutality in the slums of London or I\Ianchester,
he had an unpleasant plausibility. If you tried to
reply that such things were not unprecedented,
you felt that the line of defence was rather mean,
and that even if Ruskin was over-angry you had
no business to be too cool. When I read Fors I
used always to fancy that I could confute him,
and yet to feel uncomfortable that he might be
more in the right than was pleasant. The evils
which had stung so fine a nature to such wrath
must at least be grievous.

How much Ruskin did to awaken people to
a sense of social diseases, or how far his diagnosis
was correct, is another question. I am only con-
sidering the literary aspect. Ruskin is now often
compared to his master, and although attempts to
compare great writers, and especially to place
them in order of merit, are generally vexatious,
the relation between the master and his disciple
may suggest certain points. In the twenty-five
years which preceded Ruskin 's assault upon the
Economists, Carlyle had been, one may say, the
leader of the intellectual opposition. He de-

I02 Studies of a Biographer

•
nounced the prevailing tendencies, one outcome

of which was in his dialect the ''pig philosophy"
of Utilitarians and Materialists. His disciples
were few, and even those who shared his antipa-
thies were often shocked by his rugged idiosyn-
crasies and what seemed to be his deliberate
mannerisms. Yet, considered as a prophet, it
seems to me that Carlyle had a far more potent
influence upon the more thoughtful young men
of the time than Ruskin ever possessed. He
might be grotesque and extravagant, but his
influence embodied a more vigorous and coherent
philosophy. He had the uncompromising thor-
oughness of the Puritan, and in this respect was
a quaint contrast to his disciple. Carlyle, as a
descendant of John Knox, approved of the famous
sentiment, " May the devil fly away with the fine
arts!" He sympathised with Cromwell's view of
the right method of dealing with cathedrals, and
would have been ready enough to smash painted
windows and deface the images of saints. Ruskin,
who drew his early religious impression from an
enfeebled version of Puritanism, was alienated
from it precisely by this iconoclastic tendency.
Though he never followed Newman, he came to
admire mediaeval art so warmly that he has some
difficulty in explaining why, at a later period, he
did not become a Catholic. There was a point of

John Ruskin 103

contact, no doubt, in the hatred of the "pig phi-
losophy" (the word does not represent my own
prejudices) and Ruskin 's conviction of the desirable
subordination of art to morality. Ruskin saw, as
he tells us, that art had decayed as much in Catho-
lic as in Protestant countries, and fell back upon
a religious creed vague enough except as expressing
antipathy to scientific materialism. But his ver-
sion is curiously modified in the process of en-
grafting the love of the beautiful upon Carlyle's
Btemer philosophy.

The arrogance of Ruskin 's language was partly
adopted from Carlyle, and, indeed, is one of the
awkward consequences of being an inspired pro-
phet. It is implied in your very position that
your opponents are without an essential mental
faculty. You do not condescend to argue, but
have a direct vision of truth not perceptible to
the blind. Carlyle 's famous conversion left him
facing the "Everlasting No" of Atheism in a
humour of "indignation and grim fire-eyed de-
fiance." But he held equally that we must dis-
engage ourselves from the old creeds and legends
which were once the embodiment, but had now
become mere obstructions to the religious spirit.
We must " clear our minds from cant," and "cant"
included a great deal that was dear to weaker
brethren. Ruskin, without positively dissenting,

I04 Studies of a Biographer

»
represents a different sentiment. He really loved

the old symbols which to Carlyle appeared to be
outworn rags of "Houndsditch." It is charac-
teristic that while professing his debt to Carlyle
he associates him (of all people) with George
Herbert, the Anglican divine. He was affected,
at times, not only by the sweetness of sentiment
of Herbert's poetry, but by the ingenuity in find-
ing everywhere symbols of religious truth. The
method becomes characteristic; as external na-
ture is a divine symbolism, the old religious art,
and all great poetry and philosophy, Shakespeare
and Dante and Homer and the Book of Genesis,
are a kind of mystic adumbration of esoteric
truths. The Tempest is an allegory; the laby-
rinths of Crete and the legend of the Sirens con-
tain profound wisdom. Though he did not read
German, he was impressed by the second part of
Faust, just because it is intolerably allegorical,
and has a bearing upon the theory of usury.
Quaintly enough, he complains that the greatest
men have found it necessary to wrap up their
truths in enigmas soluble only by the wise; and
declares that even the parables in the New Testa-
ment are "necessarily misleading" to the profane.
When a man interprets books or, as sometimes
happens, history by his fancy instead of his under-
standing, he becomes simply absurd to plain

John Ruskin 105

common-sense, unless one gives him credit for
not being quite in earnest. But if considered
merely as products of graceful fancy, investing
tender feeling or sharp satire with the charm of
poetical ingenuity, his discourses sometimes make
admirable literature. The very titles of his books,
the Sesame and Lilies and Love's Meinie, and so
forth, are promises that his moralising shall be
transfigured into the most poetical forms. I do
not know that the promise is always kept: the
fancies become too palpably arbitrary, and aggra-
vate the strange discursiveness. But the little
book which seems to be his most popular, the
Sesame and Lilies, deserved its success. His style,
I think, was at its best. He can still be as eloquent
as of old, though less ornate; and, though the
argument wanders a little, he manages to give a
regular and concentrated expression of his real
convictions. The last section in that volume,
"The Mystery of Life and its Arts," is, to my
mind, the most perfect of his essays. Perhaps I
am a little prejudiced by its confession, franker
than usual, of the melancholy conviction that,
after all, life is a mystery and no solution really
satisfactory. It is a good bit of pessimism, espe-
cially if you omit the moral at the end.

To most admirers, however, this would hardly
be a recommendation. Rather they were drawn

io6 Studies of a Biographer

to Ruskin because, in spite of the gloomy views
which he shared with Carlyle, he did not give
the same impression of "grim fire-eyed despair."
Carlyle, we used to say, though he could de-
nounce the world, could suggest no remedy.
Ruskin, hardly more hopeful in fact, w^as yet
always suggesting a possible regeneration. Wis-
dom is to be found, though it is strangely hidden
away; and the Marmontel side of him comes out
in his pictures of a conceivable Utopia. There
is something pathetic in the kind of helpless and
yet enthusiastic way in which he expounds the
scheme of the '*St. George's Company." He pro-
tests that he only undertakes such a task against
his will; he would infinitely rather plunge into
his favourite studies ; he is forced to try to reform
the world because the sight of all the wrongs
and miseries is a torment to his spirit, and because
he can find no one else to share his views or take
up the burthen. He showed that he was in earnest
by lavish generosity, and managed, at least, to
start a museum. He seems to have made an over-
sight characteristic of nearly all founders of such
societies. He began as they all begin, by acquiring
a piece of freehold land. He arranged, which also
seems to be a fascinating amusement, for the cur-
rency which his followers were to use when they
were established. The difficulty which he never

John Ruskin 107

really contemplated was the rather serious one,
how the society was to be kept in order. His
tenants are to adopt the laws of " Florence in the
fourteenth century" — with some modifications.
Above all things, they are to renounce altogether
the modern heresies about liberty. Implicit
obedience to the "Master" is to be a first princi-
ple. They are to make a curious profession of
faith embodying this promise, and they are to
keep their vows. They will prosper, he says,
because they will all be strictly honest, and their
word, therefore, implicitly accepted in all trans-
actions. If the founder of a new society could be
sure that all his followers would be perfectly good
and absolutely obedient, he would, no doubt,
have surmounted the great initial difficulty. He
is more likely, it is to be feared, to collect a mixed
crowd of fanatics and hum.bugs, ready to dispute
his authority or sponge upon his benevolence.
But that is the criticism of cold common-sense,
which would be inappropriate. The Utopia served
to set forth Ruskin 's view of the existing social
evils and contrast them with an ideal of a purer
and sweeter life. He contrasts a sketch of peasant
life from Marmontel with the gangs of rowdy
labourers who, it appears, cultivate California
fields with the help of the latest machinery ; or
takes an idyllic story from Gotthelf, the Swiss

io8 Studies of a Biographer

novelist — unknown, I must confess, to me; or
recalls the wholesome Tyrolese peasant whom
he has heard singing "like a robin" in the still
uncorrupted mountain-guarded districts. It is
the old story of the men of nature contrasted
with corruption and luxury. He seems, for a mo-
ment, to be in the most congenial surroundings
at Assisi, copying Giotto's dream of the marriage
of St. Francis to the Lady Poverty. He admits
that he does not quite like the look of St. Francis's
camel's-hair coat, and doubts whether the Saint's
vow of poverty was the right thing. Perhaps,
however, a Ruskin in an earlier period might have
really founded an order, instead of fondly imagin-
ing one; and perhaps, too, it would have illus-
trated once more the tendency of impossible deals
to stimulate a reaction to corruption. If I were
capable of composing "imaginary conversations"
I should try one between St. Francis and some
sound political economist, Mai thus for example,
and contrast the idealist who scorns all compro-
mise, and proposes to change men into angels
off-hand, and the solid matter-of-fact reasoner
who perceives — perhaps too clearly — that we shall
not develop wings just yet. Both classes, I take
it, are useful, but there can be no doubt which is
most beloved. With all Ruskin 's waywardness
and dogmatism, and hopeless collisions wdth com-

John Ruskin 109

mon-sense, he attracts people who lean to the
ideal side — little as he could himself hope to
fight victoriously against the great brutal forces
of the world. It is tolerably clear that machinery
will be made and coal mines worked, and even
that men will take interest for money, for some
time to come. But we may hope that steam-
engines are not really in deadly antagonism to all
virtue and purity and simplicity of life ; and that
the leaven of Ruskin 's teaching may further the
desirable reconciliaton.

Such problems are beyond me. The real charm
of Ruskin will perhaps be most perceptible to the
future reader in a region less disturbed by contro-
versy. Ruskin 's distaste for the actual world led
him often to look fondly to the days of his in-
fancy, when there were still honest merchants
and unpolluted fields even at Dulwich, and some
people — especially his father and mother — w^ho
could lead simple lives of reasonable happiness.
People, I observe, have lately acquired a habit
of insisting upon the extraordinary stupidity and
selfishness of the last generation. They are good
enough sometimes to make allowances for poor
people born before the Reform Bill, on the ground
that it is unfair for the historian to apply to a
rude age the loftier standards of modem life.
It is pleasant for the elderly to be reminded that

no Studies of a Biographer

some of their fathers and mothers were really
worthy people, though Ruskin's estimate cannot
be taken as unbiassed. To say the truth, one has
a kind of suspicion that the objects of his rever-
ence would not have appeared to us quite as they
do to him. That does not prevent the Prcetenta
from being one of the most charming examples of
the most charming kind of literature. No autobio-
grapher surpasses him in freshness and fulness of
memory, nor in the power of giving interest to the
apparently commonplace. There is an even re-
markable absence of strildng incident, but some-
how or other the story fascinates, and, in the last
resort, no doubt on account of the unconscious
revelation of character. One point is the way in
which a singular originalty of mind manages to
work out a channel for itself, though hedged in
by the prejudices of a sufficiently narrow-minded
class and an almost overstrained deference to
his elders and his spiritual guides. But it is
enough to say here that the book should be
acceptable even to those to whom his social
and artistic dogmas have ceased to have much
significance.

William Godwin's Novels

IT AZLITT has recorded a conversation in which
^ ^ he and his friends discussed an interesting
problem : If you were able to summon from the dead
any of the great men of old, whom would you select
for an interview ? The choice is be wilderingly wide ,
and supposing that a medium limited our selection
to Hazlitt's own circle^ we might still be a little
puzzled. Some would perhaps like to know whether
a monologue of Coleridge was really as amazing as
his admirers report ; others might prefer to listen
to the spontaneous and unsophisticated outflow of
humour from which Lamb distilled the Essays of
Elia; and possibly one or two might like to try
the flavour of Hazlitt's own incisive and egotistic
sallies. One thing, I fancy, is quite clear: No-
body would ask for an hour of William Godwin.
His most obvious qualities, a remorseless ''ergo-
tism," squeezing the last drops out of an argu-
ment; a frigid dogmatism, not redeemed by the
fervour which half excuses fanaticism; and a
singular incapacity for even suspecting the hu-
morous or fanciful aspects of life, are qualities

III

112 Studies of a Biographer

which go far to make the superlative bore. They
may be harmless or even advantageous in a man
who wishes to compose a political EucHd, but that
kind of author is not likely to be attractive at a
supper-party, and certainly not likely to succeed
in other branches of literary work. Yet it is odd
that, without too much violence to language, we
might describe Godwin as one of the most ver-
satile authors of his time. Though a dealer in the
most abstract speculations, he became an indus-
trious Dryasdust, raking in the obscurest assort-
ments of waste paper. In spite of his priggishness,
he was a writer of popular books for children,
and, without the smallest claims to poetic imagi-
nation, he was the author of one tragedy which
escaped failure. A more remarkable fact, how-
ever, was his success as a novelist. He wrote
in a comparatively barren period. The genera-
tion which had been impressed by the novels
of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and
Goldsmith had passed away, and the novel
of the nineteenth century had not yet come
to life in Miss Austen and Scott. The novels
which were produced in the interval, and can still
be read by any one except conscientious pro-
fessors of English literature, may be counted on the
fingers — perhaps of one hand. Godwin's Caleb
Williams is one of the few. It can be read with-

William Godwin's Novels 113

out the pressure of a sense of duty. It has Hved
— though in comparative obscurity — for over a
century, and high authorities tell us that vitality
prolonged for that period raises a presumption
that a book deserves the title of classic. Three
generations must have accepted it, and as each
naturally condemns the taste of the old fogies, its
predecessors, the agreement implies some per-
manent attractiveness. There has been time for
a reaction and a re-reaction. Living novelists, if
one may judge from their practice, will say that
Caleb Williams offends against all manner of
sound canons of criticism. I am a little sceptical
as to all such canons, and rather infer that a book
which can survive in spite of such incompatibility
must have had some of the seeds of life. Few
writers, I fear, can be confident that their works
will interest their great-great-grandchildren; and
only such happy persons should be quite ready to
throw the first stone.

Godwin's personal characteristics are sufficiently
revealed in his life published some years ago by
Mr. Kegan Paul. The subject was not altogether
an easy one to manage. Some people shine, as it
were, by their own light. There are others, of
whom Godwin was one, who become interesting
only when the observer is prepared to look at
him from the right point of view. Lowell, in

VOL. III. — 8.

114 Studies of a Biographer

speaking of the inimitable Pepys, calls him an
" unconscious humourist." The diary, that is, has
all the effect of humorous writing, but the writer
did not intend to produce a smile, and made his
quaint confessions as if they would be to his
readers, as they were to him, just the most natural
things in the world. The reader, however, has
to supply a great deal more from his own resources
in the case of Godwin. He reminds us of a fa-
miliar difficulty which besets writers of fiction.
When they introduce a bore for the sake of the
comic effect of his tediousness, the tediousness is
very apt to tire the reader. Now Pepys had
infinitely too much vivacity ever to have been a
bore, but Godwin, as I have said, was a bore by
nature. Everybody, I hold, is a bore to some
people, but Godwin was one of the unlucky per-
sons capable of boring all round. He can never
be amusing taken by himself, and we have to
make the effort of seeing him among his fellow-
actors before we catch any glimpse of the comedy
in which he played a part. Lamb's famous descrip-
tion of the damning of Godwin's Antonio gives
the true point of view. To Godwin himself the
event, no doubt, was simply painful; the aver-
age spectator saw nothing in it but the proper pun-
ishment of stupidity. Lamb, by showing us the
simple-minded philosopher in his oddly inappro-

William Godwin's Novels 115

priate position, manages to combine a smile with
compassion. A writer possessed of Lamb's skill
might manage to throw a similar light upon the
whole career of the unlucky dramatist.

The social atmosphere of Godwin's early days
was not exactly calculated — I hope that I may
say so without offence — to stimulate any germs
of humour or fancy. The son of a dissenting
minister in a country village, he began by follow-
ing in his father's steps. A revered tutor made
him a Sandemanian. According to Godwin (I do
not answer for the statement) Calvin had damned
ninety-nine men out of every hundred; and San-
deman contrived a scheme for damning ninety-nine
out of every hundred Calvinists. Remembering
that the amiable Faraday was a member of the
sect, I cannot doubt that the creed admits of
a milder interpretation. Anyhow, Godwin stuck
to it for a time, and resisted the ensnaring argu-
ments of Arians and Arminians. A glimpse of
the social stratum which enjoyed such intellectual
food may be given by a passage in a letter from
his mother — a worthy and affectionate old lady in
spite of her peculiar views of spelling, punctuation,
and Christian charity. That her daughter may
not be

as the figtree whome the master of the vineyard came seeking
fruit and found none. Is my daily prayer for her and all of

ii6 Studies of a Biographer

you poor Jack once made a profession two but him I have no
hopes off. I may say the same of Joseph how cutting it is to
be the means of bringing children into the world to be the
subjects of the Kingdom of Darkness to dwell with Divils
and Damned Spirits from whence as I heard you mention in
your prayers there is no redemption.

The ''prayers" must have been edifying, but
WilHam went the way, it is to be feared —
wherever it may have led — of Jack, Joseph, and
Hannah. His nonconformity took him, like
Priestley and Price, into the ranks of political
radicalism, and, while his Calvinistic theory of
predestination changed into the doctrine of
''philosophical necessity," Rousseau became his
guide in place of Jonathan Edwards. He left
the pulpit, but only to preach lay sermons as an
author of all work. He became known in the
circles which were prepared to welcome the French
Revolution. He records in his diary the subjects
of some of the talks which enlivened their tea-
parties and other more convivial gatherings. San-
demanian tracts were out of place, but they talked
of "ancient virtue and respect for other men's
judgments," of self-love, sympathy, "perfecti-
bility," and "ideal unity." Now and then they
were honoured by the presence of the great Dr.
Priestley, or of the shrewd, cynical Home Tooke,
the veteran survivor of the old Wilkite agitation ;
or of Thomas Hollis, who swore by the old-

William Godwin's Novels 117

fashioned republicanism of Milton and Algernon
Sidney. Helen Maria Williams and Mary Woll-
stonecraft represented the early stage of the
crusade for the rights of women. His closest
ally was Holcroft, ex-stable-boy at Newmarket,
popular dramatist, and keen republican agitator.
With Hollis and Holcroft, Godwin helped to
revise Paine's Rights of Man. It had been sup-
pressed by the fears of its first publishers, and
its circulation was soon to become the most
dangerous of ventures for the party booksellers.
Meanwhile Godwin brought out his own Political
Justice, and became' the philosopher of the Eng-
lish Revolutionists. No book, says Hazlitt, " ever
gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the
country. Tom Paine was considered for the time
a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Ed-
mund Burke a flashy sophist. * Throw away your
books of chemistry,' said Wordsworth to a young
man, 'and read Godwin on Necessity.'" Hazlitt
probably exaggerates, but it is true that Words-
worth and Coleridge, then in their revolutionary
fever, were strongly impressed. Coleridge ad-
dressed an enthusiastic sonnet to the author of
the book (which, however, he had not read), and
became a personal friend. Rival prophets, indeed,
have their little jars, and Coleridge, after one
interview, denounces, in his peculiar phrase, the

ii8 Studies of a Biographer

"grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-
headed prig of a philosophocide." Humbler
youths not only accepted Godwin as a teacher,
but always declared that a study of his book had
made an epoch in their lives, and permanently
elevated their moral tone. The philosophy, it is
true, was startling, but it was delivered in the
most edifying tones. No ** milder-mannered"
literary Lambro ever proposed to scuttle the ship
of state. He discoursed as calmly as one of his
old colleagues in the ministry, who would be con-
demned by the godly as too much given to " cold
morality." Quietly, as one propounding mere
matter-of-fact or truths w^hich, when once an-
nounced, must be self-evident, he shows the
absurdity, not only of kings and aristocrats,
but of government in general. Democracy is the
least bad system, but it is at best a makeshift on
the way to anarchy. We are to have no parlia-
ments, no states, no laws. He sorrowfully admits
that it may be right at the moment to resist a
murderer by force, but punishment is essentially
unreasonable. Force is not argument; it is as
foolish to be indignant with a murderer as to be
indignant with his knife ; and reason is (or ought
to be) omnipotent. We ought to convince the
scoundrel of his mistake instead of sending him
to prison. All restraints are bad, ev^n when self-

William Godwin*s Novels 119

imposed. Promises in general are therefore bad,
and marriage so obviously absurd that it can be
demolished in a paragraph. Moreover, all the
*' private affections " are bad, for they imply par-
tiality and therefore injustice. Reason tells me to
save the life of a virtuous Fenelon rather than the
life of his valet. If the valet be my father or
brother, that little accident can make no difference
in the eye of pure reason. Gratitude is thus a
vice, because it tends to gross partiality. Nobody,
I suppose, ever made so clean a sweep of all exist-
ing social ties, but he always preserves the calm
and benevolent tone of a preacher drawing obvi-
ous morals from the Sermon on the Mount, though
the Christian creed is among the doctrines too
absurd to require explicit confutation.

The book thus crammed with intellectual ex-
plosives appeared in 1793, when the respectable
classes were in the panic caused by the French
Revolution and the Government preparing the
severest measures of suppression. Godwin's
friends, Home Tooke and Holcroft, were about
to be tried for high treason; and Godwin ex-
pected that he might himself be the next victim.
It is only just to say that he appears to have
rather courted martyrdom by openly showing his
sympathies. The acquittal of his friends put an
end to the danger; and his own circle rather

I20 Studies of a Biographer

regretted, it* would seem, that he had not had a
chance of sharing their glory. Pitt, they reported
by way of apology, had said in the Cabinet that a
three-guinea book could not do much harm in
the class which was dangerous precisely for want
of guineas. The fact that so dear a book should
have had an immediate circulation of over four
thousand copies is indeed a remarkable proof of
the general excitement. A surprising number of
the well-to-do must have been anxious to know
what a Jacobin had to say for himself. Pitt,
however, may have had other reasons. The
Attorney-General could have no difficulty in
quoting passages from Paine 's Rights of Man, and
inserting "innuendoes'* to show that they applied
to our gracious sovereign. Godwin kept so much
to the supernal regions of abstract argument that
it was comparatively difficult to saddle his book
with any definite or immediate political applica-
tion. Moreover — in perfect consistency with his
general doctrine — he had fully and explicitly de-
nounced violent revolution. Force, he argues, is
as bad on one side as on the other. Reason is
so omnipotent that we may trust to its efficiency
without any extraneous support. He condemned
organised agitation even in support of his own
principles. His friends were accused of belonging
to seditious clubs; he held that all clubs implied

William Godwin's Novels 121

some abnegation of individual liberty. Pitt might
be right in holding that reason thus understood
was a force of very little significance. True,
Godwin's theories logically applied might tend to
dissolve the very ties of all social and political
order. That did not much matter till his readers
became capable of drawing inferences, or till his
doctrines were translated into terms immediately
applicable to George III. and rotten boroughs.

Godwin, in any case, might well pass for a
great philosopher. He dealt in what is called
*' inexorable logic." That is to say, that whenever
he ran his head against a lamp-post, he calmly
asserted that it did not exist. If the proper
way of making a science of politics be to ignore
all appeals to experience, his method was irre-
proachable. That happened to be precisely the
opinion of a good many people at the time, and
Godwin's Utopia, though liable to collapse at the
first touch of common-sense, appeared to enthu-
siasts to be solid because self-consistent. More-
over, if we consider the merits of the exposition,
apart from the validity of the theory expounded,
it showed remarkable literary power. The style
is simple and solid ; the argument is well arranged ;
and, in short, the logical architecture leaves no-
thing to be desired if we will allow the architect to
use for his material what is really mere moon-

122 Studies of a Biographer

shine. Nor can it be denied that he is appealing
to the sense of justice and humanity of his readers ;
and that, if he is not impassioned, there is a
general glow of benevolent sentiment which com-
mended him to the more generous impulses of the
revolutionary period. I have only to say, how-
ever, that it is easy to understand that Godmn
would act the part of philosopher to perfection.
Ingenuous youths of both sexes are for a time
capable of reverence for that variety of the species.
The illusion indeed frequently lasts with the
superior sex beyond the period of early enthu-
siasm. Colleges devoted to female education are,
I fear, rapidly destroying that agreeable distinc-
tion. With minds sharpened by study, young
ladies will soon make their brothers' discovery
that when a man claims to be a philosopher there
is a strong presumption that he must be an im-
postor. In Godwin's days, Newnham and Girton
were not even conceivable; and a philosopher
might hope to be taken seriously by a circle of
feminine admirers. They could revere a man,
not though, but because, he w^as a bore. In-
capacity for lighter talk proved that his thoughts
were absorbed in serious topics, and the absence
of romance showed that in him the emotions were
under the sway of reason. Godwin had begun
by showing superiority to the impulses of a young

William Godwin's Novels 12

J

man's fancy. He had resolved to marry in a
business-like spirit, and to save trouble asked his
sister to choose a wife for him. She found a young
lady good-natured and humble, and "with about
as much religion as my William likes." Godwin
took the matter into consideration, but deliberated
so long and calmly that he never made the neces-
sary advances. His fame as a philosopher soon
rendered any advances on his side unnecessary.
He became attractive to a whole circle of feminine
enthusiasts. Among his female admirers was
Miss Alderson (afterwards Mrs. Opie), a beauty,
a bit of a poetess, and then an ardent radical.
There was Mrs. Inchbald, of the Simple Story,
a bright and very clever and saucy actress, who
was able, we are told, at any social meeting to
charm to her side the admirers who surrounded
any rival beauty. Though, as a devout Catholic,
she must have had more religion than William
liked, she was attracted by the serene philo-
sopher, and carried on what seems to have been a
lively flirtation. There was the beautiful "Per-
dita," Mary Robinson, who, in spite of her ques-
tionable position and her aristocratic connections,
was willing to reciprocate the attentions of the
humble author. There was Mrs. Reveley, after-
wards Shelley's Mrs. Gisborne. She was very
young and very beautiful, says his daughter, and

124 Studies of a Biographer

full of ''deep sensibility"; her heart was full '*to
bursting" with the hopes of political freedom,
and she "drank deeply" of Godwin's philosophy.
His heart, it is added, was not disturbed — for the
present at least — but both Mrs. Reveley and Mrs.
Inchbald burst into tears when they heard that
their philosopher was married to Mary Wollstone-
craft. His relations even to that model enthusiast
were a little hampered by philosophy. He took
the peculiar precaution of occupying a separate
house in order that their affection might not be
exposed to the trial of constant intimacy. She
complains, too, that when he Vv^as absent on a
journey, he was too much attracted by the
*' homage of vulgar minds " and restored to his
"icy philosophy." The connection did not last
long enough to try whether more serious jars
might not arise between an icy philosopher and
a romantic sentimentalist. Yet it is only fair to
admit that Godwin seems to have been roused for
once to a genuine passion, and that when his wife
died he felt the blow like a man and dropped the
philosopher. There was, one is glad to know,
some really warm blood beneath the surface,
though during the rest of his career it remained
quiescent. His domestic circumstances, however,
made it natural enough that he should soon think
of marrying again; and then the philosopher re-

William Godwin's Novels 125

appears in all his force. He applied to Miss Lee
of the " Canterbury Tales" used in Byron's Wer-
ner. She hesitated on account of his free-thinking.
He retorted by applying the omnipotent force of
reason. If you ought to argue even with a burg-
lar, you clearly should be able to persuade the
object of your affections. Accordingly he ex-
plained clearly that his theory of ethics was quite
consistent with her theological orthodoxy; he
pointed out that her creed was "the quintessence
of bigotry,'* and that in refuting him she was
acting in the spirit of the eleventh and twelfth
century. The argument may have been perfectly
sound, but seems to require some further steps
before justifying the inference that she ought to
marry him. She did not draw it. Next year he
heard of the death of Mrs. Reveley's husband,
and now applied a closer bit of logic. She, he
declares, had admitted that she loved him, even
when she had a husband and he a wife. As these
obstacles were removed, the obvious inference
followed that she should become the sole '' happi-
ness of one of the most known men of the age,
of one whose principles, whose temper, whose
thoughts you have long been acquainted with, and
will, I believe, confess their universal constancy."
Nothing could be more obvious. Moreover, the
match would '* restore her self-respect, and ensure

126 Studies of a Biographer

for her no mean degree of respectability." Mrs.
Reveley in despair took to the most irritating of
all positions. She was Incapable, she said, of
reasoning with him He pointed out in vain that
he was incapable of using an atom of sophistry.
If, therefore, she could not reason for herself, she
clearly ought to accept arguments so satisfactorily
vouched. But against a person who declines to
reason, reason is powerless, and Mrs. Reveley
married Mr. Gisborne. Godwin was next to illus-
trate the failure of reason to protect even its pos-
sessors. Mrs. Clairmont, his next-door neighbour,
saw him sitting in his balcony and exclaimed,
**Is it possible that I behold the immortal God-
win?" The poor man yielded to **the homage
of a vulgar mind," and became a slave for life.
No man's wife was ever more unanimously con-
demned by his friends. Lamb could only call her
''that damned Mrs. Godwin" or the ''disgusting
woman who wears green spectacles." She was
handsome, we are told, and clever enough to
enforce her authority. Possibly Godwin's ad-
mirers were a little too anxious to make her the
scapegoat for his infirmities. His later career
suggests a painful tract upon the moral dangers
of impecuniosity. Attempts to set up in business,
bankruptcy steadily advancing, and application
for help from old friends and even compassionate

William Godwin's Novels 127

adversaries; ending in the final appointment
of the old radical to be "yeoman usher of the
Exchequer," make up a melancholy story.

In spite of his weakness, Godwin had some real
claims upon his young friends outside his philo-
sophy. He says of himself, in a curious bit of
self-analysis, that he was always anxious to appre-
ciate and encourage merit, but was hampered by
his nervous difHdence He lost his self-possession
in company, and, like many shy men, blundered
into excessive frankness. His bluntness led him
into quarrels, though Jiis obvious good intentions
led to reconciliation. A pupil of early days noted
on paper some of the "pointed and humiliating
words" bestowed by his tutor. He had been
called "a foolish wretch," a brute, and a viper, to
his face, and behind his back, a "tiger" and a
" black heart " with " no proper feelings." Godwin,
upon finding the notes, was gratified by the pupil's
" sensibility," and pointed out that the reproaches
were only masked expressions of the kindness
which he had shown by real sacrifices for the
young gentleman's benefit. He gave really good
advice to a whole series of young men attracted
by his fame, and, when they were at a distance,
was not tempted to spice it with cutting epithets.
Shelley was only one, though the only memorable
instance. He had fancied, as boys naturally do,

128 Studies of a Biographer

that so great a man must have lived a long time
ago. Godwin belonged to the sphere of Plato and
Bacon, and must naturally have been a contem-
porary of one of those immortals or rather outside
cf time in general. On discovering that the world
was still blessed with so great a luminary, Shelley
offered his homage with characteristic enthusiasm.
Nothing could be better than the advice which
God\^dn bestowed on the enthusiastic proselyte.
He points out to the fervid disciple that the
wrongs of Ireland were not likely to be cured by
a pamphlet and a speech ; that twenty years was a
short period in the life of a nation, and that even
the Catholic superstition had done some good in
its time. If Godwin's philosophy prompted Shelley
to turn to poetry in place of politics, we should
certainly be grateful; though we may regret that
so much of the mentor's philosophy penetrated
into the poetry. Unluckily Godwin held another
doctrine, which has its charms for philosophers.
A rich man is surely bound by reason to sub-
sidise great thinkers. Godwin had already, it
seems, been demoralised by the excellent Thomas
Wedgwood, who had liberally applied that dan-
gerous principle to Coleridge and other men of
high promise. So-called "loans" became gifts,
and by Shelley's time, it would seem, the gifts
scarcely deserved gratitude, for they were the bare

William Godwin's Novels 129

discharge of a plain obligation. The culminating
point was reached when Godwin — the denouncer
of marriage — refused to see th(^ Shelleys for acting
upon his principles, and declined to accept money
from the seducer of his daughter — unless the
cheque were made payable in a different name.
We can only exclaim with Mrs. Shelley, "Oh,
philosophy!" Shelley behaved to the old gentle-
man with admirable courtesy and firmness, but
seems never to have lost his illusions. The thumb-
screw was being applied when Godwin published his
novel Mandeville in 1 8 1 7 , Shelley declares that its

interest is of that irresistible and overwhelming kind
that the mind in its influence is like a cloud borne on
by an impetuous wind. ... In style and strength
of expression Mandeville is wonderfully great and
the energy and sweetness of the sentiment scarcely
to be equalled. Clifford's character as mere beauty
is a divine ana soothing contrast, and I do not think,
if perhaps I except (and I know not if I ought to do
so) the speech of Agathon in the Symposumi of
Plato, that there ever was produced a moral discourse
more characteristic of all that is admirable and lovely
in human nature; more lovely and admirable in itself,
than that of Henrietta to Mandeville as he is recover-
ing from madness.

The touch about Plato is delightful, and reminds
one of some modern criticisms. Poets can be
the best of all critics, but they are a little apt to
fancy that singular power in the author instead

VOL. III. — Q.

I30 Studies of a Biographer

of singular impulsiveness on their own side is
the explanation of the "impetuous wind" of
enthusiasm.

That Shelley, for the moment at least, should
put Godwin beside Plato, not only as a thinker
but as a literary artist, is a little startling, even if
the compliment were intended to soften the re-
fusal to be bled in pocket. Posterity has long
ceased to hanker after Mandeville. I, at least,
have tried in vain to discover the slightest
justification for Shelley's enthusiasm. Can we
discover any grounds for such enthusiasm in God-
win's masterpiece? Caleb Williams was published
when Godwin's fame was at its zenith — just before
the trial of his friends. A preface, announcing its
purpose, was suppressed for the time by the fears
of his publisher. ''It is now know^n to philo-
sophers," says this document (philosophers had
just been enlightened by Political Justice), "that
the spirit and character of government intrude
into every rank of life." The novel was to illus-
trate this truth, and to exhibit "the modes of
domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man
becomes the destroyer of man." That is to say,
apparently, it is to show how the wicked aristo-
crat carries into private life the execrable princi-
ples of kings and ministers. Caleb Williams was,
like Uncle Tom's Cabin, to rouse men to a sense

William Godwin's Novels 131

of the evils of slavery. The reader, unassisted
by the preface, would scarcely perceive this doc-
trine between the lines. Falkland, the hero, is a
model country gentleman ; not only a benevolent
and public-spirited landlord, but a man of taste
and a poet. Like his predecessor. Sir Charles
Grandison, he shows his high qualities under the
most delicate circumstances. A lovely Italian
lady is so charmed by him as to excite the jeal-
ousy of the lover to whom she is already betrothed.
Falkland's tact and dignity enable him to avoid
a duel, to reconcile the estranged couple, and to
make it perfectly clear that his moderation is due
not to want of courage, but to the loftiest magna-
nimity. Returning to England, he settles on his
property, to become the cynosure of the sur-
rounding society, much to the disgust of the
brutal Squire Tyrrel, who had previously had
things all his own way. Tyrrel bullies his tenants,
especially certain Hawkinses, and Falkland takes
them under his protection. Tyrrel then tries to
force a poor girl who is dependent upon him into
a marriage with a lout, and, though Falkland again
endeavours to intervene, she dies in consequence
of Tyrrel's machinations. Falkland, righteously
indignant, denounces Tyrrel at a public assembly,
and the ruffian is abashed by the power of reason.
As soon as he has got out of hearing, however,

132 Studies of a Biographer

he recovers himself, and returns to deHver a knock-
down blow, a kind of argument which he had
learned from the heroes of the prize-ring. Falk-
land, who is slight, though inimitably graceful,
retires to consider the position. A duel would be
the obvious result, unless indeed Tyrrel had for-
feited the right to meet a gentleman. Had Falk-
land been a Godwinite, he would not have adopted
that barbarous custom; but perhaps Godwin's
peculiar morality might justify the course which
he actually took. On the principle illustrated by
Fenelon's valet, it was clearly desirable that
Tyrrel should be killed rather than Falkland,
while a duel would equalise the chance. It seems,
however, that Falkland forgot to reason. He
meets Tyrrel and stabs him to the heart. Sus-
picion is roused, and Falkland comes before the
magistrates. He declares himself innocent, and
tells them that he valued Tyrrel' s life even more
than his own. His enemy's death had made it
impossible to wipe off the stain on his honour.
He cannot even commit suicide — which might
have seemed desirable — because suicide might
look like a confession of the murder. Falkland
is dismissed without a stain upon his character,
and suspicion falls upon the Hawkinses, father
and son, the very victims whom Falkland had
protected against Tyrrel. He now allows them

William Godwin's Novels 133

to be hanged, and sanctions or starts a report
that they have confessed their guilt. In spite
of this satisfactory solution, Falkland cannot be
happy. He is tortured by remorse, or rather by
the fear of being found out. He is, however, as
benevolent as ever, and, unluckily for him, shows
his goodness by taking Caleb Williams for a
secretary. Now Williams is curiosity embodied.
He is sharp enough to connect his patron's gloom
with the story of the murder, and manages to
experiment upon Falkland much as Hamlet ex-
perimented upon his uncle. He discovers that
Falkland is accustomed to retire in fits of over-
powering gloom to a closet, where there is an iron
chest, which presumably contains a key to the
secret. Falkland presently discovers him in the
act of breaking open the chest. The question
naturally occurs, What did the chest contain? If
Williams had consulted Sherlock Holmes he
might, perhaps, have discovered some clue, but
to the ordinary mind no connection is conceivable.
The chest, however, struck the popular imagina-
tion and gave the title to a dramatised version
of the novel. Falkland, anyhow, is startled to
energetic action. He confesses the murder to
Williams, and adds that, though he admits him-
self to be the "blackest of villains," he is deter-
mined to leave behind him a spotless name. He

134 Studies of a Biographer

loves his reputation more than the whole world
and all its inhabitants. He will not silence
Williams by killing him, reflecting that he ''may
not be so fortunate in his next murder." He will
keep his detector in bondage, and, on the least
threat of divulging the secret, Williams shall
suffer torments of which he has not the faintest
idea. When the wretched secretary tries to
escape, Falkland makes use of the chest incident;
declares that Williams has stolen the contents,
and arranges a conclusive proof by secreting them
in the room of the supposed thief. Williams is
now at Falkland's mercy; he is imprisoned;
escapes to live with robbers, and afterw^ards
rambles into London slums and the remotest
corners of Wales. Everywhere he is watched by
Falkland's spies. He always manages to stumble
into places — Godwin has no scruples as to incred-
ible coincidences — where Falkland is revered by
some old dependent, and where the discovery
that Williams has been faithless to so perfect a
master causes him to be expelled with execration.
Driven to despair, he at last openly accuses Falk-
land, who comes to meet the charge worn to a
skeleton. Williams has no evidence to produce,
but the force of reason triumphs. On hearing his
impressive speech, Falkland throws himself into
his accuser's arms and confesses the charge.

William Godwin's Novels 135

"Williams," he says, *'you have conquered. I
see too late the greatness and elevation of your
mind." He dies in three days from the agony.
Meanwhile, strangely enough, Williams's venera-
tion for his oppressor has never declined. He
declares that he is "an atrocious and execrable
wretch for ever inflicting upon Falkland an agony
a thousand times worse than death."

The book closes with this cheerful reflection,
and suggests the question, What has become of
the moral ? How about the wickedness of govern-
ment? The answer must be that it has passed
out of sight. Something, indeed, is made of the
social abuses of the time : there is a prison of the
old pattern, and an innocent man who dies in it
because he is too poor to pay for legal assistance ;
and an impossible band of robbers — imported
apparently from the region described by Schiller
— whose captain argues philosophically as to
the rights of property with Williams. But such
matters only supply accessories. Falkland, the
centre of interest, is not the typical oppressor
of the poor; and, whenever he is not murdering
or concealing a murder, uses his influence for the
best possible purposes. His mind has been
poisoned, we are told, by the "idle and groundless
romances of chivalry." He suffers from Don
Quixote's complaint, but has managed to mis-

13^ Studies of a Biographer

learn his lesson. The Don would certainly have
felt bound to fight instead of meanly assassinat-
ing. Falldand is a perverse monomaniac, who will
guard his reputation even by deserving infamy.
That, no doubt, might suggest a very interesting
motive. The psychology of hypocrisy — of the
transition by which the sense of honour is re-
placed by a desire for being honoured — might be
embodied in a lifelike hero, as it is common
enough in real life. With Godwin, Falkland be-
comes a heap of contradictory qualities. Mono-
maniacs are rather in favour now, and a modern
novelist would, perhaps, make Falkland into an
illustration of heredity or the general corruption
of society. But he is so obviously unreal, and
all the incidents so frankly impossible, that we
scarcely feel even the interest excited by a carica-
ture of conceivable wickedness. Why, then, are
we interested? In the first place, because myste-
rious crimes are always interesting. The interest
may be wrong, but it is natural. But, in the next
place, given the situation and shutting our eyes
to impossibilities, Godwin shows the kind of
power manifested by the Political Justice. The
story is developed with admirable order and
lucidity — if the machinery will not bear inspection
we need not inspect — and the agony is slowly and
steadily piled up till the catastrophe in which the

William Godwin's Novels 137

victim suddenly changes places with the oppressor.
The sentiment is nearly that of Browning's Instans
Tyrannus. Browning's tyrant ''sets his wits on
the stretch to inveigle the wretch," till, when he
had "laid his last plan to extinguish the man,"
the man suddenly starts to his feet and prays, to
the tyrant's confusion. Godwin's hero does not
pray — it would be against his principles — he in-
vokes the force of reason; but the result is the
same, and the gradual working up of the catas-
trophe, the slow and steady evolution of the dia-
bolical agency, has a fascinating power. We catch
something of the writer's own profound interest
in the story, and admire at least the persistence
and ingenuity (perverse as its means) with which
variations are performed upon the theme which
is always in view. Godwin, of course, had not a
trace of the peculiar skill exemplified in Pride
and Prejudice, where every incident is both per-
fectly natural and conducive to the effect. Yet
his incidents are so well combined that the book
has the same sort of unity and co-ordination, and
even the formality of the style is congenial to his
own ideals. Godwin, in his Enquirer, gives a
curious discourse upon that subject. English
style, he declares, has reached its perfection; it
is no longer cumbrous, as with Hooker, nor over-
simple, as with Addison. Dignity and clearness

13^ Studies of a Biographer

are now judiciously combined. Smollett is con-
demned for ''lowering his style," and making one
of his characters talk like a real servant-maid.
Now, it is the office of a poet or novelist, says
Godwin, "to adorn the style of their characters,
and to give to real life the most impressive form,"
that is, to make everybody talk like a book.
Godwin, in short, as became a man of his epoch,
is nervous about the "dignity of history" —
whether the history be real or fictitious — and
failed to anticipate the secret revealed by Scott.
He will not condescend to the vivid touch which
suggests direct vision and gives individuality of
scenery and customs. His speakers declaim in
balanced phrases even when they try to be in a
passion. They are, in fact, generalised types
instead of individuals. To judge him fairly, we
must accept his position. His novels are a kind of
mean between the moral tale of the Rasselas or
Candide variety, where actors and incidents are
arbitrary pegs upon which to hang wise and witty
reflections, and the novel which frankly deals with
real life and makes use of the most familiar
touches. Godwin is still a publicist of his time,
given to reflections upon "nature" and "the
dignity of man," and the abstract truths or plati-
tudes which were then popular in political dis-
cussions. He condescends to become a novelist

William Godwin's Novels 139

in the interests of his doctrine, but cannot stoop
so far as quite to throw aside his stilts. His actors
are not quite men nor quite abstract quaHties,
but human beings seen as in a darkened mirror, or
at such a distance that the individual peculiari-
ties are blurred into indistinctness. Making the
necessary omissions, however, and admitting his
style to be appropriate to his end, we can accept
his good, solid, straightforward utterance as effec-
tive enough in its kind.

Caleb Williams might be compared with Mrs.
Clive's very striking Paul Ferroll. FerroU com-
bines the murderer' and the polished gentleman
far more intelligibly than Falkland, and refuses
to let an innocent person suffer in his place.
Godwin's book has, however, a certain advan-
tage from the fervour due to his intended moral.
The moral, it is true, eludes him. It reminds one
of Lowell's description of an orator who tries in
vain to get his subject properly laid down. He
makes desperate attempts, wanders off in many
directions, and in his last contortion "sees his
subjick a-nosin' round arter him ag'in. " Still,
the pursuit of a subject gives a certain unction to
oratory, and in the same kind of perverted and
anomalous fashion, Godwin's moral gives a sort
of momentum and diffused energy to his mass of
incongruities.

I40 Studies of a Biographer

Godwin's next novel, St. Leon, is, I suppose,
the last — in spite of Shelley — which anybody has
read in modern times, and marks a stage in his
development. It appeared in 1799, and shows
that he had learned something from his brief mar-
ried life. He announces in the preface that he has
now learned that there is really some good in the
"private affections." He adds calmly that this
opinion is perfectly consistent with the rest of his
doctrines — though to most readers the alteration
required in them seems to be considerable. Any-
how, his new doctrine again provided him with a
really striking situation. St. Leon is a French
nobleman of the seventeenth century, though, it
need hardly be said, Godwin takes very little
trouble to give any genuine picture of the time.
St. Leon has made a happy and aristocratic mar-
riage, when he is accidentally reduced to extreme
poverty. An affectionate family, however, sur-
rounds him, and he manages to get on pretty well
in an Alpine district where the people are not
corrupted by luxury. To him enters an old gentle-
man who has discovered the philosopher's stone.
This, as is known, enables a man to produce
boundless wealth and also gives the power of
restoring youth. The possessor, however, has
been made so miserable that he is only anxious
to die, and death, it seems, can only be secured by

William Godwin's Novels 141

transferring the stone to another man, who must
accept the same terms and be pledged to absolute
secrecy. The purpose is to show how miserable
a man would become when his exemption from
mortality made him incapable of sympathy with
his ephemeral companions. That is the kind of
text which might have been treated effectively in
the old moral tale of the Candide variety. God-
win not only expands it into a long quasi-historical
novel, with all manner of impossible adventures
and coincidences, but contrives to miss the moral.
The point of the situation in his version comes to
be the difficulty which St. Leon finds in accounting
for his sudden accession to boundless wealth.
He has a perfect wife, supposed to be meant for
a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, but the poor
lady is tormented by a curiosity as keen as that
of Caleb Williams. In those days, no doubt, it
would be more difficult than it is now to account
for a mysterious bound into w^ealth; the Stock
Exchange was not invented. Still, one would
have thought that it was not beyond human in-
genuity to get round such a perplexity. St. Leon
is unequal to the task. He comes under suspi-
cion — pretty well justified indeed — of dealing in
magic; he alienates his family by his unaccount-
able proceedings; he is locked up in a dungeon
by a nobleman who guesses at his powers and

■^'

142 Studies of a Biographer

proposes to keep him employed in making gold ; he
falls into the hands of the Inquisition ; and, though
he manages to escape and to disguise himself by
again becoming a youth, he has in that capacity
to repudiate his children; becomes thoroughly
miserable and is left at the end of the story pro-
posing to die in spite of his miraculous gifts.
Godwin had got further from realities than he was
in Caleb Williams, and makes his characters in-
dulge in a stilted declamation which he appears
to have meant for passion. A brief passage will
be enough to show what was the kind of elo-
quence which induced contemporaries — even Shel-
ley — to think that he was at home in describing
''whirlwinds of passion." St. Leon's wife has
guessed the secret. She feels that a hopeless gulf
has opened between herself and her husband.
Her beloved son has been forced to drop his
disreputable father and she herself is dying tmder
the shock. A page or two of eloquence ends with
the remarks —

How unhappy the wretch, the monster rather let me
say, who is without an equal, who looks through the
world and in the world cannot find a brother; who
is endowed with attributes which no living being
participates with him; who is therefore cut off for
ever from all cordiality and confidence, can never
unbend himself, but lives a solitary joyless inhabi-
tant of a prison, the materials of which are emeralds

William Godwin's Novels 143

and rubies. How unhappy this wretch, how weak
and ignoble the man who voluntarily accepts this
odious existence.

The lady's passion has clearly not impeded her
command of grammar.

The modern novelist does not accept this
method of giving *' the most impressive form" to
"real life." In truth, it is only tolerable so long
as there is some real force behind the queer old-
fashioned mannerism. Godwin, by the time of St.
Leon, was forcing his vein under pressure of em-
barrassment, and the usual result followed. In
Caleb Williams it was by a kind of good luck that
his philosophy provided him with an effective
situation, and though it did not in the least prove
his moral, and though characters and incidents are
simply preposterous, gave a certain power to his
elbow. The current of general conviction which
had worked the Political Justice had force enough
to turn the mill, if one may say so, even when the
purpose was incongruous and the effect produced
very different from the intention. Caleb Wil-
liams is a kind of literary curiosity — a mon-
strous hybrid between different species — which
gains its interest by a fortunate confusion. But
if any one should be prompted to push his study
into other novels, I fear that he is destined to
disappointment.

Walter Bagehot

T HAVE sometimes wondered whether Bagehot
^ has yet received his due fame. His patent
of literary rank needs, indeed, no critic's counter-
sign. His intimate friends R. H. Hutton and
Sir R. Giffen have given admirable apprecia-
tions of his intellect and character. Sir M. E.
Grant Duff's address in a recent number of this
Review^ shows how deeply he impressed a most
competent eyewitness. There is a curious testi-
mony to his interest for more distant readers.
Some years ago the "Travellers' Insurance Com-
pany" of Hartford, Connecticut, set a precedent
in advertising which authors might desire to see
imitated in England. It published a complete
edition of Bagehot's works, with its own name
printed in the headlines throughout the volumes.
It employed, too, a most competent editor. ]\Ir.
Forrest Morgan laboured upon Bagehot's text
with a zeal unsurpassable by any editor of a
classic. Bagehot was either incapable of cor-
recting proofs or calmly indifferent to errors: his
pages bristle with misprints and grammatical sole-

^ National Review for December, 1899.
144

Walter Bagehot 145

cisms ; he mangled quotations so strangely that it
is difficult to explain how he contrived to do it,
and, as he rarely gave references, the task of
identifying and correcting was very laborious.
Mr. Morgan's zeal was equal to the difficulty, and
a British author again owes to an American the
first performance of a valuable service. No one
can read the collected works without recognising
the singular versatility and vivacity of Bagehot 's
intellect. It is remarkable, says Bagehot, that
Ricardo had already made a fortune and trans-
formed the science of economics when he died at
the age of fifty-one. ' Either performance might
have been a sufficient life occupation. Bagehot
died at precisely the same age, having been a
successful man of business, an energetic journalist,
and the author of treatises which made a mark
upon political, economical, and sociological specu-
lation. Whatever the value of Bagehot's theories,
his literary faculty was, of course, incomparably
superior to Ricardo 's. His books confirm w^hat his
friends tell us of his conversation. His mind was
so alert, his interest in life so keen, and his powers
of illustration so happy, that he could give fresh-
ness even to talk upon the British Constitution
and liveliness to a discussion of the Bank reserve.
He could not, that is, be dull or commonplace
even on the driest or tritest of topics.

VOL. III. — 10.

14^ Studies of a Biographer

If, as I fancy, Bagehot scarcely received so
ready a welcome as he deserved, one cause is ob-
vious. Authors, if I may adopt a formula which
he employed rather too often, may be divided
into two classes, the sentimentalists and the
cynics. There can be no doubt which is the most
popular. Everybody likes "geniality" in print
as in talk; and, of course, everybody is quite
right in the main. Yet the genial author has the
benefit of a packed jury. Each reader perhaps
takes to himself the compliment paid to his
species: what good fellows we all are! And then
we are all pleased with every accession to the
tacit conspiracy for keeping up comfortable
illusions. The poor cynic can hardly get a fair
hearing. It is surely desirable that somebody
should look facts in the face, instead of taking
credit for the equivocal virtue called "seeing the
bright side of things." Things in general have
a very dark side ; and though the man who dwells
upon it gets an unpleasant name, he may be
doing us an important service. We always need
good assailants of humbug. "Cynic," indeed,
has a very variable connotation, and it would be
altogether wrong to apply the epithet to Bagehot
without qualification. In Hutton's life of his
friend the word inevitably comes up, but with
the explanation that it refers to a youthful failing,

Walter Bagehot 147

more or less outlived. Bagehot, he admits, always
scorned a fool, and in early days the scorn was
not yet tempered by the compassion which is
the growth of later years — when we have come
to know how many and what excellent people be-
long to the class. Bagehot's satirical '' Hear, hear, "
he tells us, took the heart out of young orators at
debating societies and reduced the over-eloquent
man to his "lowest terms." His "cynicism"
meant anything but indifference. It was com-
bined with exuberantly high spirits and intense
enjoyment of intellectual combats. University
College, in Gower Street, was then, if Hutton is
right, a far more "awakening" place than most
Oxford colleges. Bagehot, like all clever lads,
owed less to lecturers than to his contemporaries :
to the impact, as he says, of thought upon thought,
to "mirth and refutation, ridicule and laughter,"
which are the "free play of the natural mind."
The young men discussed every topic from the
Com Laws to the question whether "A is A" can
be properly called a "law of thought." Oxford,
on the contrary, according to Bagehot, was recom-
mended by authorities as a place where "the
appetite for knowledge was repressed," a sleepy
hollow in which the Thirty-nine Articles were
taken to represent ultimate logical categories.
An orthodox university, of course, looked stupid

148 Studies of a Biographer

enough in Gower Street, the natural home of
heterodoxy. Oxford men were deeply agitated
by what they innocently took to be thought, but
to Bagehot, in spite of certain faint proclivities
towards Catholicism, their speculations appeared
to be futile danglings after extinct phantasms.
Oxford, indeed, provided him with one most
congenial friend in Arthur Clough. But Clough
represented the revolt against the Oxford of
Newman developing into a mellow, all-round
cynicism. The true cynic should perceive that
neither side has a monopoly of humbug. Bage-
hot's views of many things might be expressed,
as Hutton remarks, in Clough 's lines —

Old things need not be therefore true,
O brother man; nor yet the new —

which some people, with Emerson, translate as
really meaning that "Nothing is either true or
new." Clough, says his friend, was led to a
certain discouragement — a disenchantment; a "fa-
tigued way of looking at great subjects, " partly,
as Bagehot thought, because he had been prema-
turely forced by Arnold's training into "moral
earnestness " In fact, he had learned that Ar-
nold's disciples could be prigs. From that fate
Bagehot was preserved by his vivid interest in life.
If humbugs abounded all round, he did not be-
come indifferent and fastidious, but only found

Walter Bagehot 149

an ampler field for his combative propensities.
How little he was tainted by priggishness or
''moral earnestness" appears from the curious set
of letters from Paris upon the coup d'etat in 1851.
Bagehot there came out as a thorough cynic, and
his private letters, Hutton tells us, were even
more cynical than those published in the Inquirer.
The readers of that paper — good sound believers
in the Times and the British Constitution — were
naturally scandalised by the audacious young
gentleman who argued that it was quite right
to gag the press and to ship ofl leaders of the
opposition to Cayenne. Most young Liberals
had been roused to enthusiasm by the revolution-
ary movements of 1848. Bagehot could only see
the absurdities and the failures. He superin-
tended the construction of the barricades at
Paris to amuse himself; but he was revolted by
the "sallow, sincere, sour" fanatics behind them:
the real Montagnards, who would rather shoot
him than not. It is not possible, he observes, *'to
respect any one who believes in human brother-
hood." That faith is too obviously nonsensical.
"M. Buonaparte is entitled to very great praise.
He has very good heels to his boots, and the
French just want treading down and nothing else
— calm, cruel, business-like oppression to take the
dogmatic conceit out of their heads." J. S. Mill

1 50 Studies of a Biographer

had praised the French spirit of generalisation.
That spirit had come to this, that every Parisian
wanted his head tapped in order to get the for-
mulae and nonsense out of it. Bagehot thoroughly-
accepted the view of the shopkeepers, that revo-
lutions were bad for trade, and that Louis Napo-
leon, who put them down, was a genuine '' Saviour
of Society." A really eloquent passage upon the
power of the Catholic Church suggests the more
serious side of his doctrine. You may, he tells
the Freethinker, disprove the creeds as much as
you please; but in the end you find that the
*' poorest priest in the remote region of the Basses
Alpes has more power over men's souls than
human cultivation. His ill-mouthed masses move
women's souls; can you? Ye scoff at Jupiter, yet
he at least was believed in ; you never have been.
Idol for idol, the dethroned is better than the
tinthroned." Superstition, that is, may be ridicu-
lous to the reasoner; but to the politician it is a
vast and living force to be reckoned with, and
therefore to be respected. Bagehot 's early leaning
to Catholicism meant that he was susceptible to
the historical prestige and imaginative fascinations
of the Catholic Church. But then he was too
thorough a Rationalist to accept Newman's recipe
for suppressing doubt — that is, putting it down
by an "act of will." In point of logic, the creed

Walter Bagehot 151

was false, though in practice the Church might
be not the less useful in its proper place. Though
humbug, as Hosea Biglow remarked, has a " solid
value," he won't believe it for himself. Some
humbug, moreover, is purely mischievous. Both
in religion and in politics dogmatism pretends to
make absolute truths out of any principles that
will lead to the desired conclusion. The Revolu-
tionists illustrated the political evil; for in poli-
tics all absolute principles are necessarily absurd.
Politics, as Burke had first shown, are "made of
time and place"; they are "a piece of business
... to be determined by sense and circum-
stance." The one question is whether institutions
will work; not whether they can be ostensibly
deduced from some arbitrary bit of abstract logic.
Bagehot's youthful audacity applied this to de-
fend the indefensible. He was, as Hutton says,
"exasperating." He sang the praises of an "un-
principled adventurer," and made light of perjury
and violence. His cynicism was paraded with
excessive levity, and good people's scruples need-
lessly flouted. Yet, assuming that Louis Napo-
leon deserved everything that even Victor Hugo
could say of him, the letters show the real value
of good, sweeping, outrageous cynicism. They
raise the question which, sooner or later, has to be
answered. The viler the despot the more impor-

152 Studies of a Biographer

tant it is to inquire, What is the secret of his
despotic power? It is all very well for popular
orators to answer, ''Alliance with the devil." A
more philosophic observer will remark that a
state of things in which the devil has such power
must be radically wrong. In proclaiming the
wickedness of the successful you are proving the
imbecility of the virtuous. Your own principles
may be irrefragable. Then why are they imprac-
ticable? The lofty idealist refuses to consider
such questions. The error, he assumes, cannot be
in his theories, wherever else it may be. The
function of the cynic is to force him to descend
from the clouds and explain instead of simply de-
nouncing. Bagehot, that is, was really putting a
grave difficulty. He was only giving the most
paradoxical turn to the convictions which found
fuller expression in his later writings. The weak-
nesses of French politicians which he described
with such singular vigour have certainly not
wanted illustration from later experience. No-
body could describe more clearly some causes of
the instability of the political order in France.
Politics mean business, and therefore compromise.
When every man is so logical that compromise
becomes a deadly sin, how can the antagonists
be held together except by a despotism which
at least offers material prosperity? Bagehot *s

Walter Bagehot 153

special way of putting it is characteristic.
Theory in the lump is bad. The most essential
quality for a free people, he declares, "is much
stupidity." He points his moral by describing
the pleasure with which, after a surfeit of brilHant
French journalism, he came across an article in
the Morning Herald. There was no "sharp
theory " in it, " no pointed expression, no fatiguing
brilliancy," only "a dull, creeping, satisfactory
sensation that there was nothing to admire."
There was some good in the coup d'etat, which at
least suppressed the useless, endless, empty logic-
chopping of smart Parisian theorisers.

Bagehot is seeking point at the expense of
accuracy, and will not take the sting out of his
paradoxes. His wiser readers may supply the
qualifications for themselves. If the less wise are
shocked, he will only smile in his sleeve. He had
far too much intellect to accept the thoroughly
cynical conclusions that since we can know nothing
we may believe anything, and since philosophy
is delusive give up the attempt to theorise at all.
On the contrary, his weakness is a rather excessive
tendency to theorise. It appears in the literary
criticisms, at which I can here only glance as illus-
trations of his habitual mental attitude. They have,
above all things, the essential merits of freshness
and sincerity. If he has not the special knowledge.

154 Studies of a Biographer

he is absolutely free from the pedantry, of the
literary expert. He has none of the cant of criti-
cism, and never bores us with "romantic and
classical" or "objective and subjective." When
he wants a general theory — as he always does —
he strikes one out in the heat of the moment.
He has almost a trick — as I have hinted — of
dividing all writers into two classes : philosophers
are either "seers" or "gropers"; novelists are
"miscellaneous" or "sentimental"; genius is sym-
metrical or irregular, and so forth. Such classi-
fications will not always bear reflection: they
only give emphasis to a particular aspect; but
they show how his mind is always swarming with
theories, and how he looks upon literature as a
man primarily interested in the wider problems
of the life and character w^hich literature reflects.
Critics, of course, might find fault with many of
his dicta. He is sometimes commonplace because
he tells us how things strike him, and not the less
that they have struck every competent writer in
much the same way. He writes of Shakespeare
and Milton as if he had discovered them for the
first time; he can at times utter a crude judg-
ment, because he is too indifferent — if that be
possible — to orthodox literary authority, and his
literary criticism diverges into psychological or
political speculations which are hardly relevant.

1

Walter Bagehot 155

That means that he is really most interested in
the man behind the books. It is characteristic
that he attacks the common statement about
Shakespeare which declares the man to be un-
knowable. Matthew Arnold's phrase, "Others
abide our question, thou art free! " is used, rightly
or wrongly, to justify a theory which Bagehot
holds — and I confess that I agree with him — to
involve a complete fallacy. It is this interest in
character, the comparative indifference to the
technical qualities of books, which he values as
bringing us into relations with living human
beings, that gives a special quality to Bagehot's
work. It implies no want of enthusiasm. Bagehot
admires some men who had a personal interest
for him, Clough and Hartley Coleridge, even
more warmly than most authorities would sanc-
tion. He shows at any rate — and that is the vital
point — how they affected one of their ablest
contemporaries .

Bagehot's strong point, indeed, is insight into
character: what one of his critics has called his
" Shakespearean " power of perceiving the working
of men's minds. To possess that power a man
must be a bit of what is harshly called a cynic.
He must be able to check the sentimentalist ten-
dency to lose all characterisation in a blaze of
light. His hero-worship must be restrained by

15^ Studies of a Biographer

humour and common-sense. Carlyle, the great
prophet of that creed, could draw most ad-
mirable portraits because there was a Diogenes
behind the enthusiast ; and an underlying shrewd-
ness was always asserting itself behind the didactic
panegyric. In Bagehot's case, again, this quality
appears in the curious attractiveness for him of
the more prosaic type of intellect. His article,
for example, upon Macaulay shows the struggle
in his mind. He accepts the contemporary esti-
mate of that '' marvellous " book — the History — as
was natural to a man whose youth coincided with
Macaulay 's culmination. He especially esteems
a writer who can describe a commercial panic as
accurately as M'Culloch, the "driest of political
economists," and yet make his account as pic-
turesque as a Waverley Novel. He feels keenly
the limitations of Macaulay's mind : the incapacity
ever to develop his early opinions; the ''bookish-
ness " which made him the slave of accepted Whig
formulae; the ** chill nature" (perhaps the word
is hardly fair) which made him prefer the prosaic
and respectable to the ''passionate eras of our
history." Yet he also recognised what is perhaps
too much overlooked, Macaulay's solid common-
sense, obscured as it may be by the defects which
give so antiquated and wooden an aspect to his
political doctrine. Bagehot, on one side, had

I

Walter Bagehot 157

strong affinities with the old-fashioned Liberalism
in which he had been educated. Macaulay showed
its merits as well as its defects. He represents
that kind of "stupidity" which Bagehot so thor-
oughly appreciated — the stupidity which is a
safeguard against abstract theories. Macaulay,
as Emerson observes, praised Baconian philosophy
precisely because it meant by "good," good to
eat or good to wear; and thought that its merit
was "to avoid ideas and avoid morals." Bagehot
could agree with Macaulay that "ideas" were
dangerous things. He shows in one essay how
Bolingbroke was too clever by half. He complains
in another that Lowe " cannot help being brilliant. "
He cannot talk "the monotonous humdrum"
which sends men to sleep, and which they suppose
must be "all right." He has not the "invaluable
faculty " of diffusing the " oppressive atmosphere
of business-like dulness " w^hich is "invaluable to
a Parliamentary statesman." Lord Althorp was
the ideal leader of the Reform Bill time because he
was so intellectually clumsy. His mind "had not
an epigram in the whole of it; everything was
solid and ordinary." So Bagehot criticised Glad-
stone in a very interesting article (i860), com-
plaining of his "incessant use of ingenious and
unqualified principles," combined with a "scho-
lastic " skill which enables him to prove that any

15S Studies of a Biographer

two principles may be consistent. In an earlier
article he had analysed with singular acuteness
the character of Sir Robert Peel, to illustrate the
thesis that a ''constitutional statesman is a man
of common opinions and uncommon abilities."
He has to represent public opinion — the opinion,
that is, of the average m.an; and it will come
naturally to such a man to be converted quite
' honestly and yet just at the right time ; that is,
just when other men of business are converted.
Originality and Byronic force and fervour would
make that impossible. Byron's mind was volcanic,
and flung out thoughts which crystallised into
indestnictible forms like lava. Peel's was one in
which opinions resembled the "daily accimiu-
lating insensible deposits of a rich alluvial soil."

Articles in this vein, full of brilliant flashes of
insight, show Bagehot's peculiar power. It is
quaint enough to observe the audacious, rapid
theorist devoting his brightest insight to a serious
"encomium moriae" and becoming paradoxical
in praise of the commonplace. He was quite in
earnest. He admired no one more than Sir G.
Cornewall Lewis, the very type of the thoroughly
prosaic, solid, utilitarian mind ; and not the less
that he was himself imaginative and, if not a poet,
had marked poetical sensibiHty. The explanation
may be suggested by the doctrine which he applied

Walter Bagehot 159

in his most valuable works. A scientific inquirer
must accumulate knowledge of facts, for the
whole fabric of science is based upon experience.
But he must also be always speculating, co-
ordinating, and combining his experience; his
mind must be incessantly suggesting the theories
till he hits upon the one clue that leads through
the chaotic labyrinth which experience presents to
puzzle us. Bagehot denounced and ridiculed the
theorists who asked for no base of experience and
placidly assumed that the fact would conform to
the theory. So long as such theories prevail,
there can be no stability and therefore no progress.
"Stupidity" is invaluable just so far as it involves
a tacit demand that theories should be checked by
plain practical application. But stupidity abso-
lute — sheer impenetrability to ideas — was so little
to his taste that a main purpose of his writing is
to consider how it can be effectually kept under.
As a dumb instinctive force, it wants a guide, and
he is terribly afraid that it will become refractory
and end by being master. There is the problem
which he has to solve.

First of all, we must see the facts before our
eyes. Bagehot's greatest merit is that he per-
ceives and complies with this necessary condition
of useful inquiry. He illustrates a maxim which
he is fond of quoting from Paley. It is much

i6o Studies of a Biographer

harder to make men see that there is a difficulty
than to make them understand the explanation
when once they see the difficulty. We build up
elaborate screens of words and formula which
effectually hide the facts and make us content
with sham explanations. "The reason," he says,
"why so few good books are written is that so
few people that can write know anything." An
author " has always lived in a room" ; he has read
books and knows the best authors, but he does
not learn the use of his own ears and eyes. That
is terribly true, as every author must sorrowfully
admit; and probably it is nowhere truer than of
English political philosophers. English statesmen
had made any number of acute remarks behind
which, one supposes, there ought to lie some
general theory; but when they tried to say what
it was, they fell into grievous platitudes and the
conventional twaddle which is a weariness to the
flesh. They took their general principles from
Aristotle, and their precedents from the days of
John or Queen Anne; and something surely
must have been learned in the interval. Aristotle's
remarks have become platitudes — perhaps be-
cause they were so wise; but they surely require
a little fresh testing. Bagehot's book upon the
British Constitution came like a revelation; sim-
ply because he had opened his eyes and looked at

Walter Bagehot i6i

the facts. They were known to everybody; they
had been known to everybody for generations;
and yet, somehow or other, nobody had put them
together. Every cog and wheel in the machinery
had been described to its minutest details, but the
theory supposed to be embodied in its working
was hopelessly unreal. It was a kind of fossil
erudition; and led to singular misconceptions,
and, moreover, to misconceptions of grave prac-
tical importance.

Bagehot 's main point may illustrate his method.
When the Constitution of the United States was
framed, the philosophy was supplied by the
authors of the famous Federalist. They had read
Montesquieu, who was a man of genius, but also a
Frenchman. He had naturally taken for granted
that the conventional maxims of English politi-
cians corresponded to the vital principles of the
British Constitution. His disciples supposed that
one such principle was the separation of the legis-
lative from the executive power. This, says
Bagehot, was the "literary" and therefore the
utterly wrong theory. The Americans naturally
had George HI. on the brain. George HI. repre-
sented the executive in England, and had inter-
fered unduly with the legislative. If the American
President was the true analogue of the English
monarch, the essential point was to provide

VOL. III. — ii.

1 62 Studies of a Biographer

security against this abuse. Carry out the prin-
ciple of the division of powers more thoroughly;
separate the President from the Congress; and
there would be no danger of a Washington or a
Jefferson becoming a George III. or a Cromwell.
This involved a thorough misconception. The
President was really analogous not to the King,
but to the Prime Minister. To divide his func-
tions from the functions of Congress would, there-
fore, be like making the English Prime Minister
independent of parliamentary control. That
would clearly involve a complete dislocation of
the whole English system. The fact — obscured
for a time by George III.'s personal influence —
was that the Minister had really become the
centre of the executive power and the organ of the
legislative power. The "efficient secret of
the British Constitution" was, therefore, not the
division, but "the nearly complete fusion" of
the two powers. A vital change had been un-
noticed because it had taken place by a tacit and
gradual process. The Cabinet has no recognised
position in our Constitution; its powers are de-
fined by no definite law ; and yet its development
implies a profound constitutional change. The
Cabinet is, says Bagehot, the "hyphen" which
joins the legislative to the executive power. Be-
cause the hyphen had not been forged by any

Walter Bagehot 163

legal process, the "fusion" of powers which it
indicated had been ignored. The two powers had
coalesced by slow, insensible, and unavowed
methods, and the coalescence was therefore sup-
posed not to have taken place at all. The " lit-
erary" theory not only failed to recognise, but
implicitly denied, the essential fact. The radical
change had been carried out under a mask of uni-
formity. The Constitution had come to embody
a principle which was the very reverse of the
ostensible principle; and as we had only looked
at the external forms, we had spoken as though
the prerogative of the Crown still represented the
same facts as in the days of the Tudors.

When Bagehot pointed out that the Cabinet
was virtually a committee of the legislative body,
and the real Executive elected by and respon-
sible to the Legislature, he was simply putting
together notorious facts. They had, no doubt,
been more or less recognised. Yet he was not
only clearing away a mass of useless formulae,
but almost making a discovery, and the rarest
kind of discovery, that of the already known.
He was exposing an error which had misled the
ablest founders of the most remarkable of mod-
ern constitutions. They were, without knowing
it, exchanging the "Cabinet" for the "Presiden-
tial" system. Whether the Presidential system

1 64 Studies of a Biographer

had or had not the disadvantages ascribed to it
by Bagehot is a different question. At any rate
it was true, as he said, that its founders, while in-
tending to develop a system by accepting its
ostensible principle, were really inverting it and
acting upon a contradictory principle. To have
disengaged the facts so clearly from the mass of
conventional fictions was a remarkable achieve-
ment. Bagehot revealed a plain fact hidden from
more pretentious philosophers who had been
blinded by traditional formulae.

Bagehot proceeded to draw conclusions which
seemed scandalously cynical to the young re-
formers who, when his articles first appeared in
the Fortnightly Review, were proposing to *' shoot
Niagara." He admitted that the British Consti-
tution was a whole mass of fictions ; its ostensible
principles were a mere cover for totally inconsis-
tent practice; and yet that was one of its chief
merits. It was a vast make-believe, involving an
"organised hypocrisy," and for that reason the
best of all possible constitutions. We deify a
king in sentiment as we once deified him in doc-
trine. *' This illusion has been, and still is, of in-
calculable benefit to the human race." The
"theatrical show of society" impresses the popu-
lar imagination ; and the " climax of the play is the
Queen.". . . "Philosophers may deride the super-

Walter Baorehot 165

c>

stition, but the results are inestimable." A CaVj-
inet Government is only possible for "deferential
nations": men who can delegate power to "su-
perior persons." Public opinion is supreme, and
public opinion is the opinion of " the bald-headed
man at the back of the omnibus" — whom, in
modern slang, we call "the man in the street." ^
He is totally incapable of forming any rational
opinion upon any political question whatever;
but he can be impressed by his betters. He will
choose a "select few" to rule him. They, too,
will be heavy respectable men, the "last people
in the world to whom, if drawn up in a row, an
immense nation would ever give an exclusive
preference ' ' ; but they will have sense enough to
elect in their turn an Executive of capable states-
men. Carlyle and Bagehot agreed — what few
people can deny — that men are "mostly fools."
Carlyle inferred that they should be ruled by
heaven-sent heroes; Bagehot, that they should
be impressed by the "shams," as Carlyle would
have called them, appropriate to sluggish imag-
inations. Bagehot delighted in his Somerset-
shire clown, who regarded the Crimean War as a
personal struggle between Queen Victoria and
the Emperor Nicholas and did not see how it

» Emerson uses the phrase in the essay on Napoleon in

Representative Men.

1 66 Studies of a Biographer

could be ended till the Queen had caught the
Emperor and locked him up. The clown, that is,
can only understand loyalty to a person. To
reach him you must represent general principles
by concrete symbols.

The cynic's merit is to see facts; and these
facts are undeniable. I have always wondered
how some political theories can survive a walk
through the Strand. People argue gravely, and
as if it were obviously true, that the sovereign
power should simply sum up the opinions of its
multitudinous component atoms. How many
people would you meet betw^een Temple Bar and
Charing Cross who have any real opinion what-
ever, if ''opinion" implies any process of reason-
ing? They have blind instincts, no doubt, and
strong feelings; but by what chemistry can the
vague mass of ignorance and prejudice be trans-
muted into political wisdom? If ''stupidity''
were enough, we should be in no difficulty. We
have stupidity — massive, stolid stupidity — in
superabundance. That is a great fact. But if stu-
pidity is to be harmless, it must be a stupidity con-
scious of its own defects. Bagehot's pert French
journalist was an adept in using the phrases to
take the place of thought, and enable fools to
think themselves philosophers. They took phrases
for ideas; and cast aside not only the traditional

Walter Bagehot 167

maxims, but the practical wisdom really em-
bodied in the tradition. English "stupidity"
went with docility, ''deferential" habits of mind,
and therefore willingness to trust a select few.
Bagehot argued in a very able article upon the
"imreformed Parliament" how, with all its
abuses, it had more or less encouraged this inval-
uable tendency. The whole system had trained
us to act as became well-meaning stupid people,
with just enough brains to recognise their betters.
The doctrine takes fresh shape in his most popu-
lar book, the Physics and Politics. Bagehot had
been profoundly interested in the discussions
started by Darwin, and their bearing upon political
questions. He was not, and did not in the least
affect to be an original inquirer. He followed the
teaching of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor —
though with his own intellect always keenly at
work. The book, therefore, is hardly an original
contribution to the histor}^ of primitive societies,
and his dogmas would, I suppose, often require
to be stated as more or less plausible conjectures.
What especially interests him is their application
to contemporary problems. The methods which
show how men grew out of monkeys might show
how early societies grew out of savage hordes;
and, then, as most of us are still, if not in the
savage, in the infantile stage, how modem societies

1 68 Studies of a Biographer

are actually held together. He invented the now
proverbial phrase " the cake of custom," to express
one essential condition. Men can never emerge
from pure barbarism till they are capable of form-
ing a body of sacred inviolable laws to hold them
together. But, then, if the "cake" be too solid,
they will never get any further. They will crystal-
lise into solid shapes which make progress impos-
sible. How does the ''age of discussion" ever
succeed to the age of custom? How does "con-
tract" succeed "status"? or, in other words, how
do men gain the right to settle their own lives
instead of being wedged from birth into a rigid
framework? " One of the greatest pains to human
nature," he says characteristically, "is the pain
of a new idea": it is "so upsetting." How does
so tender a shoot manage to pierce the soil har-
dened by sacred traditions? His answer suggests
a doctrine which has been elaborately worked out
(quite independently, I believe) in the singularly
ingenious and suggestive writings of M. Tarde.
Bagehot remarks that a force is at work in all
times, which shows itself in savages and civilised
races, in the greatest and smallest affairs, in
making nations and starting fashions. That is
the force of "imitation." He illustrates it by a
literary instance. What, he asks, caused the rise
of the Queen Anne literature? Steele — "a vig-

Walter Bagehot 169

orous forward man" — struck out the essay;
Addison elaborated it and gave it permanent
value. Troops of other writers followed, and
followed in the main not of set purpose, but by
unconscious imitation. The doctrine is, of course,
Darwinian. The patronage of favoured fonns
corresponds to the preservation of the fortunate
varieties. As Darwin argued from variation in
pigeons to variation of species in general, Bage-
hot argues from a literary fashion to the most
important processes of social growth. Religious
doctrines, he says, spread not by argument, but
by the attractiveness of the type; and a great
political leader dictates the tone of the commu-
nity. We were all frivolous under Palmerston,
and became ''earnest" with Gladstone. Imita-
tion is at work everywhere.

There are obvious criticisms upon which I need
not touch. The full development by M. Tarde
shows how many consequences may be, at least
plausibly, deduced. ''Imitation," thus under-
stood, discharges a double function. It produces,
on the one hand, the uniformity of life which is
essential to civilised society. The stupidity or
docility of mankind establishes the laws of con-
duct which are essential if we are to under-
stand each other and to co-operate. If, on the
other hand, the uniformity becomes excessive,

1 70 Studies of a Biographer

individual Initiative starts new types. The most
effective will succeed, but in any case is adopted
by an unconscious instinct without foresight of
results. The problem, once more, is to facilitate
the play of this natural force ; for if the wise man
imitates the fool, society v/ill stagnate, while it is
rather difficult to get the fool to see the merits of
the wise. We have to face the old problem:
Does not democracy lead to a dead level, and is
not democracy incapable of recognising the best
men? Bagehot felt that difficulty as keenly as
other men to whom intellectual culture repre-
sents one main charm of life. Will not that
''bald-headed man in the omnibus" or the prole-
tarian below him get the upper hand and set the
fashion to be universally imitated? Bagehot was
to a certain point conservative or aristocratic.
The old aristocratic system had, in a blundering
way, given a predominance to the select few.
When the Reform Bill became necessary, the
slow, clumsy intellect of Lord Althorp secured the
passage of an undoubtedly beneficial measure.
Unluckily, he was too clumsy. The aristocracy
had intelligence, but very limited ideas, and had
terribly missed its opportunities. It had properly
abolished the old system which, after an awkward
fashion, gave influence to the intellectual classes,
but it had provided no equivalent. We have,

Walter Bagehot 171

therefore, to face a tremendous difficulty: we
have to induce this "self-satisfied, stupid, inert
mass of men to admit its own insufficiency."
That is hard enough; but it is still harder to
suggest remedies, and hardest of all to secure
their application. Bagehot discusses Hare's
scheme, which Mill had recently declared to
provide a panacea, and shows — unanswerably, I
think — how it would only lead to the supremacy
of caucuses and machine-made politics. He
makes a suggestion or two of his own, life-peerages
and so forth; but of them it is enough to say that
the insufficiency is only too palpable. The demo-
cracy is too strong to be hampered by constitutional
devices, and very unlikely to adopt any measures
deliberately intended to fetter its own powers of
action. "I can venture to say," he observes in
the last addition to his book on the Constitution,
* ' what no elected Member of Parliament can ven-
ture to say, that I am terribly afraid of the igno-
rant multitude of the new constituencies. We may
have a 'glut' of stupidity." Probably the opinion
and the reluctance to utter it are both stronger
than when Bagehot wrote (1872). To the demo-
crat, Bagehot's despondency will appear as a
proper penalty of his cynicism. One remark is
suggested by his whole argument: His essential
case is that the British Constitution depends for

172 Studies of a Biographer

its excellence upon the elaboration of the pur-
blind political instincts ; upon spontaneous " defer-
ence" or docility; upon the guided or enlightened
"stupidity" which corresponds to his favourite
virtue, "animated moderation." It is obvious
that if such instincts die out, no political machin-
ery, neither Hare's scheme nor any other scheme,
can create them. The problem, that is, passes
beyond the merely legal and becomes essentially
moral. Loyalty to the monarchy and " deference "
to the aristocracy, and, therefore, the correspond-
ing institutions, could not, as Bagehot had in-
sisted, be transplanted to America. No mere
political institutions will preserve them if the
corresponding instincts really decay. Bagehot
had dwelt upon the utility of the "theatrical"
elements of the Constitution. It suddenly comes
upon him that plain men will take this invaluable
element to be superstition and humbug. When
you let out the secret that the monarchy is really
a part of a stage-play, it will cease to be an effec-
tive control of real life. That is the danger which
has all along awaited his excessive valuation of
"shams." His merit was to have shown more
clearly the foundations of the political edifice.
If they begin to fail us, the problem of re-
placing them involves vast moral and social
difficulties which lay beyond his peculiar pro-

Walter Bagehot 173

vince. They will give work for future genera-
tions.

The value of his clear insight into fact remains
and I have only to remark, in conclusion, how
well it served him in one other inquiry. Bagehot
called himself the last of the old economists. He
had a strong sympathy with Ricardo, as with
all the leaders of the old-fashioned do-nothing
Liberalism. And yet he showed most effectually
one of their weaknesses. His Lombard Street owes
its power to his imaginative vivacity. Instead of
the abstract ''economic man" — an embodied for-
mula — he sees the real concrete banker, full of
hopes and fires and passions, and shows how they
impel him in actual counting-houses. So his dis-
cussion of the " Postulates of Political Economy"
is an exposition of the errors which arise when we
apply mere abstract formulae, unless we carefully
translate them in terms of the facts instead of
forcing the facts into the formulae. When a dull
man of business talks of the currency question,
says Bagehot, he puts "bills" and "bullion" into
a sentence, and does not care what comes between
them. He illustrates Hobbes's famous principle
that words are the money of fools and the coun-
ters of the wise. The word currency loses all
interest if we do not constantly look beyond
the sign to the thing signified. Bagehot never

174 Studies of a Biographer

forgets that condition of giving interest to his writ-
ing. Few readers will quite accept the opinion of
his editor, that he has made Lombard Street as
entertaining as a novel. But he has been wonder-
fully successful in tackling so arid a topic; and
the statement gives the impression made by the
book. It seems as though the ordinary treatises
had left us in the dull leaden cloud of a London fog,
which, in Bagehot's treatment, disperses, to let us
see distinctly and vividly the human beings pre-
viously represented by vague, colourless phantoms.

Thomas Henry Huxley

nPHERE are some compensations, I am begin-
* ning to think, in the reflection that by i860
I was qualified, by age at least, to enjoy the
spectacle of intellectual sword-play. In that
year took place the famous encounter at Oxford
between Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce. It was
one incident in a remarkable outburst of intellect-
ual activity. The old controversy between scien-
tific and ecclesiastical champions was passing into
a new phase. Darwin's teaching had not only
provided a fresh method, but suggested applica-
tions of scientific principles which widened and
deepened the significance of the warfare. A ** new
reformation," as Huxley afterwards called it, was
beginning, and the intellectual issues to be de-
cided were certainly not less important than
those which had presented themselves to Eras-
mus and Luther. In the struggle which followed,
Huxley took a leading part. He made original
researches; he was the clearest expositor of the
new doctrine to the exoteric world; he helped
to organise the scientific teaching which might
provide competent disciples or critics; and he

175

1 76 Studies of a Biographer

showed most clearly and vigorously the bearing
of his principles upon the most important topics
of human thought. Whatever his success, the
strongest antagonist could not deny to him the
praise due to a strenuous and honourable com-
batant. The most careless Gallio looking on from
the outer ring might be roused to applaud the
intellectual gladiator who could hit out so straight
from the shoulder and fairly knock accomplished
prelates out of time. We could admire " Darwin's
bulldog," as he called himself, even if we felt
some sympathy with the bull whom he pinned.
Those who watched him from first to last will
be glad to make a more intimate acquaintance
with so grand a specimen of the fighting qualities
upon which Englishmen are supposed to pride
themselves. In Mr. Leonard Huxley's volumes
they will find ample materials for filling out the
more obvious and strongly marked out lines; and
will end by adding to their respect for the sturdy
intellectual warrior a cordial affection for a noble
and warm-hearted human being.

The method which Mr. L. Huxley has adopted
in the life of his father was clearly prescribed for
him. The biographer can never quite equal the
autobiographer, but with a sufficient supply of
letters he may approximate very closely to the
same result. Huxley's letters are fortunately

Thomas Henry Huxley 177

abundant, and amount to a singularly clear,
though quite unconscious, self- revelation. The
book, it is true, is of considerable dimensions,
but, in the first place, Huxley had so many inter-
ests that many topics require notice; and, in
the second place, the letters are almost uniformly
excellent. The common complaint of the decay
of letter-writing is partly answerable by the
obvious consideration that most letters of our
own time are still lying in their pigeon-holes. It
is true, no doubt, that only an Edward Fitz-
gerald or so here and there have the chance to
write letters breathing the old-world charm of
lettered ease and playful dallying with the hu-
morous aspects of life or books. Huxley's letters
were necessarily thrown out at high pressure:
pithy statements of his judgment of some prac-
tical matter, or friendly greetings for which he
can just find time between the lecture-room and
the railway station. Their vivacity and constant
felicity of phrase are the more remarkable.
R. H. Hutton remarked quaintly upon the quan-
tity of "bottled life" which Huxley could "in-
fuse into the driest topic on which human beings
ever contrived to prose." A more congenial
phrase would perhaps be the amount of "poten-
tial energy" which was always stored in his
brain. It is convertible at any moment into
VOL, HI. — 12.

1 7S Studies of a Biographer

the activity of a steam-hammer hitting the nail
on the head in the neatest and most effective
fashion. There are none of the flabby, tortuous
blunderings round about a meaning, nor of the
conventional platitudes of which so many letters
are entirely composed ; every word is alive. His
mother, he tells us, was remarkable for rapidity
of thought. "Things flash across me," she
would say by way of apology. That peculiarity,
says her son, "has been passed on to me in full
strength" ; and though it has " played him tricks,"
there is nothing with which he would less willingly
part. The letters often scintillate with such
flashes, the brighter for the strong sense of hu-
mour which is rarely far beneath the surface.
They vary from the simply playful to the earnest
moods. He does not scorn even atrocious puns.
But of course it is not the occasional conde-
scension to "goaks," as he calls them, but the
fine perception of the comic side of serious mat-
ters, which gives a charm to his casual phrases.
Sometimes it shows itself in a bit of friendly
"chaff." When Matthew Arnold has appropri-
ated — unconsciously, let us hope — an umbrella
at the Athenaeum, Huxley slyly exhorts him to
consider what that excellent prelate, Arnold's
favourite Bishop Wilson, would have advised in
a case of covetousness. An excellent example of

Thomas Henry Huxley 179

grave logic conveyed in an apologue is the letter
in answer to Cardinal Manning's defence of indis-
criminate charity. Huxley had told an Irish
carman to drive fast, and the man set off at a
hand-gallop. " Do you know where you are
going?" cried Huxley. ''No, yer honner, but
anny way I 'm driving fast!" A phrase in a
letter to Mrs. Clifford dashes out a quaint com-
ment upon human nature. **Men, my dear, are
very queer animals, a mixture of horse nervous-
ness, ass stubbornness, and camel malice, with an
angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple
in the posset, and' when they can do exactly as
they please, are very hard to drive." This, says
Mr. Leonard Huxley, sounds like a bit of his con-
versation, and in a very interesting description
Sir Spencer Walpole remarks on that manifesta-
tion of his powers. Huxley, he says, "could always
put his finger on the wrong word and always in-
stinctively choose the right one." In private
talk, lecturing, and public speaking, he was
equally conspicuous in the humorous felicity
which so often marks his admirable literary
style.

"Science and literature," said Huxley, "are
not two things, but two sides of one thing." An
aphorism in an after-dinner speech must not be
too literally construed, but the phrase indicates

i8o Studies of a Biographer

the quality which makes Huxley's writings as
refreshing to the literary as to the scientific critic.
"Exposition," he observes, "is not Darwin's
forte. But there is a marvellous dumb sagacity
about him like that of a sort of miraculous dog,
and he gets to the truth by ways as dark as those
of the Heathen Chinee." The final cause of Hux-
ley might seem — ^though the theory is a little out
of place — to have been the provision of an articu-
late utterance for Darwin's implicit logic. He
points an old moral for young literary gentlemen
in want of a style. He does not believe in mould-
ing one's style by any other process than that of
" striving after the expression of clear and definite
conceptions." First, indeed, he adds, you have
to catch your clear conceptions. I will not pre-
sume to say that for writers of a different cate-
gory a different method may not be the right one.
But most of us may heartily subscribe to Huxley's
theory. The best way to be happy, as moralists
tell us, is not to make the acquisition of happiness
a conscious aim. To acquire a good style, you
should never think of style at all. It will be the
spontaneous outcome of adequate expression of
clear thought. Some writers, Huxley admits,
might have learned dignity from a study of Hobbes,
and concision from Swift and simplicity from De
Foe and Goldsmith. The masters are significant of

Thomas Henry Huxley i8i

his taste ;■ but he learned by adopting their methods,
not by imitating them as models. The labour
which he bestowed upon his work is the more re-
markable, considering his quickness in seizing the
right word in his hastiest letters. He speaks of
writing essays half-a-dozen times before getting
them into the right shape. He had the passion,
unfortunately rare in Englishmen, for thorough
logical symmetry. His "flashes" must be fin-
ished and concentrated. The happy phrase has
to be fixed in the general framework. Arguments
are terribly slippery things ; one is always finding
one's self shunted info some slightly diverging track
of thought; and brilliant remarks are most dan-
gerous seducers. They illustrate something, but
then it is not quite the right thing. Huxley gets
his Pegasus into the strictest subordination; but
one can understand that he had to suppress a
good many swervings to right and left, and only
found the lucid order after experimental wander-
ings into the wrong paths. The result is the
familiar one. What is easy to read has not,
therefore, as the hasty reader infers, been easy
to write. An "unfriendly" but surely rather
single-minded critic declared that the interest of
Huxley's lectures was due not to the lecturer, but
to the simplicity of the theory expounded. That
is the same effect which Swift produced in the

t82 Studies of a Biographer

Drapier's Letters. He seems to be simply stating
obvious facts. Huxley's best essays deserve
to be put on a level with the best examples of
Swift or other great literary athletes ; and any
one who imagines the feat to be easy can try
the experiment.

Professor Ray Lankester, in describing this
quality of Huxley's essays, points out also how
this implies a revelation of the man. When
Swift's tracts purport to give an unvarnished
statement of plain facts and figures, we are all the
more sensible of the fierce indignation boiling
just below the surface. Huxley's resolution to be
strictly logical and to be clear before anything
only forces him to exert his powers of vivifying
the subject by happy illustration or humorous
side-lights, or sometimes by outbursts of hearty
pugnacity, and now and then by the eloquent
passages, the more effective because under strict
control, which reveal his profound sense of the
vast importance of the questions at issue. He
had one disadvantage as compared with Swift:
If Swift wanted a fact, he had not many scruples
about inventing it, whereas Huxley's most pro-
minent intellectual quality was his fidelity to
fact, or to what he was firmly convinced to be
fact. This brings me to some characteristics
strikingly revealed in these volumes. Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley 183

claims that he had always been animated by a
love of truth combined with some youthful am-
bition. The claim, I think, is indisputable. Yet
a love of truth must be considered, if I may say j [_
so, as rather a regulative than a substantive
virtue. Abstract truth is a rather shadowy
divinity, though a most essential guide in pur-
suing any great inquiry. It presupposes an
interest in philosophy or science or history, and
then prescribes the right spirit of research. Hux-
ley was not one of the rare men to whom abstract
speculation is a sufficient delight in itself. He
was most emphatically a human being, w^ith
strong affections and a keen interest in the human
life around him. He had to live as well as to
think, and to reconcile his intellectual ambition
with hard necessities. The pith of his early story
was already known in part from his autobio-
graphical fragment. Further details make the
picture more impressive. For a time he had to
thrive under conditions which w^ere only not
blighting because his courage made them bracing.
The school at which he got his brief training was
a "pandemonium." He wished to be an engi-
neer, but was forced to become a medical student
against the grain. He found, however, a suffi-
cient arena for the exercise of his awakening
faculties. Physiology, "the engineering of living

1 84 Studies of a Biographer

machines," attracted him, though he cared Httle
for other parts of the necessary studies. From
Carlyle he learned a hatred of " shams," or perhaps
rather learned to give form to an innate antipathy
to that commodity. Carlyle, too, set him upon
/ / the study of German, afterwards invaluable, and
suggested some early incursions into the field of
metaphysics. A fortunate accident afterwards
I forced him to spend four years in the Rattlesnake^
I where his personal accommodation, as he testifies,
was not much better than Jonah's ; where he had
to pass months without seeing civilised beings;
where his junior companions were as indifferent
as the Australian aborigines to his scientific pur-
suits.^ He made friends of them not the less, and
declares that the life on board ship, under sharp
discipline, with a ''soft plank" to sleep upon,
and weevilly biscuit for breakfast, was well worth
living. It taught him to work for the sake of
work, even if he and his work were to go to the
bottom of the sea. He returned to England to

1 A naval officer wrote to rebuke me for a sentence which
I have sHghtly modified. Huxley speaks very highly of his
commander, Captain Stanley, and the remarks (see Life, vol.
i., p. 49) apply to some of the junior officers, whom he never-
theless found to be " as good fellows as sailors ought to be
and generally are" (Ibid, p. 30). My correspondent thinks
that they were equal to Huxley in scientific attainments.
If so, Huxley did not find it out, and apparently took thera
for Peter Simples.

Thomas Henry Huxley 185

find that some of his work had been appreciated,
and to gain some warm friends. Still, it looked
also as though a " life of science" would mean not
a "life of poverty," but a "life of nothing," and
the art of living upon nothing, especially with a
family, had not yet been discovered. Yet the
desirability of living somehow had been enforced
by the greatest blessing of his life, the engage-
ment in Australia to the lady to whom he writes
this account. He still feels, however, and he
counts with complete confidence upon her sharing
his feeling, that he is bound for his own credit,
for the sake of his friends and of science itself, to
keep his hand to the plough. How his persistence
was rewarded, how he gradually emerged, se-
cured in spite of vexatious delays a sufficient
support to justify the long-delayed marriage and
to carry on the task which he had accepted, may
be read in these volumes. In later years, the
duties of a husband and a father forced him to
give up the line of research to which he had
aspired. But he w^as not less working in the
great cause of propagating what he believed to
be the truth: fighting its enemies and organising
its adherents. He was "driven into his career,"
as he says in his autobiography, rather than led
into it of his own free will. Yet the dominant
purpose was equally manifest, though stress of

1 86 Studies of a Biographer

circumstances and conflict of duties might force
him to set his sails to devious winds. If he could
not select the career which ambition of purely
scientific fame might have dictated, he would
accept none which involved the slightest com-
promise with falsehood; and probably took, in
fact, the part most suitable to his peculiar cast of
intellect. When Huxley took up the gauntlet
for Darwinism, and first became widely known to
the extra-scientific world, his aspirations might
be described with curious accuracy in the words
of the poet whom he held to have appreciated
most clearly the tendencies of modern scientific
thought. The first speaker in Tennyson's Two
Voices recalls the early phase when he listened
as ''the distant battle flashed and rung": sang
his joyful paean, and burnished his weapons,

Waiting to strive a happy strife,
To war with falsehood to the knife,
And not to lose the good of life.

He was to carve out

Free space for every human doubt:
to reach through

The springs of life, the depths of awe,
And reach the law within the law;

and finally to die,

but,

Thomas Henry Huxley 187

Not void of righteous self-applause,
Nor in a merely selfish cause —

having sown some generous seed,
Fruitful of further thought and deed.

Huxley, indeed, never gave in to the despon-
dency which led the second voice to recommend
suicide; nor did he precisely accept the consola-
tions which the first voice ultimately accepts in
the sight of a lady and gentleman going to church
with their daughter. He plunged into the war
and found satisfacfion in the simple joy of suc-
cessful combat. When, thirty years after the
round with Bishop Wilberforce, he again attended
a similar meeting, and, veiling criticism in eulogy,
welcomed Lord Salisbury's address as an invol-
untary testimony to the victory of evolutionism,
he could look back with a feeling of triumph. A
change of thought of unprecedented magnitude
had been admitted even by the enemy. Some,
indeed, held that the doctrine once scornfully
rejected was to become the comer-stone of a new
edifice of faith. In any case, if the chief value of
a new speculation is even more in the fermenta-
tion which it sets up than in the results which it
finally establishes, no one disputes the enormous
importance of the Darwinian theories. I have

1 88 Studies of a Biographer

sufficient reasons for not saying a word upon
the part which they have played in the physical
sciences. Their influence, however, upon other
problems has been one of their most remarkable
peculiarities. Huxley insisted upon such appli-
^ cations; and I will venture — not, of course, to
examine his arguments, but — ^to note the char-
acteristic position which they implied. Huxley
remarks somewhere that he had learned to be a
judge of the art of controversy ; to appreciate the
skill displayed in the contest abstractedly from
the merit of the positions defended. That may
seem to imply a delight in battle for its own sake.
The athlete rejoices in putting forth his power;
and I cannot see my way to deny that Huxley
was pugnacious. In fact, I both admire and envy
a quality which indicates both courage and the
spirit of fair play. Huxley himself, indeed, was
given to make frequent disavowals; his fights —
they were many, he admits — ^were forced upon
him; except, indeed, in two (or "by 'r lady," one
is tempted to interject, some ''threescore")
instances. What is the "forcing" in question —
who really began the fight — is a difficult question
to answer in most quarrels. If a man has hazel
eyes, according to high authority, another man
who cracks nuts is obviously taking the aggres-
sive. Huxley, while warning a younger man

Thomas Henry Huxley 189

against quarrels, anticipates the obvious tu quoque,
and explains that in his own case warfare had been
a simple duty. The position is explained in one
of his prefaces. He never, he declares, "went out
of his way" to attack the Bible. The dominant
ecclesiasticism thrust the book in his way, and
marked "No thoroughfare" where he claimed
an indefeasible right of passage. He therefore
brushed the barrier aside, and expressed his con-
tempt for it with a slight excess of vivacity.
Other men — his leader Darwin, for example —
were content quietly to disregard the warning;
to leave the destruction to be done by the pro-
fessional critics or perhaps by the authorities
themselves, who would presently explain that
"No thoroughfare" is equivalent to "You are
not really trespassing." Huxley was not a man
to suffer fools gladly, or to lay down a principle
without admitting and emphasising its unpopular
consequences. That might possibly show a want
of prudence ; but the alternative course may be
imputed with equal plausibility to want of
sincerity. Once, as Huxley admits, he showed
"needless savagery" in his early youth, and no
doubt could use pretty strong language. His
adversaries had set the example. The special
constable in Leech's drawing says to the rough:
"If I kill you, it is all right; but if you kill me,

190 Studies of a Biographer

by Jove, it 's murder." If I call you a child of the
devil, and sentence you to hell fire, says the
orthodox, it shows my holy zeal. If you call me
a bigot or a fool, it is fiat blasphemy. Huxley
might plead that he was not bound to use the
gloves when his opponent struck with naked
fists. No one has a right to object to plain speak-
ing; and the cases in which Huxley *s plain
speaking is edged with scorn are always cases in
which he is charging his antagonists (as I, at least,
think on very strong grounds) with want of can-
dour. Refusal to withdraw a disproved personal
allegation, or an attempt to evade the issue under
a cloud of irrelevant verbiage, roused his rightful
indignation. "Thou shalt not multiply words in
speaking" was, he observes, an old Egyptian com-
mandment, specially congenial to h*ni, and most
provokingly neglected by a conspicuous antag-
onist. A plain speaker may be pardoned for
resenting attempts to evade plain issues under
clouds of verbiage. His pugnacity remained to
the end; a challenge to a controversy acted as a
tonic, and "set his liver right at once." But he
cannot fairly be accused of a wanton love of
battle. Forced by health and circumstance to
refrain from scientific research, Huxley had taken
up with all available energy the old problems of
religious belief. He read the latest authorities

Thomas Henry Huxley 191

upon Biblical criticism with singular freshness of
interest and keenness of judgment. He could not,
of course, become an expert in such matters, or
qualified to take an authoritative part in the
controversies of specialists. But he was fully
competent to insist upon one essential point, and
even bound to speak, if it be a duty to propagate
what one believes to be a truth of vast importance.
His articles converge upon a principle which, if
fairly appreciated, explains and justifies his
method. In the long war between faith and
science, one favourite irenicon has been a pro-
posed division of provinces. Reason and author-
ity may each be supreme in its own sphere.
Huxley argues that this separation is radically
untenable. A historical religion must rest upon
evidence of fact; and the validity of evidence
of fact is essentially a scientific problem. When
Protestants appealed from the Church to the
Bible, they pledged themselves unconsciously to
defending the Bible in the court of reason, and
the old apologetic writers frankly accepted the
position. They tried to prove fact by evidence.
Whether Noah's flood did or did not really happen
is a question both for the geologist and for the
historian. One relies upon what is called " direct'*
and the other upon "circumstantial" evidence,
but the canons of proof are identical, and the

192 Studies of a Biographer

fact to be established is the same. If it cannot
be established, the inferences, whether religious
or scientific, must go with it. Some readers com-
plained that Huxley was slaying the slain, and
that it was as needless to disprove the legend of
Noah as the story of Jack the Giant- Killer. The
complaint was an incidental and perhaps not un-
natural result of his method. His strategical in-
stinct led him to seize the weakest point in the
line of defence. He had occupied the key of the
position ; and though a guerilla war may still be
carried on by people who do not know when they
are beaten, their final defeat can only be a ques-
tion of time. But that was just the point which
hasty readers might fail to perceive. The dis-
proof of the flood implied, as he held, the disinte-
gration of the whole foundations of orthodox
belief in the Hebrew legends. The argument
about the Gadarene swine, as he admitted,
seemed to some people to be superfluous —
though one gallant antagonist still held to the
truth of the legend. When, indeed, it branched
out into the singular question whether the miracle,
if it had taken place, would have involved a
breach of the local laws as well as of the laws of
nature, he apologised for his pugnacity by the
incidental bearing of his argument upon Mr.
Gladstone's authority. But, as he fully explained,

Thomas Henry Huxley 193

especially in his prefaces to the collected essays,
the force of the argument is in the necessary
implication. Accept the story, and you must
admit the whole system of demonology, which is
flatly contradicted by all scientific evidence.
Admit its absurdity, and you destroy the author-
ity of the witnesses to the cardinal points of the
miraculous story — the supernatural birth and
the resurrection — upon which the Christian dog-
matic system is founded. The witnesses may
record honestly the beliefs of their time, but they
do not tell us upon what evidence those beliefs
rested; and their whole intellectual attitude pre-
pared them to accept statements which now
seem monstrous. The early Christians were still
Jews, in theology as well as in demonology.
There is no better evidence for the early than for
the later miracles — that is to say, there is none
worth mentioning. It tickled his sense of humour
to call in Newman as an ally. Newman's doc-
trine of development admits equally that the
Christian dogma was not taught by the primitive
Christians, and that its growth was a process per-
fectly intelligible, and requiring no supernatural
interference. When the admission of scientific
canons of evidence has compelled the abandon-
ment of certain historical positions, the appli-
cation of the same canons excludes the whole

VOL. III. 13.

194 Studies of a Biographer

supernatural element of belief. Huxley, in short,
presses a dilemma. You rely upon evidence.
Rejecting altogether the a priori argument
against miracles, he admits that sufficient evi-
dence might prove any facts whatever, however
strange.^ But all evidence must be tested by
appropriate canons of proof. If the proof in-
volves the acceptance of an obsolete demon ology,
you must not accept it for theological and reject
it for medical purposes. Frankly to accept the
superstition implied in the Gadarene story is the
only position logically compatible with orthodoxy,
but it involves a declaration of war against science
in general. Reject the superstition, and you have
then destroyed the value of the evidence upon
which you profess to rely. Men, whose ability is
as unquestionable as their sincerity, have of
course implicitly denied the force of this chal-
lenge. Theologians have assimilated evolution,

' Huxley's position leads, I think, to a misunderstanding.
If we accept Hume's sceptical view that anything may be
the cause of anything, we might of course believe a "miracle"
— that is, an unusual event. A charm might cause an illness^
as a medicine might cure it. But on that assumption the
event ceases to be a " miracle " in the sense of proving a super-
natural case. In other words, the argument from miracles
supposes the legitimacy of induction from experience, or
miracles could prove nothing. To quote Huxley's dictum in
favour of evidence from miracles is therefore to accept an
inconsistent position. But I need not go into the question
here.

Thomas Henry Huxley 195

even in the Darwinian form, and accepted the
results of a criticism once supposed to be destruc-
tive, without admitting the destructiveness. The
final result remains to be seen, and I will
only suggest that Huxley's challenge requires a
plain answer. To accept the criteria of historical
inquiry essentially implied in your methods,
is to abandon the results of the old methods.
To make the narrative fairly historical, must
you not in consistency get rid of the supernatural ?
If you admit that the evidence is at second-hand,
or given by credulous, superstitious, and uncrit-
ical writers, and is therefore worthless for scien-
tific law, can it be sufficient for religious purposes ?
I merely wish to emphasise Huxley's position.
He was not simply attacking mere outworks —
excrescences which might be removed without
damage to the structure; but arguing that to
abandon them was to admit the invalidity of the
whole system of orthodoxy. He was surely not
trespassing beyond his province. The truth of
religious belief cannot be a question for critical
experts. If a man of science, or even of simple
common-sense, is required to believe, he is en-
titled to inquire into the method by which the
belief is supported. The evidence adduced must
be such as on the face of it to satisfy the general
criterions of proof. Huxley's argument is that

196 Studies of a Biographer

the testimony is by its nature not admissible for
its purpose, and that to accept it would imply
the abandonment of the most established scien-
tific doctrines. He was therefore quite justified
in asserting that he had not gone out of his way.
A man of science may, of course, be content to
write about electricity and leave Biblical criticism
to others. But, in the first place, Huxley's scien-
tific researches were on the very border where
science and theology meet, and led directly to
some fundamental problems. And, in the second
place, he had been profoundly interested in the
practical applications which concern a man of
deep affections, and compelled both by character
and circumstances to take life in deadly earnest.
He had to pass through a sharp struggle and, as
a brave man must do, had determined to come to
a clear understanding with himself as to the aims
and conduct of life. A very remarkable letter to
Charles Kingsley exactly illustrates the point.
It shows, as his son remarks, the genuine man
more clearly perhaps than any of his writings.
Huxley and his wife had suffered under the
almost crushing calamity of the sudden death of
their first child, who had lived just long enough to
become the apple of his father's eye. Kingsley,
one of the most generous of men, though not one
of the sharpest of dialecticians, had written a

Thomas Henry Huxley 197

cordial letter of sympathy and taken occasion to
set forth some of the beliefs in which he would
himself have found consolation. Huxley replied
at length, with a frankness creditable to both.
Pie has no a priori objection to the belief in im-
mortality. But it is totally without evidence, and
the assertion that an improved and unprovable
doctrine is necessary to morality is altogether re-
pugnant to him. The " most sacred act of a man's
life " is the assertion of a belief in truth. Men may
call him whatever hard names they please, but
they shall not call him ''liar." The blow which
had stirred all his convictions to their foundation
had not shaken that belief. " If wife and child
and name and fame were all lost to me one after
the other, still I would not lie." He speaks, as he
says, more openly and distinctly than he ever has
to any human being except his wife. He has been
standing by the coffm of his little son, and his
force and solemnity show how deeply he is moved.
The clearness and moral fire are imited, as Mr.
L. Huxley says, " in a veritable passion for truth."
The summary of his position reveals the secret of
his life and character. He had learned, he says,
from Sartor Resartus that " a deep sense of religion
was compatible with the entire absence of theo-f
logy-" Science had given him a resting-place
independent of authority; and finally love had

19^ Studies of a Biographer

''opened up to him a view of the sanctity of
human nature, and impressed him with a deep
sense of responsibiHty." Any one who has passed
through a similar trial can read one secret. " Con-
solation" offered by well-meaning friends deserves
the gratitude which Huxley expresses to Kingsley.
Yet the suggested comfort becomes an uninten-
tional but bitter mockery if it be not solid as well
as sincere. Proof that your sorrow is founded in
error might be infinitely welcome. But in pro-
portion to the satisfaction which would be given
by a real proof is the pang of recognising that it
is a baseless assertion. It really declares, not that
the belief is true, but that, if true, it w^ould be
pleasant. You are invited not to face your trouble,
but to seek refuge in dreams. When unprovable
assumptions are defended, not in some cruel
crisis, but as an encouragement in the great battle
of life, they encourage systematic self-deception,
and, when laid down as the ultimate ground of
morality, they become not only empty but doubly
corrupting. Huxley's hatred of shams meant the
^ refusal of a brave man to shut his eyes, and scorn
of men who deliberately provided convenient ban-
dages for the purpose. His strongest conviction,
as he says in the autobiography, was that the one
road to the alleviation of human suffering was
veracity of thought and action, and " the resolute

Thomas Henry Huxley 199

facing of the world as it is when the garment of
make-believe by which pious hands have hidden
its uglier features is stripped off."

The religion reached from such a starting-point
is of course not such as appears to most people
to be a religion at all. Yet it is a system of belief
which has been enough for the greatest minds.
'' The only religion which appeals to me," he writes
to Romanes, "is prophetic Judaism. Add to it
something from the best Stoics and something
from Spinoza and something from Goethe, and
there is a religion for men." The Stoics, as he
says elsewhere, "had cast off all illusions" and
found in the progress towards virtue a sufficient
end of existence. He valued even the orthodox /
dogma for the same reason. He was for Butler/
against the deists. Theologians had recognised i
realities — though in strange forms. Predestina-I
tion, original sin, the "primacy of Satan in this]
world," were a good deal nearer the truth than/
the comfortable optimism which culminated in/
Pope's doctrine, "Whatever is, is right." Adher/
ence to fact is the base of his philosophy. Agnos-
ticism according to him means simply that you
are not to accept as an established fact anything
not fairly proved. It led to conclusions which
appeared paradoxical to some readers. He used,
as he says, "materialistic terminology," and re-

200 Studies of a Biographer

pudiated materialistic philosophy. Physiology-
proves that, in fact, the brain is a mechanism
and the organised body an automaton. Pyscho-
logy shows equally that every phenomenon must,
as a fact, be an affection of the mind; you must
neither pervert nor go beyond fact. Materialism
and Spiritualism are " opposite poles of the same
absurdity" — the absurdity of assuming that we
know anything about either spirit or matter. The
controversy is the result of trying to transcend
the necessary limits of thought. The striking
essay upon Evolution and Ethics brings out
^ another contrast. Evolution, he maintains, "ac-
counts for morality," but the principle of evolu-
tion is not "the ethical principle." The ethical
progress of ''society depends not on imitating the
cosmic process, still less in nmning away from it,
but in combating it." The microcosm will have
a long fight against the macrocosm, and "may
count upon a tenacious and powerful enemy as
long as the world lasts." These are the facts, and,
while giving hope for the future, he orders us not
to indulge in any millennial anticipations. We see
why he appreciates the truth implied in the
"primacy of the devil."

I cannot inquire, of course, into the validity or
consistency of these doctrines. But they illustrate
the concluding formula of Huxley's creed. Love,

Thomas Henry Huxley 201

he says, has explained to him the meaning of
" sanctity " and " responsibility." The phrase per-
haps might suggest a vein of thought not very
congenial to Huxley's turn of mind. He was
fully alive to certain misapplications of his text.
*'The world," he observes to Tyndall, ''is neither
wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and
injustice by being damnably sentimental." The
truer Tyndall's portrait of it, therefore, the louder
will be the outcry. Nobody could be more heartily
opposed to " sentimentalism." If I had space, I
might illustrate the obvious fact by the admirable
common-sense of -his remarks upon political, edu-
cational, and social questions. He is far too sen-
sible of the gravity of the existing evils not to
part company with the enthusiasts who believe in
hasty panaceas and manufacture them out of fine
phrases. To convert an amiable sentiment into
a maxim of universal validity, to override facts
and refuse to listen to experience, to "drive fast,"
like his Irish carman, without asking where you
are going, was of course contrary to all his convic-
tions. But the deep and generous interest in all
well-directed efforts at alleviation is equally con-
spicuous. He was not an indiscriminate philan-
thropist; he hated a rogue and did not love a
fool; and he held that both genera were pretty
numerous. But he was a most heartily loyal

202 Studies of a Biographer

citizen; doing manfully the duties which came in
his way and declining no fair demand upon his co-
operation. And the secret is given in the phrase
about love. There is, for obvious and sufficient
reasons, little direct account of Huxley's domestic
life, and the allusions to his private happiness
suggest more than could find overt expression.
Yet the book cannot be read without a pervad-
ing impression of the life which lay behind his
manifold successes and official activities. Like
Wordsworth's ''happy warrior," he was one
who, though endued with a ''faculty for storm
and turbulence,"

Was yet a soul whose master-bias leans
To homefelt pleasures and to gentler scenes.

It was not merely that he was surrounded by a
sympathy which strengthened him in his work
and soothed the irritations of intellectual warfare ;
but that such a home makes life beautiful, gives
a meaning to vague maxims of conduct, and
deepens the sense of "responsibility." The happy
warrior is " more brave for this, that he has much
to love." The intensely affectionate disposition,
combined with a high sense of duty, extends his
interests beyond the little circle in which it is
primarily manifested. That Huxley had his sor-
rows, felt with unusual keenness, is incidentally

Thomas Henry Huxley 203

revealed ; but we can see more clearly than it
would be right to express openly, even were
expression possible, what was the source of the hap-
piness and continued vigour which threw bright-
ness over his career.

One result is more open to observation. Men
of science have their weaknesses and temptations.
They are not always more free than their literary
brethren from petty jealousies and unworthy lust
for notoriety. Huxley's life shows an admirable
superiority to such weaknesses. His battles,
numerous as they were, never led to the petty
squabbles which disfigure some scientific lives.
Nobody was ever a more loyal friend. It is
pleasant to read of the group which gathered
round Darwin, himself the most attractive of
human beings. Huxley seems to have retained
every friend whom he ever made; and one
understands their mutual regard. His life proves
what was already illustrated by Darwin's, how
honourable and dignified may be a career honestly
devoted to the propagation of truth, little as it
brings in the way of external rewards. There is
a kind of short history, as I fancy, given in the
portraits in these volumes. He had been, as his
mother assured him, a very pretty child ; and the
assurance convinced him that this was one of the
facts which are strongly in need of sufficient

204 Studies of a Biographer

evidence. The earliest portraits, in fact, do not
suggest good looks: though they show a quaint,
humorous face with a mouth clearly suggestive of
the bulldog. But he improves as he grows older;
and in the finest portrait we have the expression
remembered by all who saw him; where the old
combativeness is represented by the straight-
forward glance of the timeworn warrior, but
softened by a pathetic glow of the tender and
affectionate nature which blends so happily with
the sterner expression, and shows the truly lovable
converging from, and mutually blending with, the
masculine nature.

James Anthony Froude

PROUDE is perhaps the most eminent man
^ of letters of his generation who has not
become the victim of a biography. I do not hold
that the world has any claim for biographies
upon the representatives of distinguished men.
If they or theirs prefer silence I am inclined to
applaud the refusal to gratify curiosity. Froude
could undoubtedly have written a very interesting
autobiography had he chosen to reveal the story
of his inner life. As, however, nothing has been
published, we must assume that if anything was
written it was not meant for the world in general.
We must be content to be ignorant of what he
alone could have told us. There are few notices
of him in contemporary reminiscences; and,
though I knew him for many years, I could add
nothing worth the setting down. I had, indeed,
good reason to know that he could be very charm-
ing in personal intercourse, and that he was
cordially beloved by men who knew him most
intimately and were excellent judges of character.
I may add, however, one remark: Froude im-
pressed casual observers as somehow enigmatic.

205

2o6 Studies of a Biographer

He was reticent to the outer circle at least, and
incurred the usual penalty. Men who are shy and
sensitive are often misjudged by their neighbours :
they are supposed to be supercilious because they
shrink from irritating topics, and cynical because
they keep their enthusiasm for the few really
sympathetic hearers. I have heard Froude ac-
cused of Jesuitism, of insinuating opinions which
he would shrink from openly expressing, and even
of a malicious misrepresentation of the man whom
he chose as his prophet. I believe such a view to
be entirely mistaken; but as Froude has left no
''Apologia," and as I have no special source of
knowledge, I shall only refer to the indications
given in his published works.

The defects of Froude 's historical writings
became notorious. Freeman seemed to think
that he was specially commissioned by Providence
to expose their inaccuracies. He felt that he did
well to be angry, and wrote in the spirit of a
medical authority exposing some mischievous and
too successful quack. To Freeman and to others,
moreover, Froude was not only a blunderer but
an apologist for tyranny and a lover of religious
intolerance. He became a byword with Free-
man's disciples for all the defects which have to
be cleared away before historical inquiry can be
placed upon a satisfactory basis, Freeman's

James Anthony Froude 207

severity, probably excessive and certainly harsh,
roused some sympathy for his victim. That
Froude suffered from constitutional inaccuracy,
made strange blunders even in copying a plain
document, and often used his authorities in an
arbitrary and desultory fashion, seems, however,
to be admitted. Yet, if I want to know some-
thing of the Elizabethan period, I can nowhere
find so vivid and interesting a narrative. The
scientific historian directs me to wait till he has
ascertained the hard skeleton of objective fact.
Then, and not till then, it will be time to theorise
or to make a picture. But, in the first place, I
cannot afford to wait for another century, and
even when the inquirer has done his work there
will remain the difficulty of clothing the skeleton
with flesh and blood. Unless I abandon all that
makes history really interesting to anybody but
the antiquary and the statistician, I shall still be
dissatisfied. After all, too, the main facts are
pretty well ascertained. Darnley was blown up,
whoever supplied the powder, and the Spanish Ar-
mada certainly came somehow to grief. Froude 's
imagination may invest those facts with a poetical
haze. In reading him, I do not know certainly
where fiction ends and facts begin. The history
may be an "impressionist" picture, coloured and
distorted by the mirror in which the facts are re-

2o8 Studies of a Biographer

fleeted. But I can take that into account. I know
that I am not to read with unqualified faith. I
get such a narrative of the past as I should of the
present if I confined myself to party journalism.
I must study writers of opposite prejudices, and
superpose the pictures as well as I can. I must
take the story, not as definitive truth, but as an
aspect of the truth, seen from a particular point of
view. I get at least one important fact : if not the
real persons, the images projected by them upon
the imagination of their partisans ; and to see for
a moment as they saw is a help to understanding
the ideals and the prejudices of the time.

Anyhow, Froude was a most skilful historical
artist. I remember being startled many years
ago by the assertion of a friend that Froude' s
style was superior to Macaulay's. My notions of
style were then too crude to be shocked by
Macaulay's obvious faults of taste, his strained
and tiresome antitheses, and the purple patches
of glaring crudity. The graceful simplicity and
restraint of Froude 's style, the skill with which he
makes a story tell itself and develops the drama
without obtruding himself as showman, are less
palpable to a youthful reader. I am not sure
that I have not now become unjust to some of
Macaulay's merits, both of style and substance.
In one respect he has a great superiority. He

James Anthony Froude 209

had saturated his mind with knowledge of his
period, and his marvellous memory and eye for
the picturesque enabled him to illustrate every
topic w^th graphic and unforgettable details. He
had his prejudices, which often led to misinter-
pretation of facts ; but he had also an omnivorous
and disinterested craving for information. His
opinions appeared to him to be so obviously true
that he did not want to make out a case. He
did not so much look at the facts through coloured
spectacles as with eyes affected by constitutional
colour-blindness. He therefore read with preju-
dice, but not in ord'er to confirm his prejudices.
It would not be just to accuse Froude of accepting
the other alternative ; but it is true that Froude's
interest in history was to some extent an after-
thought, that he took it up mainly to illustrate
certain principles and confined his attention to the
topics directly relevant to his purpose. One can-
not feel that he had become a contemporary of
Elizabeth as Macaulay had made himself a con-
temporary of Queen Anne. He has only made
acquaintance with the actors in order to "adorn
the tale" which, as he is convinced, will point the
desired moral. On the other hand, Macaulay 's
prejudices are less interesting. We can no longer
accept the complacent Whig optimism which,
according to Matthew Arnold, made him the

VOL. Ill — 14.

2IO Studies of a Biographer

prince ot the Philistines. His political platform
strikes us as narrow and obsolete, and we find it
hard to do justice to the sound sense combined
with so limited an insight. Froude had at least
the advantage of being outside a little political
clique; and if his common-sense was not trained
like Macaulay's by active political experience, he
had breathed a less confined atmosphere. He has
ideals, political and religious, and does not mistake
a particular political platform for a complete and
satisfactory answer to the great enigmas of human
conduct and history.

Then, however, the problem occurs. What was
Froude's position, and how did he reach it? That
might have bsen cleared up by an autobiography.
Some light is given in his account of the '' Oxford
Counter Reformation."^ His father, he tells us,
represented the old order: he was landowner and
parson, a hard rider in his youth, and qualified in
the opinion of his parishioners to '' lay a ghost" or
try a poacher. He was a typical product of a
quiet period of ** moral health" when doctrinal
controversy had gone to sleep, but people found in
religion a light upon the path of duty. We are
generally told that the period was one of spiritual
torpor and neglect of duty. Froude perhaps, like
other people, saw the days of his youth through a

* Short Studies, vol. iv.

James Anthony Froudc 211

beautifying haze; but it is rather odd to find him
proceeding to a panegyric upon the state of things
which was the outcome of that eighteenth century
so steadily denounced by most followers of either
Newman or Carlyle. The Oxford Movement, he
says, broke up this idyllic state of things; and
but for it, he declares, "scepticism might have
contmued a harmless speculation of a few philo-
sophers." Newman and his followers had turned
the world upside down. That looks like saying
that the earthquake was caused by the first people
whom it frightened out of their wits. But, with-
out taking a passing phrase too seriously, we may
admit that Froude himself had been certainly one
of those whose mental equilibrium had been de-
stroyed. The elder brother, of whom he always
spoke with enthusiasm, had been Newman's
closest friend and ally. He was a ** high Tory of
the cavalier stamp," and took up the cause of the
Church against the Radicals of the day, with no
special taste for theological speculation. He went
forward, says Froude, "hesitating at nothing,
taking the fences as they came, passing lightly
over them all, and sweeping his friends along
with him." He had died before his brother
went to Oxford; but it was naturally to be ex-
pected that the younger man would be welcomed
as a recruit in the same cause, x^t Oxford ac-

212 Studies of a Biographer

cordingly, he fell under the influence of Newman ;
and no one has spoken more emphatically of the
fascinations of his leader. Credo in Newmannum,
he says, became the genuine symbol of faith for
him as for hundreds of young men. Newman's
simplest word was treasured as an ''intellectual
diamond." His sermons made an indelible im-
pression: he seemed to be "addressing the most
secret consciousness" of each of his hearers; and
Froude, though startled by certain conclusions,
was at last profoundly impressed. How did the
chain snap? What was the ''fence" which he
refused to clear? Was it at the sermon which
Froude describes so strikingly when Newman,
after dwelling upon the Passion, gave an "electric
stroke" to his audience by the words, " Now I bid
you recollect that he to whom these things were
done was Almighty God"? Froude gives a differ-
ent explanation. He spent a year, after his de-
gree, in Ireland, in the house of an Evangelical
clergyman. The circle which he entered was thor-
oughly Protestant. It was part of a "missionary
garrison," and its creed kept alive by antagonism
to the surrounding element. The whole tone was
devout and serious, without cant or affectation.
The misery and squalor of the Catholic population
suggested doubts as to the social effect of their
creed. He had been taught at Oxford to despise

James Anthony Froude 213

the Evangelicals, and now he came to respect them
and to regain his reverence for the Reformers.
Protestantism, he supected, after all, might have
been a revolt against intolerable corruptions.
Froude returned to Oxford to meet the uproar
created by the famous tract "No. xc." He was
still sufficiently in sympathy with his old friends
to l^e invited to contribute to the " Lives of the
Saints." The task brought him to the dilemma
which had perplexed Gibbon a century before.
Was he to accept or to reject the miraculous le-
gends which gathered round the mediaeval saints ?
If he rejected them,- must he not reject also the
miracles accepted by Protestants? Newman had
plunged him into difficulties in which he sought the
help of very different guides. He had begun to
read Carlyle, and had been led to Goethe and to
German literature and criticism. The discovery
that Evangelicals could be as saint-like as Catho-
lics had been followed by the discovery that men
of the highest genius and character could be radi-
cally opposed to both.

Many of Froude 's contemporaries went through
a similar experience. They discovered that there
was a world outs'de Oxford and that the " Move-
ment" was but a collateral result of great changes
in the whole current of European thought.
Froude's special characteristic seems to have been

2 14 Studies of a Biographer

the desire to find some definite guide. He could
not, like Clough, remain simply in suspense. He
wanted a leader to take Newman's place. His
state of mind is represented by the two early
stories : the Shadows of the Clouds and the Nemesis
of Faith. They shocked respectable people at the
time, and were crude enough in a literary sense to
deserve their suppression. The heterodox opinions
which he avows, have long ceased to possess the
charm or the offence of novelty. The books have
still an autobiographical interest. Froude pro-
tested against an identification of himself with the
hero of the later book,^ and it seems to be even
more unfair (though the attempt has been made)
to identify him with the hero of the first. That
young man has been driven by the brutality of a
public school and the harsh treatment of an un-
sympathetic father to become a liar and a sneak;
and I do not suppose that Froude meant to con-
fess that he deserved such epithets. He is, of
course, using his own experience, and the young
man in question has like himself been employed
by Newman to write on the " Lives of the Saints,"
and has been led presumably to the same reflec-
tions. He wonders that so keen an observer
should have exposed him to so dangerous an
ordeal. It has brought him into terrible per-

^ Preface to the second edition of the Nemesis of Faith.

James Anthony Froude 215

plexity. He still "loves and honours and learns
of Newman" ; but he also " loves and honours and
learns of Carlyle." He despises the miserable
Anglo- Protestantism as a *' wretched enemy of all
that is bright and noble and generous." He can-
not accept, that is, a compromise, and yet cannot
believe that the whole truth is on either side. He
dies in an edifying but perplexed state of mind,
listening on his death-bed to a pious declamation
from Jean Paul. The other hero begins as a scep-
tic, but is induced to take orders. He finds his
position unbearable, rambles abroad, forms a con-
nection with another man's wife, is driven by
remorse to the verge of suicide, is saved by a
priest more or less representing Newman, becomes
a monk, finds his old scepticism revive, falls into
despair, and dies without leaving anybody to re-
gret him. Indeed, there seems to be little enough
to regret. A slight change would make the
novels into edifying and orthodox tracts, show-
ing how scepticism may sap morality. Froude
explains that he accepts for himself the critical
conclusions of his heroes. But he holds that it
requires exceptional moral strength to resist the
resulting dangers. The period, in Carlyle's lan-
guage, was one of cant — of practical unbelief
covered by hypocritical formalism; and a man
who sees through the cant is too likely to lose the

2i6 Studies of a Biographer

vital truth which once gave meaning to the now
obsolete creeds.

A little story added to the Shadows of the
Clouds shows a preoccupation with further diffi-
culties. He had puzzled himself over the origin
of evil. External circumstances, he perceived —
the truth is painfully clear — may lead the same
person either to vice or to virtue, to the lowest
degradation or to a, happy life. He found in the
Book of Job the grandest exposition and the best
solution of the old problem of the apparently
arbitrary distribution of happiness among the
good and the wicked. He read Spinoza, and, like
all competent readers, was profoundly impressed
by the great vision of a universe of incarnate
logic, though he repudiates the conclusion that we
are throughout products of inexorable law. The
essays ^ on these topics and upon New Testament
criticism show that his literary faculty, at least,
had developed very rapidly and found a more
appropriate employment than novel-writing. He
had been reading widely, though he does not
claim to be more than an intelligent observer of
the great currents of contemporary thought. He
was by nature a literary artist, not an abstract
reasoner; and he sought to find a solution by
looking at the concrete history of the Churches

' Short Studies, vol. i.

James Anthony Froude 217

instead of examining the philosophical basis of their
doctrine. While oscillating like his hero between
the opposite poles of Newman and Carlyle, he
could agree with both upon one point — antipathy
to " philosophical radicalism," political or religious. '^
To him as to them it represented the evil principle
in rriodem thought: materialistic and mechanical
views of history, selfishness in morals, laissez-faire
in politics, the " pig philosophy" of utilitarianism,
and generally the extinction of all that is elevating
of the soul or beautiful to the imagination.

This aversion is manifest in one remarkable
result. It suggests a thorough-going historical
scepticism.^ To attempt to make history scientific
is to incur the danger of referring everything to
mere physical causes, and to get rid of free-will
and the spiritual and religious influences. To
avoid this danger, he resorts to an extreme
measure. He denies the possibility of even as-
certaining the facts. History often looks like
a child's box of letters, with which we can ** spell
any word we please"; we have only to pick the
letters and arrange them at our pleasure. Any
philosophy of history can be proved: we may
show with equal ease that the world is, or that it

' See especially the chapters upon 'History' and the "Lives
of the Saints" in Short Studies, vol. i. , and that on 'Scientific
Method Applied to History' in the same, vol. ii.

2i8 Studies of a Biographer

is not, under a moral government; that mankind
has always been progressive, or always stationary,
or steadily degenerating. No testimony can be
trusted. Patriots, politicians, and observers all
manipulate facts, and philosophers are worst of
all. He objects to all historical theories because
they ''vitiate the observation of facts, without
which the speculations are not worth the paper
on which they are written." But observation of
facts is precarious. Whenever he has found an
authentic explanation of some difficulty, it has
"almost invariably" turned out that the true
motive of the actors had been entirely misunder-
stood. If so, it would seem we must indefinitely
postpone all speculations and confine ourselves to
the barest external circumstances. These rather
impulsive assertions, however, did not correspond
to his practice and, indeed, would justify the con-
ception of history most opposed to his own. The
denial that we can prove the race to be under
moral government is followed by the assertion
that history does prove one, and only one, lesson
— the lesson that the world is ''built somehow on
moral foundations"; that in the long run it will
be well with the good and ill with the wicked.
But this, he adds, is "no science" ; it is the teach-
ing of the old Hebrew prophets. To teach us
that or any other lesson, history must possess at

James Anthony Froudc 219

least some element of truth. Froude's reading of
the " Lives of the Saints " had suggested a curious
explanation. "Two kinds of truth," he declares,
"form the warp and woof, the coloured web
which we call history;" truth of fact, briefly, and
truth of poetry. The stories which Bede tells of
St. Cuthbert may be incredible; but St. Cuthbert
represents a noble ideal, and, moreover, an ideal
which men actually tried to realise. Shakespeare
is one great example of poetical truth. His cardi-
nal merit is that he accepts the fact, and will not
allow his view to be perverted by ''theorising" or
by forcing his perceptions of human life and
nature to mould themselves upon didactic con-
clusions. Macbeth would be perfect history " were
it literally true"; and the historian should write
history like a Shakespearean drama. The history
of some periods may be so written that the actors
shall reveal their own characters in their own
words ; " mind can be seen matched against mind,
and the great passions of the epoch not simply be
described as existing, but be exhibited at their
white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by
them." There, he says, we have all the elements
of drama of the highest order — "where the huge
forces of the time are as the Grecian destiny." It
is Nature's drama, not Shakespeare's, but a drama
none the less.

220 Studies of a Biographer

The theory led him to a quaint dilemma in his
life of St. Neot. If, he says, the story teaches a
lesson, the lesson is equally good though the story
be false; if it teaches nothing, it does not matter
whether it be true or false. False stories, how-
ever, are apt to teach bad lessons; and at any
rate, it is as well to say whether you are writ-
ing fiction or history; for a mistake of one for
the other often leads to awkward consequences.
Froude was probably in the ironical mood when
he wrote about St. Neot: he was quite able to
detect his bit of sophistry; but the view with
which he plays, for he hardly means it seriously,
illustrates his conception of history. Carlyle's
French RevoU'iion has given him a model. His
own history is to take another great period.
History is to be a sum of biographies. You are
to know the real actors, Elizabeth and Drake,
Philip and Mary, to make them as living and
vivid as Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet.
Shakespeare, of course, has his weaknesses as a
historian. He cared nothing for the political
events, except as providing dramatic situations.
He had not read Hallam, and gives the history
of King John without alluding to Magna Charta.
He had not read the Waverley Novels, and cares
nothing for "local colour." His Homeric Greeks
and his ancient Britons are still Elizabethan.

James Anthony Froude 221

Froude was much better informed, and knows
very well that constitutional and economical con-
ditions have to be taken into account. But the
aim is so far similar that the final result of the
history, as of the drama, is to be the display of
personal character. Theories about scientific
''laws" are immoral as well as untrustworthy;
they substitute mechanism for volition, and make
the hero the instrument instead of the originator
of the great forces.

The ''dramatic" view of history supposes, how-
ever, a certain amount of theorising. What in
the history of England is to correspond to the
"Grecian fate"? Froude praises Shakespeare for
his want of "didacticism," and yet the drama of
history must have a central idea. Henry and
Elizabeth do not, like Hamlet, interest us sim_ply
as individuals, but as playing parts in a revolution
of surpassing importance. History does teach
the one lesson that the right triumphs "in the
long run." Froude can theorise when he pleases,
and an eloquent essay on The Conditions and
Prospects of Protestantism gives an account of
the rise and decay of religions in general. Creeds
have their periods of vitality, of established use-
fulness, and of " petrifaction." It is the " very law
of their being" that they "should stiffen" into
formalism. He could still, after parting from

222 Studies of a Biographer

Newman, enlarge upon the central idea of Cathol-
icism — the ''beautiful creed which for fifteen
hundred years turned the heart and formed the
mind of the noblest of mankind." He could
declare that the old monks were the true builders
of our national "greatness." There was once
(when is perhaps rather doubtful) a golden age,
when men were sincere believers in an elevating
ideal. But the creeds had ''stiffened" and the
monasteries were in need of a Cromwell and a
Henry. The place of the Greek fate is to be
taken by the intellectual and moral revolt against
the lying and corruption sheltered under the
system which in its origin had corresponded to
the noblest of aspirations. I have no quarrel
with this theory. An adequate account of the
great convulsions of the sixteenth century would
do much to reveal the true conditions of strength
of nations and churches. Many scenes, moreover,
in Froude's drama carry out the scheme with ex-
traordinary vividness. The last volume, with the
execution of Mary and the defeat of the Armada,
makes a fifth act, with a catastrophe, artistically
at least, completely satisfactory.

The dramatic view of history demands a hero —
a typical embodiment of the force which is shaking
mankind. To understand him will be to give
unity of action to the drama and unravel the wild

James Anthony Froudc 223

and chaotic play of conflicting powers. Froude's
artistic instinct overpowered his historic vision
when he chose Henry VIII. for the part. His
true problem, I imagine, should have been to
show how that very arbitrary and tyrannical
person was enabled to carry out so much of his
purposes, and to be accepted by so large a part of
his subjects as the national hero. When Froude
took him for an embodiment of high purpose and
statesmanlike insight, and discovered that a man
constantly acted like a brutal despot from the
loftiest political motives, he undertook one of the
most heroic pieces of whitewashing on record.
The Protestant refused to accept such a champion,
and the burly figure looked awkward in wings and
a white robe. As Froude advanced, the difficul-
ties thickened. He became, I imagine, a more
competent historian, and his elaborate researches
into State papers enabled him really to throw
much new light upon the period. He opened and
worked to great effect a quarry of information
which has yielded valuable materials to him and
his successors. With all his skill, indeed, the
intricate maze of diplomatic intrigues sometimes
becomes tiresome, and distracts him from the
main current of domestic history. The wise
Poloniuses of the day were not as all-important
and omniscient as they fancied. A grave Spaniard,

2 24 Studies of a Biographer

plunged into the unfamiliar atmosphere of Lon-
don, exposed to the solicitations of innumerable
plotters, who told him whatever story was most
likely to open his purse, could not be a good
authority upon English sentiment. The rough
sailor Hawkins saw this clearly enough when he
bamboozled Philip out of ;£4o,ooo by pretending
to be a traitor. Froude probably gives too much
weight at times to his new sources. But another
result is more important. If we are to take the
history of the time as really governed by cabinets
and diplomatists, the difficulty of finding any
adequate hero becomes an impossibility. He had
started apparently with the belief that Elizabeth
would take the leading part. The English nation
was beginning its great career, and (he said in
1852) Elizabeth's plan was "to recognise, to love,
to foster, and to guide." The ''grandeur and
moral majesty of some of Shakespeare's charac-
ters" is '' far beyond what the noblest among our-
selves can imitate." That is due not to the poet's
genius, but to his faithful portraiture of his con-
temporaries. His "great poetry is no more than
the rhythmical echo of the life which it depicts."
When he came to look into the facts, this antici-
pation had to be modified. They were, un-
doubtedly, men of noble character, patriots and
martyrs, whose grand qualities are thrown into

James Anthony Froude 225

relief by the catastrophes in the great drama.
But it is clear, too, that there never was a time in
which the noble was more intimately, strangely
mixed up with the ruffianly and the mean. The
words quoted had been suggested by the Eliza-
bethan seamen, of whose heroic spirit he was to
be the best interpreter. Yet their heroic enter-
prise shades off into slave-trading, buccaneering,
and something scarcely distinguishable from
piracy. Their hatred of idolatry blends with a
desire for the idolaters' silver. The higher the
class the worse the morality. The religion of the
Scottish nobles was mainly, he admits, a desire
for the estates of the Church. Murder was part of
the normal process of carrying on the game of
politics, and nobody would have objected to blow-
ing up Darnley had the plan been carried out with
a little more attention to decency. Massacres of
helpless people were throughout Europe part of
regular warfare. Solemn cabinets discuss plans
for assassination without thought of any scruple,
and when Elizabeth hears that Philip had plotted
her death, she takes it, as Professor Beesly re-
marks, "in the way of business," without the
smallest resentment. Kings are religious enough
to carry out the cruellest persecution, but utterly
refuse to fight for the Church if their allies are

likely to get the best of the plunder. Lying is so
VOL. III. — 15

226 Studies of a Biographer

much a matter of course in diplomacy that one
wonders how it could be expected to deceive.
The question is not whether an ambassador lies,
but why he has selected that particular lie. It
seems a profoundly interesting world, but clearly
not one which it was easy to represent as a battle
between light and darkness.

Froude was roused to a resentment against
poor Queen Elizabeth. She would not be a
heroine. She got upon his nerves. She cared
nothing for creeds: she would not admit the
papal claims to power over the English Chiirch;
but she hated Knox's Calvinism more than
Philip's Catholicism. Instead of putting herself
at the head of European Protestantism, her whole
policy was to play off the two Catholic powers
against each other by judicious alternations of
lying promises. She would not risk her throne
for a cause. *' She preferred to lie and twist and
perjure herself, and betray her friends"; and
though at bottom her purpose was ''moderately
upright," she had no nice sense of honour to raise
difficulties. She systematically induced other
people to do her dirty work, and she shuffled out
of her responsibilities and left her agents to their
fate. She kept out of the fray as long as she
could, and thought only of saving her pocket by
a cheese-paring which was almost fatal when the

James Anthony Froude 227

great inevitable struggle came at last. If she
finally succeeded, it was because she yielded to
the ministers against whose advice she had strug-
gled for thirty years. Her greatness was an illu-
sion due partly to the fate which forced her at
last to accept the policy of wiser men and partly
to the stupendous run of luck which saved her
from the consequences of her blunders.

Froude's moral had got him into dilemmas.
Henry VHI. had been an awkward hero, but
Elizabeth declined to be a heroine at all. She
succeeded, in spite of her unfitness for the part,
or, as may be held, because of it. The success
suggests a primd facie presumption that a policy
of compromise was the fittest for the time. Froude
had to explain it as an accident because it would
not confirm the great lesson of history which con-
demns all compromise with evil. And then one
has to ask, Did Froude really believe that the
thorough-going Protestantism represented the
truth and nothing but the truth? Was the
religion of Knox so wholly in the right that its
triumph was unequivocally desirable? Clearly
the concrete Protestant, on his showing, w^as, with
one or two noble exceptions, anything but a
purely unselfish and lofty-minded hero. He ac-
cepts the teaching of Knox, but did not doubt
that Knox's creed, like others, might stiffen into

228 Studies of a Biographer

unlovely formalism. He has to believe in the
whole Protestant legend for the time, and there-
fore identify himself with one extreme, and so
far fails to rise to the level of world history.
To set forth a great drama, where the truth slowly
emerges from a confused conflict, the historian
must rise above sectarian prejudices, and ad-
mit a more intricate mixture of good and evil.
The merit of Carlyle's prose-epic of the French
Revolution is that he sees it as a gigantic convul-
sion, with tremendous issues imperfectly visible
to the actors, where, therefore, we can admire
great passions without accepting the party watch-
words, and pity the victims, though admitting the
necessity of their fate. Even when Carlyle apolo-
gises for Cromwell and Frederick, his heroes are,
at least as he conceives them, embodiments of
profound insight into the cosmic forces which are
crushing or remoulding the old order. Froude is
applying the method of hero-worship in an in-
appropriate sphere, and without the glooms and
splendours of Carlyle's imagination. He takes a
side when he ought to see that the evolution of
the great drama can only be rightly judged from
a position of detachment.

One feels, in fact, that Froude's zeal has a
touch of the factitious. His position is shown by
his view of the two great types represented by

James Anthony Froude 229

Erasmus and Luther. The scholar and thinker
desires that superstition may be dispersed, and
abuses refined from above. But to appeal to the
stupid masses is to let loose all the brute forces of
destruction, and only to substitute one super-
stition for another. The rough enthusiast blurts
out his convictions; or, as he puts it, speaks the
plain truth and disregards the consequences.
Froude could appreciate Erasmus, but his position
always forces him to approve Luther. By tem-
perament, I think, he was really of the Erasmus
persuasion. Nobody could be more convinced
of human stupidity; -of the imperfections of all
creeds, and the futility of the ordinary Utopias. If
he had written his history from this point of view,
he might have drawn a forcible picture of the
process by which the human race blunders along;
each side mistaking partial truth for the whole;
masking selfish and grovelling motives under a
professed love of truth, and persecuting and mas-
sacring in the name of pure religion. He would
have been an impartial, if a pessimistic, observer,
and to him, as to Gibbon, history would have been
a long register of crime, folly, and misfortune.
But Froude was an Erasmus in need of a Luther.
He must have some prophet to follow, and has
taken Carlyle for his Luther. He and Ruskin
were the master's two disciples. Ruskin's pessi-

230 Studies of a Biographer

mism and contempt for the popular creed were as
vehement as Froude's. Yet he could attract dis-
ciples, because, however wayward his doctrines,
he could be a genuine enthusiast. Froude's en-
thusiasm is fitful, and suggests despondency as
the definitive result. He gives the worst turn to
Carlyle's doctrine of the identity of might and
right. Carlyle started with a profound sympathy
for the aims of the revolutionists; he was a man
of the people, with their democratic instinct, if
radically opposed to some democratic theories.
The worshipper of Cromwell could still gain the
sympathies of Irish Nationalists, because they had
a common hatred for misgovernment. No Irish-
man, on the other hand, could fail to be offended
by Froude's English in Ireland. It is vigorously
written, and may be read as a continuous exposure
of English misrule. But it is the most unpleasant
of Froude's books, because of the strange tendency
to take an offensive ground. The penal laws, he
declares, made little scandal in England because
they succeeded. They have been denounced in
Ireland because they failed; and he deliberately
holds that a rigid and consistent suppression of
Catholicism would have been the right policy for
England. Froude can never speak of persecution
without a wish to find apologies for the persecutor.
There is much to be said for strong government

James Anthony Froude 231

and thorough-going convictions. But when the
belief springs from intellectual timidity, and sug-
gests underlying scepticism, the result is unpleas-
ant. Froude seems to believe in fanaticism,
though he does not really share the fanatic's
belief.

He ought (using the word in the artistic sense)
to have been a refined and sensitive critic, shud-
dering at the brutalities of the great human
tragedy, where the truest and purest causes can
only work by turning to account savage and stupid
passions. That might be unpleasantly pessimistic
and sceptical; but then his pessimism and scepti-
cism shows through the superficial enthusiasm.
Take your hero as simply the embodiment of great
cosmic or providential forces, and you may have
some sympathy for his antagonists as for the vic-
tims of a pestilence or an earthquake. But Froude
at once recognises the ugly side, and feels bound
to condone the offence. The tyranny and perse-
cution are not regarded even as a painful and
hideous necessity under the perverse conditions
of life, but as somehow justifiable in themselves.
He has to defend cruelty, and to still the hatred
by which it was prompted.

That, I take it, partly explains his attitude to
Carlyle. The curious thing was that a man of
such fine literary sense should have so entirely

232 Studies of a Biographer

miscalculated the effect upon his readers. He
fancied that he was providing a pedestal for the
object of his reverence, when he was really placing
him on a pillory. Ardent Carlyleans thought
that he must have known what he was doing, and
imagined that he was satisfying some covert re-
sentment. Froude, I think, committed certain
errors which I cannot here discuss. But I fully
believe that his intentions were what he avowed.
He was, no doubt, fully sensible of his master's
failings. Froude, with his refined and sensitive
temperament, was the very man to be shocked by
Carlyle's rough and masterful dogmatism. When,
for instance, Carlyle told him that Newman had
the brain o^ a moderate-sized rabbit, Froude
could not but feel that the estimate — if half hu-
morous — showed a certain crudeness. The new
guide was a little hard upon his predecessor. But
then it was also satisfactory to have a master
who could be so thoroughly confident. The dog-
matism was delightful and comforting, and gave
a sense of security. Froude liked to shield himself
behind the uncompromising champion. The bio-
graphy throughout shows that he was even keenly
sensible to Carlyle's arrogance, and yet felt it as
a valuable support. Carlyle might be rough, but
he could sweep away any misgivings with delightful
positiveness. When Froude became aware of the

James Anthony Froude 233

revelations in Mrs. Carlyle's journal he could feel,
even more keenly than most people, the painful
side. But then they illustrated just this master-
ful temper, which, if sometimes startling, was yet
so comfortable a support to a weaker brother.
Froude 's half- suppressed scepticism made him
value the uncompromising dogmatism. The sen-
timent, too, gave dramatic unity to the biography
which his artistic instinct appreciated. He went
on to read earlier letters with this preconception
and, according to Professor Norton, the only other
reader, to misrepresent the whole story. Such a
faculty for misrepresentation is too often shown
in his history, and the fact also shows that he
might yield to it without any bad intention. In
truth, he seems to have expected that his readers
would be as ready as himself to condone Carlyle's
faults of temper, and regard his posthumous con-
fession as so "supremely honourable" as to be an
ample atonement for the offence. He, unluckily,
succeeded in exaggerating the faults, without car-
rying his readers along with him in the implied
apology. They did not appreciate the charm,
which to him was so obvious, of the despotic side
of Carlyle's character. That was the real diffi-
culty. Froude was, I believe, as loyal to his
master's memory as he had been affectionate to
him in life. The loyalty did not prevent him from

234 Studies of a Biographer

forcing tne shades as well as the lights, and he was
quite right in his desire to delineate both in his
portrait. What he did not see was that the merit
which, for him, altogether overbalanced the faults,
was not a merit at all for the outside world.
He could excuse the harshness of a despot whose
rule he loved, but to people who objected to
the despotic rule altogether, the excuse was an
aggravation.

Froude's history was necessarily unsatisfactory
on what may be called the scientific side. The
hero-worshipper cannot stoop to such prosaic
matters as economical or constitutional con-
ditions. J. R. Green says that Froude's great
fault was that in a history of England he had
omitted the English people. The centre of interest,
at any rate, is in the leading personages of the
drama, and too much is attributed to their indi-
vidual characteristics. Accepting Froude's con-
ception, however, it would be difficult to praise
the execution too highly. No man of his genera-
tion, I think, had a finer literary faculty. While
entirely free from the m^annerism of his prophet,
he can be equally vivid. His style is thoroughly
masculine, and yet never flat, prosaic, or violent.
The other writings upon which I have not dwelt
— the lectures at Oxford, for example, the Oceana,
and the Short Studies — are full of delightful read-

James Anthony Froude 235

ing. I have spoken of him from one point of view
in the attempt to understand why with his ex-
traordinary gifts he did not produce a more sat-
isfactory result. The general answer seems to
be obvious. He suffered from the epidemic which
prevailed at Oxford at his time, the " sick fatigue "
and ''languid doubt" of which Matthew Arnold
speaks, and which was generated by the contro-
versies which then raged at Oxford. It may seem
to us of a later period rather surprising that any
man could fancy that either Newman or Carlyle
could be a prophet to follow blindly. One cannot
quite realise the narrowness of the Oxford horizon
at the time (I don't mean that other places were
at all better off), in which the only alternatives
seemed to be the acceptance of intellectual suicide
with Newman or of adherence to the modified
Puritanism of Carlyle. The young gentlemen of
the day would have been the better for a little
more acquaintance with other European thought,
and for some acquaintance with scientific tenden-
cies. Many of them became wiser in time. Froude
learned much, but never, as it seems, got over the
shock which he had received. His weakness, I
fancy, was a kind of intellectual timidity. He
holds by Carlyle, but is always half afraid that
his anchor may drag. He was afraid, and not
alone in his fear, that the moral order of the world

236 Studies of a Biographer

was being sapped by scepticism. That may be,
as I should hold it to be, a mistake ; but we may
heartily respect the man whose hostility to agnos-
ticism is a product of strong, even if mistaken,
moral convictions. That I take to have been
Froude's case. The misfortune was that his
position led him to a sympathy with despotic
remedies for !he supposed disease, which made
many readers suspect the reality of his moral
sentiments instead of allowing for their accidental
misdirection.

In Praise of Walking

AS a man grows old, he is told by some moral-
ists that he may find consolation for
increasing infirmities in looking back upon a
well-spent life. No doubt such a retrospect
must be very agreeable, but the question must
occur to many of us whether our life offers the
necessary materials for self-complacency. What
part of it, if any, has been well spent? To that I
find it convenient to reply, for my own purposes,
any part in which I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
If it be proposed to add "innocently," I will not
quarrel with the amendment. Perhaps, indeed, I
may have a momentary regret for some pleasures
which do not quite deserve that epithet, but the
pleasure of which I am about to speak is ob-
trusively and pre-eminently innocent. Walking
is among recreations what ploughing and fishing
are among industrial labours: it is primitive and
simple; it brings us into contact with mother
earth and unsophisticated nature; it requires no
elaborate apparatus and no extraneous excitement.
It is fit even for poets and philosophers, and he

237

238 Studies of a Biographer

who can thoroughly enjoy it must have at least
some capacity for worshipping the ''cherub Con-
templation." He must be able to enjoy his own
society without the factitious stimulants of the
more violent physical recreations. I have always
been a humble admirer of athletic excellence.
I retain, in spite of much head-shaking from
wise educationalists, my early veneration for the
heroes of the river and the cricket-field. To me
they have still the halo which surrounded them
in the days when ''muscular Christianity" was
first preached and the whole duty of man said to
consist in fearing God and walking a thousand
miles in a thousand hours. I rejoice unselfishly
in these later days to see the stream of bicyclists
restoring animation to deserted highroads or to
watch even respected contemporaries renewing
their youth in the absorbing delights of golf.
While honouring all genuine delight in manly
exercises, I regret only the occasional admixture
of lower motives which may lead to its degenera-
tion. Now it is one merit of walking that its real
devotees are little exposed to such temptation. Of
course there are such things as professional pedes-
trians making "records" and seeking the applause
of the mob. When I read of the immortal Captain
Barclay performing his marvellous feats, I admire
respectfully, but I fear that his motives included

In Praise of Walking 239

a greater admixture of vanity than of the emotions
congenial to the higher intellect. The true walker
is one to whom the pursuit is in itself delightful;
who is not indeed priggish enough to be above a
certain complacency in the physical prowess re-
quired for his pursuit, but to whom the muscular
effort of the legs is subsidiary to the " cerebration "
stimulated by the effort, to the quiet musings and
imaginings which arise most spontaneously as he
walks, and generate the intellectual harmony
which is the natural accompaniment to the mono-
tonous tramp of his feet. The cyclist or the golf-
player, I am told, can' hold such intercourse with
himself in the intervals of striking the ball or
working his machine. But the true pedestrian
loves walking because, so far from distracting his
mind, it is favourable to the equable and abundant
flow of tranquil and half-conscious meditation.
Therefore I should be sorry if the pleasures of
cycling or any other recreation tended to put out
of fashion the habit of the good old walking-tour.
For my part, when I try to summon up re-
membrance of "well-spent" moments, I find my-
self taking a kind of inverted view of the past;
inverted, that is, so far as the accidental becomes
the essential. If I turn over the intellectual
album which memory is always compiling, I find
that the most distinct pictures which it contains

240 Studies of a Biographer

are those of old walks. Other memories of in-
comparably greater intrinsic value coalesce into
wholes. They are more massive but less distinct.
The memory of a friendship that has brightened
one's whole life siirvives not as a series of incidents
but as a general impression of the friend's charac-
teristic qualities due to the superposition of in-
numerable forgotten pictures. I remember him,
not the specific conversations by which he re-
vealed himself. The memories of walks, on the
other hand, are all localised and dated; they are
hitched on to particular times and places; the}^
spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connect-
ing thread upon which other memories may be
strung. As I look back, a long series of little
vignettes presents itself, each representing a defi-
nite stage of my earthly pilgrimage summed up
and embodied in a walk. Their background of
scenery recalls places once familiar, and the
thoughts associated with the places revive
thoughts of the contemporary occupations. The
labour of scribbling books happily leaves no dis-
tinct impression, and I would forget that it had
ever been imdergone; but the picture of some
delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference
to the nightmare of literary toil from which it
relieved me. The author is but the accidental
appendage of the tramp. My days are bound each

In Praise of Walking 241

to each not by "natural piety" (or not, let me
say, by natural piety alone) but by pedestrian
enthusiasm. The memory of school days, if one
may trust to the usual reminiscences, generally
clusters round a flogging, or some solemn words
from the spiritual teacher instilling the seed of a
guiding principle of life. I remember a sermon or
two rather ruefully ; and I confess to memories of
a flogging so unjust that I am even now stung by
the thought of it. But what comes most spon-
taneously to my mind is the memory of certain
strolls, **out of botmds," when I could forget the
Latin grammar, and enjoy such a sense of the
beauties of nature as is embodied for a child in a
pond haunted by water-rats, or a field made ro-
mantic by threats of " man-traps and spring-gtms."
Then, after a crude fashion, one was becoming
more or less of a reflecting and individual being,
not a mere automaton set in movement by
pedagogic machinery.

The day on which I was fully initiated into the
mysteries is marked by a white stone. It was
when I put on a knapsack and started from Heidel-
berg for a march through the Odenwald. Then I
first knew the delightful sensation of indepen-
dence and detachment enjoyed during a walking
tour. Free from all bothers of railway time-
tables and extraneous machinery, you trust to

VOL.III. 16.

242 Studies of a Biographer

your own legs, stop when you please, diverge into
any track that takes your fancy, and drop in upon
some quaint variety of human life at every inn
where you put up for the night. You share for
the time the mood in which Borrow settled down
in the dingle after escaping from his bondage in
the publishers' London slums. You have no dig-
nity to support, and the dress-coat of conven-
tional life has dropped into oblivion, like the
bundle from Christian's shoulders. You are in
the world of Lavengro, and would be prepared
to take tea with Miss Isopel Bemers or with the
Welsh preacher who thought that he had com-
mitted the unpardonable sin. Borrow, of course,
took the life more seriously than the literary
gentleman who is only escaping on ticket-of-leave
from the prison-house of respectability, and is
quite unequal to a personal conflict with " blazing
Bosville" — the flaming tinman. He is only dip-
ping in the element where his model was thor-
oughly at home. I remember, indeed, one figure
in that first walk which I associate with Benedict
Moll, the strange treasure-seeker whom Borrow
encountered in his Spanish rambles. My acquaint-
ance was a mild German innkeeper, who sat be-
side me on a bench while I was trying to assimilate
certain pancakes, the only dinner he could provide,
still fearful in memory, but just attackable after a

In Praise of Walking 243

thirty-miles tramp. lie confided to me that,
poor as he was, he had discovered the secret of
perpetual motion. He kept his machine upstairs,
where it discharged the humble duty of supplying
the place of a shoeblack; but he was about to go
to London to offer it to a British capitalist. He
looked wistfully at me as possibly a capitalist in
(very deep) disguise, and I thought it wise to
evade a full explanation. I have not been worthy
to encounter many of such quaint incidents and
characters as seem to have been normal in Sor-
row's experience; but the first walk, common-
place enough, remaifis distinct in my memory.
I kept no journal, but I could still give the narra-
tive day by day — the sights which I dutifully
admired and the very state of my bootlaces.
Walking tours thus rescue a bit of one's life from
oblivion. They play in one's personal recollec-
tions the part of those historical passages in which
Carlyle is an unequalled master ; the little islands
of light in the midst of the darkening gloom of
the past, on which you distinguish the actors in
some old drama actually alive and moving. The
devotee of other athletic sports remembers special
incidents: the occasion on which he hit a cricket -
ball over the pavilion at Lord's, or the crab which
he caught as his boat was shooting Barnes Bridge.
But those are memories of exceptional moments

244 Studies of a Biographer

of glory or the reverse, and apt to be tainted by
vanity or the spirit of competition. The walks
are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other
memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in
itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catas-
trophes, according to the requirements of Aris-
totle ; and it is naturally interwoven with all the
thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that
form the staple of ordinary life.

Walking is the natural recreation for a man
who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect
but to turn it out to play for a season. All great
men of letters have, therefore, been enthusiastic
walkers (exceptions, of course, excepted) . Shake-
speare, besides being a sportsman, a lawyer, a
divine, and so forth, conscientiously observed his
own maxim, "Jog on, jog on, the footpath way " ;
though a full proof of this could only be given in
an octavo volume. Anyhow, he divined the con-
nection between walking and a '* merry heart";
that is, of course, a cheerful acceptance of our
position in the universe, founded upon the deepest
moral and philosophical principles. His friend
Ben Jonson walked from London to Scotland.
Another gentleman of the period (I forget his
name) danced from London to Norwich. Tom
Coryate hung up in his parish church the shoes in
which he walked from Venice and then started to

In Praise of Walking 245

walk (with occasional lifts) to India. Contem-
porary walkers of more serious character might
be quoted, such as the admirable Barclay, the
famous Quaker apologist, from whom the great
Captain Barclay inherited his prowess. Every
one, too, must remember the incident in Walton's
Life of Hooker. Walking from Oxford to Exeter,
Hooker went to see his godfathei, Bishop Jewel,
at Salisbury. The bishop said that he would lend
him " a horse which hath carried me many a mile,
and, I thank God, with much ease," and '* presently
delivered into his hands a walking- staff with which
he professed he had travelled through many parts
of Gennany." He added ten groats and muni-
ficently promised ten groats more when Hooker
should restore the "horse." When, in later days,
Hooker once rode to London, he expressed more
passion than that mild divine was ever known to
show upon any other occasion against a friend
who had dissuaded him from ''footing it." The
hack, it seems, '' trotted when he did not," and
discomposed the thoughts which had been soothed
by the walking-staff. His biographer must be
counted, I fear, among those who do not enjoy
walking without the incidental stimulus of sport.
Yet the "Compleat Angler" and his friends start by
a walk of twenty good miles before they take
their "morning draught." Swift, perhaps, was

246 Studies of a Biographer

the first person to show a full appreciation of the
moral and physical advantages of walking. He
preached constantly upon this text to Stella, and
practised his own advice. It is true that his notions
of a journey were somewhat limited. Ten miles a
day was his regular allowance when he went from
London to Holyhead, but then he spent time in
lounging at wayside inns to enjoy the talk of
the tramps and ostlers. The fact, though his
biographers are rather scandalised, shows that he
really appreciated one of the true charms of pedes-
trian expeditions. Wesley is generally credited
with certain moral reforms, but one secret of his
power is not always noticed. In his early expedi-
tions he went on foot to save horse- hire, and made
the great discovery that twenty or thirty miles a
day was a wholesome allowance for a healthy man.
The fresh air and exercise put " spirit into his ser-
mons," which could not be rivalled by the ordinary
parson of the period, who too often passed his
leisure lounging by the fire-side. Fielding points
the contrast. Trulliber, embodying the clerical
somnolence of the day, never gets beyond his pig-
sties, but the model Parson Adams steps out so
vigorously that he distances the stage-coach, and
disappears in the distance rapt in the congenial
pleasures of walking and composing a sermon.
Fielding, no doubt, shared his hero's taste, and

In Praise of Walking 247

that explains the contrast between his vigorous
naturaUsm and the sentimentaHsm of Richardson,
who was to be seen, as he tells us, ** stealing along
from Hammersmith to Kensington with his eyes
on the ground, propping his unsteady limbs with
a stick." Even the ponderous Johnson used to
dissipate his early hypochondria by walking from
Lichfield to Birmingham and back (thirty-two
miles), and his later melancholy would have
changed to a more cheerful view of life could he
have kept up the practice in his beloved London
streets. The literary movement at the end of the
eighteenth century was obviously due in great
part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of
walking. Wordsworth's poetical autibiography
shows how every stage in his early mental devel-
opment was connected with some walk in the
Lakes. The sunrise which startled him on a walk
after a night spent in dancing first set him apart
as a "dedicated spirit." His walking tour in the
Alps — then a novel performance — roused him to
his first considerable poem. His chief performance
is the record of an excursion on foot. He kept up
the practice, and De Quincey calculates some-
where what multiple of the earth's circumference
he had measured on his legs, assuming, it appears,
that he averaged ten miles a day. De Quincey
himself, we are told, slight and fragile as he was

24B Studies of a Biographer

was a good walker, and would run up a hill " like
a squirrel." Opium-eating is not congenial to
walking, yet even Coleridge, after beginning the
habit, speaks of walking forty miles a day in Scot-
land, and, as we all know, the great manifesto of
the new school of poetry, the Lyrical Ballads, was
suggested by the famous walk with Wordsworth,
when the first stanzas of the Ancient Mariner were
composed. A remarkable illustration of the
wholesome influence might be given from the
cases of Scott and Byron. Scott, in spite of his
lameness, delighted in walks of twenty and thirty
miles a day, and in climbing crags, trusting to the
strength of his arms to remedy the stumblings of
his foot. The early strolls enabled him to saturate
his mind with local traditions, and the passion for
walking under difficulties showed the manly na-
ture, which has endeared him to three genera-
tions. Byron's lameness was too severe to admit
of walking, and therefore all the unwholesome
humours which would have been walked off in a
good cross-country march accumulated in his
brain and caused the defects, the morbid affecta-
tion and perverse misanthropy, which half ruined
the achievement of the most masculine intellect
of his time.

It is needless to accumulate examples of a
doctrine which will no doubt be accepted as soon

In Praise of Walking 249

as it is announced. Walking is the best of pana-
ceas for the morbid tendencies of authors. It is,
I need only observe, as good for reasoners as for
poets. The name of " peripatetic " suggests the
connection. Hobbes walked steadily up and down
the hills in his patron's park when he was in his
venerable old age. To the same practice may be
justly ascribed the utilitarian philosophy. Old
Jeremy Bentham kept himself up to his work for
eighty years by his regular " post-jentacular cir-
cumgyrations." His chief disciple, James Mill,
walked incessantly and preached as he walked.
John Stuart Mill imbibed at once psychology,
political economy, and a love of walks from his
father. Walking was his one recreation ; it saved
him from becoming a mere smoke-dried pedant;
and though he put forward the pretext of botanical
researches, it helped him to perceive that man is
something besides a mere logic machine. Mill's
great rival as a spiritual guide, Carlyle, was a
vigorous walker, and even in his latest years was
a striking figure when performing his regular con-
stitutionals in London. One of the vivid passages
in the Reminiscences describes his walk with Irving
from Glasgow to Drumclog. Here they sat on
the "brow of a peat hag, while far, far away to
the westward, over our brown horizon, towered
up white and visible at the many miles of distance

250 Studies of a Biographer

a high ii regular pyramid. Ailsa Craig we at once
guessed, and thought of the seas and oceans over
yonder." The vision naturally led to a solemn
conversation, which was an event in both lives.
Neither Irving nor Carlyle himself feared any
amount of walking in those days, it is added, and
next day Carlyle took his longest walk, fifty-four
miles. Carlyle is unsurpassable in his descriptions
of scenery: from the pictures of mountains in
Sartor Resartus to the battle-pieces in Frederick.
Ruskin, himself a good walker, is more rhetorical
but not so graphic; and it is self-evident that
nothing educates an eye for the features of a land-
scape so well as the practice of measuring it by
your own legs.

The great men, it is true, have not always ac-
knowledged their debt to the genius, whoever he
may be, who presides over pedestrian exercise.
Indeed, they have inclined to ignore the true
source of their impulse. Even when they speak
of the beauties of nature, they would give us to
understand that they might have been disem-
bodied spirits, taking aerial flights among moun-
tain solitudes, and independent of the physical
machinery of legs and stomachs. When long ago
the Alps cast their spell upon me, it was woven in a
great degree by the eloquence of Modern Painters.
I hoped to share Ruskin 's ecstasies in a reverent

In Praise of Walking 251

worship of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. The
influence of any cult, however, depends upon the
character of the worshipper, and I fear that in this
case the charm operated rather perversely. It
stimulated a passion for climbing which absorbed
my energies and distracted me from the prophet's
loftier teaching. I might have followed him from
the mountains to picture-galleries, and spent
among the stones of Venice hours which I devoted
to attacking hitherto unascended peaks and so
losing my last chance of becoming an art critic.
I became a fair judge of an Alpine guide, but I do
not even know how to'make a judicious allusion to
Botticelli or Tintoretto. I can't say that I feel
the smallest remorse. I had a good time, and at
least escaped one temptation to talking nonsense.
It follows, however, that my passion for the
mountains had something earthly in its composi-
tion. It is associated with memories of eating
and drinking. It meant delightful comradeship
with some of the best of friends; but our end, I
admit, was not always of the most exalted or
aesthetic strain. A certain difficulty results. I
feel an uncomfortable diffidence. I hold that
Alpine walks are the poetry of the pursuit; I
could try to justify the opinion by relating some
of the emotions suggested by the great scenic
effects: the sunrise on the snow fields; the

252 Studies of a Biographer

storm-clouds gathering under the great peaks;
the high pasturages knee-deep in flowers; the
torrents plunging through the "cloven ravines,"
and so forth. But the thing has been done
before, better than I could hope to do it; and
when I look back at those old passages in Modern
Painters, and think of the enthusiasm which
prompted to exuberant sentences of three or four
hundred words, I am not only abashed by the
thought of their unapproachable eloquence, but
feel as though they conveyed a tacit reproach.
You, they seem to say, are, after all, a poor
prosaic creature, affecting a love of sublime
scenery as a cloak for more grovelling motives.
I could protest against this judgment, but it is
better at present to omit the topic, even though
it would give the strongest groundwork for my
argument.

Perhaps, therefore, it is better to trust the case
for walking to where the external stimulus of
splendours and sublimities is not so overpowering.
A philosophic historian divides the world into the
regions where man is stronger than nature and
the regions where nature is stronger than man.
The true charm of walking is most unequivocally
shown when it is obviously dependent upon the
walker himself. I became an enthusiast in the
Alps, but I have found almost equal pleasure in

In Praise of Walking 253

walks such as one described by Cowper, where
the view from a summit is bounded, not by Alps
or Apennines, but by "a lofty quickset hedge."
Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace
British scenery. A love of walking not only
makes any English county tolerable but seems to
make the charm inexhaustible. I know only two
or three districts minutely, but the more familiar
I have become with any one of them the more I
have wished to return, to invent some new com-
bination of old strolls or to inspect some hitherto
unexplored nook. I love the English Lakes, and
certainly not on account of associations. I cannot
"associate." Much as I respect Wordsworth, I
don't care to see the cottage in which he lived : it
only suggests to me that anybody else might have
lived there. There is an intrinsic charm about
the Lake Country, and to me at least a music in
the very names of Helvellyn and Skiddaw and
Sea wf ell. But this may be due to the suggestion
that it is a miniature of the Alps. I appeal, there-
fore, to the Fen Country, the country of which
Alton Locke's farmer boasted that it had none of
your "darned ups and downs" and "was as flat
as his barn-door for forty miles on end." I used
to climb the range of the Gogmagogs, to see the
tower of Ely, some sixteen miles across the dead
level, and I boasted that every term I devised a

254 Studies of a Biographer

new route for walking to the cathedral from Cam-
bridge. Many of these routes led by the little
public-house called " Five Miles from Anywhere " :
which in my day was the Mecca to which a re-
markable club, called — from the name of the
village — the *'Upware Republic," made periodic
pilgrimages. What its members specifically did
when they got there beyond consuming beer is
unknown to me; but the charm was in the dis-
tance "from anywhere" — a sense of solitude
under the great canopy of the heavens, where,
like emblems of infinity,

The trenched waters run from sky to sky.

I have always loved walks in the Fens. In a
steady march along one of the great dykes by the
monotonous canal with the exuberant vegetation
dozing in its stagnant waters, we were imbibing
the spirit of the scenery. Our talk might be of
senior wranglers or the University crew, but we
felt the curious charm of the great flats. The
absence, perhaps, of definite barriers makes you
realise that you are on the surface of a planet
rolling through free and boundless space. One
queer figure comes back to me — a kind of scholar-
gipsy of the fens. Certain peculiarities made it
undesirable to trust him with cash, and his family
used to support him by periodically paying his

In Praise of Walking 255

score at riverside publics. They allowed him to
print certain poems, moreover, which he would
impart when one met him on the towpath. In
my boyhood, I remember, I used to fancy that
the most delightful of all lives must be that of a
bargee — enjoying a perpetual picnic. This gentle-
man seemed to have carried out the idea; and in
the intervals of lectures I could fancy that he had
chosen the better part. His poems, alas! have
long vanished from my memory, and I therefore
cannot quote what would doubtless have given
the essence of the local sentiment and invested
such names as Wicken Fen or Swaffham Lode
with associations equal to those of Arnold's
Hincksey ridge and Fyfield elm.

Another set of walks may, perhaps, appeal to
more general sympathy. The voice of the sea,
we know, is as powerful as the voice of the moun-
tains; and, to my taste, it is difficult to say
whether the Land's End is not in itself a more
impressive station than the top of Mont Blanc.
The solitude of the frozen peaks suggests tomb-
stones and death. The sea is always alive and at
work. The hovering gulls and plunging gannets
and the rollicking porpoises are animating sym-
bols of a gallant struggle with wind and wave.
Even the unassociative mind has a vague sense
of the Armada and Hakluyt's heroes in the back-

256 Studies of a Biographer

ground. America and Australia are just over the
way. " Is not this a dull place?" asked some one
of an old woman whose cottage was near to the
Lizard lighthouse. "No," she replied, "it is so
' cosmopolitan.' " That was a simple-minded way
of expressing the charm suggested in Milton's
wonderful phrase —

Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold.

She could mentally follow the great ships coming
and going, and shake hands with people at the
ends of the earth. The very sight of a fishing-
boat, as painters seem to have found out, is a
poem in itself. But is it not all written in West-
ward Ho! and in the Prose Idylls, in which Kings-
ley put his most genuine power? Of all walks
that I have made, I can remember none more
delightful than those roimd the southwestern
promontory. I have followed the coast at differ-
ent times from the mouth of the Bristol Avon by
the Land's End to the Isle of Wight, and I am
only puzzled to decide which bay or cape is the
most delightful. I only know that the most de-
lightful was the more enjoyable when placed in its
proper setting by a long walk. When you have
made an early start, followed the coast-guard track
on the slopes above the cliffs, struggled through the

In Praise of Walking 257

gold and purple carpeting of gorse and heather on
the moors, dipped down into quaint little coves
with a primitive fishing village, followed the
blinding whiteness of the sands round a lonely
bay, and at last emerged upon a headland where
you can settle into a nook of the rocks, look down
upon the glorious blue of the Atlantic waves
breaking into foam on the granite, and see the
distant sea-levels glimmering away till they blend
imperceptibly into cloudland; then you can con-
sume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe,
and feel more virtuous and thoroughly at peace
with the universe than- it is easy even to conceive
yourself elsewhere. I have fancied myself on
such occasions to be a felicitous blend of poet and
saint — which is an agreeable sensation. What I
wish to point out, however, is that the sensation
is confined to the walker. I respect the cyclist,
as I have said ; but he is enslaved by his machine :
he has to follow the highroad, and can only come
upon what points of view open to the common-
place tourist. He can see nothing of the retired
scenery which may be close to him, and cannot
have his mind brought into due harmony by the
solitude and by the long succession of lovely bits
of scenery which stand so coyly aside from public
notice.

The cockney cyclist, who wisely seeks to escape

VOL. III. — 17.

258 Studies of a Biographer

at intervals from the region ''where houses thick
and sewers annoy the air," suffers the same dis-
advantages. To me, for many years, it was a
necessity of Hfe to interpolate gulps of fresh air
between the periods of inhaling London fogs.
When once beyond the "town," I looked out for
notices that trespassers would be prosecuted.
That gave a strong presumption that the trespass
must have some attraction. The cyclist could
only reflect that trespassing for him was not only
forbidden but impossible. To me it was a re-
minder of the many delicious bits of walking
which, even in the neighbourhood of London,
await the man who has no superstitious reverence
for legal rights. It is indeed surprising how
many charming walks can be contrived by a
judicious combination of a little trespassing with
the rights of way happily preserved over so many
commons and footpaths. London, it is true, goes
on stretching its vast octopus arms farther into
the coimtry. Unlike the devouring dragon of
Wantley, to whom ''houses and churches" were
like "geese and turkies," it spreads houses and
churches over the fields of our childhood. And
yet, between the great lines of railway there are
still fields not yet desecrated by advertisements of
liver pills. It is a fact that within twenty miles
of London two travellers recently asked their way

In Praise of Walking 259

at a lonely farmhouse; and that the mistress of
the house, seeing that they were far from an inn,
not only gave them a seat and luncheon, but
positively refused to accept payment. That
suggested an idyllic state of society which, it is
true, one must not coimt upon discovering. Yet
hospitality, the virtue of primitive regions, has
not quite vanished, it would appear, even from
this over- civilised region. The travellers, perhaps,
had something specially attractive in their man'
ners. In that or some not distant ramble they
made time run back for a couple of centuries.
They visited the quiet grave where Penn lies
under the shadow of the old Friends* meeting-
house, and came to the cottage where the seat
on which Milton talked to Ellwood about Para-
dise Regained seems to be still waiting for his
return; and climbed the hill to the queer monu-
ment which records how Captain Cook demon-
strated the goodness of Providence by disproving
the existence of a continent in the South Sea —
(the argument is too obvious to require exposi-
tion) ; and then gazed reverently upon the obelisk,
not far off, which marks the point at which
George III. concluded a famous stag hunt A
little valley in the quiet chalk country of Bucking-
hamshire leads past these and other memorials,
and the lover of historical associations, with the

26o Studies of a Biographer

help of Thome's Environs of London^ may add
indefinitely to the list. I don't object to an asso-
ciation when it presents itself spontaneously and
unobtrusively. It should not be the avowed goal
but the accidental addition to the interest of a
walk; and it is then pleasant to think of one's
ancestors as sharers in the pleasures. The region
enclosed within a radius of thirty miles from
Charing Cross has charms enough even for the
least historical of minds. You cannot hold a fire in
your hand, according to a high authority, by
thinking on the frosty Caucasus; but I can com-
fort myself now and then, when the fellow-pas-
sengers who tread on my heels in London have
put me out of temper, by thinking of Leith Hill.
It only rises to the height of a thousand feet by
help of the "Folly" on the top, but you can see,
says my authority, twelve counties from the
tower; and, if certain legendary ordnance sur-
veyors spoke the truth, distinguish the English
Channel to the south, and Dunstable Hill, far
beyond London, to the north. The Crystal
Palace, too, as we are assured," sparkles like a
diamond." That is gratifying; but to me the
panorama suggests a whole network of paths,
which have been the scene of personally con-
ducted expeditions, in which I displayed the skill
on which I most pride myself — ^skill, I mean, in

In Praise of Walking 261

devising judicious geographical combinations,
and especially of contriving admirable short cuts.
The persistence of some companions in asserting
that my short cuts might be the longest way
round shows that the best of men are not free
from jealousy. Mine, at any rate, led me and my
friends through pleasant places innumerable.
My favourite passage in Pilgrim's Progress — an
allegory which could have occurred, by the way,
to no one who was not both a good man and a
good walker — ^was always that in which Christian
and Hopeful leave the highroad to cross a stile
into ''Bypath Meadow." I should certainly have
approved the plan. The path led them, it is true,
into the castle of Giant Despair; but the law of
trespass has become milder; and the incident
really added that spice of adventure which is
delightful to the genuine pilgrim. We defied
Giant Despair; and if our walks were not quite
so edifying as those of Christian and his friends,
they add a pleasant strand to the thread of mem-
ory which joins the past years. Conversation,
we are often told, like letter-writing, is a lost art.
We live too much in crowds. But if ever men
can converse pleasantly, it is when they are in-
vigorated by a good march: when the reserve
is lowered by the long familiarity of a common
pursuit, or when, if bored, you can quietly drop

262 Studies of a Biographer

behind, or perhaps increase the pace sufficiently
to check the breath of the persistent argufier.

Nowhere, at least, have I found talk flow so
freely and pleasantly as in a march through pleas-
ant country. And yet there is also a peculiar
charm in the solitary expedition when your inter-
locutor must be yourself. That may be enjoyed,
perhaps even best enjoyed, in London streets
themselves. I have read somewhere of a distin-
guished person who composed his writings during
such perambulations, and the statement was sup-
posed to prove his remarkable power of intel-
lectual concentration. My own experience would
tend to diminish the wonder. I hopelessly envy
men who can think consecutively under conditions
distracting to others — ^in a crowded meeting or in
the midst of their children — for I am as sensitive
as most people to distraction; but if I can think
at all, I am not sure that the roar of the Strand is
not a more favourable environment than the
quiet of my own study. The mind — one must
only judge from one's own — seems to me to be a
singularly ill-constructed apparatus. Thoughts
are slippery things. It is terribly hard to keep
them in the track presented by logic. They jostle
each other, and suddenly skip aside to make room
for irrelevant and accidental neighbours; till the
stream of thought, of which people talk, resembles

In Praise of Walking 263

rather such a railway journey as one makes in
dreams, where at every few yards you are shunted
on to the wrong line. Now, though a London
street is full of distractions, they become so mul-
titudinous that they neutralise each other. The
whirl of conflicting impulses becomes a continuous
current because it is so chaotic and determines a
mood of sentiment if not a particular vein of re-
flection. Wordsworth describes the influence upon
himself in a curious passage of his Prelude, He
wandered through London as a raw country lad,
seeing all the sights from Bartholomew Fair to St.
Stephen's, and became a unit of the ''monstrous
ant-hill in a too busy world." Of course, according
to his custom, he drew a moral, and a most ex-
cellent moral, from the bewildering complexity of
his new surroundings. He learned, it seems, to
recognise the unity of man and to feel that the
spirit of nature was upon him "in London's vast
domain" as well as on the mountains. That
comes of being a philosophical poet with a turn
for optimism. I will not try to interpret or to
comment, for I am afraid that I have not shared
the emotions which he expresses. A cockney,
bom and bred, takes surroundings for granted.
The hubbub has ceased to distract him; he is
like the people who were said to become deaf be-
cause they always lived within the roar of a

264 Studies of a Biographer

waterfall : he realises the common saying that the
deepest solitude is solitude in a crowd ; he derives
a certain stimulus from a vague sympathy with
the active life around him, but each particular
stimulus remains, as the phrase goes, "below the
threshold of consciousness.'* To some such ellect,
till psychologists will give me a better theory, I
attribute the fact that what I please to call my
"mind" seems to work more continuously and
coherently in a street walk than elsewhere. This,
indeed, may sound like a confession of cynicism.
The man who should open his mind to the im-
pressions naturally suggested by the "monstrous
ant-hill" would be in danger of becoming a phi-
lanthropist 01 a pessimist, of being overpowered
by thoughts of gigantic problems, or of the im-
potence of the individual to solve them. Carlyle,
if I remember rightly, took Emerson round London
in order to convince his optimistic friend that the
devil was still in full activity. The gates of hell
might be found in every street. I remember how,
when coming home from a country walk on a
sweltering summer night, and seeing the squalid
population turning out for a gasp of air in their
only playground, the vast labyrinth of hideous
lanes, I seemed to be in Thomson's City of Dreadful
Night. Even the vanishing of quaint old nooks is
painful when one's attention is aroused. There is

In Praise of Walking 265

a certain churchyard wall, which I pass sometimes,
with an inscription to commemorate the bene-
factor who erected it "to keep out the pigs." I
regret the pigs and the village green which they
presumably imply. The heart, it may be urged,
must be hardened not to be moved by many such
texts for melancholy reflection. I will not argue
the point. None of us can be always thinking over
the riddle of the universe, and I confess that my
mind is generally employed on much humbler
topics. I do not defend my insensibility nor argue
that London walks are the best. I only maintain
that even in London walking has a peculiar fas-
cination. The top of an omnibus is an excellent
place for meditation; but it has not, for me at
least, that peculiar hypnotic influence which
seems to be favourable to thinking and to pleas-
ant day-dreaming when locomotion is carried on
by one's own muscles. The charm, however, is
that even a walk in London often vaguely recalls
better places and nobler forms of the exercise.
Wordsworth's Susan hears a thrush at the comer
of Wood Street, and straightway sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees,

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

The gulls which seem lately to have found out
the merits of London give to occasional Susans, I

266 Studies of a Biographer

hope, a whiff of fresh sea-breezes. But, even
without gulls or wood-pigeons, I can often find
occasions in the heart of London for recalling the
old memories, without any definable pretext ; little
pictures of scenery, sometimes assignable to no
definable place, start up invested with a faint
aroma of old friendly walks and solitary medita-
tions and strenuous exercise, and I feel convinced
that, if I am not a thorough scoundrel, I owe that
relative excellence to the harmless monomania
which so often took me, to appropriate Bunyan's
phrase, from the amusements of Vanity Fair to
the Delectable Mountains of pedestrianism.

PR

Stephen, (Sir) Leslie

99

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1907

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