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The Scott Library.

THE NEW SPIRIT.


  ⁂ FOR FULL LIST OF THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES,
  SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK.


THE NEW SPIRIT.

by

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

“En portant à leur plus haut degré ses sentiments les plus intimes,
on devient le chef de file d’un grand nombre d’autres hommes. Pour
acquérir une valeur typique, il faut être le plus individuel qu’il est
possible.”

Third Edition, with a New Preface.






London: Walter Scott, Ltd.,
24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.




CONTENTS.


                  PAGE
  PREFACE          vii
  INTRODUCTION       1
  DIDEROT           34
  HEINE             68
  WHITMAN           89
  IBSEN            133
  TOLSTOI          174
  CONCLUSION       228




PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.


No alterations have been made in this edition. It is true that three
of the figures here studied were living when the book was written;
but their genius had matured, their work was for the most part done.
Nothing they could produce would seriously modify one’s conception
of them as aboriginal personal forces, the outcome of the past, the
initiators of the future. Apart from this, it seems to me a mistake to
manipulate or add to one’s own completed work. If I were to re-write
it, I should doubtless write it differently; the Conclusion, for
instance, which is earliest in date, seems to me now rather formal and
metaphysical. But for the most part I have nothing seriously to alter
or to omit.

I have sometimes been asked why, in a discussion of some of the new
influences of the past century, I have left out representative men who
have made so great a stir in the world. Goethe, it may possibly be
true, stalks through every page, but where are Kant, Hegel, Auguste
Comte, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer? I cannot remember ever
proposing to include these names. The reason may be clearer if I
mention other names I once wished to include, although--partly doubting
my competence to discuss them, partly fearing that their introduction
might seem to interfere with the unity of the book--I ultimately
refrained.

One was Burne Jones. I shall never forget how, as a youth in the Public
Library at Sydney, I turned over the leaves of a volume of etchings
and suddenly alighted on “Merlin and Vivien.” Something I knew of
Botticelli, Lippi and the rest, and I had brooded over their antique
mystery and charm; but here were all the mystery and the charm brought
down among us from the world where saints stand stiff and aureoled,
and angels walk tip-toe on lily cups. The fifteenth century artists
of Flanders and Venice and Florence introduced us into a frankly
supernatural world, and they delighted like children to scatter rich
fruits on the golden floors, and to stick peacocks’ feathers into
the bejewelled walls. It is a rarer and subtler art to suggest that
infinitely remote world while accepting the austere conditions of
our own earth. The pale ghosts of Puvis de Chavannes’ frescoes are
a far-off suggestion of this art; and one thinks too of the modern
magician who has brought before us the twinkling of Salome’s feet by
the red blood from the Baptist’s head, curdling amid the flowers; the
rich-robed daughters of Apollo among the olives; the mystic elephant
in solemn festival, gathering the lotus with his trunk as his feet
plash slowly in the clear waters of the sacred lake. But the shadowy
art of Puvis, the wayward and limited art of Gustave Moreau, come
short of the consistent and completely realised art which has been
attained by the painter who stands forth in the eyes of Europe as the
greatest imaginative artist of England. It is a new synthesis of the
world of nature and the world of dreams. The three women who dance in
the foreground of “The Mill” tell us of a country where human joys and
sorrows, hopes and fears, are set to a different measure, and sung in
unknown keys. A strange and troublous art, it seems sometimes,--like
the sinuous melodies of Renan, which seem to belong to some far-haunted
past, and yet contain the intimate secrets of our own hearts,--but it
fascinates and holds us as though music became visible before our eyes.
It opens before us a new and delightful pathway into the land of dreams.

Another was Auguste Rodin. To mould the human figure has been an
amusement for man since ever he carved wood or indented clay. It was
left for the sculptors of Egypt and of Greece and of Italy to form
human figures of stone, not as a mere symbol of the reality, but as
a revelation of their own moods and visions of beauty or passion;
and since then the amusement has fallen back into convention and
symbol, although the plastic representation of the modern human body,
etiolated and hidden, offers fewer difficulties than its representation
in painting which Millet and Degas have in varying ways striven to
achieve. Now even the great sculptors of old only suggest to us beauty
or grace or strength that has become conventional; they reveal nothing.
In this man’s work the form that is closest to us of all forms in the
world, that we cling to from the day of birth, and that remains with
us, half-seen or divined, until the day of death, has been revealed
anew, just as new aspects of light have been revealed by Claude Monet.
It is the ancient human way-worn and passion-used form, rendered with
pathetic truth, and yet we feel that we have never truly seen the human
body before. We marvel how expression can be carried so far without
passing the bounds of nature and simplicity. It is far from the method
of Michelangelo, Rodin’s immediate predecessor, with whom it has been
the fashion to compare him. Michelangelo’s stupendous fantasy twisted
the human body into the strange or lovely shapes of his own inverted
dreams. In Rodin’s work, it is through a relentless love of nature that
we are led to a new and intimate vision of the body. The quiet artist
in his simple work-room has been building up through long years his
great Gate of Hell; it is the gate of the joy and beauty and terror of
life, expressed otherwise than those sober stories of the old world so
charmingly told on that gate that was thought worthy of Heaven. But
through this gate we are led to a new insight of that figure in the
world which is closest to us and most precious, such an insight, it may
well be, as Pheidias and Donatello brought to the men of their time.

Another personality that I desired to analyse, and perhaps the
greatest, was Richard Wagner. The Leipzig youth, who hated the tawdry
tinsel of the theatre, and was so little of a musical prodigy that he
could never learn to play the piano, impelled by a strange instinct
has yet wrought music and the stage to a poetic height never before
approached. Just as our arts rise out of our industries, so the
manifold art of Wagner--woven of music and poetry and drama--rises to
something that is beyond art. Wagner has made the largest impersonal
synthesis yet attainable of the personal influences that thrill our
lives, and has built it on the broadest physiological basis of our
senses, so that faith has here become sight. Such harmony is what we
are accustomed to call Heaven, and such art--to the mere musician
cacophony and confusion--is truly called religion. It will take some
time yet before we understand its place in life as a new expression of
the human soul. Generations must pass before it will be possible for
a greater artist, by a still wider sensory appeal, to lift us to any
higher Heaven.

It is not the men of one idea--important as these are--who most truly
represent the spirit of an age. Such men most often represent the
spirit of some earlier generation, which in them has become definitely
crystallised. It is the men whose ideas are still free in pungent,
penetrating, often confused solution that we may count nearest to the
natural forces of an age, and it is these that are most interesting
to analyse. In such men the feebler instincts of their fellows are
concentrated, and the flaming energy of their spirits attracts few,
repels most, of their fellows. It is, no doubt, because of this high
degree of emotional exaltation that these men bring us to religion.
It all comes to religion. I would point out to those who think that
this result needs apology, that such men do not bring before us the
pale, animistic children of dreams, who for so many ages have sought
with their shadowy arms to beckon men away from the world to a home
on the other side of the sky, but the robust children of our working
life, the offspring of our living energies and emotions, the harmonised
satisfaction of all that we have lived, of all that we have felt.

So the “new spirit” brings us to one of the most ancient modes of
human emotion. I sought to emphasise this in my Introduction as well
as in the Conclusion, not altogether successfully for some of my
readers, who have been led to credit me with virtues of modernity to
which I can make no claim. So far from being “an apostle of modernity,”
the “new spirit” that I am concerned with is but a quickening in the
pulse of life such as may take place in any age, though my tracings
are only of a recent acceleration. The greatest manifestation of the
new spirit that I know of took place long since in the zoological
history of the race when the immediate ancestor of man began to walk
on his hind legs, so developing the skilful hands and restless brain
that brought sin into the world. That strange and perilous method
of locomotion--which carried other diseases and disabilities in its
train, more concrete than sin--marked a revolutionary outburst of new
life worth contemplating. Yet even among the later and minor movements
of life it is not the most recent that to me personally are the most
attractive. The Eiffel Tower does not thrill me like the gray towers of
Chartres; I find the streets of Zaragoza more interesting than those of
Manchester. And, on the other hand, there are modernities which seem to
me old, very old, older than life itself.

To say this is no doubt to confess that the personal element has a
large place in this study of the “New Spirit.” And it is true that,
however honest a piece of mechanism your sphygmograph may be, if it
is alive there is a very considerable personal equation which you
must make up your mind to reckon with. I believe I am not altogether
incapable of slinging facts at the head of the British Goliath (with
purely benevolent intentions), but on this occasion I wrote for my own
pleasure: let me apologise to Goliath for any annoyance I may so have
caused him. I wished to speak for once, so far as might be, in my own
voice, glad if here and there a reader cared to follow my impatient
track, furnishing from the stores of his own knowledge and intelligence
what was lacking in commentaries and _pièces justificatives_. I wished
at the outset to take a bird’s-eye view of the world as it presented
itself to me personally, only indicating by mere hints those parts
of the field in which I was more specially concerned. And I wished
also to indicate--perhaps once for all--my own faith in those large
facts of nature which are unaffected by personal equation, and which
harmonise all our petty individual activities. Nature is bent on her
own ends, and with infinite ingenuity uses all our energies to carry
out her idea of increasing and multiplying the countless forms of
life. Death itself is but an accidental after-thought, a beneficial
adaptation--as Weismann would have us express it--only affecting the
body, that servant of the immortal germ-cells which has grown so large
and arrogant since the days when we Metazoa were young in the world.
That is the one master-thought of Nature, or--shall we say?--her
systematised delusion, her _délire à forme chronique_. But the malady,
if it is one, is incurable. A friend of mine, under the influence of
nitrous oxide, once found himself face to face with the Almighty. Being
a man of earnest and philosophic temperament, he took advantage of the
opportunity to demand passionately the meaning and aim of this tangled
skein of things in which we find ourselves: “Why have You placed us
here? For what purpose have You submitted us to all this strife and
misery? What is the solution of the riddle of life?” And then, uttered
in a characteristic bass, came in one word the awful reply which my
friend will never forget: “_Procreation_.” I fear that that voice is,
or might well have been, divine.

And yet why should one “fear”? We have our brief triumph. Seeking out
many curious things, we learn to know and to enjoy the earth. Nature’s
naughty children--whether artists or scientists or mystics--we may
stand aside, contemplate her great object, and impudently elevate our
fingers to our nose. It amuses us, and scarcely hurts her. She cannot
refuse us the by-play of her own adaptations. For it all comes of that
primitive manifestation of the new spirit, the “Fall,” which raised us
on to our hind limbs and enabled us to drink of the Cider of Paradise.

      H. E.

  _7th October, 1892._




PREFACE.


From our earliest days we look out into the world with wide-eyed
amazement, trying to discover for ourselves what it is like.
Instinctively we must spend a great part of our lives in searching
and probing into the nature and drift of the things among which, by a
volition not our own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand, as it
were, at the beginning of a new era, and when we have been celebrating
the centenary of the most significant event in modern history, an
individual who, for his own guidance, has done his part in this
searching and probing, may perhaps be allowed to present some of the
results, not claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose on others
any private scheme of the universe. The pulse of life runs strong and
fast; I have tried to bring a sensitive lever to that pulse here and
there, to determine and record, as delicately as I could, its rhythms:
the papers I now present might be called a bundle of sphygmographic
tracings.

A large part of one’s investigations into the spirit of one’s time
must be made through the medium of literary personalities. I have
selected five such typical individuals; it is the intimate thought and
secret emotions of such men that become the common property of after
generations.

Whenever a great literary personality comes before us with these
imperative claims, it is our business to discover or divine its
fundamental instincts; we ought to do this with the same austerity
and keen-eyed penetration as, if we were wise, we should exercise in
choosing the comrades of our daily life. He poses well in public; he
has said those brave words on the platform; he has written those rows
of eloquent books--but what (one asks oneself) is all that to me? I
want to get at the motive forces at work in the man; to know what his
intimate companions thought of him; how he acted in the affairs of
every day, and in the great crises of his life; the fashion of his face
and form, the tones of his voice. How he desired to appear is of little
importance; I can perhaps learn all that it imports me to know from a
single involuntary gesture, or one glance into his eyes.

This is the attitude in which I have recorded, as impersonally as may
be, these impressions of the world of to-day, as revealed in certain
significant personalities; by searching and proving all things, to grip
the earth with firmer foothold.

  H. E.




THE NEW SPIRIT.




INTRODUCTION.


There is a memorable period in the history of Europe which we call
the Renaissance. We do well to give pre-eminence to that large
efflorescence of latent life, but we forget sometimes that there have
been many such new expansions of the human spirit since that primitive
outburst of Christianity which is the most interesting of all in modern
times. The tree of life is always in bloom somewhere, if we only know
where to look. What a great forgotten renascence that is which in the
middle of the twelfth century centres around the name of Abelard! It
was nothing less than the new birth of the intellect. Abelard had
made anew the discovery that reason, too, is the gift of God, and
faith was no longer blind; from all Europe thousands of students
gathered around the great teacher who dwelt in his rough hermitage on
the desert plains of Troyes. It was in the strength of that feast
that men wove scholastic cobwebs so diligently that the human spirit
itself seemed for awhile suffocated. It was a great renascence of
life, a hundred years later, in the wonderful thirteenth century,
when Francis of Assisi revealed anew in his own person the ideal
charm of Jesus, and a group of fine spirits, his fellows, who bore
the Everlasting Gospel,--Jean de Parme, Pierre d’Olive, Fra Dolcino
and the rest,--sought to rebuild the edifice of Christendom on the
foundation of the Gospels, only in the end to deluge the world with a
plague of grey friars. And then a great wave, with Luther on its crest,
swept across Europe, reached at last the coast of England, and left
on its shores, as a dreary monumental symbol, St. Paul’s Cathedral.
There is another great vital expansion about the time of the French
Revolution. Since then, and chiefly as a result of that final triumph
of the middle-class throughout Europe, of which the French Revolution
was the decisive seal, the energy of Europe, and of England especially,
has found its main outlets in the development of a huge commercial
structure, now, in the opinion of many, slowly and fearfully toppling
down. The nineteenth century has seen the rise and fall of middle-class
supremacy. What has been the result of it?

One naturally turns first to literature to see the reflection of the
life of a period. The man who seems in the eyes of all Englishmen, so
far as one can make out, to have represented during this century the
claims of humanity, of dignity, of what is called the spiritual side
of life, was Carlyle; and Carlyle has been likened again and again to
the Joels and Jeremiahs of that most material Hebrew race. The whole
of his long day was spent in crying out to a faithless and perverse
generation. Therefore Carlyle never attained the serenity and hilarity
of those two great spirits, Goethe and Emerson, between whom he stood
midway. Nor is it surprising that he was often blinded by the smoke
and heat of a land that had become one huge Black Country, and that he
fought against freedom, and sometimes mistook his friends for enemies.
Nor again is it surprising that of the two great poets who occupy the
centre of the century, one found inspiration in the blunders of a
Crimean war and the royal representative of respectable middle-class
chivalry, while the other gave himself up to marvellous feats of
psychological gymnastic. Matthew Arnold, for his part, resolved the
discords of his time in the austere calm of Stoicism; the calm of souls

                            “who weigh
    Life well and find it wanting, nor deplore;
    But in disdainful silence turn away,
    Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more:”

practically, however, Arnold found it necessary neither to turn
away nor to be silent. There was yet another solution for sensitive
souls: to hide the heart in a nest of roses away from the world,
just as Schopenhauer, who in Germany represented in more philosophic
vesture this same vague unrest, resolved it by the aid of his profound
religious sense in refined and æsthetic joy. That is the solution
sought in what seems to me one of the most exquisite and significant
books of the century, “Marius the Epicurean.” For Marius, life is
made up of a few rare and lovely visions. All the rough sorrow and
gladness of the world, its Dantesque bitterness or its Rabelaisian
joy, only reaches him through a long succession of mirrors, and every
strong human impulse as an attenuated echo. This serious, sweet,
and thoughtful book is the summary of the “sensations and ideas” of
the finest natures of an era; as in certain of the distinguished
opium-eaters of the beginning of the century, Coleridge or De Quincey,
we see a refined development of the passive sensory sides of the human
organism with corresponding atrophy of the motor sides. It is clearly
impossible to go any farther on that road.

There is no renascence of the human spirit unless some mighty leverage
has been at work long previously. Such forces work underground, slowly
and coarsely and patiently, during barren periods, and they meet with
much contempt as destructive of man’s finer and higher nature; but,
in the end, it is by these that the finer and higher is lifted to new
levels. No great spiritual eruption can take place without the aid of
such levers. What forces have been at work during the century that is
now drawing to a close? Three, I think, stand clearly forth.

At the end of the sixteenth century, it was above all the sudden
expansion of the world that inspired human effort and aspiration. In
later days science has carried on the same movement by revealing world
within world. A chief element in the spirit of the French Revolution
was, as Taine pointed out, that scientific activity which centred
around Newton. In our own time the impulse has come from scientific
discoveries much more revolutionary, far-reaching and relative to life,
than any of Newton’s. The conception of evolution has penetrated every
department of organic science, especially where it touches man. Darwin
personally, to whom belongs the chief place of honour in the triumph
of a movement which began with Aristotle, has been a transforming
power by virtue of his method and spirit, his immense patience, his
keen observation, his modesty and allegiance to truth; no one has
done so much to make science--that is to say, all inquiry into the
traceable causes or relations of things--so attractive. The great and
growing sciences of to-day are the sciences of man--anthropology,
sociology, whatever we like to call them, including also that special
and older development, now become a new thing, though still retaining
its antiquated name of Political Economy. It is difficult for us to-day
to enter into the state of mind of those who once termed this the
dismal science; if the question of a man’s right to a foothold on the
earth is not interesting, what things are interesting? Our hopes for
the evolution of man, and our most indispensable guide, are bound up
with all that we can learn of man’s past and all that we can measure
of his present. It was by a significant coincidence that that great
modern science which has man himself for its subject was created by
Broca, when he founded the Société d’Anthropologie of Paris in the
same memorable year of 1859 which first saw “The Origin of Species.”
Man has been brought into a line with the rest of life; a mysterious
chasm has been filled up; a few fruitful hints have been received
which help to make the development of all life more intelligible. This
has, on the one hand, given a mighty impulse to the patient study of
nature and to the accumulation of facts now seen to bear such infinite
possibilities of farther advance; just as the discovery of America in
the sixteenth century produced a like spirit of adventure which led
men to all parts of the globe. On the other hand, this devotion to
truth, this instinctive search after the causes of things, has become
what may be called a new faith. The fruits of this scientific spirit
are sincerity, patience, humility, the love of nature and the love of
man. “Wisdom is to speak truth and consciously to act according to
nature.” So spake the old Ephesian, Heraclitus, to whom, rather than
to Socrates, men are now beginning to look back as the exponent of the
true Greek spirit; and so also speaks modern science. It is a faith
that has become a living reality to many; Clifford, for instance, as
revealed in his “Lectures and Essays,” has long been a brilliant and
inspiring member, often called typical, of the company of those who are
filled with the scientific spirit. Huxley, one of the most militant
and indefatigable exponents of the scientific spirit during the past
half century, has lately set forth its aim, which has been that of
his own life:--“To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to
forward the application of scientific methods of investigation to all
the problems of life to the best of my ability, in the conviction,
which has grown with my growth and strengthened with my strength, that
there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity
of thought and of action, and the resolute 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.” It is important to
note that this spirit is becoming widely diffused; it would be easy
to point to manifestations in various departments of this open-eyed,
sensitive observation, not pretending to know prematurely, ready to
throw away all prepossessions and to follow Nature whithersoever her
caprices lead, without crying “Out upon her!” It is impossible to
forecast the magnitude of the results that will flow from this growing
willingness to search out the facts of things, and to found life upon
them, broadly and simply, rather than to shape it to the form of
unreasoned and traditional ideals. There was long abroad in the world
a curious dread of all attempts to face simply and sincerely the facts
of life. This audacious frankness and scarcely less audacious humility
aroused horror and suspicion; and those who marched at the front heard
with considerable pain many members of the rear black-guard hurling
“Materialist!” and other such terms of scorn at their backs. The sting
has now died out of these terms. We know that wherever science goes the
purifying breath of spring has passed and all things are re-created. We
realize that it is, above all, by following the light that is shed by
the low and neglected things--the “survivals”--of the world, that the
reasonable path of progress becomes clear. We cried for the moon for
so many thousand years before we conquered the world. We know at last
that it must be among our chief ethical rules to see that we build the
lofty structure of human society on the sure and simple foundations of
man’s organism.

These three great movements are clearly allied, and certainly the
practical applications of this scientific spirit, of which there
is more to say immediately, will rest very largely in the hands of
women. The great wave of emancipation which is now sweeping across
the civilized world means nominally nothing more than that women
should have the right to education, freedom to work, and political
enfranchisement--nothing in short but the bare ordinary rights of
an adult human creature in a civilized democratic state. But many
other changes will follow in the train of these very simple and
matter-of-fact changes, and it is no wonder that many worthy people
look with dread upon the slow invasion by women of all the concerns of
life--which are, after all, as much their own concerns as anyone’s--as
nothing less than a new irruption of barbarians. These good people are
unquestionably right. The development of women means a reinvigoration
as complete as any brought by barbarians to an effete and degenerating
civilization. When we turn to those early societies, which are as lamps
to us in our social progress, we find that the arts of life are in the
possession of women. Therefore when the torch of science is placed
in the hands of women we must expect them to use it as a guide with
audacious simplicity and directness, because of those instincts for
practical life which they have inherited.

The rise of women--who form the majority of the race in most civilized
countries--to their fair share of power, is certain. Whether one looks
at it with hope or with despair one has to recognize it. For my own
part I find it an unfailing source of hope. One cannot help feeling
that along the purely masculine line no striking social advance is
likely to be made. Men are idealists, in search of wealth usually,
sometimes of artistic visions; they have little capacity for social
organization. It is sometimes said that the fundamental inferiority
of women is shown by the very few surpassing women of genius in the
world’s history. In their anxiety to combat this argument women have
even enlisted Semiramis and Dido into their ranks. But it is a fact.
For all great solitary and artistic achievements--the writing of
Divine Comedies, the painting of Transfigurations, the construction
of systems of metaphysic, the inauguration of new religions--men are
without rivals; the more abstract and unsocial an art is, the easier
it is for men to attain eminence in it; in music and in the art of
erecting philosophies men have had, least of all, any occasion to fear
the rivalry of women. Such things are precious, although it may be
that what we call “genius” is something abnormal and distorted, like
those centres of irritation which result in the pearls we likewise
count so precious. Women are comparatively free from “genius.” Yet
it might probably be maintained that the average level of women’s
intelligence is fully equal to that of men’s. Compare the men and
women among settlers in the Australian bush, or wherever else men and
women have been set side by side to construct their social life as
best they may, and it will often be to the disadvantage of the men. In
practical and social life--even perhaps, though this is yet doubtful,
in science--women will have nothing to fear. The most important mental
sexual difference lies in the relative and absolute preponderance in
women of the lower, that is, the more important and fundamental nervous
centres.[1] What new forms the influence of women will give to society
we cannot tell. Our most strenuous efforts will be needed to see to it
that women gain the wider experience of life, the larger education in
the full sense of the word, the entire freedom of development, without
which their vast power of interference in social organization might
have disastrous as well as happy results.

[1] The detailed analysis of the elements which women, by the facts of
their constitution, must bring to the organization of life, cannot be
entered into in this volume. I hope to deal with it in part elsewhere.

We most of us began in youth with literature; the seeds of art and
imagination found a kindly soil in childhood and puberty; and we spent
our enthusiasm on Scott or Shelley, on Gautier or Swinburne. As we
grew older we tired of these, developing instincts that craved other
satisfaction, discovering sometimes even that our idols had clay feet.
Then we turned to the things that had seemed to us before so dull and
stupid that we had scarcely looked at them; we began to be fascinated
by economics and the growth of society, the problem of surplus value
turns out to be full of attraction, and the historic development of
the relationship between men and women as charming as any novel. In
the same way the men of 1859, who were nurtured on “The Origin of
Species,” naturally and rightly turned their militant energies against
theology and fought over the book of Genesis. To-day, when social
rather than theological questions seem to be the legitimate outcome
of the scientific spirit, and when all things connected with social
organization have become the matters of most vital interest to those
who are really alive to the time in which they live, even in youth
such questions begin to grow enchanting, and those who are older feel
the same fascination; the man who shared with Darwin the honour of
initiating a new scientific era becomes a land nationaliser, William
Morris a socialist, and the poet laureate who sixty years earlier had
sung fantastic poems of a coming Utopia grasps at length the concrete
problems with which we have to deal. All this is hopeful, for we have
scarcely yet got to the bottom of the questions raised by the growth of
democracy.

The influence of science on life is an accomplished fact, and we can
distinctly trace its gradual development; the influence of women is on
the eve of attaining its outward consummation, and it is not altogether
impossible to forecast some of the changes which it will involve. But
the influence of democracy, more talked of than either of the others,
is much more vague, complex, and uncertain. Once it was thought that we
had but to give a vote to every adult--outside the asylum and perhaps
the prison--and democracy would be achieved. This crude notion has long
since become ridiculous. We see now that the vote and the ballot-box
do not make the voter free from even external pressure; and, which
is of much more consequence, they do not necessarily free him from
his own slavish instincts. We see that enfranchisement does not mean
freedom, since the enfranchised are capable of running in a brainless
and compact mob after any man who is clever enough to gain despotic
influence over them. This is not democracy, though it is doubtless a
step towards it. If we test the intelligence of the enfranchised by
examining the persons whom they elect as their representatives, we
soon realize the trifling character of the step. Even the free and
generously democratic colonies of Australia show few brilliant results
by this test. It is hard to get rid of the old distinction between a
governing class and a governed, and to recognize that every man must be
a member of the government.

If democracy means a state in which every man shall be a freeman,
neither in economic nor intellectual nor moral subjection, two
processes at least are needed to render democracy possible--on the one
hand a large and many-sided education; on the other the reasonable
organization of life.

The conception of education has within recent times undergone a curious
development. Some of us can still remember the time when the word
“education” meant as a matter of course the rudiments of intellectual
education only, and when such education was regarded as a panacea for
many evils; this kind of education has, in consequence, we may take it,
been virtually secured to every child in all civilized countries. To
this kind of education, however, it is no longer possible to attribute
any satisfying sort of virtue. It may produce a very inferior
order of clerk; but _education_--the reasonable development of the
individual--it cannot deserve to be called; it merely puts a certain
rude intellectual instrument into the hands of a still thoroughly
uneducated person. Education, as we understand it now, must be founded
on the harmonious exercise of body, senses, and emotions, as well
as intellect; the whole environment is the agent of education. That
is why we are now extending the meaning of the word indefinitely.
Fresh air, good food, manual training, the cultivation of the art
instincts, physical exercise and abundant recreation, wholesome home
relationships--these are a few of the things which we now recognize as
essential parts of the rational education of every boy and girl, and
which we are seeking to obtain for all. Nor is education in this sense
incompatible with intellectual development; on the contrary, it is the
only sound foundation for such development. There is here no need for
fear. We seem, indeed, to be rapidly approaching a period in which the
excessive intension of knowledge, its confinement to a few persons,
will give way to a marked extension of knowledge. Such a process is in
the lines of our democratic advance. It is for the advantage of the men
of science who have paid for the seclusion of extreme specialism by
incapacity to understand popular movements and popular needs; it is to
the advantage of all that there should be no impassable gulf between
those who know and those who are ignorant. It is well to sacrifice
much, if we may thereby help to diffuse the best things that are known
and thought in the world, and make the scientific attitude, even more
than scientific results, a common possession.

It is clear that education thus understood leads directly to the other
great factor of democracy. Education is impossible without social
organization: no advanced stage of social organization is possible
without a complex and diffused education; they lead up to each other
and go hand in hand. The average working man, in England at all events,
is not an enthusiast for schemes of technical education; as things
stand, such schemes constitute a method for supplying the capitalist
with cheap instruments, and the working man cannot be expected to view
with enthusiasm his own depreciation in the market. At the same time
his lack of education leads him to overrate the value of a tawdry
intellectual equipment, and he views with little anxiety the growth of
a race of inferior clerks, for whom the world has few uses.

In England the love of independent individual initiative and the
dislike of all harmonious social organization is certainly stronger
than elsewhere; it is intimately associated with the best and worst
qualities of the race, and it has spread over all the countries we
have overrun. For three hundred years this tendency has had a free
field. But during the last fifty years a new instinct of social
organization has been slowly developing and gaining strength. Trades
unions have been one of the most potent influences in this direction.
All our factory legislation has been a sign of its growth, and the same
movement has given enthusiasm to the County Council. There are very
few things in our daily life which this spirit of social organization
is not embracing or promising to embrace. The old bugbear of “State
interference” (a real danger under so many circumstances) vanishes
when a community approaches the point at which the individual himself
becomes the State. It might be added that under no circumstances could
the temper of the English people tolerate any considerable amount of
“State interference.” The communalization of certain social functions
corresponds--without being an exact analogy--to the process by which
physiological actions become automatic. As it becomes a State function
commerce will cease to absorb the best energy and enterprise of the
world, and will become merely mechanical.

It may not be out of place to point out that while this process of
socialization is rapidly developing, individual development so far
from stopping, is progressing no less rapidly. It is too often
forgotten that the former is but the means to secure the latter. While
we are socializing all those things of which all have equal common
need, we are more and more tending to leave to the individual the
control of those things which in our complex civilization constitute
individuality. We socialize what we call our physical life in order
that we may attain greater freedom for what we call our spiritual life.

The growth of social organization is now beginning to open up
possibilities which a few years ago would have seemed Utopian. It
cannot remain limited within merely national bounds. It is concerned
with the things of which all have a common need, and the interests of
nations are here inextricably intertwined. This must sooner or later
result in the formation of international tribunals, and this again will
have decisive results in relation to war--a method of dispute rapidly
becoming antiquated. Twenty-eight millions of men, ready to be put into
the field (is not this a suggestive euphemism?) at a moment’s notice,
in a corner of the world! Take a _plébiscite_ of the adult population
of Europe, of whose life-blood these twenty-eight millions are,
to-morrow--and what would the _régime_ of militarism be worth? We must
certainly expect to see the same process repeated between nations which
has everywhere taken place among individuals. When a strong power to
which appeal can be made is established, individuals cease to fight and
become litigants; this was seen in the Middle Ages, and again, as Maine
pointed out, when a strong British executive was established in India.
As soon as a sufficiently strong tribunal is formed, nations who once
went to war must in the same way become litigants. This again will have
its reaction on democracy and social life.

Along another line we may observe the approaching disappearance of
war. The wars of modern times have, to a large extent, had commercial
causes at their roots. The downfall of unrestricted competition,
and the organization of industrialism, will remove this cause of
war. In the profoundly interesting movement, witnessed to-day in the
direction of trusts and syndicates, we see the natural and inevitable
transition to a new era. Like all transitions, it can only be effected
with much friction. From one point of view it is the last barricade
of capitalism; from a wider stand-point it is the forging of a huge
instrument to be taken up eventually by a vast international community
who will thus control the means of providing for themselves by methods
of simple and uneventful routine.

Before international organization can be realized there seems
little doubt that a period of protective national organization must
intervene. At present there is a floating population of the weakest
and less capable--unable to emigrate to a new country--always flowing
from a poorer country into a less poor country, and bearing with them
the seeds of vagrancy and crime. No progress is possible if every
little redeemed patch is at once flooded from over sea. It must be
remembered also, that the dykes necessary to regulate the floating
population are required even in the interests of the poorer countries.
We are approaching a time when the general spread of information,
especially by means of newspapers, will render it impossible for any
country to tolerate the fact that the general level of its people’s
existence should exceed in wretchedness that of any other nation.
The evolution of a better state can only take place by the pressure
resulting from the presence of these outcast elements of society. To
reject them is but to disguise the condition of a nation and to imperil
its destiny.

The destiny and fate of nations has always fascinated the popular
imagination, and the destinies of nations are now shaping themselves
before our eyes with singular clearness. Within a measurable period
of time France will have become a beautiful dream; all Frenchmen
will be Belgians or Italians, the races which have already in large
measure taken possession of the country; it is a process which
Frenchmen themselves observe and chronicle with painful interest.
But France has already accomplished a great work among the nations.
Of wider significance is the development of Russia. For various
reasons the position of Russia is peculiar. The youngest of European
nations in civilization, with a strong Asiatic element by position
and race, Russia is approaching the task of social organization with
a different endowment from that possessed by any other nation. This
racial endowment, while imparting a curious freshness to its methods
of dealing with European problems, especially fits it for its great
mission of dominating Asia. To the English it has never been easy
to find a _modus vivendi_ with lower races, or races which we are
pleased to consider lower; the very qualities which give us insular
independence and toughness of fibre, unfit us for the other task. But
the Russian temperament, as is now generally recognized, is peculiarly
adapted for mingling harmoniously even with the fiercest yellow races
and bringing them into relation with the best European influences;
all those who care for humanity view with satisfaction the growing
influence of Russia in the East, an influence which, we may reasonably
hope, will overspread the continent. A very large field indeed is
still left for the other great expanding race of the world. The
English-speaking races have in their hands the greater part of North
America, and nearly all Australia, and here their special qualities
find ample scope. This division gives no ground for quarrel; the
Russians have never had much capacity for emigration in the English
sense, and the English are beginning to learn by bitter experience that
they are not suited for the mission of civilizing Asia; the Spanish
races have, as a field for their renascence, now so rapidly taking
place, nearly the whole of the rich continent of South America; while
those slow, yet tenacious and admirable colonists, the Germans, will
be able to gain ground in that African continent to which they are
most attracted, and which was long ago claimed by the Dutch for this
division of the Teutonic race. If we English are certain to make little
progress where, as in Asia, the great task is conciliation, when it is
a question of stamping out a lower race--then is our time! It has to
be done; it is quite clear that the fragile Red men of America and the
strange wild Blacks of Australia must perish at the touch of the White
man. On the whole we stamp them out as mercifully as may be, supplying
our victims liberally with missionaries and blankets.

It is the English race, not England, that is thus possessing so large
a part of the earth. And it is interesting to observe that both the
races--almost the latest of the great European nations to emerge from
barbarism--that now promise to dominate the world are by temperament
disinclined for monarchic government. With the Russians their despotic
Empire has been an exotic which they may have worshipped at a distance,
but which, except as a symbol of the ideal, has had little influence
on their lives. We can only determine the institutions that will
develop healthfully in a country by a careful and patient study of that
nation’s origin. Why is the parliamentary system a dubious success in
France, and the jury an acknowledged failure in Italy? One watches
anxiously to see whether Russia will find the methods of national
progress in the brilliant but fatal examples of a foreign Western
civilization or in the fundamental instincts of its own race. The
English have always been impatient of kings and governors, and have
taken every opportunity to establish republican government. We see this
in the United States. In Australia the race is developing its most
intensely democratic instincts, and the Australians will certainly not
tolerate any attempt to draw them closer to any country outside their
own land. England has, during the present century, owing to special
conditions, occupied a position in the world enormously disproportioned
to its size. These special conditions are now rapidly ceasing; the Suez
Canal, which has dealt so decisive a blow to the commercial greatness
of England, has made it more difficult than ever for us to maintain the
artificial position of advantage which we possessed as distributors; so
that England, as a distributing power, is being reduced by the failure
of the Cape route to the same condition as Venice was reduced to by its
discovery. Nor is it merely as a distributing power that England is
losing its position; it is losing its position--relatively, that is--as
one of the great producing powers of the world. There will soon be no
reason why the coarse products of a great part of the earth should be
sent all the way to a small northern country to be returned in a more
or less ugly and adulterate manufactured condition. We witness to-day
the wonderful development of India as a centre of production. In the
colonies the beginnings are small, but they are rapidly increasing;
in these matters it is the first step that costs; while a well-marked
tendency to protection, not likely on the whole to diminish, tends
to make both America and Australia self-dependent, and, in the East,
Japan is becoming a controlling force that has to be reckoned with.
We are still, indeed, far from the time when the chief industry of
England will be the _Fremdenindustrie_, but we may already trace the
development of England as a museum of antiquities and as a Holy Land
for the whole English-speaking race. Everywhere, for those who have
been born in the colonies, England is a remote land of glamour and
tradition, a land of sacred associations and strange old-world customs,
and the most radical colonist is a conservative where the old country
is concerned. Everyone who has lived in the colonies has come upon this
attitude of sentiment, perhaps with a shock of surprise; nor is it
easy at once for a prosaic Londoner to realize the feelings of the man
who arrives for the first time in the land of his fathers and beholds
Fenchurch Street and Cheapside through an atmosphere of old romance.
Yet this emotional attitude will develop mightily with the development
of English-speaking nations, and will but be strengthened by the dying
down of England’s political and commercial activity. Every country must
succumb at last, but to succumb to its own children is a happier fate
than ever befell any great country of old.

It has been necessary to take this brief survey of the influences
that are now modifying the face of the civilized world, for it is in
this theatre and under these conditions that the three great modern
forces that we shall meet with throughout this book are acting. What
impresses one is the vast resonance which now accompanies every human
achievement, because of the communalization and extension of the
methods of intercourse. It has become one of the chief tasks of science
to attain unity, unity of standard and measure and nomenclature; this
has been the object of numberless conferences. It is to attain this end
that the efforts to manufacture a universal language have obtained some
support, fruitless as they have hitherto been. It was by a wholesome
instinct that men formerly clung to Latin as the universal language of
educated Christendom; the humanizing intercourse which by means of a
common language broke through the barriers of race, forms one of the
most charming features of the early Middle Ages. The equally wholesome
instinct of individual development has intervened; but the other again
becomes dominant, and the universal language becomes more and more
inevitable every day. Around it will centre the chief struggle and the
chief triumph of the scientific spirit.

The very splendour and inevitable impetus of these modern movements is
producing, here and there among us, a reasonable reaction, a reaction
against the hurry and excitement of modern life. And yet, perhaps, less
a reaction than their natural outcome and development.

It is by art and religion that men have always sought rest. Art is a
world of man’s own making, in which he finds harmonious development,
a development that satisfies because framed to the measuring-rod of
his most delicate senses. Religion is the anodyne cup--indeed of our
own blood--at which we slake our thirst when our hearts are torn by
personal misery, or weary and distracted by life’s heat and restless
hurry. At times, the great motor instincts of our nature, impelling us
by a force that we cannot measure or control, cause us to break up our
dainty house of art, or to dash down bravely the cup of healing. But
we shall always return to them again; they, too, represent an instinct
at the root of our being. In the recognition of this harmony lies the
secret of wise living.

Religion is hidden by many a strange garment, but its heart is the
same, and built firmly into the human structure. The old mystic spoke
truly when he defined God as an unutterable sigh. Now and again we
must draw a deep breath of relief--and that is religion. That no
intellectual belief or opinion is necessarily bound up with religion,
it is nowadays unnecessary to show. To how many has Schopenhauer--an
indifferent philosopher, but a great master of the secrets of
religion--brought from afar, into the light of the modern world,
the mysteries of the soul that seeks for consolation? A weary and
distracted creature, at war even with himself, he was of those for
whom the Kingdom of Heaven is especially made; he sought and found,
and moulded into the sweet harmonics of his prose, the things that
make for rest and for consolation--and who is not sometimes weary and
distracted, and in need of rest? We English, it is true, are not an
aboriginally religious people; we are great in practical life, and
we are marvellous poets; but while we have an immense appetite for
imported religion, we have never ourselves even produced one of those
manuals of piety which, since the days of Lâo-tsze, have become the
common possession of the devout everywhere. One little Encheiridion
alone there is, so far as I know, in which, during recent years, an
English writer has brought echoes of old times, of exhilaration or of
peace, into forms which enable the children of to-day to be at one
with those of former days. “Quid nobis cum generibus et speciebus?”
asked the author of the “Imitation.” Hugo de St. Victor was driven to
religion by the barrenness of dialectics: “Truth cannot be discovered
by ratiocination,” he said; “it is by what he is that man finds truth.”
To-day, Edward Carpenter escapes from the burden of science to find joy
for awhile in the perennial fountain which springs up within, and which
the measuring-rod of science has never meted. “Towards Democracy” has a
quality of its own, which many have tasted with delight, and which will
probably give it place with those sources of joy known to few, but well
loved of those few.

For religion is a mystery, into which not all of us are initiated. The
road to the Kingdom of Heaven, as it was well said of old time, is
narrow, and blessed are they who, having reached it, stay but a little
while! To drink deep of that cup is to have all the motor energies of
life paralyzed. Art remains to give us the same joy and refreshment,
in more various, wholesome, and acceptable forms. For art is nothing
less than the world as we ourselves make it, the world re-moulded
nearer to the heart’s desire. In this construction of a world around
us, in harmonious response to all our senses, we have at once a healthy
exercise for our motor activities, and the restful satisfaction of
our sensory needs. Art, as no mere passive hyperæsthesia to external
impressions, or exclusive absorption in a single sense, but as a
many-sided and active delight in the wholeness of things, is the great
restorer of health and rest to the energies distracted by our turbulent
modern movements. Thus understood, it has the firmest of scientific
foundations; it is but the reasonable satisfaction of the instinctive
cravings of the organism, cravings that are not the less real for being
often unconscious. Its satisfaction means the presence of joy in our
daily life, and joy is the prime tonic of life. It is the gratification
of the art-instinct that makes the wholesome stimulation of labour
joyous; it is in the gratification of the art-instinct that repose
becomes joyous. The fanatical commercialism that has filled so much
of our century made art impossible--so impossible that beyond one
or two voices, raised to hysterical scream, no one dared to protest
against it. The satisfaction of the art-instinct is now one of the
most pressing of social needs. In England, William Morris probably
stands first among those who have perceived this weighty fact. A man
of immense energies and varied activities, one of the greatest modern
masters of English speech and poet-craft, an ardent advocate of the
most advanced social ideas of his time, he has slowly felt his way to
the realization of the truth, that the secret of good living is even
economically involved in the communalization of art. Our most glorious
dreamer, he has placed this conception at the foundation of his lovely
and substantial visions.

It is true, indeed, that we have already an art in which for the
great mass of people to-day our desires and struggles and ideals are
faithfully mirrored. The great art of the century has been fiction. It
is common, among some writers, to speak contemptuously of novels, but
the mass of contemporary fiction has a value that is little realized,
and perhaps is not likely to be realized, for some time to come. There
is a very large and wonderful and little-read collection of fiction,
the “Acta Sanctorum,” in which the whole life and soul of a remote
period are laid bare to us. It is, like our own fiction, a fiction that
is more than half reality, and it has often seemed to me that the
novels of this century will in the future be found to have precisely
the same value as the “Acta Sanctorum.” For the novel is contemporary
moral history in a deeper sense than the De Goncourts meant. Many
novels of to-day will be found to express the distinctive features of
our age as truly as the distinctive features of another age, its whole
inner and outer life, are expressed in Gothic architecture.

William Morris looks back wistfully towards the popular art of the
Middle Ages, and deals out scorn to the novel; he is unjust to our
modern popular art. Yet, by a wholesome instinct. For fiction is, more
than any other art, the art of a period of repression. The world’s
great ages have never much cared to rehearse themselves in the brooding
solitudes that the story-teller demands. Our faces now are turned in
another direction.

I have tried to obtain and present here a faint tracing of the
evolution of the modern spirit, as it strikes a contemporary. In the
subsequent chapters we shall be able to trace it yet more distinctly,
at different stages, and in various phases. Diderot, eclipsed once, is
seen now, as, in a manifold sense which may be claimed for no other
man, the initiator of our own day in all its varied manifestations,
and, above all, in its practical scientific spirit. In Heine we see
the most characteristic, if not the finest, artist of the second
quarter of our century, the melodious embodiment of all its discords,
the impersonation of a transition which we have all passed through, and
which draws us to him with cords of a peculiarly personal tenderness.
Whitman represents, for the first time since Christianity swept over
the world, the re-integration, in a sane and whole-hearted form, of
the instincts of the entire man, and therefore he has a significance
which we can scarcely over-estimate. Goethe had done something of this
in a more artistic and intellectual shape; it is from no lack of love
or reverence for Goethe that I have chosen the American, a democrat
rather than an aristocrat, the very roughness of whose grasp of life
serves but to reveal the genuine instinct of the modern Greek. All that
is finest in aristocracy we see revealed in Ibsen, a keen and sombre
figure that reminds one perpetually of Dante--the same curt and awful
contempt for lies and for shams, the same vision of a Heaven beyond.
Into such Kingdoms of Heaven it needs but a child to enter, and when
I see this man with that little diamond wedge of sincerity and the
mighty Thor’s hammer of his art, I feel as though no mountain of error
could resist the new spirit that he represents. In Tolstoi we see the
manifestation of another great modern force; no keenness or clearness
here indeed in the interpretation of life, though such a marvellous
power of presentation; yet a massive elemental force, groping slowly
and incoherently towards the light, so interesting to us because we
seem to be conscious of the heart of a whole nation, the great nation
of the future, towards which all eyes are turned.

Certainly old things are passing away; not the old ideals only,
but even the regret they leave behind is dead, and we are shaping
instinctively our new ideals. Yet we are at peace with the past. The
streams of hot lava flow forth and cover the world; the lava is but
the minute fragments of former life. We marvel at the prodigality
of nature, but how marvellous, too, the economy! The old cycles are
for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would advance can
never cling too close to the past. The thing that has been is the
thing that will be again; if we realize that, we may avoid many of the
disillusions, miseries, insanities, that for ever accompany the throes
of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the world’s wheel: you may
spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand, you slip the book of
_Ecclesiastes_ beneath your arm.




DIDEROT.


Of the three intellectual heroes of the Revolution, Diderot exercised
the least apparent influence; he was, for the most part, too far
ahead of his time, and his tremendous energies were frequently either
concealed or dissipated along innumerable channels. The humane
Voltaire, short-sighted, but so keen within his range, whose sarcasm
was always on the side of benevolence; the morbid, wrong-headed,
suffering Rousseau, who spent his life in bringing to birth an
exquisite emotional thrill which is now a common possession--these
two men stood out in the eyes of all, then and long after, as the
standard-bearers of revolution. On the other hand, Diderot’s great
German contemporary, Goethe, the only man with whom he may fairly
be compared, has during most part of this century seemed to us the
inaugurator of the spiritual activities of the modern world. Goethe
is still full of meaning; it will be long before we have exhausted
“Wilhelm Meister” or “Faust.” Perhaps, now that we are so anxious to
reform the world before reforming ourselves, we need more than ever
the example of Goethe’s self-culture and self-restraint, of his wise
reverence for temperance and harmony. But even Goethe, with that
peaceful Weimar atmosphere about him, seems to us a little antique and
remote from our modern ways. Diderot, on the other hand, who grew up
and lived among the various and turbulent activities of the city that
was in his time the focus of European life, appears before us now as a
spirit of the latter nineteenth century, at one with our aspirations
to-day. It was fitting that his works should wait until our own time
for the most adequate and complete publication yet possible, and that
he should now first receive full and ungrudging appreciation.[2] “At
the distance of some centuries Diderot will appear prodigious; men will
look from afar at that universal head with admiration mingled with
astonishment, as we to-day look at the heads of Plato and Aristotle.”
So Rousseau wrote, at the end of his life, of the friend whose
unwearying kindness he--almost alone among human beings--had at last
wearied out; to-day the prophecy seems in a fair way of fulfilment.

[2] The handsome edition of Diderot’s “Œuvres” in some twenty volumes,
edited by Assézat and Tourneux, contains nearly a fourth of previously
unpublished material, much of considerable interest. The _centenaire_
edition of his “Œuvres Choisies,” comprised in one moderate-sized
volume, includes all that most people need read of Diderot’s works,
and is, on the whole, a most varied and judicious selection, made by
such competent editors as Letourneau, Lefèvre, Guyot, Véron, &c. Mr.
Morley’s well-known work on Diderot and the Encyclopædists has done
more than anything else to create an intelligent English interest in
the matter.

The whole life of Diderot, all his actions and all his words,
everything that he wrote, bears the impress of his ever-flaming
enthusiasm. That “air vif, ardent et fou,” which, in his own words,
marked him in early life, meets us at every turn. As a boy at the
Jesuit College he wished to go out into the world. “But what do you
wish to be?” asked over and over again that most excellent of fathers,
the cutler of Langres. And the young Diderot persisted that he wanted
to be nothing: “mais rien, mais rien du tout.” He was not the last
youth who, feeling the stirring of a deep instinct, would not, and
could not, shut himself down to one narrow path of life. But to the
men of this stamp “nothing” means “everything.” Then ten years passed,
ten years, as his daughter wrote, passed “sometimes in good society,
sometimes in indifferent, not to say bad, society, given up to work, to
pain, to pleasure, to weariness, to want, sometimes intoxicated with
gaiety, sometimes drowned in bitter reflection.” He taught mathematics:
if the scholar was apt, he taught him all day; if he was a fool, he
left him. “He was paid in books, in furniture, in linen, in money, or
not at all.” When teaching failed he had to earn money how he could--as
by supplying a missionary with a stock of sermons. Once he had to
starve for a few days. That was not the least instructive experience
to the youth, for he resolved that, whenever he could help it, no
fellow-creature should suffer the like.

There could have been no better education. It was the seed-time of all
his energies, of his encyclopædic knowledge, of his manifold hold on
life, of his extraordinary capacity. He found time in the midst of it
to fall in love with and marry a pious, honest, and affectionate girl
who happened to be living in a room near him, but who was so ignorant
that she once scolded him for the amount (very far from excessive) that
he took for his writings; she could not imagine that mere writing could
be worth so much. That he was not always faithful to her scarcely needs
to be told; that could, perhaps, have been otherwise at no period,
least of all in eighteenth-century Paris. There is a deep pathos in
the brief story of her long life and her devotion to the husband whose
own energies were at the service of any human being, however poor or
disreputable, who cared to climb up the stairs to his room. In the
early days of poverty she would make little sacrifices to procure a
cup of coffee or similar trifling luxury for her husband; and during
his last illness, though she would have given her life, her daughter
wrote, to make him a Christian, yet realizing how deeply rooted his
convictions were, she shielded him from the efforts of the orthodox,
and would not leave the parish _curé_ alone with him for an instant;
at his death, the daughter adds, she “regretted the unhappiness he
had caused her as another would have regretted happiness.” But we do
not regret unhappiness; it is but another way of saying that life
is complex and full of mitigation. In tenderness Diderot was never
deficient; he was clearly a man of deep family affection; he seems
to have inherited this from his father; so judicious a critic as
Sainte-Beuve remarks that of the whole group of _philosophes_--not
eminent, perhaps, in this respect--Diderot was the one who “most
piously cultivated the relations of father, of son, of brother, and who
best felt and practised family morality,” and we constantly come across
traces of this “piety.” He tells us with great glee how, when he was
once walking through his native Langres, a townsman came up to him and
said, “Monsieur Diderot, you are a good man, but, if you think that you
will ever be equal to your father, you are mistaken.” His eldest sister
seems to have had something of his own downrightness and solidity;
he loves her, he says, not because she is his sister, but because he
“likes excellent things.” His only brother was an ecclesiastic and a
bigot, but Diderot dwells on the inexhaustible charity by which this
rather eccentric man had impoverished himself. At the latter part of
his life Diderot’s letters are full of proof of his tender love for his
daughter, of the care and thought he devoted to her education, of the
gentleness with which he sought to open to her the mysteries of the
world.

At the age of twenty-eight Diderot conceived the plan of that
“Encyclopædia” which became the central activity of his life. A
few years later he published his first work, a free translation of
Shaftesbury’s “Essay on Merit and Virtue,” which indicates well the
philosophical point from which he set out. It was followed, a year
after, by the “Pensées Philosophiques,” a few brief pages, full of
condensed and vigorous satire on the theologians and of robust faith
in man and nature. Perhaps the most memorable is that in which he
imagines that a man, betrayed by his wife, his children, his friends,
retired into a cavern to meditate some awful revenge against the human
race, a perpetual source of dread and misery; at last the misanthrope
rushed out of his cavern shouting. “God! God!” and his fatal desire
was accomplished: this account of the matter at all events indicates
how little, even at this early period of his life, Diderot sympathized
with the fashionable Deism of his day. The book was condemned to be
burned by command of Parliament, but it was subsequently reinforced by
still more audacious additions. So began characteristically, if with
something of the reckless impetuosity of youth, a series of writings,
far too long even to name here, many that were only published at his
death, some that are only now being published, a large number that have
probably been lost altogether--all marked by the same prodigious wealth
and variety and eloquence. Yet they lie apart from the great work of
his life. The “Encyclopædia” occupied thirty years; the appearance of
the first volume was retarded by Diderot’s imprisonment at Vincennes,
and it appeared in 1751; the last appeared in 1772. The “Encyclopædia”
was more than an encyclopædia; it was not founded on that of Chambers,
by which it was suggested, nor is it represented by our own estimable
“Encyclopædia Britannica.” It was not a simple summary of the knowledge
of the time, for the benefit of a community trained to appreciate the
value of science. It was in the words of the prospectus, “a general
picture of the efforts of the human spirit in every field, in every
age.” It was the frank and audacious application to the whole of
knowledge of new ideas, for the first time loudly proclaimed to a
society slowly crumbling to ruin, but still by no means powerless. It
was an evangelistic enterprise among infidels, with dangers on every
side, and where one holds one’s life in one’s hands. We may still
appreciate the significance of such a struggle. The future in every
age belongs to those who can see further ahead than their fellows, and
who fight their way towards the vision that they see; but the risks are
equally great under any condition of society, and some sort of Bastille
or Vincennes is always at hand.

Diderot was certainly of all men most fitted to organize and uphold
this great work and to carry it to triumphal completion. He said once
of himself that he belonged to his windy countryside of Langres;
“the man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock
on the top of the church spire--it is never fixed at one point.” He
was scarcely just to himself; with all his emotional vivacity and
his readiness to receive new impressions, there was in him also an
infinite patience and a tenacity to hold on to the end in spite of
all. Both his versatility and his patience were called for here. He
was indefatigable, for ever animating the waverers, stimulating the
slow-paced, fighting with timid publishers, himself having a hand in
everything, ever ready to suggest new ideas or to spend months in
studying the details of machines or factories, or anything else that
had to be done; knowing all the time that at every moment he might be
exiled or imprisoned. The personal qualities of the man, even more
than his varied abilities, carried him through. Someone speaks of
“his eyes on fire and the prophetic air which seemed always announcing
the enthusiasm of actual labour;” we hear of his “éloquence fougueuse
et entraînante;” and, with this, of his feminine sensibility, his wit
and tact and fertility of resource. We divine these qualities in his
head as it has come down to us, though his characteristics do not
easily lend themselves to brush or chisel. He has himself some remarks
on this point. In his _Salons_ he comes upon his own portrait by Van
Loo, and, after some good-humoured criticism, he adds: “But what will
my grandchildren say when they come to compare my sad books with
that smiling, mincing, effeminate old flirt? My children, I warn you
that I am not like that. I had a hundred different faces in one day,
according to the thing that affected me. I was calm, sad, dreaming,
tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic, but I was never as you see
me there. I had a large forehead, very bright eyes, tolerably large
features, a head quite like that of an ancient orator, a _bonhomie_
which approached stupidity, and an old-fashioned rusticity. I wear a
mask which deceives the artist, whether it is that there are too many
things mixed together, or that the mental impressions which trace
themselves on my face succeed one another so rapidly that the painter’s
task becomes more difficult than he expected. I have never been well
done except by a poor devil called Garand, who caught me as it happens
to a fool who utters a _bon mot_.” Meister, Grimm’s secretary, who knew
Diderot well, says of him: “The artist who would seek an ideal head for
Plato or Aristotle could hardly meet a modern head more worth his study
than Diderot’s. His large forehead, uncovered and slightly rounded,
bore the imposing imprint of his large, luminous, and fertile spirit.
The great physiognomist, Lavater, thought he detected there some
traces of timidity and lack of enterprise, and this intuition, founded
only on such portraits as he could see, has always seemed to me that
of a keen observer.[3] His nose was of masculine beauty, the contour
of his upper eyelid full of delicacy, the habitual expression of his
eyes sensitive and gentle; but when he became excited they gleamed
with fire; his mouth revealed an interesting mixture of refinement,
of grace, of _bonhomie_; and, whatever indifference there might be
about his bearing, there was naturally in the carriage of his head,
especially when he began to talk, much energy and dignity. Enthusiasm
seemed to have become the most natural attitude of his voice, of his
soul, of all his features. When his mental attitude was cold and calm,
one might find in him constraint, awkwardness, timidity, even a sort
of affectation; he was only truly Diderot, he was only truly himself,
when his thoughts transported him beyond himself.”

[3] “Timid and awkward in his own cause,” says Meister elsewhere, “he
was scarcely ever so in that of others.”

It was the inexhaustible profusion and generosity of Diderot’s genius
which seems to have impressed men chiefly. A small literary man of
the time wrote his impression of Diderot, as he appeared in later
life, with what is probably but a very mild touch of good-natured
caricature:--“Some time ago I had a desire to write a book. I sought
solitude in order to meditate. A friend lent me an apartment in a
charming house amid delightful scenery. Hardly had I arrived when I
learnt that M. Diderot occupied a room in the same house. I do not
exaggerate when I say that my heart beat violently; I forgot all my
literary projects, and thought only of seeing the great man whose
genius I so much admired. I entered his room with the dawn, and he
seemed no more surprised to see me than it. He spared me the trouble of
stammering awkwardly the object of my visit. He guessed it apparently
by my air of admiration. He spared me likewise the long windings of
a conversation which must be led to poetry and prose. Hardly was it
mentioned than he rose, fixed his eyes upon me, and, it was quite
clear, did not see me at all. He began to speak, at first very low and
fast, so that though I was quite close to him I could scarcely hear or
follow him. I saw at once that my part in the conversation would be
limited to silent admiration, a part which it costs me little to play.
Gradually his voice rose and became distinct and sonorous; he had been
almost immovable; now his gestures became frequent and animated. He
had never seen me before, and when we were standing he put his arms
round me; when we were seated he struck my thighs as though they were
his own. If the rapid courses of his talk brought in the word ‘law,’
he made me a plan of legislation; if the word ‘theatre’ came in, he
offered me the choice between five or six plans of dramas. _A propos_
of the relation between the scene and the dialogue, he recalls that
Tacitus is the greatest painter of antiquity, and recites or translates
for me the Annals or the History. But how terrible that the barbarians
should have buried in the ruins of architectural masterpieces so many
of Tacitus’s _chefs-d’œuvre_! Thereupon he grows as tender over those
lost beauties as though he had known them. But if the excavations at
Herculaneum should reveal fresh Annals and Histories! And this hope
transports him with joy. But how often in the process of discovery
ignorant hands have destroyed the masterpieces preserved in tombs! And
here he dissertates like an Italian engineer on methods of excavation.
Then his imagination turns to ancient Italy, and he recalls how the
arts of Athens had softened the terrible virtues of the conquerors of
the world. He turns to the happy days of Lælius and Scipio, when even
the conquered assisted with delight in the triumphs of the conquerors.
He acts for me an entire scene of Terence; he almost sings several
songs of Horace. He concludes by actually singing a song full of grace
and wit, an impromptu of his own at a supper, and recites for me a very
agreeable comedy of which, to save the trouble of copying, he has had
a single copy printed. Then a number of people entered the room. The
noise of chairs makes him break off his enthusiastic monologue. Then he
distinguishes me in the midst of the company, and comes up to me as to
a person whom one has previously met with pleasure. He reminds me that
we have talked about many very interesting things--law, drama, history;
he acknowledges that there was much to be learnt from my conversation,
and makes me promise to cultivate an acquaintance the value of which
he appreciates. At parting he gives me two kisses on the forehead, and
snatches his hand from mine with genuine sorrow.” Diderot is recorded
to have laughed heartily at this sketch when he saw it in the “Mercure”
of 1779: “I must be an eccentric sort of fellow; but is it such a great
fault to have preserved amid all the friction of society some vestiges
of the angularity of nature?”

These impressions are confirmed by those of the Empress Catherine,
whose delicate generosity in buying Diderot’s library and appointing
him librarian smoothed the last years of his life. She wrote to
Mme. Geoffrin: “Your Diderot is an extraordinary man. I emerge from
interviews with him with thighs bruised and quite black. I have been
obliged to put a table between us to protect myself and my members.” He
could not understand, his daughter remarks, that one must not behave
the same way in a palace as in a barn. It must be added, in justice to
Diderot, that Catherine was no lover of ceremony, as she certainly let
Diderot know.

He was the same to everybody; not more ready to furnish the Empress
with the plan of a university on the largest scale, and in accordance
with the most advanced ideas, than to write laughingly _Avis au public_
for a new pomade to promote the luxuriant growth of the hair. He was
equally ready to throw out the brilliant suggestions which Helvetius
and Holbach worked into their books “De l’Esprit” and the “Système
de la Nature,” and to assist some poor devil in tatters who, once
at least, after he had long fed and clothed him, turned out to be a
police spy; he was none the less bountiful to every comer. Now we
see him devising ingenious ruses to obtain succour for a nobleman’s
forsaken mistress; again finding a manager for Voltaire’s comedy,
the “Dépositaire,” or revising Galiani’s “Dialogues” on the wheat
trade. The Dauphin dies; a monument must be erected to him in Sens
Cathedral; Diderot is sought out and speedily submits five designs.
All the men of talent and all the people in distress found their way
to Diderot; dedicatory epistles for needy musicians, plots of comedies
for playwrights deficient in invention, prefaces, discourses--no one
went away disappointed who climbed up to that fourth-floor door in the
corner house of the Rue St. Benoît and the Rue Taranne.

Some of his benevolent schemes were certainly of a rather dubious
character; there seems to linger about them a touch of the
sanctification of means by ends which we may, if we like, attribute to
his Jesuit education. In his comedy, “Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?”--no
doubt the best of his plays--he has satirized himself in the person
of the hero, Hardouin, a man who gets into terrible scrapes with his
friends from the questionable devices by which he tries to serve them;
obtaining, for instance, a pension for a widow lady by pretending that
her child is illegitimate, and causing an obdurate mother to acquiesce
eagerly in the marriage of her daughter by delicately suggesting that
she has already been seduced. We find Diderot carrying on various
benevolent little intrigues of this kind when we read his letters to
Mlle. Voland.

These letters to Mlle. Voland form the most characteristic and
intimately personal record of himself that Diderot left. He was forty
years old when the correspondence began, and it lasted for more than
twenty years. Of Sophie Voland almost nothing is known; we only catch
glimpses of her as a woman of wide sympathies and decided intelligence,
neither very young nor pretty, and wearing spectacles; she lived with
her family, who were clearly more orthodox and conventional than
herself, and must not, as Diderot frequently hints, see everything that
he writes. Of the depth and reality of his affection for her there
is no doubt; his editors have discussed the question as to whether
this affection was throughout of the nature of friendship only, or
whether, according to the phrase of Sainte-Beuve, an hour’s passion had
served as the golden key to the most precious and intimate secrets of
friendship. This may be as it will; Diderot had found some one in whose
presence he could show himself, without reserve or precaution, on every
side of his manifold nature, and he was always tenderly grateful to the
woman who had procured him this sweetest of pleasures. “My Sophie is
both man and woman,” he wrote to her, “when she pleases;” as such he
always addressed her, pouring out recklessly all that happened to be
in his head, narrating the incidents of the day, telling what he was
thinking about or projecting, repeating current scandal or sometimes
not quite decent story, flashing instinctively into wise or witty
reflection; always with a swift, almost unconscious pen, forgetting now
and again what he has already said. It is only in these letters, where
he is, as he says, “rendering an account of all the moments of a life
that belongs to you,” that we realize the personal charm, the exuberant
strength and at the same time the weakness of the man who in the midst
of his manifold energies bursts out: “A delicious repose, a sweet book
to read, a walk in some open and solitary spot, a conversation in which
one discloses all one’s heart, a strong emotion that brings the tears
to one’s eyes and makes the heart beat faster, whether it comes of some
tale of generous action or of a sentiment of tenderness, of health,
of gaiety, of liberty, of indolence--there is the true happiness, nor
shall I ever know any other.”

The “Encyclopædia” seems to us to-day but a small portion of the
achievement of Diderot’s life, though it represents the part that he
played in relation to the science of his time. His place in science
has sometimes been wrongly stated. It has been said, for instance,
that he anticipated Lamarck and Darwin. It is true that he wrote, “The
need produces the organ; the organization determines the function,”
and that this contains the germ of Lamarck’s doctrine; and again,
“The world is the abode of the strong,” and that this may be said to
be the germ of the doctrine of natural selection; but at both points
he was simply putting into epigrammatic form the conceptions of the
greatest scientific genius of his age and country, Buffon, the only
man of that time who was cast in the same massive mould, and to whom
Diderot could turn with fraternal delight and admiration. It is to
Buffon also, and not to Diderot, that the honour of anticipating
Lyell belongs. It is in his Baconian thoughts on the interpretation
of nature, and again in such a comprehensive collection of data as
his notes on physiology, discovered of recent years, that Diderot’s
searching and inquisitive scientific spirit appears. He frequently
startles us by the way in which he vividly realizes and follows out to
their legitimate conclusions those floating ideas of his time which
we are working out to-day. Above all, and from the first, he clearly
grasps the fundamental value of the human body and its processes in the
interpretation of mental phenomena; in one of his comparatively early
works, the “Lettre sur les Aveugles,” he remarks that he has never
doubted that “our most purely intellectual ideas are closely related
to the conformation of our bodies.” “How difficult it is,” he says
elsewhere, “to be a good philosopher and a good moralist without being
anatomist, naturalist, physiologist, and doctor.” Holding firmly by
this clue, he was constantly trying to fathom the mysteries of the soul
and to picture the processes of life; it is because he has realized
that this can only be done fruitfully from the physiological side that
the “Rêve de d’Alembert,” his most brilliant effort in this direction,
is interesting after the lapse of a century.

He brought the same eager, impressionable spirit to his novels and
stories. It is indeed no great step from “Le Rêve de d’Alembert” to
“Le Neveu de Rameau,” and from that to “La Religieuse.” Whatever he
undertook he carried out with the whole energy and enthusiasm of his
nature, and while this takes from the artistic symmetry of his work, it
adds to its vitality and significance. It is owing to this quality that
“Les Bijoux Indiscrets,” a frivolous novel in the style of the younger
Crebillon, pointless and indecent, written, at the age of thirty-five,
mainly to obtain money for his mistress, Mme. de Puisieux, contains
passages which have been considered among the finest he ever wrote,
and by its reflections on the reform of the theatre, its criticisms
of manners, and philosophical insight served avowedly as the point of
departure for Lessing’s famous “Dramaturgie.” It was not until he read
Richardson that Diderot produced any very noteworthy work in fiction;
his admiration for the English novelist was extreme, but certainly
not out of proportion to Richardson’s historic importance. Richardson
not only marks the first real landmark in the evolution of the English
novel; he is the point of departure of the modern French novel, and
Diderot, more than any one else, helped to make his influence felt
in France. Very soon after falling under the spell of the great
English story-teller and writing his “Éloge de Richardson,” Diderot
produced his most famous novel, “La Religieuse.” It is clear how much
Richardson influenced this minute study, in autobiographic form, of
the life and sufferings of a young girl forced into a convent with
its uncongenial atmosphere and petty persecutions. It was a distinct
artistic achievement, the more remarkable as it was certainly intended
as an attack on the small vices of a community of women isolated from
the world. Even those parts of this attack which have been considered
questionable are always in the tone of the unsuspecting young girl who
writes them, and only become offensive when a modern editor removes
them in order to substitute asterisks; compare these passages with the
more ostentatious propriety and zeal for virtue of a modern Parisian
in “Mademoiselle Giraud ma Femme.” A year later Diderot wrote an
unquestionable artistic masterpiece, only preserved for us by a happy
chance, “Le Neveu de Rameau,” a dialogue of unfailing spirit between
himself and a strange social parasite whom he is analyzing. Some years
later he fell under the influence of Sterne; “Jacques le Fataliste,”
so attractive to Goethe and many others, was the result. But he had no
great affinity for the sinuous humour of Sterne, and, while he threw
himself into it with his usual energy, the result, though Shandean
enough, is less happy than his great Richardsonian effort. Yet “Jacques
le Fataliste” contains the “Histoire de Mme. de la Pommeraye,” and
this little _histoire_, when disentangled from the manifold episodes
which interrupt the hostess of the inn who tells it, is Diderot’s most
perfect and most characteristic effort as a story-teller. Even in his
novels it is the directness and the veracity of his scientific spirit,
united to his emotional impressionability, which gives significance to
his work.

The same features mark his plays, though here the result has ceased to
be pleasing, and we may be permitted to-day not to read through the
“Fils Naturel” and the “Père de Famille.” Yet we must not forget that
from them is dated the modern drama, with the notes of sincerity and
simple realism, peculiar then to Diderot, which nowadays have become a
more common possession. Diderot’s dramas produced a great and immediate
effect in Germany, on Goethe and Schiller as well as on Iffland and
Kotzebue, and the “Père de Famille” was translated by Lessing.

As a critic of the stage Diderot has, perhaps, attracted exaggerated
attention, though he has not escaped misunderstanding, most people’s
knowledge of his opinions on this head beginning and ending with the
“Paradoxe sur le Comédien.” Diderot at first attributed, as from the
nature of his temperament he was sure to do, the chief part in acting
to emotion and sensibility; in time he outgrew this youthful opinion,
and in the “Paradoxe” he emphasized as strongly as he could the part
of study and reflection in the actor’s art, a part which must always
be of the first importance, notwithstanding all the tears shed by
charming actresses, and carefully bottled for controversial purposes.
Diderot was far too sane and many-sided to see only one aspect of so
complex an art as the actor’s; it is, as he says, “study, reflection,
passion, sensibility, the true imitation of nature,” which go to make
up good acting. An interesting and too brief series of letters to Mlle.
Jodin is well worth reading from this point of view. Mlle. Jodin, the
daughter of an old friend of his, was a rather wild and impetuous young
lady of some talent who had suddenly adopted the life of an actress.
Diderot performed many small services both for her and her mother, and
wrote letters full of wise and, it appears, much-needed counsel as
to her conduct both on and off the stage. “Mademoiselle,” he writes,
“there is nothing good in this world but that which is true; be true,
then, on the stage, true off the stage.... An actor who has nothing
but sense and judgment is cold; one who has nothing but _verve_ and
sensibility is mad. It is a certain temperament of mingled good sense
and warmth which makes men sublime; on the stage and in the world he
who shows more than he feels makes us laugh instead of touching us.”

Diderot inaugurated modern art criticism by the notices of the
pictures in the Salon, which he wrote during many years for “Grimm’s
Correspondence.” One cannot help regretting that he was not born among
a greater group of artists. Chardin we still esteem, and Greuze is at
the height of his popularity, but it is difficult to take more than an
antiquarian interest in Boucher, and who cares now for Loutherbourg
or Van Loo? Even before Joseph Vernet, whose variety, freshness, and
love of nature appealed so strongly to Diderot, it sometimes requires
an effort to be sympathetic. Diderot now and then criticizes with
severity--as occasionally when he is dealing with Boucher--but the tone
of his criticism, as generally happens with contemporary criticism,
seems to us to-day pitched altogether too high. In one respect, at all
events, it is unlike most old appreciations of now neglected pictures;
it is generally delightful to read, perhaps sometimes more delightful
than the picture can ever have seemed. One suspects that Diderot
treated pictures like books; Holbach, having read a book he had warmly
recommended, came to him to say that the book contained nothing of
which he had spoken. “Well,” replied Diderot, “if it wasn’t there it
ought to have been there.”

Everything that Diderot touched he vitalized. There were few things
that he left untouched. There were very few roads of modern life on
which he was not an enthusiastic and often audacious pioneer. He
seems to have known instinctively the things that we are laboriously
learning. So it is with politics, sexual morality, various social and
politico-economical questions, education, philosophy. He touched all
the social questions which absorb our attention to-day. He approached
the problem of the place of the workers in society in the same temper
in which we approach it to-day, and the practical knowledge of
industries and industrial life which he had obtained in order to write
some of his most remarkable articles in the “Encyclopædia” gave him
some right to be heard.

His views on education, chiefly expressed in the “Plan d’une Université
pour le Gouvernement de Russie,” are on a level with the most advanced
views to-day. The education he demands is free and compulsory, and
he is in favour of giving children free meals at school. He censures
classical teaching, advocates professional education and instruction
in the natural sciences, “the study of things rather than the study
of words.” “I think,” he says, “that we should give in our schools
something of all the knowledge necessary to a citizen, from legislation
to the mechanical arts, and in these mechanical arts I include the
occupations of the lowest class of citizens. The spectacle of human
industry is in itself large and satisfying, and it is good to know the
different ways in which each contributes to the advantages of society.
This kind of knowledge is attractive to children, who are naturally
inquisitive.” Certainly, from more than one point of view, such an
element in education would have an important social significance.

Of the functions and position of women--in most countries, he remarks,
that of idiot children--he speaks often, shrewdly indeed, yet with
peculiar sympathy. The most important expression of his opinions
on sexual morality is contained in the “Supplément au Voyage de
Bougainville.” Bougainville, the first Frenchman to sail round the
world, had visited the lovely island of Tahiti, and brought back a
strange and vivid picture of the idyllic innocence and frank license
that existed there. Diderot was aroused to set forth his views on
sexual questions with that union of fiery enthusiasm, uncompromising
thoroughness, and saving grace of humorous good sense which always
characterizes him. He imagines a dialogue between the chaplain of
Bougainville’s expedition and Orou, a Tahitian, who is anxious to know
why the chaplain refuses to conform to the customs of the country.
The worthy chaplain represents the morality of civilized Europe, and
Orou, with a few questions concerning this morality, easily succeeds
in confounding him and in pouring keen ridicule on the inconsistencies
of European morals. With reference to rules of conduct which vary
with the country and the time, Diderot makes Orou say, “We must have
a surer rule, and what shall this rule be? Do you know any other than
the good of the community and the advantage of the individual?” “You
were unhappy,” he remarks again to the chaplain, “when I presented
to you last night my two daughters and my wife; you exclaimed, ‘But
my religion! my office!’ Do you wish to know what in every time and
place is good and bad? Concern yourself with the nature of things and
of actions, and with your relations to your fellows. Consider the
influence of your conduct on yourself and on the community. You are
mad if you think that there is anything in the universe, above or
below, which can add to or take from the laws of nature.” That rule,
he explains, is the polar star on the path of life, and the invention
of crimes, punishments, and remorse will only obscure it. “In founding
morality on the relationships which must always exist between men, the
religious law becomes perhaps superfluous; and the civil law should
only be the enunciation of the law of nature, which we bear engraved
on our hearts, and which must always be the strongest.” At the end
Diderot intervenes with a counsel of moderation and practical wisdom:
“What shall we do, then? We will protest against foolish laws until
they are reformed: meanwhile we will submit. He who by his private
authority breaks a bad law, authorizes others to break good laws. There
is less inconvenience in being mad with the mad than in being wise by
oneself. Let us say to ourselves, let us proclaim incessantly, that
shame, punishment, and ignominy have been attached to actions which
in themselves are innocent. But do not let us commit them; for shame,
punishment, and ignominy are themselves the worst of evils.”

“Every century has its own spirit; that of ours seems to be liberty.”
So in 1776, when men were beginning to say that it was time to burn
philosophers instead of their books, and a boy of eighteen was actually
burned, Diderot wrote to Voltaire, in the famous letter in which he
announced that in spite of all he would stay in Paris, among the
enemies of liberty, to carry on his own mission. Timidity in political
matters was excusable in Diderot’s day, and existed even among the men
of his own set. Helvetius, for instance, advocated the advantages of
paternal government and benevolent despotism; with his usual keen and
vigorous good sense, Diderot shows how unreal these advantages are.
When we give a ruler absolute power to do good, we cannot prevent
him assuming also an absolute power to do evil. Moreover, as Diderot
insisted, it is not possible to make people good against their wills,
nor is it desirable to treat men like sheep. “If they say, ‘We are well
enough here,’ or if, even, they say, ‘We are not well here, but we
will stay,’ let us try to enlighten them, to undeceive them, to bring
them to saner views by persuasion, but never by force.” “The arbitrary
government of a just and enlightened prince is always bad.” He insists,
again and again, that we must never let our pretended masters do good
to us against our wills. “Whenever you see the sovereign authority in
a country extending beyond the region of police, you may say that that
country is badly governed.” Diderot, Goethe, Adam Smith, Beccaria,
Mill, to mention but a few typical names, threw all the weight of
their influence, sometimes with passionate emphasis, on the side
of individuality and freedom, and their teaching reached its final
consecration when Darwin accepted as his central theory the fruitful
idea of Malthus. They felt, and rightly felt, that they were taking
the step that was most needed. Those who advocated solidarity and
social co-operation mostly went to the wall. Now it is the turn of the
social instincts, and we must expect them to work themselves out to the
utmost. We have to see to it that the truth to which Diderot and the
rest fought their way is not meanwhile lost. The general will is itself
to-day in danger of becoming a benevolent despotism, and perhaps the
time will never arrive when such warnings as these will be quite out
of date. When it is a question of the oppression of our fellows, we
cannot always afford to wait until the offender listens to the voice of
persuasion; him, at least, we must bring within “the region of police:”
beyond that lies danger.

    “Et si j’ai quelque volonté,
    C’est que chacun fasse la sienne.”

So Diderot wrote in some impromptu verses at a convivial gathering
over which he once presided; it was a summary of his views on
many matters. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there can be no
true happiness for the human race except in a social state in
which there is neither king nor magistrate, nor priest nor laws,
nor _meum_ nor _tuum_, nor property in goods or land, nor vices
nor virtues.” This is the anarchism that stands at the end of
all social progress, but as an attainable social state it is
still certainly, as Diderot adds, “diablement idéal.” He had no
faith in moralization by Act of Parliament. “There will then be
prostitutes?--Assuredly.--Mistresses?--Why not?--Girls seduced?--I
expect there will.--Husbands and wives not always faithful?--I fear
so. But at least,” he adds, “I shall be spared all those vices which
misery, luxury, and poverty produce. The rest may be as it will be.”

Diderot’s robust faith in nature, that finest fruit of the scientific
spirit, comes out again and again, here and elsewhere. “The evil-doer
is one whom we must destroy, not punish”: that is the great truth,
held by a large number of the foremost men to-day, which is not even
yet accepted. “Never to repent and never to reproach others: these
are the first steps to wisdom.” And, again: “In the best and most
happily constituted man there remains always much of the animal; before
becoming a misanthrope, consider whether you have the right.” Not many
men have had so much reason as Diderot for becoming misanthropic; few
men have had in them less of the misanthrope. “My life is not stolen
from me,” he writes; “I give it.... A pleasure which is for myself
alone touches me slightly. It is for myself and for my friends that I
read, that I reflect, that I write, that I meditate, that I hear, that
I observe, that I feel.... I have consecrated to them the use of all
my senses, and that is perhaps the reason why everything is a little
enriched in my imagination and conversation; sometimes they reproach
me, ungrateful as they are. Ungrateful! would I could make hundreds
ungrateful every day!” He never seems to waver in his faith in men,
nor in the determination, with which, indeed, that faith must ever be
bound up, to look every fact of nature squarely in the face. The words
with which his letters to Sophie Voland close seem to be the constant
refrain throughout all his work: “There is nothing good in this world
but that which is true.”

It cannot be said that Diderot performed any one great and
paramount achievement. The most brilliant of his fragments--the
“Rêve de d’Alembert” or “Le Neveu de Rameau”--is but a magnificent
improvisation. He made no memorable contribution to our knowledge of
the world. Nor was his genius of what may be called the wedge-shaped
order--the genius of the man who, with every nerve strained to the
solution of one mystery, never rests until the heart of it is cloven.
His genius was essentially fermentative. He knew by a native instinct
every promising germ of thought, and he knew how to make it fruitful.
He was, as Voltaire called him, Pantophile, the man who loved and was
interested in everything. His extreme sensitiveness to impressions
was the source of his strength and of his weakness. In his sane,
massive, and yet so sensitive temperament, aspirations keen and
lyrical as Shelley’s seem to blend harmoniously with laughter broad
and tolerant as Rabelais’s. The latent elements in him of fantastic
extravagance were held in check by a _bourgeois_ good sense in which
we seem to recognize the shrewd old cutler of Langres. There is a
profound democratic instinct in him; his never-failing faith in nature
and man seems to be a part of this; it is a faith that may possibly be
foolish, but for all those who are born men it is the most reasonable
faith, and it has commended itself most to those who have been oftenest
disillusioned.

There can be no doubt that the immediate effect of the Revolution of
1789 was to kill the spirit that Diderot represented--the spirit of
scientific advance, active even to audacity, and allied with a firm
faith in man and in social development. The party of progress were
not able to recognize progress in the form of the Revolution, and the
more obviously dominating movement of the century that is now closing
has been the Counter-Revolution, corresponding in many respects to
that Counter-Reformation which dominated Catholic countries during
the seventeenth century. Putting aside a few stray enthusiasts,
like Shelley or Owen, attractive personalities with little grasp
of practical life, the men who have directed European thought,
especially in England, have been men whose imaginations were profoundly
impressed, and their mental equilibrium considerably disturbed, by
that brief convulsion of France; and they developed a curious timidity
and distrust, visible even when they had the courage to adopt a
short-sighted optimism. It is very interesting now to turn back to the
essay in which Carlyle, perhaps the most brilliant and distinguished
representative of the Counter-Revolution, recorded his estimate of
Diderot. How curiously old-fashioned seem to us to-day its mitigated
admiration, its vague mysticism, its sneers at Diderot’s loquacity,
his generosity, his dyspepsia--sneers that, in the light of Carlyle’s
own life, have aroused feelings of pain, and even indignation, among
some who in their youth looked up to Carlyle as to a sort of venerable
prophet--its absolute failure to perceive that here was a man not to be
stifled by a handful of transcendental phraseology. Yet this was at the
time accepted as an adequate and even generous account of the matter.
To-day we are again in the same position as Diderot, and we are able
to see in him the significance, hidden from Carlyle, of the light of
science fearlessly brought to illuminate the whole of life.

When men begin to say that everything has been done, the men come
who say that there has yet nothing been done. We have congratulated
ourselves that many sciences of nature and of man are in the main
settled, but we are always compelled to begin again, and on a larger
and perhaps simpler scale. In many fields of physical and social
knowledge--from electricity at the one end to criminology at the
other--we are now laying anew great foundations, and the walls are
being raised so rapidly that it is sometimes hard to know where we are,
or to realize what is being done. When science is thus renewing itself,
and men are on every hand seeking how, by means of science, they may
enlarge and ennoble life, the spirit that moved Diderot is again making
itself felt. It is worth while to realize his fellowship for a few
moments, and to sun ourselves, if we can bear it, in his inspiring
enthusiasm.




HEINE.


I.

Heine gathers up and focuses for us in one vivid point all those
influences of his own time which are the forces of to-day. He appears
before us, to put it in his own way, as a youthful and militant Knight
of the Holy Ghost, tilting against the spectres of the past and
liberating the imprisoned energies of the human spirit. His interest
from this point of view lies, largely, apart from his interest as a
supreme lyric poet, the brother of Catullus and Villon and Burns; we
here approach him on his prosaic--his relatively prosaic--side.

One hemisphere of Heine’s brain was Greek, the other Hebrew. He was
born when the genius of Goethe was at its height; his mother had
absorbed the frank earthliness, the sane and massive Paganism, of the
Roman Elegies, and Heine’s ideals in all things, whether he would or
not, were always Hellenic--using that word in the large sense in which
Heine himself used it--even while he was the first in rank and the last
in time of the Romantic poets of Germany. He sought, even consciously,
to mould the modern emotional spirit into classic forms. He wrought his
art simply and lucidly, the aspirations that pervade it are everywhere
sensuous, and yet it recalls oftener the turbulent temper of Catullus
than any serener ancient spirit.

For Heine arose early in active rebellion against a merely passive
classicism; in the same way that fiercer and more ardent cries, as
from the East, pierce through the songs of Catullus. The mischievous
Hermes was irritated by the calm and quiet activities of the aged Zeus
of Weimar. And then the earnest Hebrew nature within him, liberated by
Hegel’s favourite formula of the divinity of man, came into play with
its large revolutionary thirsts. Thus it was that he appeared before
the world as the most brilliant leader of a movement of national or
even world-wide emancipation. The greater part of his prose works, from
the youthful “Reisebilder” onwards, and a considerable portion of his
poetic work, record the energy with which he played this part.

But whether the Greek or the Hebrew element happened to be most active
in Heine, the ideal that he set up for life generally was the equal
activity of both sides--in other words, the harmony of flesh and
spirit. It is this thought which dominates “The History of Religion
and Philosophy in Germany,” his finest achievement in this kind. That
book was written at the moment when Heine touched the highest point
of his enthusiasm for freedom and his faith in the possibility of
human progress. It is a sort of programme for the immediate future
of the human spirit, in the form of a brief and bold outline of the
spiritual history of Germany and Germany’s great emancipators, Luther,
Lessing, Kant, and the rest. It sets forth in a fresh and fascinating
shape that Everlasting Gospel which, from the time of Joachim of Flora
downwards, has always gleamed in dreams before the minds of men as the
successor of Christianity. Heine’s vision of a democracy of cakes and
ale, founded on the heights of religious, philosophical, and political
freedom, may still spur and thrill us,--even now-a-days, when we have
wearied of stately bills of fare for a sulky humanity that will not
feed at our bidding, no, not on cakes and ale. Heine is wise enough to
see, however imperfectly, that it is unreasonable to expect the speedy
erection of any New Jerusalem; for, as he expresses it in his own way,
the holy vampires of the Middle Ages have sucked away so much of our
life-blood that the world has become a hospital. A sudden revolution of
fever-stricken or hysterical invalids can effect little of permanent
value; only a long and invigorating course of the tonics of life can
make free from danger the open-air of nature. “Our first duty,” he
asserted in this book, “is to become healthy.”

Heine confesses that he too was among the sick and decrepit souls.
In reality he was at no period so full of life and health, so
harmoniously inspired and upborne by a great enthusiasm. He laughs
a little at Goethe; he fails to see that the Phidian Zeus, at whose
confined position he jests, was the greatest liberator of them all;
but for the most part his mocking sarcasm is here silent. It was not
until ten years later, when the subtle seeds of disease had begun to
appear, and when, too, he had perhaps gained a clearer insight into the
possibilities of life, that Heine realized that the practical reforming
movements of his time were not those for which his early enthusiasm
had been aroused. With the slow steps of that consuming disease, and
after the revolution of 1848, he ceased to recognize as of old any
common root for his various activities, or to insist on the fundamental
importance of religion. Everything in the world became the sport of his
intelligence. The brain still functioned brilliantly in the atrophied
body; the swift lightning-like wit still struck unerringly; it spared
not even himself. The “Confessions” are full of irony, covering all
things with laughter that is half reverence, or with reverence that
is more than half laughter--and woe to the reader who is not at every
moment alert! In the romantic, satirical poem of “Atta Troll,” written
at the commencement of the last period, this, his final altitude, is
most completely revealed. It needs a little study to-day, even for a
German, but it is well worth that study. The history of a dancing
bear who escapes from servitude, “Atta Troll” is a protest against
the radical party, with their narrow conceptions of progress, their
tame ideal of _bourgeois_ equality, their little watchwords, their
solemnity, their indignation at the human creatures who smile “even
in their enthusiasm.” All these serious concerns of the tribunes of
the people are bathed in soft laughter as we listen to the delicious
child-like monotonous melody in which the old bear, surrounded by his
family, mumbles or mutters of the future. “Atta Troll” is not, as
many have thought, a sneer at the most sacred ideals of men. It is,
rather, the assertion of those ideals against the individuals who would
narrow them down to their own petty scope. There are certain mirrors,
Heine said, so constructed that they would present even Apollo as a
caricature. But we laugh at the caricature, not at the god. It is well
to show, even at the cost of some misunderstanding, that above and
beyond the little ideals of our immediate political progress, there is
built a yet larger ideal city, of which also the human spirit claims
citizenship. The defence of the inalienable rights of the spirit, Heine
declares, had been the chief business of his life.

In the history of Germany, it was her two great intellectual
liberators, Luther and Lessing, to whom Heine looked up with the most
unqualified love and reverence. By his later vindication of the rights
of the spirit, not less than by his earlier fight for religious and
political progress, he may be said to have earned for himself a place
below, indeed, but not so very far below, those hearty and sound-cored
iconoclasts.


II.

To reach the root of the man’s nature we must glance at the chief facts
of his life. He was born at Düsseldorf, on the Rhine, then occupied
by the French, probably on the 13th of December, 1799. He came, by
both parents, of that Jewish race which is, as he said once, the dough
whereof gods are kneaded. The family of his mother, Betty van Geldern,
had come from Holland a century earlier; Betty herself received an
excellent education; she shared the studies of her brother, who
became a physician of repute; she spoke and read English and French;
her favourite books were Rousseau’s “Emile” and Goethe’s elegies.
For novels or poetry generally she cared little. She preferred logic
to sentiment, and was careful of the precise value of words. Some
letters written during her twenty-fourth year reveal a frank, brave,
and sweet nature; she was a bright, attractive little person, and had
many wooers. In the summer of 1796 Samson Heine, bearing a letter of
introduction, entered the house of the Van Gelderns. He was the son of
a Jewish merchant settled in Hanover, and he had just made a campaign
in Flanders and Brabant, in the capacity of commissary with the rank of
officer, under Prince Ernest of Cumberland. He was a large and handsome
man, with soft blonde hair and beautiful hands; there was something
about him, said his son, a little characterless, almost feminine; “he
was a great child.” After a brief courtship he married Betty, and
settled at Düsseldorf as an agent for English velveteens. Harry (so he
was named after an Englishman) was the first child. From his rather
weak and romantic father came whatever was loose and unbalanced in
Heine’s temperament, and his ineradicable instinct for posing; it was
his mother, with her strong and healthy nature, well developed both
intellectually and emotionally, and her great ambitions for her son,
who, as he himself said, played the chief part in the history of his
evolution.

Harry was a quick child; his senses were keen, though he was not
physically strong; he loved reading, and his favourite books were “Don
Quixote” and “Gulliver’s Travels.” He used to make rhymes with his
only and much-loved sister Lotte, and at the age of ten he wrote a
ghost-poem which his teachers considered a masterpiece. At the Lyceum
he worked well, at night as well as by day. Only once, at the public
ceremony at the end of a school year, he came to grief; he was reciting
a poem, when his eyes fell on a beautiful, fair-haired girl in the
audience; he hesitated, stammered, was silent, fell down fainting.
So early he revealed the extreme cerebral irritability of a nature
absorbed in dreams and taken captive by visions. It was not long after
this, at the age of seventeen, when his rich uncle at Hamburg was
trying in vain to set him forward on a commercial career, that Heine
met the woman who aroused his first and last profound passion, always
unsatisfied except in so far as it found exquisite embodiment in his
poems. He never mentioned her name; it was not till after his death
that the form standing behind this Maria, Zuleima, Evelina of so many
sweet, strange, or melancholy songs was known to be that of his cousin,
Amalie Heine.

With his uncle’s help he studied law at Bonn, Göttingen, and Berlin. At
Berlin he fell under the dominant influence of Hegel, the vanquisher
of the romantic school of which Schelling was the philosophic
representative. Heine afterwards referred to this period as that in
which he “herded swine with the Hegelians;” it is certain that Hegel
exerted great and permanent influence over him. At Berlin, in 1821,
appeared his first volume of poems, and then he began to take his true
place.

At this period he is described as a good-natured and gentle youth,
but reserved, not caring to show his emotions. He was of middle height
and slender, with rather long light brown hair (in childhood it was
red, and he was called “Rother Harry”) framing the pale and beardless
oval face, the bright, blue, short-sighted eyes, the Greek nose,
the high cheek bones, the large mouth, the full--half cynical, half
sensual--lips. He was not a typical German; like Goethe, he never
smoked; he disliked beer, and until he went to Paris he had never
tasted _sauerkraut_.

For some years he continued, chiefly at Göttingen, to study law. But
he had no liking and no capacity for jurisprudence, and his spasmodic
fits of application at such moments as he realized that it was not good
for him to depend on the generosity of his rich and kind-hearted uncle
Solomon, failed to carry him far. A new idea, a sunny day, the opening
of some flower-like _lied_, a pretty girl--and the Pandects were
forgotten.

Shortly after he had at last received his doctor’s diploma he went
through the ceremony of baptism in hope of obtaining an appointment
from the Prussian Government. It was a step which he immediately
regretted, and which, far from placing him in a better position,
excited the enmity both of Christians and Jews, although the Heine
family had no very strong views on the matter; Heine’s mother,
it should be said, was a Deist, his father indifferent, but the
Jewish rites were strictly kept up. He still talked of becoming an
advocate, until, in 1826, the publication of the first volume of
the “Reisebilder” gave him a reputation throughout Germany by its
audacity, its charming and picturesque manner, its peculiarly original
personality. The second volume, bolder and better than the first,
was received with delight very much mixed with horror, and it was
prohibited by Austria, Prussia, and many minor states. At this period
Heine visited England; he was then disgusted with Germany and full of
enthusiasm for the “land of freedom,” an enthusiasm which naturally
met with many rude shocks, and from that time dates the bitterness
with which he usually speaks of England. He found London--although,
owing to a clever abuse of uncle Solomon’s generosity, exceedingly
well supplied with money--“frightfully damp and uncomfortable;” only
the political life of England attracted him, and there were no bounds
to his admiration of Canning. He then visited Italy, to spend there
the happiest days of his life; and having at length realized that
his efforts to obtain any government appointment in Germany would be
fruitless, he emigrated to Paris. There, save for brief periods, he
remained until his death.

This entry into the city which he had called the New Jerusalem was an
important epoch in Heine’s life. He was thirty-one years of age, still
youthful, and eager to receive new impressions; he was apparently in
robust health, notwithstanding constant headaches; Gautier describes
him as in appearance a sort of German Apollo. He was still developing,
as he continued to develop, even up to the end; the ethereal loveliness
of the early poems vanished, it is true, but only to give place to
a closer grasp of reality, a larger laughter, a keener cry of pain.
He was now heartily welcomed by the extraordinarily brilliant group
then living and working in Paris, including Victor Hugo, George Sand,
Balzac, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Gautier, Chopin, Louis Blanc,
Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, Quinet, Berlioz, and he entered with eager delight
into their manifold activities. For a time also he attached himself
rather closely to the school of Saint-Simon, then headed by Enfantin;
he was especially attracted by their religion of humanity, which seemed
the realization of his own dreams. Heine’s book on “Religion and
Philosophy in Germany” was written at Enfantin’s suggestion, and the
first edition dedicated to him; Enfantin’s name was, he said, a sort
of Shibboleth, indicating the most advanced party in the “liberation
war of humanity.” In 1855 he withdrew the dedication; it had become
an anachronism; Enfantin was no longer ransacking the world in search
of _la femme libre_; the martyrs of yesterday no longer bore a
cross--unless it were, he added characteristically, the cross of the
Legion of Honour.

A few years after his arrival in Paris Heine entered on a relationship
which occupied a large place in his life. Mathilde Mirat, a lively
grisette of sixteen, was the illegitimate daughter of a man of wealth
and position in the provinces, and she had come up from Normandy to
serve in her aunt’s shoe-shop. Heine often passed this shop, and an
acquaintance, at first carried on silently through the shop-window,
gradually ripened into a more intimate relationship. Mathilde could
neither read nor write; it was decided that she should go to school for
a time; after that they established a little common household, one of
those _ménages parisiens_, recognized as almost legitimate, for which
Heine had always had a warm admiration, because, as he said, he meant
by “marriage” something quite other than the legal coupling effected
by parsons and bankers. As in the case of Goethe, it was not until
some years later that he went through the religious ceremony, as a
preliminary to a duel in which he had become involved by his remarks on
Börne’s friend, Madame Strauss; he wished to give Mathilde an assured
position in case of his death. After the ceremony at St. Sulpice he
invited to dinner all those of his friends who had contracted similar
relations, in order that they might be influenced by his example. That
they were so influenced is not recorded.

It is not difficult to understand the strong and permanent attraction
that drew the poet, who had so many intellectual and aristocratic women
among his friends, to this pretty, laughter-loving grisette. It lay
in her bright and wild humour, her childlike impulsiveness, not least
in her charming ignorance. It was delightful to Heine that Mathilde
had never read a line of his books, did not even know what a poet was,
and loved him only for himself. He found in her a continual source of
refreshment.

He had need of every source of refreshment. In the years that
followed his formal marriage in 1841, the dark shadows, within and
without, began to close round him. Although he was then producing
his most mature work, chiefly in poetry--“Atta Troll,” “Romancero,”
“Deutschland”--his income from literary sources remained small.
Mathilde was not a good housekeeper; and even with the aid of a
considerable allowance from his uncle Solomon, Heine was frequently
in pecuniary difficulties, and was consequently induced to accept a
small pension from the French Government, which has sometimes been a
matter of concern to those who care for his fame. As years passed, the
enmities that he suffered from or cherished increased rather than
diminished, and his bitterness found expression in his work. Even
Mathilde was not an unalloyed source of joy; the charming child was
becoming a middle-aged woman, and was still like a child. She could not
enter into Heine’s interests; she delighted in theatres and circuses,
to which he could not always accompany her: and he experienced the
pangs of an unreasonable jealousy more keenly than he cared to admit.
Then uncle Solomon died, and his son refused, until considerable
pressure was brought to bear on him, to continue the allowance which
his father had intended Heine to receive. This was a severe blow, and
the excitement it produced developed the latent seeds of his disease.
It came on with symptoms of paralysis, which even in a few months gave
him, he says, the appearance of a dying man. During the next two years,
although his brain remained clear, the long pathological tragedy was
unfolded.

He went out for the last time in May, 1848. Half blind and half lame,
he slowly made his way out of the streets, filled with the noise of
revolution, into the silent Louvre, to the shrine dedicated to “the
goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Milo.” There he sat long at her
feet; he was bidding farewell to his old gods; he had become reconciled
to the religion of sorrow; tears streamed from his eyes, and she
looked down at him, compassionate but helpless: “Dost thou not see,
then, that I have no arms, and cannot help thee?”

“On eût dit un Apollon germanique”--so Gautier said of the Heine of
1835; twenty years later an English visitor wrote of him--“He lay on a
pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a
child under the sheet which covered him--his eyes closed, and the face
altogether like the most painful and wasted ‘Ecce Homo’ ever painted by
some old German painter.”

His sufferings were only relieved by ever larger doses of morphia;
but although still more troubles came to him, and the failure of a
bank robbed him of his small savings, his spirit remained unconquered.
“He is a wonderful man,” said one of his doctors; “he has only two
anxieties--to conceal his condition from his mother, and to assure his
wife’s future.” His literary work, though it decreased in amount, never
declined in power; only, in the words of his friend Berlioz, it seemed
as though the poet was standing at the window of his tomb, looking
around on the world in which he had no longer a part.

He saw a few friends, of whom Ferdinand Lassalle, with his exuberant
power and enthusiasm, was the most interesting to him, as the
representative of a new age and a new social faith; and the most
loved, that girl-friend who sat for hours or days at a time by the
“mattress-grave” in the Rue d’Amsterdam, reading to him or writing
his letters or correcting proofs. To the last the loud, bright voice
of Mathilde, when he chanced to hear it, scolding the servants or in
other active exercise, often made him stop speaking, while a smile of
delight passed over his face. He died on the 16th of February, 1856. He
was buried, silently, in Montmartre, according to his wish; for, as he
said, it is quiet there.


III.

Throughout and above all, Heine was a poet. From first to last he was
led by three angels who danced for ever in his brain, and guided him,
singly or together, always. They were the same as in “Atta Troll” he
saw in the moonlight from the casement of Uraka’s hut--the Greek Diana,
grown wanton, but with the noble marble limbs of old; Abunde, the
blonde and gay fairy of France; Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm
of the oasis, with all the fragrance of the East between her breasts:
“O, you dead Jewess, I love you most, more than the Greek goddess, more
than that fairy of the North.”[4]

[4] “C’est le Bible, plus que tout autre livre,” a well-known French
critic wrote, “qui a façonné le génie poétique de Heine, en lui
donnant sa forme et sa couleur. Ses véritables maîtres, ses vrais
inspirateurs sont les glorieux inconnus qui ont écrit l’Ecclesiaste
et les Proverbes, le Cantique des cantiques, le livre de Job et ce
chef-d’œuvre d’ironie discrète intitulé: le livre du prophète Jonas.
Celui qui s’appelait un rossignol Allemand niché dans la perruque de
Voltaire fut à la fois le moins évangélique des hommes et le plus
vraiment biblique des poètes modernes.”

Those genii of three ideal lands danced for ever in his brain, and that
is but another way of indicating the opposition that lay at the root
of his nature. From one point of view, it may well be, he continued
the work of Luther and Lessing, though he was less great-hearted, less
sound at core, though he had not that element of sane Philistinism
which marks the Shakespeares and Goethes of the world. But he was, more
than anything else, a poet, an artist, a dreamer, a perpetual child.
The practical reformers among whom at one time he placed himself,
the men of one idea, were naturally irritated and suspicious; there
was a flavour of aristocracy in such idealism. In the poem called
“Disputation” a Capuchin and a Rabbi argued before the King and Queen
at Toledo concerning the respective merits of the Christian and Jewish
religions. Both spoke at great length and with great fervour, and in
the end the King appealed to the beautiful Queen by his side. She
replied that she could not tell which of them was right, but that
she did not like the smell of either; and Heine was generally of
the Queen’s mind. He sighed for the restoration of Barbarossa, the
long-delayed German Empire, and his latest biographer asserts that he
would have greeted the discovery of Barbarossa under the disguise of
the King of Prussia, with Bismarckian insignia of blood and iron, as
the realization of all his dreams. It is doubtful, however, whether
the meeting would be very cordial on either side. It would probably
be the painful duty of the Emperor, as of the Emperor of the vision
in “Deutschland,” to tell Heine, in very practical language, that he
was wanting in respect, wanting in all sense of etiquette; and Heine
would certainly reply to the Emperor, as under the same circumstances
he replied to the visionary Barbarossa, that that gentleman had better
go home again, that during his long absence Emperors had become
unnecessary, and that, after all, sceptres and crowns made admirable
playthings for monkeys.

“We are founding a democracy of gods,” he wrote in 1834, “all equally
holy, blessed and glorious. You desire simple clothing, ascetic morals,
and unseasoned enjoyments; we, on the contrary, desire nectar and
ambrosia, purple mantles, costly perfumes, pleasure and splendour,
dances of laughing nymphs, music and plays.--Do not be angry, you
virtuous republicans; we answer all your reproaches in the words
of one of Shakespeare’s fools: ‘Dost thou think, because thou art
virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’” What could an austere
republican, a Puritanic Liberal, who scorned the vision of roses and
myrtles and sugar-plums all round, say to this? Börne answered, “I
can be indulgent to the games of children, indulgent to the passions
of a youth, but when on the bloody day of battle a boy who is chasing
butterflies gets between my legs; when at the day of our greatest
need, and we are calling aloud on God, the young coxcomb beside us in
the church sees only the pretty girls, and winks and flirts--then, in
spite of all our philosophy and humanity, we may well grow angry....
Heine, with his sybaritic nature, is so effeminate that the fall of a
rose-leaf disturbs his sleep; how, then, should he rest comfortably
on the knotty bed of freedom? Where is there any beauty without a
fault? Where is there any good thing without its ridiculous side?
Nature is seldom a poet and never rhymes; let him whom her rhymeless
prose cannot please turn to poetry!” Börne was right; Heine was not
the man to plan a successful revolution, or defend a barricade, or
edit a popular democratic newspaper, or represent adequately a radical
constituency--all this was true. Let us be thankful that it was true;
Börnes are ever with us, and we are grateful: there is but one Heine.

The same complexity of nature that made Heine an artist made him a
humorist. But it was a more complicated complexity now, a cosmic game
between the real world and the ideal world; he could go no farther.
The young Catullus of 1825, with his fiery passions crushed in the
wine-press of life and yielding such divine ambrosia, soon lost his
faith in passion. The militant soldier in the liberation-war of
humanity of 1835 soon ceased to flourish his sword. It was only with
the full development of his humour, when his spinal cord began to fail
and he had taken up his position as a spectator of life, that Heine
attained the only sort of unity possible to him--the unity that comes
of a recognized and accepted lack of unity. In the lambent flames of
this unequalled humour--“the smile of Mephistopheles passing over
the face of Christ”--he bathed all the things he counted dearest; to
its service he brought the secret of his poet’s nature, the secret
of speaking with a voice that every heart leaps up to answer. It is
scarcely the humour of Aristophanes, though it is a greater force, even
in moulding our political and social ideals, than Börne knew; it is
oftener a modern development of the humour of the mad king and the fool
in “Lear”--that humour which is the last concentrated word of the human
organism under the lash of Fate.

And if it is still asked why Heine is so modern, it can only be said
that these discords out of which his humour exhaled are those which we
have nearly all of us known, and that he speaks with a voice that seems
to arise from the depth of our own souls. He represents our period of
transition; he gazed, from what seemed the vulgar Pisgah of his day,
behind on an Eden that was for ever closed, before on a promised land
he should never enter. While with clear sight he announced things to
come, the music of the past floated up to him; he brooded wistfully
over the vision of the old Olympian gods, dying, amid faint music of
cymbals and flutes, forsaken, in the mediæval wilderness; he heard
strange sounds of psaltries and harps, the psalms of Israel, the voice
of Princess Sabbath, across the waters of Babylon.--In a few years
this significance of Heine will be lost; that it is not yet lost the
eagerness with which his books are read and translated sufficiently
testifies.




WHITMAN.


I.

If we put aside imaginative writers--Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte,
and Mark Twain--America has produced three men of world-wide
significance.[5] These three belong to the same corner of the
continent; they form a culminating series, and at the same time they
complement each other. It is difficult to consider one of them without
throwing a glance at the others.

[5] The significance of Lowell, a great writer unquestionably, seems to
be chiefly national.

Emerson comes first. In Emerson, after two hundred years, Puritanism
seems, for the first time, to have found voice. The men of Banbury
and Amsterdam were too much distracted by the outer world to succeed
in finding adequate artistic expression for the joys that satisfied
them and the spirit that so powerfully moved them. They have been the
sport of their enemies, and have come down to us in literature as a
set of sour fanatics. It was not until the seed was carried over sea,
to germinate slowly and peacefully in New England, that at length
it broke into flower, and that we know clearly that union of robust
freedom and mystic exaltation which lies at the heart of Puritanism. In
his calm and austere manner--born of the blood that had passed through
the veins of six generations of Puritan ministers--Emerson overturned
the whole of tradition. “A world in the hand,” he said, with cheery,
genial scepticism, “is worth two in the bush.” With gentle composure,
with serene hilarity, perhaps with an allusion to the roses that
“make no mention of former roses,” he posited the absolute right of
the individual to adjudicate in religion, in marriage, in the State.
Even he himself, while able, like Spinoza and Goethe, to live by
self-regulating laws that are death to men of less sanity, could not
always in his peaceful haunts at Concord recognize or allow the fruits
of his doctrines.

Emerson was a man of the study; he seems to have known the world as in
a _camera obscura_ spread out before him on a table. He never seems
to come, or to be capable of coming, into direct relations with other
men or with Nature. Thoreau, an original and solitary spirit, born
amid the same influences as Emerson, but of different temperament,
resolved to go out into the world, to absorb Nature and the health of
Nature: “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not
wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its
lowest terms.” So he went into Walden Woods and built himself a hut,
and sowed beans, and grew strangely familiar with the lives of plants
and trees, of birds and beasts and fishes, and with much else besides.
This period of self-dependent residence by Walden Pond has usually been
regarded as the chief episode in Thoreau’s life. Doubtless it was,
in the case of a man who spent his whole life in a small New England
town, and made the very moderate living that he needed by intermittent
work at pencil-making, teaching, land-surveying, magazine-writing,
fence-building, or whitewashing. Certainly it was this experience
which gave form and character to the activities of his life, and the
book in which he recorded his experiences created his fame. But in the
experience itself there was nothing of heroic achievement. One would
rather say that in the Walden episode Thoreau has vindicated the place
of such an experience in all education. Every one, for some brief
period in early life, should be thrown on his own resources in the
solitudes of Nature, to enter into harmonious relations with himself,
and to realize the full scope of self-reliance. For the man or woman
to whom this experience has never been given, the world must hold many
needless mysteries and not a few needless miseries.

There was in this man a curious mingling of wildness and austerity,
which Mr. Burroughs, in the most discriminating estimate of him yet
made, traces to his ancestry. On the paternal side he was French; his
privateering grandfather came from Jersey: “that wild revolutionary
cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity and hirsuteness
are French.” But on the mother’s side he was of Scotch and New
English Puritan stock. In person he was rather undersized, with
“huge Emersonian nose,” and deep-set bluish-grey eyes beneath large
overhanging brows; prominent pursed-up lips, a weak receding chin, “a
ruddy weather-beaten face, which reminds one of some shrewd and honest
animal’s.” He was a vigorous pedestrian; he had sloping shoulders, long
arms, short legs, large hands and feet--the characteristics, for the
most part, of an anthropoid ape. His hands were frequently clenched,
and there was an air of concentrated energy about him; otherwise
nothing specially notable, and he was frequently supposed “a pedlar of
small wares.” He possessed, as his friend Emerson remarked, powers
of observation which seemed to indicate additional senses: “he saw
as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a
photographic register of all he saw and heard.”

It has been claimed for Thoreau by some of his admirers, never by
himself, that he was a man of science, a naturalist. Certainly, in some
respects, he had in him the material for an almost ideal naturalist.
His peculiar powers of observation, and habits of noting and recording
natural facts, his patience, his taste for spending his days and nights
in the open air, seem to furnish everything that is required. Nor would
his morbid dislike of dissection have been any serious bar, for the
least worked but by no means the least important portion of natural
history is the study of living forms, and for this Thoreau seems to
have been peculiarly adapted; he had acquired one of the rarest of
arts, that of approaching birds, beasts and fishes, and exciting no
fear. There are all sorts of profoundly interesting investigations
which only such a man can profitably undertake. But that right question
which is at least the half of knowledge was hidden from Thoreau; he
seems to have been absolutely deficient in scientific sense. His bare,
impersonal records of observations are always dull and unprofitable
reading; occasionally he stumbles on a good observation, but, not
realizing its significance, he never verifies it or follows it up.
His science is that of a fairly intelligent schoolboy--a counting of
birds’ eggs and a running after squirrels. Of the vital and organic
relationships of facts, or even of the existence of such relationships,
he seems to have no perception. Compare any of his books with, for
instance, Belt’s “Naturalist in Nicaragua,” or any of Wallace’s
books: for the men of science, in their spirit of illuminating
inquisitiveness, all facts are instructive; in Thoreau’s hands they are
all dead. He was not a naturalist: he was an artist and a moralist.

He was born into an atmosphere of literary culture, and the great
art he cultivated was that of framing sentences. He desired to make
sentences which would “suggest far more than they say,” which would
“lie like boulders on the page, up and down or across, not mere
repetition, but creation, and which a man might sell his ground
or cattle to build,” sentences “as durable as a Roman aqueduct.”
Undoubtedly he succeeded; his sentences frequently have all the
massive and elemental qualities that he desired. They have more; if
he knew little of the architectonic qualities of style, there is a
keen exhilarating breeze blowing about these boulders, and when we
look at them they have the grace and audacity, the happy, natural
extravagance of fragments of the finest Decorated Gothic on the site
of a fourteenth century abbey. He was in love with the things that
are wildest and most untamable in Nature, and of these his sentences
often seem to be a solid artistic embodiment, the mountain side, “its
sublime gray mass, that antique, brownish-gray, Ararat colour,” or the
“ancient, familiar, immortal cricket sound,” the thrush’s song, his
_ranz des vâches_, or the song that of all seemed to rejoice him most,
the clear, exhilarating, braggart, clarion-crow of the cock. Thoreau’s
favourite reading was among the Greeks, Pindar, Simonides, the Greek
Anthology, especially Æschylus, and a later ancient, Milton. There
is something of his paganism in all this, his cult of the aboriginal
health-bearing forces of Nature. His paganism, however unobtrusive, was
radical and genuine. It was a paganism much earlier than Plato, and
which had never heard of Christ.

Thoreau was of a piece; he was at harmony with himself, though it
may be that the elements that went to make up the harmony were few.
The austerity and exhilaration and simple paganism of his art were
at one with his morality. He was, at the very core, a preacher; the
morality that he preached, interesting in itself, is, for us, the
most significant thing about him. Thoreau was, in the noblest sense
of the word, a Cynic. The school of Antisthenes is not the least
interesting of the Socratic schools, and Thoreau is perhaps the
finest flower that that school has ever yielded. He may not have been
aware of his affinities, but it will help us if we bear them in mind.
The charm that Diogenes exercised over men seems to have consisted
in his peculiarly fresh and original intellect, his extravagant
independence and self-control, his coarse and effective wit. Thoreau
sat in his jar at Walden with the same originality, independence, and
sublime contentment; but his wisdom was suave and his wit was never
coarse--exalted, rather, into a perennial humour, flashing now and
then into divine epigram. A life in harmony with Nature, the culture
of joyous simplicity, the subordination of science to ethics--these
were the principles of Cynicism, and to these Thoreau was always true.
“Every day is a festival,” said Diogenes, and Metrocles rejoiced that
he was happier than the Persian king. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin
and have it all to myself,” said Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet
cushion.” “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.... It is
life near the bone, where it is sweetest.... Money is not required to
buy one necessary of the soul.” He had “travelled much in Concord.”
“Methinks I should be content to sit at the back-door in Concord under
the poplar tree for ever.” Such utterances as these strewn throughout
Thoreau’s pages--and the saying in the last days of the dying man to
the youth who would talk to him about a future world, “One world at
a time”--are full, in the uncorrupted sense, of the finest cynicism.
Diogenes, seeing a boy drink out of his hand, threw away his cup;
Thoreau had an interesting mineral specimen as a parlour ornament, but
it needed dusting every day, and he threw it away: it was not worth
its keep. The Cynics seem to have been the first among the Greeks to
declare that slavery is opposed to nature. Thoreau not only carried his
independence so far as to go to prison rather than pay taxes to Church
or State--“the only government that I recognize is the power that
establishes justice in the land”--but in 1859, when John Brown lay in
prison in Virginia, Thoreau was the one man in America to recognize the
greatness of the occasion and to stand up publicly on his side: “Think
of him!--of his rare qualities!--such a man as it takes ages to make,
and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any
party. A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted
land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant;
sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to
which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!”

Every true Cynic is, above all, a moralist and a preacher. Thoreau
could never be anything else; that was, in the end, his greatest
weakness. This unfailing ethereality, this perpetual challenge of
the acridity and simplicity of Nature, becomes at last hypernatural.
Thoreau breakfasts on the dawn: it is well; but he dines on the rainbow
and sups on the Aurora borealis. Of Nature’s treasure more than half is
man. Thoreau, with his noble Cynicism, had, as he thought, driven life
into a corner, but he had to confess that of all phenomena his own race
was to him the most mysterious and undiscoverable. He writes finely:
“The whole duty of man may be expressed in one line: Make to yourself a
perfect body;” but this appears to be a purely intellectual intuition.
He had a fine insight into the purity of sex and of all natural animal
functions, from which we excuse ourselves of speaking by falsely saying
they are trifles. “We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of
the necessary functions of human nature;” but he is not bold to justify
his insight. He welcomed Walt Whitman, at the very first, as the
greatest democrat the world had seen, but he himself remained a natural
aristocrat. “He was a man devoid of compassion,” remarks Mr. Burroughs,
“devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as
those words are generally understood.” He had learnt something of the
mystery of Nature, but the price of his knowledge was ignorance of his
fellows. The chief part of life he left untouched.

Yet all that he had to give he gave fully and ungrudgingly; and it was
of the best and rarest. We shall not easily exhaust the exhilaration
of it. “We need the tonic of wildness.” Thoreau has heightened for us
the wildness of Nature, and his work--all written, as we need not be
told, in the open air--is full of this tonicity; it is a sort of moral
quinine, and, like quinine under certain circumstances, it leaves a
sweet taste behind.


II.

Whitman has achieved the rarest of all distinctions: he has been placed
while yet alive by the side of the world’s greatest moral teachers,
beside Jesus and Socrates--

              “the latter Socrates,
    Greek to the core, yet Yankee too.”

And his biographer records briefly his conviction that this man was
“perhaps the most advanced nature the world has yet produced.” Yet the
facts of his life are few and simple. He was born in May, 1819, on the
shores of the great south bay of Long Island. Like Bret Harte, who has
given classic expression to the young life of Western America, Whitman
is half Dutch, and this ancestral fact is significant. The well-known
portrait prefixed to “Leaves of Grass” shows him with an expression
like his father’s; in later life he bears a singular resemblance to
his mother as she is represented in Bucke’s book. He himself, we are
told, makes much of the women of his ancestry. “I estimate three
leading sources and formative stamps of my own character,”--in his
own words--“the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away
Netherlands, for one (doubtless the best); the subterranean tenacity
and central bony structure (obstinacy, wilfulness) which I get from my
paternal English elements, for another; and the Long Island birth-spot,
sea-shores, childhood’s scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and
New York--with, I suppose, my experiences afterwards in the Secession
outbreak--for third.” His mother, he wrote, was to him “the ideal
woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the
best.”

For thirty years the youth set himself to learn the nature of the
world. There could be no better education; he has described its
elementary stages, by barnyard and roadside, in “There was a child went
forth.” The same large receptiveness still went with him, as he was by
turn teacher, printer, journalist, government clerk, and always, and
above all, loafer. He loafed year after year in Broadway, on Fulton
Ferry, on the omnibuses talking to the drivers, in the workshops
talking to the artisans. His physical health was perfect; he earned
enough to live on; he felt himself the equal of highest or lowest; he
drank of the great variegated stream of life before him from every
cup. His culture was, in its own way, as large and as sincere as
Goethe’s. Of books, indeed, he knew little; he was equally ignorant
of science, of philosophy, of the fine arts; he appears to have been
content--for his own ends wisely content--with elemental and mostly
ancient utterances of the race, as the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, the
Nibelungenlied. And by-and-by, in 1855, when this new personality, with
its wide and deep roots, had become organized, Walt Whitman, at the
age of thirty-six, himself printed and published a little book called
“Leaves of Grass.”

After this there was but one fresh formative influence in Whitman’s
life, but without it his life and his work would both have suffered an
immense lack. What had chiefly characterized him so far had been his
audacious _nonchalance_, the frank and absolute egotism of a healthy
Olympian schoolboy. In 1860 the Civil War began; from 1862 to 1865
Whitman nursed the sick and wounded at Washington. During that period
of three years (broken by an attack of hospital malaria, the first
illness of his life, contracted in the discharge of these self-imposed
duties) he visited and tended nearly 100,000 men, and the personal
presence of the man, his inexhaustible love and sympathy, were of even
more worth than the manifold small but precious services that he was
enabled to render. He has himself given a simple and noble record of
his work in the “Memoranda” included in “Specimen Days and Collect,”
and in “Drum Taps,” a still more precious and intimate record of his
experiences. From this period a deep tenderness, a divine compassion
for all things human, is never absent from Whitman’s work; it becomes
more predominant than even his superb egotism. It is this element in
his large emotional nature, brought to full maturity by these war
experiences, which so many persons have felt thrilling through the
man’s whole personality, and which probably explains in some measure
the devotion he has inspired. Whitman went to Washington young, in
the perfection of virile physical energy (“He is a _Man_,” said the
shrewd Lincoln, to whom Whitman was unknown, as he chanced to see
him through a window once); he came away old and enfeebled, having
touched the height of life, to walk henceforth a downward path.
Physically impressive, however, at that time and always, he remained.
He is described, after this time (chiefly by Dr. Bucke), as six feet
in height, weighing nearly two hundred pounds; with eyebrows highly
arched; eyes light blue, rather small, dull and heavy (this point is
of some interest, bearing in mind that with exceptional creative
imagination large bright eyes are associated); full-sized mouth, with
full lips; large handsome ears, and senses exceptionally acute. The
peculiar complexion of his face, Bucke described as a bright maroon
tint; that of his body “a delicate but well-marked rose colour,”
unlike the English or Teutonic stock; his gait an elephantine roll.
“No description,” his Boswellian biographer, Dr. Bucke, again speaks
(and Mr. Kennedy, a later and equally Boswellian biographer, supplies
confirmatory details), “can give any idea of the extraordinary
physical attractiveness of the man,” even upon those who came in
contact with him for a moment. In 1873 he had a stroke of paralysis
(left hemiplegia), and for three years there seemed little promise of
recovery. The return to health was slow and incomplete. In those years
he spent much time bathing, or naked in the open air--“hanging clothes
on a rail near by, keeping old broad-brim straw on head and easy shoes
on feet”--and considered that that counted for much in his restoration
to health. “Perhaps,” he adds, “he or she to whom the free exhilarating
ecstasy of nakedness in nature has never been eligible, has not really
known what purity is--nor what faith or art or health really is.”

It is not possible to apprehend this man’s work unless the man’s
personality is apprehended. Every great book contains the precious
life-blood of a master-spirit, and no book throbs with a more vivid
personal life than “Leaves of Grass.” It is the whole outcome of
a whole man, audacious and unrepentant, who has here set down the
emotional reverberations of a manifold life. “For only,” according to
his own large saying,

    “For only at last, after many years, after chastity, friendship,
        procreation, prudence and nakedness,
    After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
    After a loosened throat, after absorbing eras, temperaments, races,
        after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
    After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing
        obstructions,
    After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man,
        a woman, the divine power to speak words.”


III.

Of art, in the conventional sense of the word, there is not much in
Whitman. If we wish to approach him as an artist, J. F. Millet probably
helps us to understand him, more than any other artist in foreign
fields and lands. Millet has a deep and close relationship to Whitman.
At first sight, their work is curiously unlike: Whitman, in a great
new country, delighting in every manifestation of joy and youth and
hope; Millet, the child of an older and colder country, in love with
age and suffering and toil. Yet in essentials it is identical. Even
personally, it is said, Millet recalled Whitman.[6] Judging from the
representations of him, Millet, in his prime, was a colossal image of
manly beauty--deep-chested, muscular, erect, the quiet, penetrating
blue eyes, the delicately expressive eyelids, the large nose and
dilating sensitive nostrils, the firm mouth and jaw, the thick and
dark brown beard. The consumptive artist--a Keats or a Thoreau--craves
for health and loveliness; he turns shuddering from all that is not
pleasant. It is only these men, heroic incarnations of health, who are
strong enough to look sanely upon age and toil and suffering, and equal
to the prodigious expense of spirit of writing “Leaves of Grass” with a
heart laden with memories of Washington hospitals.

[6] See an interesting paper of “Recollections of J. F. Millet” in
the “Century,” May, 1889, to which I am indebted for several of the
painter’s utterances here quoted.

Millet and Whitman have, each in his own domain, made the most earnest,
thorough, and successful attempts of modern times to bring the Greek
spirit into art, the same attempt which Jan Steen, a great artist whom
we scarcely yet rate at his proper value, made in seventeenth century
Holland. It is not by the smooth nudities of a Bouguereau or a Leighton
that we reach Hellenism. The Greek spirit is the simple, natural,
beautiful interpretation of the life of the artist’s own age and people
under his own sky, as shown especially in the human body. It cannot be
the same in two ages or in two lands. One little incident mentioned
by Madame Millet to a friend is suggestive, “of Millet compelling her
to wear the same shirt for an uncomfortably long time; not to paint
the dirt, as his early critics would have us believe, but that the
rough linen should simplify its folds and take the form of the body,
that he might give a fresher and stronger accent to those qualities he
so loved, the garment becoming, as it were, a part of the body, and
expressing, as he has said, even more than the nude, the larger and
simpler forms of Nature.” There is the genuine Hellenic spirit, working
in a different age and under a different sky. Millet felt that for him
it was not true to paint the naked body, and at the same time that
the body alone was the supremely interesting thing to paint. In the
“Sower” we see this spirit expressed in the highest form which Millet
ever reached--the grace of natural beauty and strength, in no remote
discobolus or gladiator, but in the man of his own country and clime,
a peasant like himself, whose form he had studied from his own in the
mirror in his own studio. The coarse clothes and rough _sabots_ play
the same part in Millet’s work as the bizarre, uncouth words and varied
technical phraseology in Whitman’s; one may call them accidental,
but they are inevitable and necessary accidents. “One must be able,”
Millet said, “to make use of the trivial for the expression of the
sublime.” They both insisted that the artist must deal with the average
and typical, not with the exceptional. They both tried to bring the
largeness and simplicity of Nature into their work, and to suggest more
than they expressed. They both refused to believe any part of Nature
could be other than lovely. “The man who finds any phase or effect in
Nature not beautiful,” said Millet sternly, “the lack is in his own
heart.”

It is not as an artist that Whitman is chiefly interesting to us. It
is true that he has written “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking,”
“When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed,” “This Compost,” and
other fragments from which may be gained a simple and pure æsthetic
joy. Frequently, also, we come across phrases which reveal a keen
perception of the strangeness and beauty of things, lines that
possess a simplicity and grandeur scarcely less than Homeric; thus,
“the noiseless splash of sunrise;” or of the young men bathing, who
“float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun.” But such
results are accidental, and outside the main purpose. For that very
reason they have at times something of the divine felicity, unforeseen
and incalculable, of Nature; yet always, according to a rough but
convenient distinction, it is the poetry of energy rather than the
poetry of art. When Whitman speaks prose, the language of science, he
is frequently incoherent, emotional, unbalanced, with no very just and
precise sense of the meaning or words or the structure of reasoned
language.[7] It is clear that in this man the moral in its largest
sense--that is to say, the personality and its personal relations--is
more developed than the scientific; and that on the æsthetic side the
artist is merged in the mystic, wrapt in emotional contemplation of a
cosmic whole. What we see, therefore, is a manifold personality seeking
expression for itself in a peculiarly flexible and responsive medium.
It is a deep as well as a superficial resemblance that these chants
bear to the Scriptures of the old Hebrews--as Isaiah or the Book of
Job--wherein also the writer becomes an artist, and also absorbs all
available science, but where his purpose is the personal expression
of a moral and religious conception of life and the world. Whitman
has invented a name for the person who occupies this rare and, in the
highest degree, significant position; he calls him the “Answerer.” It
is not the function of answerers, like that of philosophers, to arrange
the order and limits of ideas, for they have to settle what ideas are
or are not to exist; nor is it theirs, like the singers, to celebrate
the ostensible things of the world, or to seek out imaginative forms,
for they are “not followers of beauty, but the august masters of
beauty.” The answerer is, in short, the maker of ideals.

[7] I think this defective scientific perception is perhaps as
responsible as any failure of moral insight for the vigorous manner in
which an element of “manly love” flourishes in “Calamus” and elsewhere.
Whitman is hardy enough to assert that he expects it will to a large
extent take the place of love between the sexes. “Manly love,” even in
its extreme form, is certainly Greek, as is the degradation of women
with which it is always correlated; yet the much slighter degradation
of women in modern times Whitman sincerely laments.

Whitman will not minimize the importance of the answerer’s mission. “I,
too,” he exclaims, “following many and followed by many, inaugurate
a religion.” If we wish to understand Walt Whitman, we must have
some conception of this religion. We shall find that two great and
contradictory conceptions dominate his work; although in his thoughts,
as in his modes of expression, it is not possible to find any strongly
marked progression.

The “Song of Myself” is the most complete utterance of Whitman’s first
great conception of life.

    “I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
    And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
    And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”

The absolute unity of matter and spirit, and all which that unity
involves, is the dominant conception of this first and most
characteristic period. “If the body were not the soul,” he asks, “what
is the soul?” This is Whitman’s naturalism; it is the re-assertion of
the Greek attitude on a new and larger foundation. “Let it stand as an
indubitable truth, which no inquiries can shake, that the mind of man
is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God, that he cannot
conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted,
foul, impure and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly environed
by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness.”
That is the fundamental thought of Christian tradition set down in the
“Institutes,” clearly and logically, by the genius of Calvin. It is
the polar opposite of Whitman’s thought, and therefore for Whitman the
moral conception of duty has ceased to exist.

    “I give nothing as duties,
    What others give as duties I give as living impulses.
    (Shall I give the heart’s action as a duty?)”

Morality is thus the normal activity of a healthy nature, not the
product either of tradition or of rationalism.

“Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally
right”--this, it has been said, is the maxim on which Whitman’s
morality is founded, and it is the morality of Aristotle. But no Greek
ever asserted and illustrated it with such emphatic iteration.

From the days when the Greek spirit found its last embodiment in
the brief songs, keen or sweet, of the “Anthology,” the attitude
which Whitman represents in the “Song of Myself” has never lacked
representatives. Throughout the Middle Ages those strange haunting
echoes to the perpetual chant of litany and psalm, the Latin
student-songs, float across all Europe with their profane and gay
paganism, their fresh erotic grace, their “In taberna quando sumus,”
their “Ludo cum Cæcilia,” their “Gaudeamus igitur.” In the sane and
lofty sensuality of Boccaccio, as it found expression in the history
of Alaciel and many another wonderful story, and in Gottfried of
Strasburg’s assertion of human pride and passion in “Tristan and
Isolde,” the same strain changed to a stronger and nobler key. Then
came the great wave of the Renaissance through Italy and France and
England, filling art and philosophy with an exaltation of physical
life, and again later, in the movements that centre around the French
Revolution, an exaltation of arrogant and independent intellectual
life. But all these manifestations were sometimes partial, sometimes
extravagant; they were impulses of the natural man surging up in
rebellion against the dominant Christian temper; they were, for the
most part consciously, of the nature of reactions. We feel that there
is a fatal lack about them which Christianity would have filled; only
in Goethe is the antagonism to some extent reconciled. Beneath the
vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy
method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some
strange and exquisite flower of _ascêsis_--some Francis or Theresa or
Fénelon--a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making
itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physical--in those
everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected--the very
foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision
of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.

No one in the last century expressed this tendency more impressively
and thoroughly, with a certain insane energy, than William Blake--the
great chained spirit whom we see looking out between the bars of his
prison-house with those wonderful eyes. Especially in “The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell,” in which he seems to gaze most clearly “through
narrow chinks of his cavern,” he has set forth his conviction that
“first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to
be expunged,” and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man, as it is, infinite.” This most
extraordinary book is, in his own phraseology, the Bible of Hell.

Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty,
had boldly emerged. At the time that “Leaves of Grass” sought the light
Tourgueneff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern
militant spirit of science, positive and audacious--a spirit marked
also, as Hinton pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay
in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional
forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and
technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and a new
civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to
him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific
current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to
represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and co-ordinated cosmos,
tenoned and mortised in granite:

    “All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me,
    Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”

That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably
true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without
understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained
from the philosophy of Hegel--with its conception of the universe
as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but
transient perturbations--with which he had a second-hand acquaintance,
that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his
work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scientific conceptions
which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie
behind “Children of Adam.”

This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality, rejoicing with a joy as
massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio’s, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio
never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the
world--saying, not: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” but,
with Clifford: “Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive
together”--is certainly Whitman’s most significant and impressive mood.
Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity as his never-changing
attitude towards death. We know the “fearful thing” that Claudio, in
Shakespeare’s play, knew as death:

        “to die and go we know not where;
    To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
    ... to be worse than worst
    Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
    Imagine howling!”

And all the Elizabethans in that age of splendid and daring life--even
Raleigh and Bacon--felt that same shudder at the horror and mystery of
death. Always they felt behind them some vast mediæval charnel-house,
gloomy and awful, and the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance
quail when they think of it. There was in this horror something of
the child’s vast and unreasoned dread of darkness and mystery, and it
scarcely survived the scientific and philosophic developments of the
seventeenth century. Whitman’s attitude is not the less deep-rooted
and original. For he is not content to argue, haughtily indifferent,
with Epicurus and Epictetus, that death can be nothing to us, because
it is no evil to lose what we shall never miss. Whitman will reveal
the loveliness of death. We feel constantly in “Leaves of Grass” as
to some extent we feel before the “Love and Death” and some other
pictures of one of the greatest of English artists. “I will show,” he
announces, “that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.” It must
not be forgotten that Whitman speaks not merely from the standpoint
of the most intense and vivid delight in the actual world, but that
he possessed a practical familiarity with disease and death which has
perhaps never before fallen to the lot of a great writer. At the end of
the “Song of Myself” he bequeaths himself to the dust, to grow from the
grass he loves:

    “If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles,
    You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
    But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
    And filter and fibre your blood.”

And to any who find that dust but a poor immortality, he would say
with Schopenhauer, “Oho! do you know, then, what dust is?” The vast
chemistry of the earth, the sweetness that is rooted in what we call
corruption, the life that is but the leavings of many deaths, is nobly
uttered in “This Compost,” in which he reaches beyond the corpse that
is good manure to sweet-scented roses, to the polished breasts of
melons; or again, in the noble elegy, “Pensive on her dead gazing,” on
those who died during the war. In his most perfectly lyrical poem, “Out
of the Cradle endlessly rocking,” Whitman has celebrated death--“that
strong and delicious word”--with strange tenderness; and never has the
loveliness of death been sung in a more sane and virile song than the
solemn death-carol in “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard bloomed”:

    “Dark mother, always gliding near with soft feet,
    Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
    Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
    I bring thee a song, that when thou must indeed come, come
        unfalteringly.

           *       *       *       *       *

    “Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
    Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
        prairies wide,
    Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
    I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death.”

Whitman’s second great thought on life lies in his egoism. His intense
sense of individuality was marked from the first; it is emphatically
asserted in the “Song of Myself”--

    “And nothing, not God, is Greater to one than one’s self is”--

where it lies side by side with his first great thought. But even in
the “Song of Myself” it asserts a separate existence:

    “This day before dawn I ascended a hill and looked at the crowded
        heaven,
    And I said to my spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs,
        and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we
        be filled and satisfied then?_
    And my spirit said, _No, we but level that lift to pass and continue
        beyond._”

In the end he once, at least, altogether denies his first thought; he
alludes to that body which he had called the equal of the soul, or even
the soul itself, as excrement:

    “Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burned, or reduced
        to powder, or buried,
    My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.”

The first great utterance was naturalistic; this egoism is
spiritualistic. It is the sublime apotheosis of Yankee self-reliance.
“I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God,
beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.” This became the dominant
conception in Whitman’s later work, and fills his universe at length.
Of a God, although he sometimes uses the word to obtain emphasis, he
at no time had any definite idea. Nature, also, was never a living
vascular personality for him; when it is not a mere aggregate of
things, it is an order, sometimes a moral order. Also he wisely refuses
with unswerving consistency to admit an abstract Humanity; of “man”
he has nothing to say; there is nothing anywhere in the universe for
him but individuals, undying, everlastingly aggrandizing individuals.
This egoism is practical, strenuous, moral; it cannot be described as
religious. Whitman is lacking--and in this respect he comes nearer to
Goethe than to any other great modern man--in what may be possibly the
disease of “soul,” the disease that was so bitterly bewailed by Heine.
Whitman was congenitally deficient in “soul;” he is a kind of Titanic
Undine. “I never had any particular religious experiences,” he told
Bucke, “never felt the need of spiritual regeneration;” and although he
describes himself as “pleased with the earnest words of the sweating
Methodist preacher, impressed seriously at the camp-meeting,” we
know what weight to give to this utterance when we read elsewhere, of
animals:

    “They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
    They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
    They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
    Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning
        things,
    Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
        years ago,
    Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”

We may detect this lack of “soul” in his attitude towards music; for,
in its highest development, music is the special exponent of the modern
soul in its complexity, its passive resignation, its restless mystical
ardours. That Whitman delighted in music is clear; it is equally clear,
from the testimony of his writings and of witnesses, that the music he
delighted in was simple and joyous melody as in Rossini’s operas; he
alludes vaguely to symphonies, but

            “when it is a grand opera,
    Ah! this indeed is music--this suits me.”

That Whitman could have truly appreciated Beethoven, or understood
Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” is not conceivable.

With Whitman’s egoism is connected his strenuousness. There is a
stirring sound of trumpets always among these “Leaves of Grass.” This
man may have come, as he tells us, to inaugurate a new religion, but he
has few or no marks upon him of that mysticism--that Eastern spirit of
glad renunciation of the self in a larger self--which is of the essence
of religion. He is at the head of a band of sinewy and tan-faced
pioneers, with pistols in their belts and sharp-edged axes in their
hands:

    “And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,
    And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”

This strenuousness finds expression in the hurried jolt and bustle of
the lines, always alert, unresting, ever starting afresh. Passages of
sweet and peaceful flow are hard to find in “Leaves of Grass,” and the
more precious when found. Whitman hardly succeeds in the expression
of joy; to feel exquisitely the pulse of gladness a more passive and
feminine sensibility is needed, like that we meet with in “Towards
Democracy;” we must not come to this focus of radiant energy for repose
or consolation.

This egoism, this strenuousness, reaches at the end to heights of
sublime audacity. When we read certain portions of “Leaves of Grass” we
seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing for ever along
the cosmic roads, stalwart Pioneers of the Universe. There are superb
young men, athletic girls, splendid and savage old men--for the weak
seem to have perished by the roadside--and they radiate an infinite
energy, an infinite joy. It is truly a tremendous diastole of life to
which the crude and colossal extravagance of this vision bears witness;
we weary soon of its strenuous vitality, and crave for the systole of
life, for peace and repose. It is not strange that the immense faith of
the prophet himself grows hesitant and silent at times before “all the
meanness and agony without end,” and doubts that it is an illusion and
“that may-be identity beyond the grave a beautiful fable only.” Here
and again we meet this access of doubt, and even amid the faith of the
“Prayer of Columbus” there is a tremulous, pathetic note of sadness.

Yet there is one keen sword with which Whitman is always able to cut
the knot of this doubt--the sword of love. He has but to grasp love
and comradeship, and he grows indifferent to the problem of identity
beyond the grave. “He a-hold of my hand has completely satisfied me.”
He discovers at last that love and comradeship--adhesiveness--is, after
all, the main thing, “base and finale, too, for all metaphysics;”
deeper than religion, underneath Socrates and underneath Christ. With
a sound insight he finds the roots of the most universal love in the
intimate and physical love of comrades and lovers.

    “I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
    How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over
        upon me,
    And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to
        my bare-stript heart,
    And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

    “Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
        all the argument of the earth,
    And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
    And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
    And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my
        sisters and lovers,
    And that a kelson of the creation is love.”


IV.

This “love” of Whitman’s is a very personal matter; of an abstract
Man, a _solidaire_ Humanity, he never speaks; it does not appear ever
to have occurred to him that so extraordinary a conception can be
formulated; his relations to men generally spring out of his relations
to particular men. He has touched and embraced his fellows’ flesh; he
has felt throughout his being the mysterious reverberations of the
contact:

    “There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on
        them, and in the contact and odour of them, that pleases the soul
        well,
    All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.”

This personal and intimate fact is the centre from which the whole of
Whitman’s morality radiates. Of an abstract Humanity, it is true, he
has never thought; he has no vision of Nature as a spiritual Presence;
God is to him a word only, without vitality; to Art he is mostly
indifferent; yet there remains this great moral kernel, springing from
the sexual impulse, taking practical root in a singularly rich and
vivid emotional nature, and bearing within it the promise of a city of
lovers and friends.

This moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude
towards sex and the body generally. For the lover there is nothing
in the loved one’s body impure or unclean; a breath of passion has
passed over it, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence
spreads no farther; for the man of strong moral instinct it covers
all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out
to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity;
henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence
and love. “Leaves of Grass” is penetrated by this moral element. How
curiously far this attitude is from the old Christian way we realize
when we turn to those days in which Christianity was at its height, and
see how Saint Bernard with his mild and ardent gaze looked out into
the world of Nature and saw men as “stinking spawn, sacks of dung, the
food of worms.”

But there is another element in Whitman’s attitude--the artistic. It
shows itself in a twofold manner. Whitman came of a vigorous Dutch
stock; these Van Velsors from Holland have fully as large a part in him
as anything his English ancestry gave him, and his Dutch race shows
itself chiefly in his artistic manner. The supreme achievement in art
of the Dutch is their seventeenth century painting. What marked those
Dutch artists was the ineradicable conviction that every action, social
or physiological, of the average man, woman, child, around them might
be, with love and absolute faithfulness, phlegmatically set forth. In
their heroic earthliness they could at no point be repulsed; colour
and light may aureole their work, but the most commonplace things of
Nature shall have the largest nimbus. That is the temper of Dutch art
throughout; no other art in the world has the same characteristics. In
the art of Whitman alone do we meet with it again, impatient indeed and
broken up into fragments, pierced through with shafts of light from
other sources, but still constant and unmistakable. The other artistic
element in Whitman’s attitude is modern; it is almost the only artistic
element by which, unconsciously perhaps, he allies himself to modern
traditions in art instead of breaking through them by his own volcanic
energy--a curious research for sexual imagery in Nature, imagery often
tinged by bizarre and mystical colour. Rossetti occasionally uses
sexual imagery with rare felicity, as in “Nuptial Sleep”:

    “And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
    From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
    So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.”

With still greater beauty and audacity Whitman, in “I sing the body
electric,” celebrates the last abandonment of love:

    “Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate
        dawn,
    Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
    Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-fleshed day.”

Or, again, in the marvellously keen “Faces”--so realistic and so
imaginative--when the “lily’s face” speaks out her longing to be filled
with albescent honey. This man has certainly felt the truth of that
deep saying of Thoreau’s, that for him to whom sex is impure there
are no flowers in Nature. He cannot help speaking of man’s or woman’s
life in terms of Nature’s life, of Nature’s life in terms of man’s;
he mingles them together with an admirably balanced rhythm, as in
“Spontaneous Me.” All the functions of man’s or woman’s life are sweet
to him because they bear about them a savour of the things that are
sweet to him anywhere in the world,

    “Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
    Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves.”

Sometimes when he is on this track he seems to lose himself in mystic
obscurity; and the words in which he records his impressions are mere
patches of morbid colour.

There is a third element in Whitman’s attitude. It is clear that he
had from the outset what may be vaguely called a scientific purpose
in that frank grasp of the body, which has a significance to be
measured by the fierce opposition it aroused, and by the tenacity
with which, in the latest volume of his old age, “November Boughs,”
he still insists that the principle of those lines so gives breath to
the whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been
left unwritten were those lines omitted. He has himself admirably
set this forth in “A Memorandum at a Venture” in “Specimen Days and
Collect.” In religion and politics we have, after a great struggle,
gained the priceless possibility of liberty and sincerity. But the
region of sex is still, like our moral and social life generally, to
a large extent unreclaimed; there still exist barbarous traditions
which mediæval Christianity has helped to perpetuate, so that the
words of Pliny regarding the contaminating touch of a woman, who has
always been regarded as in a peculiar manner the symbol of sex--“Nihil
facile reperiabatur mulierum profluvio magis monstrificum”--are not
even yet meaningless. Why should the sweetening breath of science
be guarded from this spot? Why should not “freedom and faith and
earnestness” be introduced here? Our attitude towards this part of
life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether. To
realize this, read Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” which enshrines,
vividly and unshrinkingly, in a classic form, a certain emotional way
of approaching the body. It narrates the very trivial experiences of a
man and woman on their bridal night. The incidents are nothing; they
are perfectly innocent; the interesting fact about them is the general
attitude which they enfold. The unquestioning faith of the man is that
in setting down the simple daily facts of human life he has drowned
the possibilities of love in filth. And Swift here represents, in an
unflinchingly logical fashion, the opinions, more or less realized,
more or less disguised, of most people even to-day. Cannot these facts
of our physical nature be otherwise set down? Why may we not “keep
as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart?” That
is, in effect, the question which, in “A Memorandum at a Venture,”
Whitman tells us that he undertook to answer. This statement of it was
probably an afterthought; else he would have carried out his attempt
more thoroughly and more uncompromisingly.

For I doubt if even Whitman has fully realized the beauty and purity of
organic life; the scientific element in him was less strong than the
moral, or even the artistic. While his genial poetic manner of grasping
things is of prime importance, the new conceptions of purity are
founded on a scientific basis which must be deeply understood. Swift’s
morbid and exaggerated spiritualism, a legacy of mediævalism--and the
ordinary “common-sense” view is but the unconscious shadow of mediæval
spiritualism--is really founded on ignorance, in other words, on the
traditional religious conceptions of an antique but still surviving
barbarism.

From our modern standpoint of science, opening its eyes anew, the
wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure, the
loathsomeness, if indeed anywhere, lies in the conceptions of
hypertrophied and hyperæsthetic brains. Some who have striven to find
a vital natural meaning in the central sacrament of Christianity have
thought that the Last Supper was an attempt to reveal the divine
mystery of food, to consecrate the loveliness of the mere daily bread
and wine which becomes the life of man. Such sacraments of Nature
are everywhere subtly woven into the texture of men’s bodies. All
loveliness of the body is the outward sign of some vital use.

Doubtless these relationships have been sometimes perceived and their
meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition, but it is only of
recent years that science has furnished them with a rational basis. The
chief and central function of life--the omnipresent process of sex,
ever wonderful, ever lovely, as it is woven into the whole texture of
our man’s or woman’s body--is the pattern of all the process of our
life. At whatever point touched, the reverberation, multiplexly charged
with uses, meanings, and emotional associations of infinite charm, to
the sensitive individual more or less conscious, spreads throughout
the entire organism. We can no longer intrude our crude distinctions
of high and low. We cannot now step in and say that this link in the
chain is eternally ugly and that is eternally beautiful. For irrational
disgust, the varying outcome of individual idiosyncrasy, there is
doubtless still room; it is incalculable, and cannot be reached. But
that rational disgust which was once held to be common property has
received from science its death-blow. In the growth of the sense of
purity, which Whitman, not alone, has annunciated, lies one of our
chief hopes for morals, as well as for art.


V.

Behind “Leaves of Grass” stands the personality of the man Walt
Whitman; that is the charm of the book and its power. It is, in his
own words, the record of a _Person_. A man has here sought to give a
fresh and frank representation of his nature--physical, intellectual,
moral, æsthetic--as he received it, and as it grew in the great field
of the world. Sometimes there is an element in this record which,
while perhaps very American, reminds one of the great Frenchman who
shouted so lustily through his huge brass trumpet, seated on the
apex of the universe in the Avenue d’Eylau. The noble lines to “You
felons on trial in Courts” accompany “To him that was crucified.” Such
rhetorical flourishes do not impair the value of this revelation. The
self-revelation of a human personality is the one supremely precious
and enduring thing. All art is the search for it. The strongest and
most successful of religions were avowedly founded on personalities,
more or less dimly seen. The intimate and candid record of personality
alone gives quickening energy to books. Herein is the might of “Leaves
of Grass.”

In our overstrained civilization the tendency in literature--and in
life as it acts on literature and is again reacted on by it--is, on
the one hand, towards an artificial mode of presentment, that is, a
divorce between the actual and the alleged, a divorce which, in the
language of satire, is often called hypocrisy. On the other hand,
the tendency is towards a singleness of aim and ideal indeed, but a
thin, narrow, super-refined ideal, at the same time rather hysterical
and rather prim. In youth we cannot see through these Tartuffes and
_Précieuses_; when we become grown men and women we feel a great
thirst for Nature, for reality in literature, and we slake it at such
fountains as this of “Leaves of Grass.” Like Antæus of old we bow down
to touch the earth, to come in contact with the great primal energies
of Nature, and to grow strong. We realize that the structure of the
world is indeed built most gloriously on the immense pillars of Hunger
and Love, and we will not seek to deny or to attenuate its foundations.
Presenting a truth so abstract in fresh and living concrete language,
this man, as an Adam in a new Paradise, which is the very world itself,
walks again upon the earth, sometimes with calm complaisance, sometimes
“deliriating” wildly:

    “Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
    Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
    Be not afraid of my body.”

He has tossed “a new gladness and roughness” among men and women. He
has opened a fresh channel of Nature’s force into human life--the
largest since Wordsworth, and more fit for human use--“the amplitude
of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the
great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also.” And in his
vigorous masculine love, asserting his own personality he has asserted
that of all--“By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart of on the same terms.” Charging himself in every place
with contentment and triumph, he embraces all men, as St. Francis in
his sweet, humble, Christian way also embraced them, in the spirit of
audacity, and rankness, and pride. So that all he has written is summed
up in one ejaculation: “How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real is
a human being, himself or herself!”




IBSEN.


The Scandinavian peoples hold to-day a position not unlike that held
at the beginning of the century by Germany. They speak, in various
modified forms, a language which the rest of the world have regarded
as little more than barbarous, and are looked upon generally as an
innocent and primitive folk. Yet they contain centres of intense
literary activity; they have produced novels of a peculiarly fresh
and penetrating realism; and they possess, moreover, a stage on which
great literary works may be performed, and the burning questions of the
modern world be scenically resolved. It is natural that Norway, with
its historical past and literary traditions, should be the chief centre
of this activity, and that a Norwegian should stand forth to-day as the
chief figure of European significance that has appeared in the Teutonic
world of art since Goethe.

To understand Norwegian art--whether in its popular music, with
its extremes of melancholy or hilarity, or in its highly-developed
literature--we must understand the peculiar character of the land
which has produced this people. It is a land having, in its most
characteristic regions, a year of but one day and night--the summer a
perpetual warm sunlit day filled with the aroma of trees and plants,
and the rest of the year a night of darkness and horror; a land
which is the extreme northern limit of European civilization, on the
outskirts of which the great primitive gods still dwell; and where
elves and fairies and mermaids are still regarded, according to the
expression of Jonas Lie, as tame domestic animals. Such an environment
must work mightily on the spirit and temper of the race. As one of the
persons in Björnson’s “Over Ævne” observes--“There is something in
Nature here which challenges whatever is extraordinary in us. Nature
herself here goes beyond all ordinary measure. We have night nearly all
the winter; we have day nearly all the summer, with the sun by day and
by night above the horizon. You have seen it at night half-veiled by
the mists from the sea; it often looks three, even four, times larger
than usual. And then the play of colours on sky, sea, and rock, from
the most glowing red to the softest and most delicate yellow and white!
And then the colours of the Northern Lights on the winter sky, with
their more suppressed kind of wild pictures, yet full of unrest and
forever changing! Then the other wonders of Nature! These millions of
sea-birds, and the wandering processions of fish, stretching for miles!
These perpendicular cliffs that rise directly out of the sea! They are
not like other mountains, and the Atlantic roars round their feet. And
the ideas of the people are correspondingly unmeasured. Listen to their
legends and stories.”

So striking are the contrasts in the Norwegian character that they have
been supposed to be due to the mingling of races; the fair-haired,
blue-eyed Norwegian of the old Sagas, silent and deep-natured, being
modified, now (especially in the north) by the darker, brown-eyed Lapp,
with his weakness of character, vivid imagination, and tendency to
natural mysticism, and, again (especially in the east), by the daring,
practical, energetic Finn.

However this may be, among the Norwegian poets and novelists various
qualities often meet together in striking opposition; wild and
fantastic imagination stands beside an exact realism and a loving
grasp of nature; a tendency to mysticism and symbol beside a healthy
naturalism. We find these characteristics variously combined in Ibsen;
in Björnson, with his virile strength and generous emotions, amid which
a mystic influence now and then appears; in Jonas Lie, with his subtle
and delicate spirit, so intimately national; in Kielland, a realistic
novelist of most dainty and delicate art, beneath which may be heard
the sombre undertone of his sympathy with the weak and the oppressed.
Of these writers, and others only less remarkable, one alone is at all
well known in England, and even he is known exclusively by his early
work, especially by that most delightful of peasant stories, “Arne.” In
Germany the Scandinavian novelists and dramatists have received much
attention, and are widely known through excellent and easily accessible
translations. Yet our English race and speech are even more closely
allied to the northern; our land is studded with easily recognizable
Scandinavian place-names and Scandinavian colonies, whose dialects
are full of genuine Scandinavian words unknown to literary English.
It is not likely that this indifference to the social, political, and
literary history of our northern kinsmen can last much longer.

About 1720 a Danish skipper, one Peter Ibsen, came over from Moen[8]
to Bergen and settled there. He married the daughter of a German who
had likewise emigrated from his own country: these were the poet’s
great-great-grandparents. Peter Ibsen had a son, Henrik Petersen Ibsen,
who was also a ship’s captain. He married a lady whose name is given as
Wenche Dischington, the daughter of a Scotchman naturalized in Norway.
This Henrik Ibsen settled in Skien, and had a son of the same name who
married a German wife. All these Ibsens were sailors. Henrik Ibsen’s
son, Knud Ibsen, the dramatist’s father, like his father married a
wife of German extraction, Maria Cornelia Altenburg, the daughter of a
merchant who had begun life as a sailor.

[8] This island, I may note in passing, is the home of a black-haired
race, very unlike the typical Norsemen, and which has been identified
with those “black strangers” spoken of by the Irish chroniclers who
described the Viking invasions.

This ancestry is very significant. It will be seen that Ibsen is
on both sides predominantly German, and that in his German and
Danish blood there is an interesting Scotch strain. The tendency
to philosophic abstraction and the strenuous earnestness, mingling
with the more characteristically northern imaginative influences,
are explained by this German and Scotch ancestry; it explains also
the peculiarly isolated and yet cosmopolitan attitude which marks
Ibsen--why it is that his works have been so enthusiastically received
and so easily naturalized in Germany, and why, now that they are
beginning to be known, they promise to make so deep an impression in
our own land.

Ibsen’s mother possessed a shy, silent, and solitary nature, which she
imparted to her son. One of her daughters thus describes her: “She
was a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the house, devoted to her
husband and children. She was always sacrificing herself. There was no
bitterness or reproach in her.” The father was of cheerful disposition,
a man of sociable tastes, popular in his circle, but also feared, for
he had a keen wit, and, like his son, he could use it unmercifully.

Knud Ibsen’s eldest son, Henrik,[9] was born at Skien, a busy little
town of some 3,000 inhabitants occupied in the timber trade, on
the 20th March, 1828. “I was born,” the dramatist writes in some
reminiscences published by Mr. Jaeger for the first time, “in a house
in the market-place, Stockmann’s house it was then called. The house
lay right opposite the church with its high steps and large tower.
To the right, in front of the church, stood the town pillory, and to
the left the town-hall, the lock-up, and the ‘madhouse.’ The fourth
side of the market-place was occupied by the Latin school and the town
school. The church lay free in the middle. This prospect was the first
view of the earth that presented itself to my eyes. All buildings;
no green, no rural open landscape.” It was in the church tower that
the baby Henrik received his first conscious and deep impression. The
nursemaid took him up and held him out (to the horror of his mother
below), and he never forgot that new and strange vision of the world
from above. Ibsen goes on to describe the attractions which were held
for him in the gloomy town-hall and the pillory, unused for many years,
a red-brown post of about a man’s height, with a great round knob which
had originally been painted black, but which then looked like a human
face. In front of the post hung an iron chain, and in that an iron
ring which seemed like two small arms ready to clasp the child’s neck
on the least provocation. And then there was the town-hall. That, too,
had high steps like the church, and underneath it was the gaol with its
barred windows: “inside the bars I have seen many pale and dark faces.”
And then there was the “madhouse,” which in its time had really been
used to confine lunatics. That also was barred, but inside the bars the
little window was filled by a massive iron plate with small round holes
like a sieve. This place was said to have been the abode of a famous
criminal who had been branded.

[9] Many books and pamphlets dealing with his life and works have
appeared in Denmark, Sweden and Germany. The chief of these are
Vasenius’s “Henrik Ibsen, ett Skaldeporträtt,” Stockholm, 1882;
Passarge’s “Henrik Ibsen: Ein Beitrag zur neusten Geschichte der
norwegischen Nationalliteratur,” Leipsic, 1883; and H. Jaeger’s “Henrik
Ibsen, 1828-1888,” Copenhagen. The last-named, now translated, is by
far the best.

These early impressions of the dramatist--the church tower, the
pillory, the barred windows, the pale criminals--are of no little
interest. They help to explain for us the sombre and tragic cast,
purely human and reflective, of Ibsen’s character. They explain, too,
the absence in his work of the sea and the forest, of those things
which give such a sweet, wild aroma, now and again, to the work of
Björnson and Lie. The little town, with its active commercial life and
its equally active religious life--for Skien was a centre of pietistic
influence--was such a place as is brought before us in “De Unges
Forbund” and in “Samfundets Stötter,” and it was a fit birthplace for
the author of “Brand.”

Knud Ibsen belonged to the aristocracy of Skien, and his house was a
centre of its social life. When Henrik was eight years old there was an
end of this, for his father became a bankrupt. After the catastrophe
the family retired to a small and humble home outside Skien, where they
lived with a frugality which was in marked contrast with their former
life. There can be no doubt that this sudden change of circumstances,
and the insight which it brought into the social cleavage of a
provincial town, counted for much in Ibsen’s development. It is certain
that at this period his marked individuality began to be perceived.
He did not play like the other children; while they romped in the
yard, he retired into a little inclosure in an alley that led to the
kitchen, and barricaded himself against the heedless incursions of the
younger members of the family. Here he kept guard, not only in summer,
but in the depth of winter. It is clear that even at this early age
Ibsen had reached the point of proud isolation and defiance of his
fellow-citizens which Stockmann ultimately attained. One of his sisters
describes how they used to throw stones and snowballs at his retreat
to make him come out to join their play, but when he could no longer
withstand the attack and yielded to the assailants, he could display no
skill in any kind of sport, and soon retired again to his den. Reading
appears to have been one of his chief occupations there, and Jaeger
assures us that the words which many years afterwards Ibsen put into
the mouth of the little girl Hedwig, who is so pathetic and tender a
figure in one of his latest dramas, “Vildanden,” contain a reminiscence
of childhood. “And do you read the books?” asked Gregers. “Oh, yes,
when I can. But most of them are English, and I can’t read those. But
then I can look at the pictures. There is one big black book, called
Harryson’s ‘History of London;’ it must be a hundred years old, and
that has such a number of pictures in it. First there is a picture of
Death with an hourglass and a girl. I think that is hideous. But then
there are all sorts of other pictures, with churches and castles and
streets and great ships that sail on the sea.” He also amused himself
with pencil and colour-box. Meanwhile he went to school, going through
the usual course and learning a little Latin; he appears to have taken
a special interest in the Biblical instruction. At fourteen he was
confirmed, and the time came for him to make his way in the world.

At this period he wished to become a painter; he devoted himself with
zeal to drawing, and an interest in painting has remained with him, the
formation of an excellent little collection of Renaissance pictures
becoming in later life one of his chief hobbies. In the existing state
of the family means, this career was out of the question, and he was
sent to an apothecary at Grimstad, a little town containing at that
time not more than 800 inhabitants. The apothecary’s shop, Jaeger
remarks, is the place where all the loungers meet in the evening to
discuss the events of the day, and doubtless the apothecary’s shop was
an element in the education of the future dramatist. In his interesting
preface to the second edition of “Catilina” he has himself described
the five years of development that he went through in this little town.
He did not wish to become a chemist; he would become a student and
study medicine. At the same time his poetical activity and the eventful
year of 1848 came to arouse in the silent, solitary boy a healthy
interest in the outside world.

It was while reading Sallust and Cicero for his matriculation
examination that he conceived, and wrote at midnight, his first
play, “Catilina.” With the help of two enthusiastic young friends the
tragedy was published and some thirty copies sold--a result which
did not permit of the proposed tour in the East on which the three
friends had decided to expend the profits of the sale. Ibsen was now
in his twenty-second year, and he came up to Christiania to carry
on his studies at the school of Heltberg, who seems to have had a
singularly stimulating influence on young men, and at the university.
Here Ibsen was the comrade of Björnson, Jonas Lie, and others who have
since become famous. At a later date Björnson condensed his youthful
impression of his friend in two vigorous lines:

    “Tense and lean, the colour of gypsum,
    Behind a vast coal-black beard, Henrik Ibsen.”

The period now arrived at which Ibsen’s career was definitely
settled. He had been making several unsuccessful literary attempts at
Christiania, having finally abandoned the intention to study medicine,
when, in 1851, the famous violinist, Ole Bull, who has done so much
to give artistic shape and energy to the modern Norwegian spirit,
gave him an appointment at the National Theatre which he had recently
established at Bergen. Ibsen’s prentice hand was now trained by the
writing of several dramas not included among his published works;
and, like Shakespeare and Molière in somewhat similar circumstances,
he here acquired his mastery of the technical demands of dramatic
form. In 1855 his apprenticeship may be said to have ended, and he
produced “Fru Inger til Östraat” (Dame Inger of Östraat), an historical
prose drama of great energy and concentration. In 1858 he married
Susanna Thoresen, the daughter of a Bergen clergyman, whose second
wife, Magdalene Thoresen, is a well-known authoress. At the same
period he was appointed artistic director of the Norwegian theatre
at Christiania, a post previously occupied by Björnson, who had
just inaugurated the Norwegian peasant novel by the publication of
“Synnöve Solbakken.” In 1864, having acquired the means, Ibsen found it
desirable to quit the somewhat provincial and uncongenial atmosphere of
his native country, and has since lived in Rome, in Ischia, in Dresden,
and at other places, but mainly at Munich, producing on an average a
drama every two years. In 1885 he revisited Norway. Time had brought
its revenges, and he was enthusiastically received everywhere. At
Drontheim he made a remarkable speech to a club of working-men. “Mere
democracy,” he said, “cannot solve the social question. An element of
aristocracy must be introduced into our life. Of course I do not mean
the aristocracy of birth or of the purse, or even the aristocracy of
intellect. I mean the aristocracy of character, of will, of mind.
That only can free us. From two groups will this aristocracy I hope
for come to our people--from our women and our workmen. The revolution
in the social condition, now preparing in Europe, is chiefly concerned
with the future of the workers and the women. In this I place all my
hopes and expectations; for this I will work all my life and with all
my strength.” In private conversation, it is said, Ibsen describes
himself as a Socialist, although he has not identified himself with any
definite school of Socialism.

In personal appearance he is rather short, but impressive and very
vigorous. He has a peculiarly broad and high forehead, with small,
keen, blue-grey eyes “which seem to penetrate to the heart of things.”
His firm and compressed mouth is characteristic of “the man of the iron
will,” as he has been called by a fellow-countryman. Altogether it
is a remarkable and significant face, clear-seeing and alert, with a
decisive energy of will about it that none can fail to recognize. It is
far indeed from the typical “pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning
artist’s face.” In middle age it recalled, rather, the faces of some of
our most distinguished surgeons; as is perhaps meet in the case of a
writer who has used so skilful and daring a scalpel to cut to the core
of social diseases. In society, although he likes talking to the common
people, Ibsen is usually reserved and silent; or his conversation
deals with the most ordinary topics; “he talks like a wholesale
tradesman,” it has been said.

Ibsen’s dramas (excluding two or three which have not been published)
may be conveniently divided into three groups, but the division is a
rough one, for the groups merge one into another; Ibsen’s artistic
development has been gradual and continuous.--1. Historical and
Legendary Dramas, chiefly in Prose: The youthful “Catilina” (written
in 1850, but revised at a later period), which stands by itself, and
contains the germ of much of his later work; “Fru Inger til Östraat”
(Dame Inger of Östraat), 1855, an effective melodramatic play of
great technical skill; “Gildet paa Solhaug” (The Feast at Solhaug),
an historical play of the fourteenth century, written in 1855, and
reprinted in 1883, with a preface explaining its genesis; “Hærmændene
paa Helgeland” (The Warriors at Helgeland), 1858, a noble version of
the Volsunga-Saga, here brought down to more historical times, so as to
present a vivid and human picture of the Viking period; “Kongs-emnerne”
(The Pretenders), 1864, dealing with Norwegian history in the twelfth
century; “Keiser og Galilæer” (Emperor and Galilean), finished in
1873, but begun many years earlier. 2. Dramatic Poems: “Kjærlighedens
Komedie” (Love’s Comedy), 1862; “Brand,” 1866; “Peer Gynt,” 1867. 3.
Social Dramas: “De Unges Forbund” (The Young Men’s League), 1869;
“Samfundets Stötter” (The Pillars of Society), 1877; “Et Dukkehjem”
(A Doll’s House), 1879; “Gengangere” (Ghosts), 1881; “En Folkefiende”
(An Enemy of Society), 1882; “Vildanden” (The Wild Duck), 1884;
“Rosmersholm,” 1886; “Fruen fra Havet” (The Lady from the Sea), 1888.

“Hærmændene paa Helgeland” is Ibsen’s first great drama; it has,
indeed, been called the most perfect of his plays. The antique form
and substance which he imposed upon himself compelled him to a severe
self-restraint; the style also of the drama, which is in prose, is
austerely simple and strong. Yet there is at the same time a curious
and undisguised modern note about this work, and we feel throughout the
presence of that spirit which gives life to Ibsen’s plays of to-day.
The strong, passionate figure of Hjördis fills most of the field,
however finely the lesser figures are moulded. She is the Brunhild of
the ancient story, yet she is the same woman who is the heroine and
the hero of all Ibsen’s social dramas; a strong and passionate woman,
instinct with suppressed energy to which the natural outlets have been
closed, and which is transformed into volcanic outbreaks of disaster.
“A woman, a woman,” she says to Dagny, who is shocked at a remark about
using the armour and weapons of a man, and mixing among men, “there
is no one who knows what a woman can do.” Her father having been
slain, she is brought as a young girl into the conqueror’s household.
She finds a temporary satisfaction in the exercise of her physical
strength. When the mild and honourable warrior Sigurd comes with his
feeble friend Gunnar, both fall in love with her, and she, without
speaking it, returns Sigurd’s love. She promises to give herself to
him who can perform the greatest feat of strength, and Sigurd, by a
ruse, wins her for his friend Gunnar, himself taking to wife the gentle
Dagny. Henceforth there is something strange and incalculable in all
the deeds of Hjördis, and a concentrated bitterness in her words. When
afterwards she learns that Sigurd had once loved her, the proud and
reserved woman offers in vain to put on helmet and breastplate and to
follow him through the earth. “I have been homeless in the world from
the day that you took another to wife. Ill was that deed of yours. All
good gifts may a man give to his trothful friend,--all, but not the
woman he holds dear. When he does that deed, he breaks the thread that
the Norns have spun, and wastes two lives.” Hjördis is the woman of the
social dramas, but it has not yet occurred to her that she has a life
of her own.

“Emperor and Galilean,”[10] although historical and written in prose,
is very unlike “Hærmændene paa Helgeland”; it belongs, indeed, in date
as well as in character, almost as much to the second group. It is
made up of two five-act dramas, presenting a series of brilliant and
powerful scenes in the life of the Emperor Julian, lacking, however,
dramatic unity and culminating interest. It is probable that the
disconnected character of the work, and its undue length, is owing to
the long period which intervened between its commencement in Norway and
its completion at Rome. It is, in its parts, undoubtedly a fascinating
work; we trace Julian’s life from his youth as a student of philosophy
to his death as Emperor conquered by the Galilean. The interest of
his life lies in his various relations to the growing Christianity
and decaying Paganism by which he is surrounded. Julian realizes the
possibility of a third religion--“the reconciliation between nature
and spirit, the return to nature through spirit: that is the task for
humanity.” But he imagines that he is himself the divine representative
of this new religion. His friend Maximus prophesies at the end “The
third kingdom shall come! The spirit of man shall take its inheritance
once more.” Julian failed because he was weak and vain, and because
the age was against him; he dies with the cry on his lips, “Thou hast
conquered, O Galilean!”

[10] It may be noted that this was the first of Ibsen’s dramas to be
translated into English, by Miss Catherine Ray, in 1876. To Mr. Gosse
belongs the honour of having first introduced Ibsen to English readers,
in an article in the “Fortnightly,” in 1874. The first of his social
dramas to be translated into English was “The Doll’s House” (under the
title of “Nora”), by Miss Frances Lord in 1882.

“Love’s Comedy,” the earliest of the poems of the second group, is the
first work in which Ibsen’s characteristic modern tone appears, not
again to vanish. It is a satire on the various conventional phases
of love, exquisite in form but comparatively slight in texture. In
“Brand” Ibsen produced a poem which for imagination and sombre energy
stands alone. It is perhaps the most widely known of all his works; in
Germany it has already found four translators, and there is reason to
hope that before long a translation will appear in England. “Brand” is
the tragedy of will and self-sacrifice in the service of the ideal--a
narrow ideal, but less narrow, Ibsen seems sometimes to hint, than the
ideals of most of us. The motto on which Brand acts in all the crises
of his life is, “All or nothing;” and with him it means in every case
the crushing of some human emotion or relationship for the fulfilment
of a religious duty. Soon after the commencement of the poem Brand
became the pastor of a gloomy little northern valley, between mountains
and glaciers, into which the sun seldom penetrates. He is accompanied
by his wife Agnes, a pathetic image of love and devotion. A child is
born to them, but soon dies in this sun-forsaken valley. There are few
passages in literature of more penetrating pathos than the scene in the
fourth act in which, one Christmas eve, the first anniversary of the
child’s death, Brand persuades Agnes to give her Alf’s clothes--the
last loved relics--to a beggar-woman who comes to the door with her
child during a snowstorm. Soon Agnes also dies. In the end, stoned
by his flock, Brand makes his way, bleeding, up into the mountains.
Here, amid the wild rocks and his own hallucinations, he is met by a
mad girl who mistakes him for the thorn-crowned Christ. This scene, in
which, overwhelmed at last by an avalanche, Brand dies amid his broken
ideals, attains an imaginative height not elsewhere reached in modern
literature, and for the like of which we have to look back to the great
scene on the heath in “Lear.” Here and elsewhere, however, Ibsen brings
in supernatural voices, which scarcely heighten the natural grandeur
of the scene, and which seem out of place altogether in a poem so
entirely modern. “Brand” brings before us a wealth of figures and of
discussions, carried on in brief, clear, musical, though irregular,
metrical form, and it would be impossible to analyze so complex a work
within moderate compass.

“Peer Gynt,” is regarded in his own country as Ibsen’s most important
achievement, for it is a great modern national epic, the Scandinavian
“Faust.” A successful attempt has even been made to represent it on the
stage, the incidental music being composed by Grieg. The name of its
hero and many incidents in his career have their home in old Norwegian
folk-lore, and Ibsen has himself declared that Peer Gynt is intended
as the representative of the Norwegian people. Peer is the child of
imagination who lives in a world in which fantasy and reality can
scarcely be distinguished. He is an egoist with colossal ambitions;
at the same time he is by no means wanting in worldly wisdom; he goes
to America, and makes a large fortune (later on suddenly lost) by the
importation of slaves and the exportation of idols to China, a trade
which he reconciles to his conscience by opening up another branch of
business for supplying missionaries (at a considerable profit) with
Bibles and rum. The whole is a series of scenes and adventures, often
fantastic or symbolic in character, always touched by that profound
irony which is Ibsen’s most marked feature. One scene is so original
and penetrative that it stands alone in literature. It is that scene of
peculiarly Norwegian essence in which Peer Gynt enters the hut in which
his mother lies dying, with the fire on the hearth and the old tom-cat
on a stool at the bottom of the bed. He talks to her in the tone of the
days of childhood, reminding her how they used to play at driving to
the fairy-tale castle of Soria Moria. He sits at the foot of the bed,
throws a string round the stool on which the cat lies, takes a stick in
his hand, imagines a journey to Heaven--the altercation with St. Peter
at the gate, the deep bass voice of God declaring that Mother Aase
shall enter free--and lulls her to death with the stories with which
she had once lulled him to sleep. At a much later date in his career
Peer finds himself in a madhouse at Cairo, where he is assured that
his own guiding principle of the self-sufficiency of the individual,
without regard for the actions or opinions of others, is carried out to
its extreme limits. He is here acclaimed as emperor and crowned with a
garland of straw. Thus are his dreams of power fulfilled. In the end he
returns, a white-haired old man, to be eagerly welcomed by the faithful
Solveig, whom, as a girl, he had forsaken, and who is now an old woman,
still waiting for him with the kingdom of love that he had missed.
The poem ends with the picture of Solveig singing over her lover a
cradle-song of death. The failure of an over-mastering imagination and
weak will to attain the love that alone satisfies, that is the last
lesson of this marvellous work, so full of manifold meaning.

It is certainly by the third and latest group--the Social Dramas--that
Ibsen has attracted most attention both in his own country and abroad.
They are all written in mature life, and he has here devoted his early
acquired mastery of the technical requirements of the drama, as well
as the later acquired experiences of men, to a keen criticism of the
social life of to-day. He himself, it is said, regards these plays
as his chief title to remembrance. It is scarcely possible to say so
much as this when we think of “Hærmændene paa Helgeland,” of “Brand,”
and of “Peer Gynt.” But it certainly does not befit us of to-day to
complain that Ibsen has devoted his most mature art to work which has
a significance which to-day at all events cannot be over-estimated.
That significance may be very easily set forth; the spirit that works
through Ibsen’s latest dramas is the same that may be detected in
his earliest, “Catilina;” it is an eager insistance that the social
environment shall not cramp the reasonable freedom of the individual,
together with a passionately intense hatred of all those conventional
lies which are commonly regarded as “the pillars of society.” But this
impulse that underlies nearly all Ibsen’s dramas of the last group is
always under the control of a great dramatic artist. The dialogue is
brief and incisive; every word tells, and none is superfluous; there
is no brilliant play of dialogue for its own sake. “The illusion I
wish to produce,” he has himself said, “is that of truth itself,
I want to produce upon the reader the impression that what he is
reading is actually taking place before him.” In the hands of a meaner
artist such an attempt would be fatal; to Ibsen it has brought greater
strength. If there is fault to find in the construction of Ibsen’s
prose dramas, it lies in their richness of material; the subsidiary
episodes are frequently dramas in themselves, although duly subordinate
to the main purpose of the play. The care lavished on the development
and episodes of these dramas is equalled by the reality and variety
of the persons presented. These are never mere embodied “humours” or
sarcastic caricatures; the terrible keenness of Ibsen’s irony comes of
the simple truth and moderation with which he describes these social
humbugs who are yet so eminently reasonable and like ourselves. Every
figure brought before us, even the most insignificant, is an organic
and complex personality, to be recognized without trick or catchword.

“The Young Men’s League,” the earliest of the series, deals with the
rise and progress of one Stensgaard. He is a man whose character is
essentially vulgar and commonplace, but who is undoubtedly clever, and
whose ambition it is to gain political success. At the same time he
is short-sighted, conceited, absolutely wanting in tact. He is even
unstable, save in the great central aim of his life, which he seeks
to bring about by the formation of a compact majority of voters, of
which the nucleus is the Young Men’s League. Stensgaard is always
at his best as an orator; he is a Numa Roumestan, genial, almost
childishly open-hearted, with a flow of facile emotion and a great
mastery of phrases. We leave him under a cloud of contempt but nowise
defeated; and we are given to understand that he is on his way to
the highest offices of state. In this vivid and skilful portrait of
the representative leader of semi-democratized societies, Ibsen has
given his chief utterance on current political methods. It is scarcely
favourable. He realizes that government by party mobs, each headed by
a Stensgaard--a phase in the progress towards complete democratization
illustrated in England to-day--is by no means altogether satisfactory.
“A party,” remarks Dr. Stockmann, in “An Enemy of Society,” “is like
a sausage-machine: it grinds all the heads together in one mash.”
Something more fundamental even than party government is needed, and
in some words written in 1870 Ibsen has briefly expressed what he
conceives to be the pith of the matter:--

“The coming time--how all our notions will fall into the dust then!
And truly it is high time. All that we have lived on up till now has
been the remnants of the revolutionary dishes of the last century, and
we have been long enough chewing these over and over again. Our ideas
demand a new substance and a new interpretation. Liberty, equality, and
fraternity are no longer the same things that they were in the days of
the blessed guillotine; but it is just this that the politicians will
not understand, and that is why I hate them. These people only desire
partial revolutions, revolutions in externals, in politics. But these
are mere trifles. There is only one thing that avails--to revolutionize
people’s minds.”

He is not an aristocrat of the school of Carlyle, eager to put
everything beneath the foot of a Cromwell or a Bismarck. The great
task for democracy is, as Rosmer says in “Rosmersholm,” “to make every
man in the land a nobleman.” “The State must go!” Ibsen wrote to G.
Brandes in 1870. “That will be a revolution which will find me on its
side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous
action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that
makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which
will be something worth possessing.” It is only by the creation of
great men and women, by the enlargement to the utmost of the reasonable
freedom of the individual, that the realization of Democracy is
possible. And herein, as in other fundamental matters, Ibsen is at one
with the American, with whom he would appear at first sight to have
little in common. “Where the men and women think lightly of the laws;
... where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity
of elected persons; ... where outside authority enters always after
the precedence of inside authority; where the citizen is always the
head and ideal; where children are taught to be laws to themselves; ...
there the great city stands!” exclaims Walt Whitman.

In “The Pillars of Society”--which was separated from “The Young Men’s
League” by the appearance of “Emperor and Galilean”--Ibsen pours
delicious irony on those conventional lies which are regarded as the
foundations of social and domestic life. Here also he presents us with
one of the most eminent of the group of “governors, teachers, spiritual
pastors and masters” that throughout these plays strive to act as the
pillars of the social system. Straamand in “Love’s Comedy,” Manders
in “Ghosts,” the schoolmaster, Rörlund, here, with many minor figures
scattered through other plays, notwithstanding slight differences, are
closely allied. The clergyman is for Ibsen the supreme representative
and exponent of conventional morality. Yet the dramatist never falls
into the mistake of some of his Scandinavian contemporaries who make
their clerical figures mere caricatures. Here, as always, it is
because it is so reasonable and truthful that Ibsen’s irony is so
keen. Rörlund is honest and conscientious, but the thinnest veils of
propriety are impenetrable to him; he can see nothing but the obvious
and external aspects of morality; he is incapable of grasping a new
idea, or of sympathizing with any natural instinct or generous emotion;
it is his part to give utterance, impressive with the sanction of
religion, to the traditional maxims of the society he morally supports.
Pastor Manders, in “Ghosts,” is less fluent than Rörlund, and of
stronger character. His training and experience have fitted him to deal
in all dignity with the proprieties and conventions of social morality;
but when he is in the presence of the realities of life, or when a
generous human thought or emotion flashes out before him, he shrinks
back, shocked and cowed. He is then, as Mrs. Alving says, nothing but
a great child. That Ibsen is, in his clerical personages, as some have
said, covertly attacking Protestantism, it is not necessary to assert.
It is the traditional morality, of which the priesthood everywhere
are the chief and authorized exponents, with which he is chiefly
concerned. His attitude towards Christianity generally we may perhaps
gather from the intensity of feeling with which Julian, in “Emperor and
Galilean,” expresses his passionate repugnance to its doctrine of the
evil of human nature and its policy of suppression. “You can never
understand it, you,” he continues, “who have never been in the power of
this God-Man. It is more than a doctrine which he has spread over the
world; it is a charm which has fettered the senses. Whoever falls once
into his hands--I think he never becomes free again. We are like vines
planted in a foreign soil; plant us back again and we should perish;
yet we languish in this new earth.”

“A Doll’s House” contains Ibsen’s most elaborate portrait of a woman,
and it is his chief contribution to the elucidation of the questions
relating to the social functions and position of women in the modern
world. It is the tragedy of marriage, and on this ground it has excited
much discussion, and is perhaps the most widely known of Ibsen’s social
dramas. As a work of art it is probably the most perfect of them. He
has here thrown off the last fragments of that conventionality in
treatment which frequently mars the two previous plays, and has reached
the full development of his own style. The play is an organic whole,
all its parts are intimately bound together, and every step in the
development is vital and inevitable. Nora herself, the occupant of the
doll’s house, is a being whose adult instincts have been temporarily
arrested by the influences which have made her an overgrown child.
She is the daughter of a frivolous official of doubtful honesty;
she has been fed on those maxims of conventional morality of which
Rörlund is so able an exponent; and her chief recreation has been in
the servants’ room. She is now a mother, and the wife of a man who
shields her carefully from all contact with the world. He refrains
from sharing with her his work or his troubles; he fosters all her
childish instincts; she is a source of enjoyment to him, a precious
toy. He is a man of æsthetic tastes, and his love for her has something
of the delight that one takes in a work of art. Nora’s conduct is the
natural outcome of her training and experience. She tells lies with
facility; she flirts almost recklessly to attain her own ends; when
money is concerned her conceptions of right are so elementary that she
forges her father’s name. But she acts from the impulses of a loving
heart; her motives are always good; she is not conscious of guilt. Her
education in life has not led her beyond the stage of the affectionate
child with no sense of responsibility. But the higher instincts are
latent within her; and they awake when the light of day at length
penetrates her doll’s house, and she learns the judgment of the world,
of which her husband now stands forth as the stern interpreter. In the
clash and shock of that moment she realizes that her marriage has been
no marriage, that she has been living all these years with a “strange
man,” and that she is no fit mother for her children. She leaves her
home, not to return until, as she says, to live with her husband will
be a real marriage. Will she ever return?--The Norwegian poets, it has
been said, like to end their dramas, as such end in life, with a note
of interrogation.

Nora is one of a group of women, more or less highly developed,
who are distributed throughout Ibsen’s later plays. They stand, in
their stagnant conventional environment, as, either instinctively or
intelligently, actually or potentially, the representatives of freedom
and truth; they contain the promise of a new social order. The men
in these plays, who are able to estimate their social surroundings
at a just value, have mostly been wounded or paralyzed in the battle
of life; they stand by, half-cynical, and are content to be merely
spectators. But the women--Selma, Lona, Nora, Mrs. Alving, Rebecca--are
full of unconquerable energy. There is a new life in their breasts that
surges, often tumultuously, into very practical expression.

As “The Doll’s House” is the tragedy of marriage, so “Ghosts” is the
tragedy of heredity. This wonderful play is the logical outcome and
continuation of “The Doll’s House.” Mrs. Alving is a Nora who had
resolved to cling to her husband in spite of all, and here is the
result. She is a woman of energy and intellect, who has managed the
estate, and devoted herself successfully to the task of creating an
artificial odour of sanctity around the memory of her late husband.
At the same time she has been gradually throwing aside the precepts
of the morality in which she has been educated, and has learned to
think for herself. When her son Oswald returns home, in reality dying
of disease that has been latent from his birth, he seems to her the
ghost of his father. His own life has been free from excess, but he
now drinks too much; and he begins to make love to the girl who is
really his half-sister, exactly as his father had done to her mother
in the same place. The scene finally closes over the first clear signs
of his madness. The irony of the play is chiefly brought about by
the involuntary agency of Pastor Manders, the consummate flower of
conventional morality, and in the few hours which the action covers
the tragedy of heredity is slowly and relentlessly unfolded, with the
vanity of all efforts to conceal or suppress the great natural forces
of life.

In “Ghosts,” it seems to me, Ibsen reached the highest point of his
art. He deals here with commonplace characters and everyday scenes;
most of the action is conveyed in mere drawing-room dialogue; but
we feel how the clearness and completeness of this play, its tragic
intensity, its immense concentration, have at the back the whole of
Ibsen’s various achievement. When we reach the end we experience
that prolonged shudder of horror, in which, as Aristotle said, the
purification of tragedy lies, and we involuntarily recall whatever is
most awful in literature, the “Oresteia” of Æschylus, Shakespeare’s
“Macbeth,” Shelley’s “Cenci.” It is only on more intimate acquaintance
that we are able to look beyond the horror of it, and that we realize
here, better than elsewhere, how Ibsen has absorbed the scientific
influences of his time, the attitude of unlimited simplicity and trust
in the face of reality. “I almost think,” Mrs. Alving says, “that we
are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have
inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us,--it is all
sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs and so forth. They have
no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid
of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding
between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick
as the sand of the sea.” There is the absolute acceptance of facts,
however disagreeable. But, beside it, is the hope that lies in the
skilful probing of the wound that the ignorant have foolishly smothered
up; the hope also that lies in a glad trust of nature and of natural
instincts. Nowhere else in Ibsen’s work can we feel so strong and
invigorating a breath of new life.

“An Enemy of Society” is closely connected in its origin with
“Ghosts.” When “Ghosts” was published it aroused fierce antagonism.
Such a subject was not suited, it was said, to artistic treatment.
The discussion was foolish enough; the wise saying of Goethe still
remains true, that “no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the
poet knows how to use it.” All the worthy people, however, in whose
name Pastor Manders is entitled to speak, declared, further, that the
play was immoral--as it certainly is from their point of view--and
it was some time before its first representation on the stage, with
the distinguished northern actor, Lindberg, in the part of Oswald.
Ibsen had expected a storm, but the storm was even greater than he
had anticipated; and in the history of Dr. Stockmann he has given an
artistic version of his own experiences at this time. It is pleasant
that the only figure in these plays that we can intimately associate
with Ibsen himself is that of the manly and genial Stockmann. When
he discovers that the water at the Baths, of which he is the medical
director, and which are the chief cause of the town’s prosperity, are
infected and producing disastrous results to the invalids, he resolves
that the matter shall at once be made known and remedied. It is in the
shock of the universal disapprobation that this resolution arouses that
our genial and homely doctor is lifted into heroism, and becomes the
mouthpiece of truths with far-reaching significance. The great scene
in the fourth act, in which he calls a public meeting as the only
remaining way to make his discovery public, and, amid general clamour,
sets forth his opinions, is one of the most powerful and genuinely
dramatic that Ibsen has ever written.

“The Wild Duck” is, as a drama, the least remarkable of Ibsen’s plays
of this group. There is no central personage who absorbs our attention,
and no great situation. For the first time also we detect a certain
tendency to mannerism, and the dramatist’s love of symbolism, here
centred in the wild duck, becomes obtrusive and disturbing. Yet this
play has a distinct and peculiar interest for the student of Ibsen’s
works. The satirist who has so keenly pursued others has never spared
himself; in the lines that he has set at the end of the charming little
volume in which he has collected his poems, he declares that, “to write
poetry is to hold a doomsday over oneself.” Or, as he has elsewhere
expressed it: “All that I have written corresponds to something that
I have lived through, if not actually experienced. Every new poem has
served as a spiritual process of emancipation and purification.” In
both “Brand” and “Peer Gynt” we may detect this process. In “The Wild
Duck” Ibsen has set himself on the side of his enemies, and written,
as a kind of anti-mask to “The Doll’s House” and “The Pillars of
Society,” a play in which, from the standpoint to which the dramatist
has accustomed us, everything is topsy-turvy. Gregers Werle is a
young man, possessing something of the reckless will-power of Brand,
who is devoted to the claims of the ideal, and who is doubtless an
enthusiastic student of Ibsen’s social dramas. On returning home after
a long absence he learns that his father has provided for a cast-off
mistress by marrying her to an unsuspecting man who is an old friend
of Gregers’. He resolves at once that it is his duty at all costs to
destroy the element of falsehood in this household, and to lay the
foundations of a true marriage. His interference ends in disaster;
the weak average human being fails to respond properly to “the claims
of the ideal;” while Werle’s father, the chief pillar of conventional
society in the play, spontaneously forms a true marriage, founded on
mutual confessions and mutual trust. If the play may be regarded, not
quite unfairly, as a burlesque of possible deductions from the earlier
plays, it witnesses also, like “Ghosts,” to Ibsen’s profound conviction
that all vital development must be spontaneous and from within,
conditioned by the nature of the individual.

In “The Wild Duck” Ibsen approaches in his own manner, without,
however, much insistence, the mural aspects of the equality of
the sexes. Is a woman, who has had no relationships with a man
before marriage, entitled to expect the same in her husband? Is a
man, who has had relationships with other women before marriage,
entitled to complain if his wife has also had such relationships?
These are the sort of questions which the Scandinavian and Danish
dramatists--Björnson, Eduard Brandes, Charlotte Edgren, Benzon--seem
never tired of discussing. Eduard Brandes makes his admirable little
drama “Et Besög,” published about the same time as “Vildanden,” hang
on this problem, and although he brings no new idea into the play, he
settles the question in the same spirit as his great fellow-dramatist.
“En Hanske,” also published about the same time, gives us Björnson’s
contribution to the question. In this play a young woman is in love
with a young man who, as she learns accidentally at the moment of
formally engaging herself to him, has had previous relationships with
other women. At the same time she discovers that her own father, an
amiable old _élégant_, has been frequently unfaithful to his wife,
and that her mother still carries about a suppressed bitterness. The
girl realizes that life is not like what she has been brought up to
believe; she rejects her lover, and after some unexpected and quite
unnecessary brutalities from him, flings her glove in his face. All
Björnson’s genial vivacity and emotional expansiveness come out in
the earlier scenes of this play, and there is some pleasant comedy,
especially when the easy-going father tries to lecture his daughter,
to the accompaniment of her acute comments and the wife’s sarcastic
exclamations, on a wife’s privileges. “Here,” he says, “is woman’s
noblest calling.” “As what?” asks the daughter. “As what?--Have you
not listened? As--as the ennobling influence in marriage, as that
which makes man purer, as, as----” “Soap?” “Soap? what on earth makes
you think of soap?” “You make out that marriage is a great laundry
for men. We girls are to stand ready, each at her wash-tub, with her
piece of soap. Is that how you mean it?” On this ground, however, it
is difficult to avoid comparisons with Ibsen, and we miss here both
the artistic and moral grip of the greater dramatist. Ibsen’s solution
of the matter in “The Wild Duck” seems to be that there can be no true
marriage without mutual knowledge and mutual confession.

In “Rosmersholm,” social questions have passed into the background:
they are present, indeed, throughout; and to some extent they cause
the tragedy of the drama, as the numberless threads that bind a man to
his past, and that cut and oppress him when he strives to take a step
forward. But on this grey background the passionate figure of Rebecca
West forms a vivid and highly-wrought portrait. Ibsen has rarely shown
such intimate interest in the development of passion. The whole life
and soul of this ardent, silent woman, whom we see in the first scene
quietly working at her crochet, while the housekeeper prepares the
supper, are gradually revealed to us in brief flashes of light between
the subsidiary episodes, until at last she ascends and disappears down
the inevitable path to the mill stream. The touches which complete this
picture are too many and too subtle to allow of analysis; in the last
scene Ibsen’s concentrated prose reaches as high a pitch of emotional
intensity as he has ever cared to attain.

“The Lady from the Sea” seems to carry us into an atmosphere rather
different from that of the early social dramas. An element of melodrama
mingles here with the social interest, and makes this play one of
the least characteristic, but certainly one of the most dramatically
effective of the group. Ellida, a morbid, romantic young woman, whose
mother died insane, has met before her marriage the second mate of an
American ship, a “stranger;” he attracts her with all the charm of
the wild life of the sea and the fascination of the unknown. Having
perpetrated a more or less justifiable homicide, the second mate is
compelled to flee, not before he has gone through a form of betrothal
with Ellida. Subsequently she marries a well-meaning, commonplace
widower, but she wanders helplessly and uselessly through life, like
a mermaid among the children of men, still held, in spite of herself,
by the old fascination of the sea. At length the mysterious “stranger”
turns up again, resolved, if she wishes, to carry her off in spite of
everything. She feels that she must be free--free to go or free to
stay. The husband, naturally, refuses to hear of this, proposes to
send the man about his business. At length he consents to allow her
to choose as she will. Then at once she feels able to decide against
the “stranger,” who leaps over the wall and disappears. The charm is
broken for ever, and she has the chance to make something of her life.
The moral is evident: without freedom of choice there can be no real
emancipation or development.

The men of our own great dramatic period wrote plays which are the
expression of mere gladness of heart and childlike pleasure in the
splendid and various spectacle of the world. Hamlet and Falstaff, the
tragic De Flores and the comic Simon Eyre, they are all merely parts of
the play. It is all play. The breath of Ariosto’s long song of delight
and Boccaccio’s virile joy in life was still on these men, and for
the organization of society, or even for the development and fate of
the individual save as a spectacle, they took little thought. In the
modern world this is no longer possible; rather, it is only possible
for an occasional individual who is compelled to turn his back on the
world. Ibsen, like Aristophanes, like Molière, and like Dumas to-day,
has given all his mature art and his knowledge of life and men to the
service of ideas. “Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid
getting straight”--one of the audacious sayings of James Hinton--might
be placed as a motto on the title-page of all Ibsen’s later plays. His
work throughout is the expression of a great soul crushed by the weight
of an antagonistic social environment into utterance that has caused
him to be regarded as the most revolutionary of modern writers.

An artist and thinker, whose gigantic strength has been nourished
chiefly in solitude, whose works have been, as he himself says in
one of his poems, “deeds of night,” written from afar, can never be
genuinely popular. Everything that he writes is received in his own
country with attention and controversy; but he is mistaken for a cynic
and pessimist; he is not loved in Norway as Björnson is loved, although
Björnson, in the fruitful dramatic activity of his second period,
has but followed in Ibsen’s steps;--just as Goethe was never so well
understood and appreciated as Schiller. Björnson, with his genial
exuberance, his popular sympathies and hopes, never too far in advance
of his fellows, invigorates and refreshes like one of the forces of
nature. He represents the summer side of his country, in its bright
warmth and fragrance. Ibsen, standing alone in the darkness in front,
absorbed in the problems of human life, indifferent to the aspects of
external nature, has closer affinities to the stern winter-night of
Norway. But there is a mighty energy in this man’s work. The ideas and
instincts, developed in silence, which inspire his art, are of the kind
that penetrate men’s minds slowly. Yet they penetrate surely, and are
proclaimed at length in the market-place.




TOLSTOI.


I.

Russia is the natural mediator between Europe and Asia. It happens
with the regularity of an ethnic law that every race partakes of the
characteristics of neighbouring races. The extinct Tasmanian, by his
curious aberrations from the Australian type and approximation to that
of Polynesia, furnished an unexpected anthropological problem that is
still unsolved. Everywhere the same mysterious blending or transition
may be witnessed. Apart from complexion, it has been said, many a
Russian peasant might pass in Lahore or Benares as a native of the
Ganges valley. Whatever the ethnologist may say, one way or another,
as to the racial elements of the country, anyone who approaches the
study of Russian men and Russian things perpetually meets with traits
that are not familiar to him as European, but which he may have already
learnt to know as Asiatic. Nor is it only in the little traits of
character and daily life that these Eastern influences appear; the
language itself has close Oriental affinities, and the old Sclavonic
is nearly related to Sanscrit. In trying to make Russia plain to
ourselves, it is constantly necessary to sound this keynote.

A nation’s instincts are revealed in its art. The complex history
of the origin and development of Russian art is full of interest.
“Russia,” as Viollet le Duc wrote in his charming book, “L’Art russe,”
“has been a laboratory in which the arts coming from all parts of
Asia have united to assume an intermediate form between the eastern
and western worlds.” The art of Russia has three great sources, the
Scythian, the Byzantine, and the Mongolian, but when these are analyzed
it is found that each of them consists largely, when not entirely,
of Oriental elements. Not less than nine-tenths of these component
elements, Persian, Greek, Hindu, Finnic, and other, may, in Viollet
le Duc’s opinion, be set down as Eastern. Sometimes the art of Russia
seems to have been almost effaced by Byzantine or Hindu influences,
yet it ultimately assimilated all these Eastern influences until it
reached its highest point of development at the end of the sixteenth
century. In the gilded bulbous domes we see Hindu influence. Persian
influence was peculiarly strong; the beautiful Holy Gate of the Church
of St. John at Rostoff, the work of sixteenth century Russian artists,
is of thoroughly Persian character. All that Russia took from Central
Asia and Persia strengthened her art, though it retained its own
characteristics, shown partly by the love of splendour peculiar to
a youthful and semi-barbaric race, as in the fantastic magnificence
of that “gigantic madrepore,” the Church of Vassili Blagennoi in the
Kremlin at Moscow; partly by a freedom of conception and variety of
execution in which the native spirit found expression. Gothic art,
with its whole gamut of notes, from divine aspiration to grotesque
humour, remained absolutely alien. When Peter the Great introduced
Latin and Teutonic influences, and German, Italian, English, above
all, French elements poured into the country, an “official Russia”
grew up, speaking a foreign language and having no contact with the
nation. Russia remained the same, but the dissolution of Russian art
was ensured.

The genuine Russian spirit seems not to have emerged distinctively into
the region of great art until it was brought into the peculiarly modern
and western shape of the novel by Gogol, the Ukranian Cossack. “Dead
Souls” is the first great Russian example of the modern story-teller’s
art, and still the most popular. Oriental influences have ceased; in
Gogol we find western, especially English, influences, but, unlike the
literary tendencies of the last century, they are duly subordinated
to elements that are essentially Russian. The direct simplicity of
the Russian, his love of minute realistic detail, which seems to be
expressed even in the ancient form of the Russian cross, his quietism,
his profound human sympathy, have all found adequate voice in the
modern Russian novel. The Russian painters of to-day, and the artists
in bronze, with their simple realism and constant research for the
expression of life in action, have but followed in the steps of the
Russian novel, which has, as its supreme representatives, Tourgueneff,
Dostoieffski, and Tolstoi. Tourgueneff, so delicate and sensitive in
his realism, with its atmosphere of ineffable melancholy, a Corot
among novelists, as De Vogüé calls him, is great not only by the
breadth and insight of his art, but by the unique position he holds
in the development of Russian literature. The “Stories by a Hunter,”
published a few years before the emancipation of the serfs, to which
they are supposed to have contributed, turned the Russian novel in the
direction of peasant life. The study of the peasant which occupies
so much attention in Russia to-day is much more than a mere fashion,
for the peasant in Russia represents by far the chief element in
the population; certainly the interest in him has already left an
ineffaceable mark on those great Russian novelists whose influence is
world-wide. Tolstoi, Gregorovitch, Tchedrine, and others, have drawn
the _moojik_ with the breadth and faithfulness of Millet, in every
attitude of godlike strength, of pathetic resignation, of abject vice.
In Dostoieffski, as in the poet Nekrassoff, this democratic element is
more fundamental than in either Tourgueneff or Tolstoi. Dostoieffski’s
profound science of the human heart could never get near enough to its
primitive and instinctive elements. There are two or three scenes in
“Recollections of the Dead House,” of Dantesque awfulness, which seem
to bring nearer to us than anything else the very flesh and spirit of
humanity. Such is that scene of the convicts in the bath-room, close
and crowded, until, on the reddened backs, beneath the stress of the
heat and the steam, stand out clearly the old scars of whips and rods.
In all Dostoieffski’s books we are constantly irritated and fascinated
by this same strange penetrating odour of humanity.

Russian art has always been very closely allied with religion, and
the Russian is very religious. Ever since, a thousand years ago,
the Muscovites swam by thousands into their rivers, headed by the
chiefs, to receive Christian baptism, they seem to have taken great
interest in religion. But their religion has a distinctive character.
It has no clear demarcation from ordinary life, a characteristic
that is reflected in the similarity of religious and secular art in
Russia. More than this, unlike both the favourite religions of the
Indian and of the Teutonic races, it is not largely mystical; it is
simply a mystical communism. Sympathy and the need of comradeship,
which seem to be deeply rooted in the national character, are the
characteristics of Russian religion. “Pity for a fallen creature is
a very national trait,” wrote Gogol, and among the great Russian
novelists, Dostoieffski, who is the most intensely Russian, is
throughout penetrated by the passion of pity. This spirit shows itself
in the remarkable sympathy with which, in Russian popular stories, the
devil is treated. “He is represented,” Stepniak remarks, “as the enemy
of man, doing his best to drag him down into hell. But as this is his
trade he cannot help it, and the people bear him no malice. He is a
good devil after all.” Of the three persons of the Christian Trinity,
the second, most associated with images of love, appeals most to the
Russian popular imagination. God the Father, as an austere personage,
lacking in sympathy, is, on the other hand, regarded with indifferent,
not to say hostile, feelings. This was well exemplified by the innocent
remark of a venerable _moojik_ in a remote part of the country: “What!
Is the old fellow alive still?”

The Russian has yet changed but little. The Scythians, as we see them
in the realistic repoussé work of the Nikopol vase of twenty-three
centuries ago, are the Russian _moojiks_ of to-day; the features and
the dress have scarcely changed. They are, as Herodotus described them,
a race very tenacious of their customs. The sorcerer still holds his
own among them, while the orthodox pope, it is well known, is regarded
with no reverence, but rather as a tradesman. Propitiatory sacrifices,
it is said, are still paid by fishermen to the river-gods, and families
in the same way try to keep on good terms with the household deities.
The ancient communistic land customs still flourish, together with the
ineradicable belief that the land must be the property of everyone. In
some parts of the country it is not uncommon for a poor man to help
himself to the corn of a rich man, the loan being repaid with interest
in subsequent years. The deeply-rooted indifference of the people to
external laws appears in the difficulty with which they have been
induced to accept an officially recognized marriage ceremony, and in
the indulgence which is still felt towards liberty, which is not always
licence, in such matters. In some parts of Russia, even to-day, it is
said, a kind of _Pervigilium Veneris_ is held periodically; the young
people ascend a mountain to sing and to dance, after which it is _de
rigueur_ to separate and to spend the night in couples. The primitive
matter-of-fact simplicity of the people, as well as their indifference
to law and authority, is shown in an incident that is said to have
occurred only a few years ago. The peasants in a certain village
decided that it was not desirable for their widowed pope to live
alone, but the priest of the Greek Church is not allowed to re-marry;
therefore the peasants, having obtained the consent of a soldier’s
widow to be the pope’s mistress, insisted on introducing her into his
house.[11] Such incidents often took place in the western Europe of
five centuries ago.

[11] I take this, and much of what follows, from N. Tsakni’s
interesting book, “La Russie Sectaire.” It is scarcely necessary to
refer the English reader to the valuable series of works in which
Stepniak has set forth the condition of modern Russia.

We have to bear in mind these characteristics when we try to understand
the great religious movements that are going on in Russia. In all these
sects we see the tenacity with which the Russian people have clung to
their inborn practical instincts of communism, fraternity, and sexual
freedom. This religious movement is but another aspect of the spirit
that shows itself in Nihilism, and it is a wider, deeper, and more
interesting aspect. Both represent a profound antagonism to the State
and to the official western methods of social organization promulgated
by the State. Religious nonconformity dates far back into the Middle
Ages, but to Peter the Great is owing the first great development of
Russian sects. That Tzar, with his hatred of all things Russian, was
naturally regarded by pious and patriotic Russians as Antichrist, and
they perished, in thousands at a time, by their own hands, rather than
submit to the western notions which, knout in hand, he tried to force
upon them. On the soil of poverty, wretchedness and disease, which
distinguishes Russia to-day from the rest of Europe, these religious
sects have everywhere sprung up and flourished; some of an ascetic
type, with Asiatic tendencies, belonging more especially to the north
of Russia, such as those frantic devotees, the Skoptsy, who mutilate
themselves after the manner of the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele; or
of those sects, belonging more to the south, and rapidly gaining ground
over the others, who desire to lead a life of reason and love, such as
the Doukhobory, who recognize no more divinity in Jesus than resides in
all men, deny all dogmas, ceremonies, authority, give equal rights to
every man and woman, treat children with the same respect as the aged,
practise free marriages, and are in their daily lives both more moral
and more prosperous than their neighbours. One of the most recent of
these sects is the Soutaiefftsky, that first became generally known
about 1880. Basil Soutaieff, an uneducated mason, belonging to the
centre of Russia, from his early years pondered and dreamed over the
misery of the world. To obtain light he visited the priests, and one
referred him to the Gospels. His zeal induced him to learn to read, and
he studied the New Testament eagerly. One day he carried to the church
the body of a young son for burial. The pope asked fifty kopecks for
the ceremony; Soutaieff had only thirty, and the pope began to bargain
with him over the corpse. Soutaieff indignantly took up the body and
buried it in his own garden. From that time dated his criticism of
the Church, and side by side grew up also a criticism of the world.
He observed in his own trade the tricks of commerce and the perpetual
effort to amass money and to deceive the worker. He abandoned his work
as a mason and returned from St. Petersburg to the country to cultivate
the earth, distributing to the poor the money he had previously earned.
But in the country he found, from pope to peasant, the same vices as in
the town, and with no wish to found a new sect, he became, by example
as well as by precept, the teacher of a religion of universal love and
pity.

Soutaieff rejects all ceremonies, including baptism and marriage (for
which he substitutes a simple blessing and exhortation to a just
life), and all those external manifestations of religion which render
men hypocritical. At the same time he rejects all faith in angels or
devils, or in the supernatural generally, and is absolutely indifferent
to the question of a future life. We have to occupy ourselves with the
establishment of happiness and justice on this earth; what happens
above, he says, I cannot tell, never having been there; perhaps there
is nothing but eternal darkness.

He recognizes that the moral regeneration of men is closely connected
with social and economic questions. Private property is the source of
the hatreds, jealousies, and miseries of men. The proprietors must
give up the land of which they have arbitrarily gained possession, and
work for their living. But this end is to be gained, not by violence,
but by persuasion; men will recognize the hypocrisy and injustice of
their lives, and those who persist in evil will be shut out from the
fraternal community. Soutaieff refused, at one period at all events,
to pay taxes. Once he went to St. Petersburg to explain the state of
things to the Emperor; great was his indignation when not only was
an interview refused, but he was summarily expelled from the city.
Soutaieff and his disciples refuse military service, for the men of all
nations and religions are brothers: why should they quarrel?

This is the substance of Soutaieff’s teaching. Large numbers of persons
come to hear him, sometimes out of curiosity, more often as disciples.
He leads the life of a simple peasant. One evening, it is said, on
going to his barn, he found several men carrying away sacks of flour.
Without saying a word, he entered the barn and found a sack that the
robbers had not yet carried off. He pursued them, and on catching up
with them, he said: “My brothers, you must be in need of bread; take
the sack that you have forgotten.” The following day the robbers
brought back the flour, and asked Soutaieff’s forgiveness.

He has himself summed up his teaching. “What is truth?” a hearer once
asked him. “Truth,” answered Soutaieff with conviction, “truth is love,
in a common life.”


II.

Every artist writes his own autobiography. Even Shakespeare’s works
contain a life of himself for those who know how to read it. There is
little difficulty in reading Tolstoi’s; moreover, it is very copious,
and possesses the additional advantage of being written from at
least two distinct points of view. It is seldom necessary to consult
any other authority for the essential facts of his life and growth.
“Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” the earliest of his large books, and
one of the most attractive, tells us all that we need to know of his
early life. An English critic has remarked that, if Tolstoi has here
described his boyhood, he must have been a very commonplace child. The
early life of men of genius is rarely a record of precocities. The
boy here described so minutely, with his abnormal sensitiveness, his
shy awkwardness and profound admiration of the _comme il faut_, his
perpetual self-analysis, his brooding dreams, his amusing self-conceit,
bears in him the germs of a great artist much more certainly than
any small monster of perfection. It is scarcely necessary to say that
the autobiography here is not one of incident, as some persons have
foolishly supposed; it is neither complete nor historically accurate.
Tolstoi uses his material as an artist, but the material is himself.
The artist craves to express the inward experiences of his past life,
of which he can scarcely speak. He invents certain imaginary events, or
rearranges actual events as a frame into which he fits his own inward
experiences. Whatever is most poignant and vivid in the novelist’s art
is so produced; and you say to him, “This is so real; you are narrating
your own history.” He will be able to reply laughingly, “Oh, no! my
life is not at all like that.” Imagination is a poor substitute for
experience. There is sufficient external evidence extant, even if it
were possible to doubt the internal, that Tolstoi is here throughout
drawing on his own youthful experiences. Like Irteneff, young Tolstoi
followed Franklin’s injunctions as to the use of “Rules of Life;” his
favourite books are the same; like him, also, he early developed a
love of metaphysics, owing to which, young Irteneff says, “I lost one
after the other the convictions which, for the happiness of my own
life, I never should have dared to touch.” All the slight indications
in the “Confessions” of young Tolstoi’s spiritual experiences agree
with young Irteneff’s. Even the plain face, “exactly like that of a
common peasant,” the small grey eyes and thick lips and wide nose, that
caused the boy of the story to look at himself in the glass with such
sorrow and aversion, to pray so fervently to God to be made handsome,
correspond exactly to those of the real hero. No sign of the boy’s
early development is left untouched. We feel that this book, in which
the artist is first fully revealed, was the outcome of an overmastering
impulse to give expression to the accumulated experiences of an intense
and sensitive childhood, now receding for ever into the past.

Descended from a well-known minister and friend of Peter the Great,
and belonging to a family that has been eminent for two hundred years
in war, diplomacy, literature, and art, Lyof Tolstoi was born in 1828,
the youngest of four sons; his mother, the Princess Marie Volkonsky,
was the daughter of a general in Catherine’s time, and, according to
friends of the novelist’s family, she resembled the Marie Bolkonsky of
“War and Peace.” Both parents were, he says, in the general esteem,
“good, cultivated, gentle, and devout.” He was early left an orphan,
his mother dying when he was not yet two years of age, his father when
he was nine. At the age of fifteen he went to the University of Kazan;
he left it suddenly to settle on the estate at Yasnaya Polyana which
had fallen to him. In 1851, at the age of twenty-three, he became
a yunker (the usual position of a nobleman entering the army, doing
the work of a common soldier and associating with the officers) in
the artillery at the Caucasus; he was stationed on the Terek. This
expedition to the Caucasus was a memorable event in young Tolstoi’s
life. It determined finally his artistic vocation. A centre of military
activity on the most interesting frontier of the empire, it is a land
of wonderful scenery and strange primitive customs, hallowed with
association with Poushkin and Gogol. Tolstoi’s elder and most loved
brother Nikolai had just come home on leave from the Caucasus; it was
natural that young Lyof, who had never yet left the neighbourhood of
Moscow, should be attracted to a land which held for him a fascination
so manifold. Under the influence of this strange and new environment he
became, almost at once, a great artist, and “Childhood, Boyhood, and
Youth” was written in 1852.

Tolstoi’s critics have sometimes regretted that he never continued
this story. The only possible continuation of “Childhood, Boyhood,
and Youth” is “The Cossacks.” The young Irteneff of the end of the
former book corresponds as closely as possible with the Olyenin who
is analyzed at the beginning of the latter. A few years only have
intervened. These years he long after summed up briefly and too sternly
in the “Confessions”: “I cannot think of those years without horror,
disgust, and pain of heart. There was no vice or crime that in those
days I would not have committed. Lying, theft, pleasure of all sorts,
intemperance, violence, murder--I have committed all. I lived on my
estate, I consumed in drink or at cards what the labour of the peasants
had produced. I punished them, and sold them, and deceived them; and
for all that I was praised.” Tolstoi condemns himself without mercy,
as Bunyan condemned himself in his “Grace Abounding;” even in the
“Confessions” he admits that at this time his aspirations after good
were the central element in his nature, and it was out of desire to
benefit his peasants that he left the university prematurely to settle
on his estate.

Tolstoi’s spiritual autobiography is carried on as accurately as
anyone need desire in “The Cossacks.” It was in the Caucasus that he
first powerfully realized what nature is, and natural life; he was,
for the first time, forced to consider his own relation to such life.
Lukashka, the healthy, coarse young Cossack soldier, Maryana, the
beautiful robust Cossack girl, and the delightful figure of Uncle
Jeroshka, the old hunter, display their vivid and active life before
Olyenin, the child of civilization. He lives constantly in the presence
of the “eternal and inaccessible mountain snows and a majestic woman
endowed with the primitive beauty of the first woman;” he feels the
contrast between this and the life of cities: “happiness is to be with
Nature, to see her, to hold converse with her;” and he longs to mingle
himself with the life of Maryana. In vain. “Now if I could only become
a Cossack like Lukashka, steal horses, get tipsy on red wine, shout
ribald songs, shoot men down, and then while drunk creep in through
the window where she was, without a thought of what I was doing or why
I did it, that would be another thing, then we should understand one
another, then I might be happy.... She fails to understand me, not
because she is beneath me, not at all; it would be out of the nature
of things for her to understand me. She is light-hearted; she is like
Nature, calm, tranquil, sufficient to herself. But I, an incomplete
feeble creature, wish her to understand my ugliness and my anguish.”
The book is full of strongly-drawn pictures of the beauty of natural
strength and health; sometimes recalling Whitman at his best. They are
strange, these resemblances between three great typical artists of
to-day, so far apart, so little known to each other, Millet, Whitman,
and Tolstoi. In “The Cossacks” Tolstoi gives his first statement of
that problem of man’s natural function in life which he has been
seeking to solve ever since. Here he has no sort of solution to offer;
“some voice seemed to bid him wait, not decide hastily.”

In 1854 Tolstoi was transferred at his own request to the Crimea,
to obtain command of a mountain battery, doing good service at the
battle of the Tchernaya. At this period also he wrote his “Sketches of
Sebastopol.” By this time he had attracted considerable attention as a
writer, and by command of the Emperor, who said that “the life of that
young man must be looked after,” he was, much to his own annoyance,
removed to a place of comparative safety.

When peace was made, Tolstoi, then twenty-six years of age, left the
army and settled in St. Petersburg, where he was warmly received by
the chief literary circle of the capital, then including Tourgueneff,
Gregorovitch, and Ostroffsky; the first, who was a comparatively
near neighbour at Yasnaya Polyana, becoming one of his most intimate
friends. During the following ten years he wrote little, but travelled
in Germany, France, and Italy, and devoted himself to the education
of the serfs on his estate, marrying in 1862 the young and beautiful
daughter of a German military doctor at Tula. Although he wrote little,
he was enlarging his conception of art and studying literature. He
admired English novels, both for their art and naturalism, and among
French novelists he preferred Dumas and Paul de Kock, whom he called
the French Dickens. Schopenhauer was a favourite writer at this
period. He found his chief recreations in that love of sport in all
its forms which has left such vivid and delightful traces throughout
his work. In his portraits he appears with a shaggy bearded face,
with large prominent irregular features, and rather a stern fixed and
reserved expression; the deep eyes are watchful yet sympathetic, and
at the same time melancholy, and the thick lips are sensitive. His
acquaintances described him as not easy to approach, very shy and
rather wild (_très-farouche et très-sauvage_), but those who approached
him found him “extremely amiable.” In his later “Confessions” he thus
summarizes his view of things, and that of the group to which he
belonged, during this literary period of his life, more especially with
reference to the earlier part of it. “The view of life of my literary
comrades lay in the opinion that in general life developed itself; that
in this development we, the men of intellect, took the chief part,
and among the men of intellect we, artists and poets, stood first.
Our vocation was to instruct people. The very natural question, ‘What
do I know and what can I teach,’ was unnecessary, for, according to
the theory, one needed to know nothing. The artist, the poet, taught
unconsciously. I held myself for a wonderful artist and poet, and very
naturally appropriated this theory. I was paid for it, I had excellent
food, a good habitation, women, society; I was famous.... When I look
back to that time, to my state of mind then, and to that of the people
I lived with (there are thousands of them, even now), it seems to me
melancholy, horrible, ludicrous; I feel as one feels in a lunatic
asylum. We were all then convinced that we must talk, talk, write and
print as quickly as possible and as much as possible; because it was
necessary for the good of humanity.” This is by no means a satisfactory
or final account of the matter.

“War and Peace,” Tolstoi’s longest and most ambitious work, which began
to appear in 1865, is from the present point of view of comparatively
slight interest. His art had now become more complex, and this was a
serious attempt to give life to various aspects of a great historical
period. Much of himself, certainly, we find scattered through the
work, especially in Pierre Besoukhoff, though it is unnecessary to say
that a very large part of Pierre’s experiences had no counterpart in
Tolstoi’s; the not very life-like or interesting Masonic episode, for
instance, has clearly been read up. Pierre, however, appears before us,
from first to last, as Tolstoi appears before us, a seeker.

“Anna Karenina” is full of biographic material of intense interest. In
Vronsky, doubtless much of his earlier experience, and in Levine, his
own inner history at that time, are written clearly enough. From this
standpoint the book has the vivid interest of a tragedy; we see the man
whose efforts to solve the mystery of life we can trace through all
that he ever wrote, still groping, but now more restlessly and eagerly,
with growing desperation. The nets are drawn tight around him, and when
we close the book we see clearly the inevitable fate of which he is
still unconscious.

I once lived on the road to the cemetery of a large northern town. All
day long, it seemed to me, the hearses were trundling along their dead
to the grave, or gallopping gaily back. When I walked out I met men
carrying coffins, and if I glanced at them, perhaps I caught the name
of the child I saw two days ago in his mother’s lap; or I was greeted
by the burly widower of yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along
to arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew, upstairs at home,
thin and haggard and dead. The road became fantastic and horrible at
last; even such a straight road to the cemetery, it seemed, was the
whole of life, a road full of the noise of the preparation of death.
How daintily soever we danced along, each person, laughing so merrily
or in such downright earnest, was merely a corpse, screwed down in
an invisible coffin, trundled along as rapidly as might be to the
grave-edge.--It was at such a point of view that Tolstoi arrived in
his fiftieth year.

“When I had ended my book ‘Anna Karenina,’” he wrote in his
“Confessions,” “my despair reached such a height that I could do
nothing but think, think, of the horrible condition in which I
found myself.... Questions never ceased multiplying and pressing
for answers, and like lines converging all to one point, so these
unanswerable questions pressed to one black spot. And with horror and
a consciousness of my weakness, I remained standing before this spot.
I was nearly fifty years old when these unanswerable questions brought
me into this terrible and quite unexpected position. I had come to
this, that I--a healthy and happy man--felt that I could no longer
live.... Bodily, I was able to work at mowing hay as well as a peasant.
Mentally, I could work for eighteen hours at a time without feeling any
ill consequence. And yet I had come to this, that I could no longer
live.... I only saw one thing--Death. Everything else was a lie.”

The greater part of the “Confessions” is occupied with the analysis of
this mental condition, and with the earlier stages of his deliverance,
for when he wrote the book he was scarcely yet quite free. The
direction in which light was to break in upon him is very clear even
to the reader of “Anna Karenina.” It seemed to him at length that
the awful questions which had oppressed him so long had been solved
for thousands of years by millions upon millions of persons who had
never reasoned about them at all. “From the time when men first began
to live anywhere,” he says in the “Confessions,” “they already knew
the meaning of life, and they carried on this life so that it reached
me. Everything in me and around me, corporeal and incorporeal, is the
fruit of their experiences of life; even the means by which I judge
and condemn life, all this is not mine, but brought forth by them. I
myself have been born, bred, grown up, thanks to them. They have dug
out the iron, have tamed cattle and horses, have taught how to till the
ground, and how to live together and to order life; they have taught me
to think and to reason. And I, their production, receiving my meat and
drink from them, instructed by their thoughts and words, have proved
to them they are an absurdity!... It is clear that I have only called
absurd what I do not understand.”

When he had made this great discovery the rest followed, slowly, but
simply and naturally. First, he understood the meaning of God. He had
all his life been seeking God. Now, one day in early spring, he was in
the wood, trying to catch among the tones of the forest the cry of the
snipe, listening and waiting, and thinking of the things he had been
thinking of for the last three years, especially of this question of
God. There was no God--that he knew was an intellectual truth. But is
the knowledge of God an intellectual matter? And it seemed to him that
he realized that God is life, and that to live is to know God. “And
from that moment the consciousness of God, as known by living, has
remained with me.”

Following up this clue, he proceeded to attend church regularly,
and to fulfil all the orthodox ceremonies. This, however, was a
failure. He could not get rid of the consciousness that these things
were--“bosh.” He turned from the church to the Gospels. At this point
the “Confessions” end. In the year 1879, in which he wrote that book,
he heard of, and met, Soutaieff.

One evening a beggar woman had knocked at Soutaieff’s door, asking
shelter for the night. She was given food and a place of rest. Next
morning all the family went to work in the field. The woman took the
opportunity of collecting all the valuables she could lay her hands
on, and fled. Some peasants at work saw her, stopped her, examined
her bundle, and having bound her hands, led her before the local
authorities. Soutaieff heard of this, and soon arrived. “Why have you
arrested her?” he asked. “She is a thief; she must be punished,” they
cried. “Judge not, and you will not be judged,” he said solemnly; “we
are all guilty at some point. What is the good of condemning her?
She will be put in prison, and what advantage will that be? It would
be much better to give her something to eat, and to let her go in
the grace of God.” Such curiously Christ-like stories as this of the
peasant-teacher reached Tolstoi, and made a deep impression on him.
They were in the line of his mental development, and threw light on his
own experiences. The influence of Soutaieff appears in “What then must
we do?”--a further chapter in the history of Tolstoi’s development, and
perhaps the most memorable of his attempts at the solution of social
questions.

What then must we do? It was the question the people asked of John
the Baptist, and we know his brief and practical answer. It was the
question that pressed itself for solution on Tolstoi when he began to
investigate the misery of Moscow, and to start philanthropic plans for
its amelioration. He tells us in this narrative, which has a dramatic
vividness of its own that will not bear abbreviation, how he was
gradually forced, by his own well-meaning attempts and mistakes, to
abandon his philanthropic projects, and to realize that he himself and
all other respectable and well-to-do people were the direct causes of
the misery of poverty.

He investigated the worst parts of the city, finding more comfort and
happiness amidst rags than he had expected, and only discovering one
hopelessly useless class--the class of those who had seen better days,
who had been brought up in the notions that he himself had been brought
up in as to the relative position of those who are workers and those
who are not workers.

He met with a prostitute who stayed at home nursing the child of a
dying woman. He asked her if she would not like to change her life--to
become, he suggested at random, a cook. She laughed: “A cook? I cannot
even bake bread;” but he detected in her face an expression of contempt
for the occupation of a cook. “This woman, who, like the widow of the
Gospel, had in the simplest way sacrificed all that she possessed for
a dying person, thought, like her companions, that work was low and
contemptible. Therein was her misfortune. But who of us, man or woman,
can save her from this false view of life? Where among us are the
people who are convinced that a life of labour is more honourable than
one of idleness, who live according to such a conviction, and value and
respect men accordingly?” He came across another prostitute who had
brought up her daughter of thirteen to the same trade. He determined to
save the child, to put her in the hands of some compassionate ladies,
but it was impossible to persuade the woman that she had not done the
best for the daughter whom she had cared for all her life and brought
up to the same occupation as herself; and he realized that it was the
mother herself who had to be saved from a false view of life, according
to which it was right to live without bearing children and without
working, in the service of sensuality. “When I had considered this,
I understood that the majority of ladies whom I would have called on
to save this girl, not only themselves live without bearing children
and without working, but also bring up their daughters to live such
a life; the one mother sends her daughter to the public-house, the
other to the ball. But both mothers possess the same view of life,
namely, that a woman must be fed, clothed, and taken care of, to
satisfy the wantonness of a man. How, then, could our ladies improve
this woman and her daughter?” He was anxious to befriend a bright boy
of twelve, and took him into his own house among the servants, pending
some better arrangement to give him work. At the end of a week this
ungrateful little boy ran away, and was subsequently found at the
circus, acting as conductor to an elephant, for thirty kopecks a day.
“To make him happy and to improve him I had taken him into my house,
where he saw--what? My children--older, younger, and the same age as
himself--who not only did not work for themselves, but in every way
gave work to others: they spoiled everything they came in contact with,
over-ate themselves with sweets and delicacies, broke crockery, and
threw to the dogs what to this boy would seem dainties.... I ought to
have understood how foolish it was on my part--I who brought up my
children in luxury to do nothing--to try to improve other people and
their children, who lived in what I called ‘dens,’ but three-fourths
of whom worked for themselves and for others.” His experience was the
same throughout, and he brings his usual keen insight to the analysis
of his mental attitude when he gave money in charity, and to the mental
attitude of the recipients of his charity. He found also that, even if
his charity were to rival that of the poor, he would have to give 3,000
roubles to make a gift proportioned to the three kopecks bestowed by a
peasant, or to sacrifice his whole living for days at a time, like the
prostitute who nursed the dying woman’s child.

It seemed to him that he was like a man trying to draw another man out
of a swamp, while he himself was standing on the same shifting and
treacherous ground; every effort only served to show the character of
the ground that he stood upon himself. When he was at the Night Shelter
at Moscow, and looked at the wretched crowd who sought admission, he
recalled his impression when he had seen a man guillotined at Paris
thirty years previously, and with his whole being had understood
that murder would always be murder, and that he had his share in
the guilt. “So, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degradation of
thousands of men, I understood, not with my reason, but with my heart
and my whole being, that the existence of ten thousand such men in
Moscow, while I and other thousands eat daintily, clothe our horses
and cover our floors--let the learned say as much as they will that
it is inevitable--is a crime, committed not once but constantly, and
that I with my luxury do not merely permit the crime, but take a direct
part in it. The difference in the two impressions consisted only in
this--that before the guillotine all I could have done would have been
to cry out to the murderers that they were doing evil, and to try to
prevent them. Even then I should have known beforehand that the deed
would not have been prevented. But here I could have given, not merely
a warm drink or the little money that I had about me, but I could have
given the coat from my body, and all that I had in my house. I did not
do so, and therefore I felt, and still feel, and shall never cease to
feel, that I am a partaker in that never-ceasing crime, so long as I
have superfluous food and another has none, so long as I have two coats
and another has none.”

“My Religion,” the best known of Tolstoi’s social works, contains--not,
indeed, the latest or the final statement, for Tolstoi is not a man
to stand still--the clearest, most vigorous and complete statement of
his beliefs. He here frankly admits that he has arrived by the road
of his own experience at convictions similar to those of Jesus as
expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. That he has nothing to say in
favour of the Christianity of to-day, which approves of society as it
now is, with its prison cells, its factories, its houses of infamy, its
parliaments, one need scarcely point out. He has nothing but contempt
for “faith” which he regards as merely a kind of lunacy. “But reason,
which illuminates our life and impels us to modify our actions, is not
an illusion, and its authority can never be denied.... Jesus taught
men to do nothing contrary to reason. It is unreasonable to go out to
kill Turks or Germans; it is unreasonable to make use of the labours of
others that you and yours may be clothed in the height of fashion and
maintain that source of _ennui_, a drawing-room; it is unreasonable to
take people, already corrupted by idleness and depravity, and devote
them to further idleness and depravity within prison walls: all this
is unreasonable--and yet it is the life of the European world.” The
doctrine of Jesus is hard, men say. But how much harder, exclaims
Tolstoi, is the doctrine of the world! “In my own life,” he says, “(an
exceptionally happy one, from a worldly point of view), I can reckon
up as much suffering caused by following the doctrine of the world
as many a martyr has endured for the doctrine of Jesus. All the most
painful moments of my life--the orgies and duels in which I took part
as a student, the wars in which I have participated, the diseases that
I have endured, and the abnormal and unsupportable conditions under
which I now live--all these are only so much martyrdom exacted by
fidelity to the doctrine of the world.” And what of those less happily
situated? “Thirty millions of men have perished in wars, fought in
behalf of the doctrine of the world; thousands of millions of beings
have perished, crushed by a social system organized on the principle of
the doctrine of the world.... You will find, perhaps to your surprise,
that nine-tenths of all human suffering endured by men is useless, and
ought not to exist--that, in fact, the majority of men are martyrs to
the doctrine of the world.”

Tolstoi sums up his own doctrine under a very few heads:--Resist not
evil--Judge not--Be not angry--Love one woman. His creed is entirely
covered by these four points. “My Religion” is chiefly occupied by the
exposition of what they mean, and in his hands they mean much. They
mean nothing less than the abolition of the State and the country.
He is as uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the State. “It is
a humbug, this State,” he remarked to Mr. Stead. “What you call
a Government is mere phantasmagoria. What is a State? Men I know;
peasants and villages, these I see; but governments, nations, states,
what are these but fine names invented to conceal the plundering
of honest men by dishonest officials?” Law, tribunals, prisons,
become impossible with the disappearance of the State; and with the
disappearance of the country, and of “that gross imposture called
patriotism,” there can be no more war.

In place of these great and venerable pillars of civilization,
what? The first condition of happiness, he tells us, is that the
link between man and nature shall not be broken, that he may enjoy
the sky above him, and the pure air and the life of the fields.
This involves the nationalization of the land, or rather, to avoid
centralizing tendencies, its communalization. “I quite agree with
George,” he remarked, “that the landlords may be fairly expropriated
without compensation, as a matter of principle. But as a question of
expediency, I think compensation might facilitate the necessary change.
It will come, I suppose, as the emancipation of slaves came. The idea
will spread. A sense of the shamefulness of private ownership will
grow. Someone will write an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ about it; there will
be agitation, and then it will come, and many who own land will do
as did those who owned serfs, voluntarily give it to their tenants.
But for the rest, a loan might be arranged, so as to prevent the work
being stopped by the cry of confiscation. Of course I do not hold with
George about the taxation of the land. If you could get angels from
Heaven to administer the taxes from the land, you might do justice and
prevent mischief. I am against all taxation.” The second condition of
happiness is labour, the intellectual labour that one loves because one
has chosen it freely, and the physical labour that is sweet because
it produces the muscular joy of work, a good appetite, and tranquil
sleep. The third condition of happiness is love. Every healthy man
and woman should have sexual relationships; and Tolstoi makes no
distinction between those that are called by the name of marriage and
those that are not so called; in either case, however, he would demand
that they shall be permanent. The fourth condition is unrestrained
fellowship with men and women generally, without distinction of class.
The fifth is health, though this seems largely the result of obedience
to the others. These are the five points of Tolstoi’s charter. They
seem simple enough, but he is careful to point out that most of them
are closed to the rich. The rich man is hedged in by conventions,
and cannot live a simple and natural life. A peasant can associate
on equal terms with millions of his fellows; the circle of equal
association becomes narrower and narrower the higher the social rank,
until we come to kings and emperors, who have scarcely one person with
whom they may live on equal terms. “Is not the whole system like a
great prison, where each inmate is restricted to association with a
few fellow-convicts?” The rich may, indeed, work, but even then their
work usually consists in official and administrative duties, or the
observance of arduous social conventions which are odious to them: “I
say odious, for I never yet met with a person of this class who was
contented with his work, or took as much satisfaction in it as the man
who shovels the snow from his doorstep.” From this standpoint Tolstoi
has never since greatly varied.

Such as he is now he is known throughout the civilized world. He lives
at his old home at Yasnaya Polyana, surrounded by less luxury than
may be found in many a Siberian cottage, writing or shoemaking or
ploughing, or kneading clay in a tub to build incombustible cottages,
or spending the day in spreading manure over the land of some poor
widow. Such we see him in his portraits, in the coarse blouse and
the leather belt that he has always worn, with the massive, earnest,
suffering, baffled face, as of a blind but unconquered Samson.


III.

With Tolstoi the artist we have here little concern. Yet from the
first he has been an artist, and in spite of himself he is an artist
to the last. We cannot pass by his art. One realizes this curiously in
reading “What then must we do?” A profoundly sincere record without
doubt of deeply-felt experiences and of a mental revolution, it is
yet the work of an artist, a tragedy broadly and solemnly unfolding
the misery of the world, the impotence of every scheme or impulse of
charity, the light that comes only from freedom and self-development.
Let us read, again, that little popular tract--“Does a man need much
land?”--brimming over with meaning, about the man who gained permission
to possess as much land as he could walk round from sunrise to sunset.
Can he get so much into the circuit, not omitting this fine stretch of
land, and this other? His constantly growing desires, his efforts, are
told in brief, stern phrase, his feverish and failing strain to reach
the goal, that at sunset is reached, and the man drops down dead. Then
the curt and unaccentuated conclusion: “Pakhom’s man took the hoe, dug
a grave for him, made it just long enough from head and foot--three
arshins--and buried him.” All the tragedy of the nineteenth century is
pressed together into those half-dozen pages by the strong, relentless
hand of the great artist who deigns to point no moral. From the early
and delicious sketch of the frail musician, Albert, down to the sombre
and awful “Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” Tolstoi has produced an immense
body of work that must be considered, above all, as art. One reads
this body of work with ever-growing delight and satisfaction. Gogol
was a finer artist than Dickens, but there are too many suggestions
about him of Dickens and the English novelists. Tourgueneff, a very
great artist--how great, those little prose-poems, “Senilia,” would
alone suffice to show--an artist who thrilled to every touch, suffered
from the excess of his sensitiveness, and perhaps also from an undue
absorption in the western world. In Dostoieffski there is nothing of
the west; he is intimately and intensely personal, with an even morbid
research of all the fibres of organic misery in human nature. In all
his work we seem to hear the groans of the prison-house, the house of
the dead in Siberia. When we have read the wonderful book in which he
has recorded the life of his years there, we know the source of all his
inspiration. Reading all these authors, we are constantly aware of the
neurotic element in Russian life and Russian character, the restless,
diseased element that is revealed to us in cold scientific analysis
by Tarnowsky and S. P. Kowalevski and Dmitri Drill. It is not so when
we turn to Tolstoi. In him we find not merely the insight and the
realistic observation, but a breadth and sanity and wholeness that the
others mostly fail to give us. His art is so full and broad and true
that he seems able to do for his own time and country what Shakespeare
with excess of poetic affluence did for his time, and Balzac for
his. He is equal to every effort, he omits nothing that imports, he
describes everything with the same calm ease and simplicity. It makes
no difference whether, within the limits of a slight sketch, he is
tracing delicately the life of the drunken artist, Albert, or producing
the largest literary canvas of modern times, “War and Peace.” In
“Family Happiness” he analyzes passion, marriage, parenthood, the cycle
of life, in a simple narration, a few chapters, yet nothing is omitted,
and one shudders at the awful ease with which to this man these things
seem to yield their secret. In “Ivan Ilyitch” he analyzes death and the
house of death, quietly, completely, with a hand that never falters.
He writes as a man who has touched life at many points, and tasted
most that it has to offer, its joys and its sorrows, but he gazes upon
it, even from the first, with the luminous and passionless calm of old
age. His art is less perfect than Flaubert’s, but Flaubert’s intense
personal note, the ferocious nihilism of the Norman, is absent. He
holds life up to the light, simply, and says: “This is what it is!”

For one who cannot read Tolstoi in the original, and who misses the
style so much praised by those who are more privileged, Tolstoi seems
an uncompromising realist. He has therefore often been compared with
Zola, the prodigious representative and champion of Latin realism. In
vain Zola himself disclaims this position; it is he more than any other
who has influenced the novel, especially in the Latin countries, in the
direction, if not of realism, at all events in that of anti-idealism;
not Balzac or Stendhal, who have reached sure summits of fame, but
have ceased to be living influences; not the De Goncourts, whose style
cannot be imitated; least of all Flaubert, an idealist of idealists,
whose profound art and marmoreal style are of the sort that it
takes generations even to understand. It is interesting, doubtless,
to put Tolstoi beside Zola, but the resemblance is not deep. Zola
is the avowed prophet of a formula. He has read and pondered the
“Introduction à l’étude de la Médicine Expérimentale,” in which the
great physiologist, Claude Bernard, expounded the principles of the
experimental method as applied to the sciences of physical life. He has
asked himself: “Can we not apply this same method to the psychological
life? Can we not have an experimental novel?” “We seek the causes of
social evil,” he declares in “Le Roman Experimental,” a collection of
essays not less instructive than his novels, and more interesting; “we
present the anatomy of classes and of individuals, in order to explain
the aberrations which are produced in society and in man. This obliges
us often to work on bad subjects, and to descend into the midst of
human miseries and follies. But we bring the documents necessary to be
known by those who would dominate good and evil. Here is what we have
seen, observed, explained in all sincerity. Now it is the turn of the
legislators!” To bring the scientific spirit of the age into the novel:
it was a brilliant idea, and Zola forthwith set to work, with his
immense energy and unshakeable resolution, to draw up a _procès-verbal_
of human life--for this is the most that the “experimental method”
comes to in the novel--which has not ceased to this day.

But, one asks oneself, what _is_ reality? Zola has frankly explained
how a novel ought to be written; how one must get one’s human
documents, study them thoroughly, accumulate notes, systematically
frequent the society of the people one is studying, watch them, listen
to them, minutely observe and record all their surroundings. But have
we got reality then? Does the novelist I casually meet, and who has
opportunities to take notes of my conversation and appearance, to
examine the furniture of my house and to collect gossip about me,
know anything whatever of the romance or tragedy which to me is the
reality of my life, these other things being but shreds or tatters
of life? Or if my romance or tragedy has got into a law-court or a
police-court, is he really much nearer then? The unrevealable motives,
the charm, the mystery, were not deposed to by the policeman who was
immediately summoned, nor by the servant-girl who looked through the
key-hole. Certain disagreeable details: do they make up reality? To
select the most beautiful and charming woman one knows, and to set a
detective artist on her track, to follow her about everywhere, to keep
an opera-glass fixed upon her, to catch fragments of her conversation,
to enter her house, her bedroom, to examine her dirty linen,--would
Helen of Troy emerge beautiful from this _procès-verbal_? And on which
side would be most reality? Nature seems to resent this austere method
of approaching her, and when we have closed our hands the reality has
slipped through our fingers. A great artist, a Shakespeare or a Goethe,
is not afraid of any fact, however repulsive it may seem, so long as
it is significant. But it must be significant. Without sympathy and
a severe criticism of details, the truly illuminating facts will be
missed or lost in the heap. It is interesting to note that Zola himself
recognizes this, and admits that he has been carried away by his
delight and enthusiasm in attempting to vindicate for Art the whole of
Nature. Whatever is really fine in Zola’s work--“La Faute de l’Abbé
Mouret,” or the last chapters of “Nana”--is fine because the man of a
formula is for awhile subordinated to the artist.

Zola may work as hard as he will in the cause of the formula; he
remains, above all, a man of massive temperament and peculiarly strong
individuality. That is the real secret of his influence. A youth,
developed in the poverty and hunger of a garret on the outskirts of
Paris, who was fascinated by the great city he has lovingly painted,
as it was there spread out before him, in “Une Page d’Amour,” and
condemned to see it only from the outside,--here was material for that
irony, unending and absolutely pitiless, that runs through the whole of
the vast Rougon-Macquart drama of the world. He is an austere moralist,
with no tenderness for human weakness, “un tragique qui se fâche,”
as he calls himself, a Republican in spirit long before the Republic
was proclaimed, a hater of all hypocrisies and empty prettinesses and
fine phrases and elegant circumlocutions, a fighting man ready to
fight to the last, with rude weapons but in fair combat. He represents
the revolt against the French romantic movement--“une émeute de
rhétoriciens,” he calls it--which found its supreme incarnation in
Victor Hugo. The Forty Immortals may have laughed serenely, but when
Zola declared that he was carrying on the classic tradition he was not
altogether wrong. The classic tradition of France is marked by a very
vivid sense of life; it has a close grip of the practical and material
side of things, a wholesome contempt for all pretence, and sometimes
a certain rather rank savour of audacity. Zola will scarcely stand
beside Rabelais and Montaigne and Molière; the artist in him is too
much crushed by ideas, and he has altogether run too much to seed; but
he is fighting on the same side, and he has been proved to possess one
quality which leaves little more to be said, effectiveness. Whatever
the value of his work, he has turned the tide of novel literature,
wherever his influence has spread, from frivolous inanities to the
painstaking study of the facts of human life. Whatever we may think for
the moment, that is a very wholesome and altogether moral revolution.

As for great art, that is neither here nor there. Shakespeare, Goethe,
Flaubert,--for such men the extremes of poetry and of realism are
equally welcome. Tolstoi, it is clear, is more of a realist than a
poet, but his realism is of the kind that grows naturally out of the
experiences of a man who has lived a peculiarly full and varied life.
It is life _sur le vif_, not studied from a garret window. Nothing
is omitted, nothing is superfluous; the narrative seems to lead
the narrator rather than the narrator it, and through all we catch
perpetually what seems an almost accidental fragrance of poetry. See
the account of the storm in the “Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth,” or of
the child in the raspberry bush, or of the mowing, or the horse-race,
in “Anna Karenina,” with their peculiar, intangible yet vivid reality.
But these things, it may be said, are poetry, the effluence of some
divine moment of life, the record of some unforgettable thrill of
blood and brain. Compare, then, the account of a childbirth in “Anna
Karenina” (there is an earlier and less successful attempt in “War and
Peace”) with a similar scene which is the central episode in Zola’s
“La Joie de Vivre.” The latter, doubtless, is instructive from its
fidelity; every petty detail is coldly and minutely set forth. Its
artistic value is difficult to estimate; it can scarcely be large. Zola
presents the subject from the point of view of a disinterested and
impossible spectator; in Tolstoi’s scene we have frankly the husband’s
point of view. There is no room here for instructive demonstration of
the mechanism of birth, of all its physical details and miseries. It is
real life, but at such a moment real life is excitement, emotion, and
the result is art. What, again, can be more unpromising than a novel
about a remote historical war? But read “War and Peace” to see how
lifelike, how vivid and fascinating, the narrative becomes in the hands
of a man who has known the life of a soldier and all the chances of war.

Tolstoi is not alone among Russian novelists in the character of his
realism. Gogol’s “Dead Souls” has something of the wholesome naturalism
as well as of the broad art and the good-natured satire of Fielding.
He is perpetually insisting on the importance to the artist of those
“little things which only seem little when narrated in a book, but
which one finds very important in actual life.” In his letters on “Dead
Souls” Gogol wrote: “Those who have dissected my literary faculties
have not discovered the essential feature of my nature. Poushkin alone
perceived it. He always said that no author has been gifted like me to
bring into relief the triviality of life, to describe all the platitude
of a commonplace man, to make perceptible to all eyes the infinitely
little things which escape our vision. That is my dominating faculty.”
Tourgueneff declared that the novel must cast aside all hypocrisy,
sentimentality, and rhetoric for the simple yet nobler aim of becoming
the history of life. Dostoieffski, that tender-hearted student of the
perversities of the human heart, so faithful in his studies that he
sometimes seems to forget how great an artist he is, justifies himself
thus: “What is the good of prescribing to art the roads that it must
follow? To do so is to doubt art, which develops normally, according
to the laws of nature, and must be exclusively occupied in responding
to human needs. Art has always shown itself faithful to nature, and
has marched with social progress. The ideal of beauty cannot perish in
a healthy society; we must then give liberty to art, and leave her to
herself. Have confidence in her; she will reach her end, and if she
strays from the way she will soon reach it again; society itself will
be the guide. No single artist, not Shakespeare himself, can prescribe
to art her roads and aims.” Tolstoi but followed in the same path when,
in one of the earliest of his books, the “Sebastopol Sketches,” he
wrote: “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my
soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has
always been, is, and always will be, most beautiful, is--Truth.”

It is, after all, impossible to disentangle Tolstoi’s art from the
man himself and the ideas and aspirations that have stirred him. When
we consider his history and development we are sometimes reminded of
our own William Morris. They are both men of massive and sanguine
temperament, of restless energy, groping their way through life with a
vague sense of dissatisfaction; both pure artists through the greater
part of their career, and both artists still, when late in life, and
under the influence of rather sectarian ideas, they think that they
have at length grasped the pillars of the heathen temple of society in
which they have so long been groping, and are ready to wreak on it the
pent-up unrest of their lives. But they go to work in not quite the
same way. Both, it is true, having apparently passed through a very
slight religious phase in early life, have had this experience in later
life, and in both it has taken on a social character; both, also, have
sought their inspiration, not so much in a possible future deduced from
the present, as in the past experiences of the race. Tolstoi with his
semi-oriental quietism has returned to the rationalistic aspects of
the social teaching of Jesus. Morris, who regards Iceland rather than
Judæa as the Holy Land of the race, looks to Scandinavian antiquity
for light on the problems of to-day. It is on the robust Scandinavian
spirit of independence and comfortable well-to-do intolerance of all
oppression and domination that Morris relies for the redemption of
his own time and people. So far from identifying art, as Tolstoi is
inclined to do, with the evil and luxury of the world, Morris finds in
art a chief hope for the world. It is not, therefore, surprising that
his art has suffered little from the fervour of his convictions, while
his varied artistic activities have given him a wholesome grip on life.
His new beliefs, on the other hand, have given new meaning to his art.
His mastery of prose has only been acquired under the stress of his
convictions. It is prose of massive simplicity, a morning freshness,
unconscious and effortless. There is about it something of the peculiar
charm of the finest Norman architecture. The “Dream of John Ball,”
a strong unpretentious piece of work, penetrated at every point by
profound social convictions, yet with the artist’s touch throughout,
may be read with a delight which the complex and artificial prose we
are accustomed to cannot give. England, it is said, is predominantly a
Scandinavian country; Morris is significant because he gives expression
in an extreme form to the racial instincts of his own people, just as
Tolstoi expresses in equally extreme form the deepest instincts of his
Sclavonic race.

Against the “Dream of John Ball,” we may place the work produced at
the same time by the Russian’s keener and more searching hand, “The
Dominion of Darkness.” This sombre and awful tragedy is a terribly
real and merciless picture of the worst elements in peasant life, a
picture of avarice and lust and murder. Only one pious, stuttering,
incoherent _moojik_, whose employment is to clean out closets, appears
as the representative of mercy and justice. So thick is the gloom
that it seems the artistic effect would have been heightened if the
concluding introduction of the officers of an external and official
justice had been omitted, and the curtain had fallen on the tragic
merriment of the wedding feast. The same intense earnestness taking,
almost unconsciously, an artistic shape, reveals itself in the little
stories of which in recent years Tolstoi has produced so many, some
indeed comparatively ineffective, but others that are a fascinating
combination of simplicity, realism, imaginative insight, brought to the
service of social ideas. Such is “What men live by,” the story of the
angel who disobeyed God, and was sent to earth to learn that it is only
in appearance that men are kept alive through care for themselves, but
that in reality they are kept alive through love.

Tolstoi’s voice is heard throughout the vast extent of Russia, not by
the rich only, but by the peasant. That is why his significance is so
great. Sometimes the religious censure prohibits his books; sometimes
it allows them; in either case they are circulated. Published at a few
halfpence, these little books are within the reach of the poorest,
and Tolstoi gives free permission to anyone to reproduce or translate
any of his books. His drama, “The Dominion of Darkness, or when a
bird lets himself be caught by one foot he is lost,” was intended for
the public who frequent the open-air theatres of fairs, and eighty
thousand copies were sold during the first week, although certainly
not altogether among the audience he would have preferred. The stories
for children are circulated in scores of editions of twenty thousand
copies each. Tolstoi has nothing to teach that he has not learnt from
peasants, and which thousands of peasants might not have taught him.
He has used his character and genius as a sounding-board to enable
his voice to reach millions of persons, many of whom, even the most
intelligent, are not aware that he is but repeating the lessons he has
learnt from unlettered _moojiks_.

Now his voice has reached the countries of the West, and it sounds here
far more unfamiliar than in a land so stirred by popular religious
movements as Russia. “My Religion,” that powerful argument _ad hominem_
to the Christian from one who accepts both the letter and the spirit of
Jesus’s simplest and least questionable teaching, has had an especially
large circulation in the West. Such a challenge has never before been
scattered broadcast among the nations. What, one wonders, will be the
outcome?

To most people the simplicity of the challenger is a cause of
astonishment. After the assassination of Alexander II. and the sentence
on the assassins, Tolstoi wrote to the present Tzar imploring him
not to begin his reign with judicial murder, and he was deeply and
genuinely disappointed at the inevitable reception of his appeal.
Count Tolstoi, the author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” made
the same mistake as the simple peasant Soutaieff. That little incident
throws much light on his mental constitution. It is the attitude of
a child, absorbed wholly in one thing at a time, unable to calculate
the nature and the strength of opposing forces. It is the same fact of
mental structure which leads the world-renowned novelist to delight
to learn from children, to be mortified when they do not like his
stories, and to experience one of the greatest excitements of life when
he thinks he detects the dawn of genius in a child of ten. The same
characteristic appears in his treatment of science. He had heard, he
told Mr. Kennan, that a Russian scientist had completely demolished the
Darwinian theory. In “Life,” one of his latest books, this tendency has
carried him far away into a sterile and hopeless region of mystical
phraseology. He dismisses scientific men briefly as the Scribes. It
has not occurred to him apparently that this book, “Life,” is a book
of science. And, certainly, if science could produce nothing better
than “Life,” the language that Tolstoi uses regarding it were not one
whit too strong. This childlike simplicity is not peculiar to Tolstoi;
it is more or less the attitude of every true Russian, of the peasant
who sets up the kingdom of Heaven, as of the Nihilist who thinks he
can emancipate his country by destroying a few Tzars. It is a weakness
that must often mean failure because it cannot estimate the strength
of difficulties. At the same time it is a power. It is by this intense
concentration on one desired object, this heroic inability to see
opposition, that the highest achievement becomes possible.

Whatever Tolstoi’s limitations and failures of perception, those things
which he believes he has seen he grasps with inexorable tenacity.
The violence and misery of the world--that is a reality; a reality,
he feels, which must be fought at all costs. Mr. Kennan tells how he
pressed home on Tolstoi the cases of extreme brutality and oppression
that he had known practised on political prisoners in Siberia, and how,
though Tolstoi’s eyes filled with tears as he imagined the horrors
described, he still pointed out in detail how, by opposing violence
to violence in the cases cited, the misery of the world would be
increased: “At the time when you interposed there was only one centre
of evil and suffering. By your violent interference you have created
half-a-dozen such centres. It does not seem to me, Mr. Kennan, that
that is the way to bring about the reign of peace and good-will on
earth.”[12]

[12] See the interesting paper, “A Visit to Count Tolstoi,” in
“Century,” June, 1887.

Tolstoi possesses that social imagination which, though growing among
us, is still so rare. If at the dinner where cheerful guests prolong
their enjoyment, there were placed behind each chair a starved, ragged
figure, with haggard and haunting face--would not the meal be broken up
as speedily as if every guest had found the sword of Dionysius hanging
by a thread above his head? Yet it is only a lack of imagination which
prevents us from seeing through the few layers of bricks that screen us
off from these realities. For him who has seen it there is little rest,
“so long as I have superfluous food and another has none, so long as I
have two coats and another has none.”

With tears in his voice, and in words whose intense reality pierces
through the translation, though this, we are told, cannot reproduce the
graphic vividness of the original, Tolstoi speaks to us through his
life and his work as he once spoke to the interviewer who came to him:

“People say to me, ‘Well, Lef Nikolaivitch, as far as preaching goes,
you preach; but how about your practice?’ The question is a perfectly
natural one; it is always put to me, and it always shuts my mouth. ‘You
preach,’ it is said, ‘but how do you live?’ I can only reply that I do
not preach--passionately as I desire to do so. I might preach through
my actions, but my actions are bad. That which I say is not preaching;
it is only my attempt to find out the meaning and the significance of
life. People often say to me, ‘If you think that there is no reasonable
life outside the teachings of Christ, and if you love a reasonable
life, why do you not fulfil the Christian precepts?’ I am guilty and
blameworthy and contemptible because I do not fulfil them; but at the
same time I say,--not in justification, but in explanation, of my
inconsistency,--Compare my previous life with the life I am now living,
and you will see that I am trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true,
fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it; but it
is not because I do not wish to fulfil all, but because I am unable.
Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which
I am entangled,--help me,--and I will fulfil all. I wish and hope to do
it even without help. Condemn me if you choose,--I do that myself,--but
condemn _me_, and not the path which I am following, and which I point
out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know
the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side
to side, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If it is
not the right one, show me another. If I stagger and wander, come to
my help, and support and guide me in the right path. Do not yourselves
confuse and mislead me and then rejoice over it and cry, ‘Look at him!
He says he is going home, and he is floundering into the swamp!’ You
are not evil spirits from the swamp; you are also human beings, and
you also are going home. You know that I am alone,--you know that I
cannot wish or intend to go into the swamp,--then help me! My heart is
breaking with despair because we have all lost the road; and while I
struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, instead
of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ‘See! He is in the
swamp with us!’”




CONCLUSION.


Tolstoi brings us face to face with religion. If we think of it, every
personality we have considered has brought us subtly in contact with
that ineluctable shape. It is strange: men seek to be, or to seem,
atheists, agnostics, cynics, pessimists; at the core of all these
things lurks religion. We may find it in Diderot’s mighty enthusiasm,
in Heine’s passionate cries, in Ibsen’s gigantic faith in the future,
in Whitman’s not less gigantic faith in the present. We see the same
in the music-dramas of Wagner, in Zola’s pathetic belief in a formula,
in Morris’s worship of an ideal past, in the aspirations of every
Socialist who looks for the return of those barbarous times in which
all men equally were fed and clothed and housed. The men who have most
finely felt the pulse of the world, and have, in their turn, most
effectively stirred its pulse, are religious men.

One is forced to ask oneself at last: How can I make clear to myself
this vast and many-shaped religious element of life? It will not
let me pass it by. Can I--without any attempt to theorize or to
explain--reduce it to some common denominator, so that I may at
least gain the satisfaction that comes of the clear and harmonious
presentation of a complex fact? When we have settled the question
of the evolution of religion, another more fundamental question may
still be asked: What is the nature of the impulse that underlies, and
manifests itself in, that sun-worship, nature-worship, fetich-worship,
ghost-worship, to which, with occasional appeal to the vast reservoir
of sexual and filial love, we may succeed in reducing religious
phenomena? On the one hand, this impulse must begin to develop at
least as early as the earliest appearance of worship; on the other
hand, we cannot ascertain its distinctive characters unless we also
examine and compare its more specialized forms. What is there in common
between the religious attitude of the child of to-day, enfranchized
from creeds, and that of, let us say, Lâo-tsze, the child of a day
that is twenty-five centuries old; or between these and the far more
primitive adoration of the Dravidian for his cattle? If the vague
term “religion,” which, as commonly used, contains at least three
elements--moral, scientific, emotional--covers any distinct and
persistent human impulse, what is the nature and scope of that impulse?
I wish to represent to myself, as precisely and as broadly as may be,
man’s religious relation.

When we look out into the universe we see a vast medium, the world,
gradually merging itself indistinctly in a practical infinite, and
in the centre a certain limited number of souls, souls like the
theoretical atoms of the physicist, never under any circumstances
touching. Let two souls approach ever so nearly, there is yet a subtle
chasm, through which

    “The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea”

still flows. These souls are made up essentially of mind and body.
There can be no change of consciousness without a corresponding change
in the vascular circulation. There can be no thrill of body in a soul
without a correlated thrill of mind. Matter and mind in the soul are
co-extensive. When we speak of the “spirit” as ruling the body, or as
yielding to it, we are, it must be remembered, using a traditional
method of speech which had its origin in a more primitive theory, just
as we still speak of sun-rise. In the soul the spiritual can no more
be subordinated to the material, strictly speaking, than in water the
oxygen be subordinated to the hydrogen. The old dispute for supremacy
between mind and matter no longer has any significance. Both matter and
mind are in the end equally unknown: _exeunt in mysterium_.

The soul is born and then dies. What do we mean by _birth_ and _death_?
According to the old Hebrew conception a spirit was created out of
nothing and put into a mould of matter, and then at death again passed
back into nothing. But to-day this conception is impossible. _Ex
nihilo nihil fit._ It is clear that both the elements that make up
the soul must be, under some form, equally eternal. By a marvellous
cosmic incident, our little planet has broken forth into a strange and
beautiful efflorescence. We rise from the world, whom we are, on this
variegated jet of organic life, to fall back again to our true life, by
whatever unknown ways and under whatever change of form, conscious, it
may be, but, as before birth, no longer with any self to be conscious
of, no longer organic.

Now souls, although they always remain isolated, are acted upon by
the world and by other souls, and when so acted upon they yield an
emotional response. And for the present purpose these actions may
be divided into two classes, corresponding to the two classes of
sympathetic nerve fibres--vaso-constrictor and vaso-dilator--which
control the vascular system, the rougher daily contacts of life, which
contract though they strengthen the soul with their legacy of strong
desires and griefs, and the incomparably rarer contacts at which the
soul for a while and in varying degrees expands with a glad sense of
freedom. As every bodily change in the compacted soul is correlated
with a mental change, these responses may be spoken of indifferently
in mental or material terms. We know that they are on the bodily side
vaso-motorial; that a thrill of joy is accompanied by a change in
arterial tension, and we can therefore use this expression of the part
as the symbol of the whole. It is this enlarged diastole of the soul
that we call _religion_.

“The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single
individual,--namely, to You.” From the religious standpoint this is
essentially true. The soul is situated at the centre of the world,
exposed to a practically infinite number of appeals, to which it is
capable of yielding a practically infinite number of responses or
initiations. Every moment a stream of influences is striking against
the soul and producing a multitudinous stream of responses, new stops
growing, as it were, beneath the player’s touch. We know that for the
most part the harsh and jarring discords predominate, that a soul
that answers to the world’s touch with a music that is ever large and
harmonious, is so rare that we call it by some divine ideal word. Yet
the field of the soul’s liberation is a large one, whether we look
at it on the physical or on the mental side. The simplest functions
of physiological life may be its ministers. Everyone who is at all
acquainted with the Persian mystics, knows how wine may be regarded
as an instrument of religion. Indeed, in all countries and in all
ages, some form of physical enlargement--singing, dancing, drinking,
sexual excitement--has been intimately associated with worship. Even
the momentary expansion of the soul in laughter is, to however slight
an extent, a religious exercise. I do not fear to make this assertion;
the expansions of the soul differ indefinitely in volume and quality.
If this is but a low rung of the ladder along which pass the angels of
our gladness, at the other end is that vision of divine self-sacrifice,
so marked in the more highly developed religions, which has sustained
through sorrow and defeat some of the world’s loftiest spirits. They
differ, as much as we will, in degree, but between them what hint
by which to draw a line? Whenever an impulse from the world strikes
against the organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain,
not even the muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous
expansion or aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the
infinite for which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave
that promises to bear us towards it.[13]

[13] It may be said that religion, as even the etymology of the word
witnesses, has been a force on the side of repression. That also is
true; it cannot indeed be too strongly emphasized. Only in the strength
of that joyous expansion could men have acted and suffered such
intolerable torture in the service of religion. (It must be remembered,
however, that in certain stages of civilization religion is largely
identified with morality). It is necessary to generalize from the most
various and highly specialized cases in order to arrive at a reasonable
definition.

When we try to classify the chief of these affections of the soul
according to the impulses that arouse them, we find that they may be
conveniently divided into four classes:--(1.) Those caused by the
liberation of impulses stored up in the soul. (2.) Those caused by
impulses from other souls. (3.) Those caused by impulses from the
world, as distinct from souls. (4.) Those caused by an intuition of
union with the world.

(1.) Here we are, above all, concerned with art. It is not necessary
here to distinguish between the emotion of the artist and that of him
who merely follows the artist, passing his hand as it were over the
other’s work, and receiving, in a less degree it may be, the same
emotion. We are all artists potentially. The secret of the charm of
art is that it presents to us an external world which is manifestly of
like nature with the soul. “Non merita nome di Creatore,” according
to Tasso’s saying, “se non Iddio ed il Poeta.” The work of art--poem,
statue, music--succeeds in being what every philosophy attempts to
be. Neither change nor death can touch it; also it is immeasurable;
we feel that we are in the presence of the infinite. No art has ever
succeeded in embodying those visions of the infinite which are commonly
regarded as specifically religious--so that even to-day we respond
with a thrill of dilatation--as the old fragmentary art of Egypt in
the ruined temples of the Thebaid. Greek art, also, is a manifestation
of the infinite; we may lose ourselves among those subtle curves of
man’s or woman’s body. A Gothic cathedral of the thirteenth century
is an embodiment of the infinite world itself. The soul responds
expansively to all these things. When that response is wanting, and the
art therefore, however interesting, is not religious--as in the art of
Pompeii and the Italian post-Raphaelite art--it will generally be found
technically inferior. The subject, one may note, has little or nothing
to do with the matter. A representation of God the Father rarely
evokes any religious response. De Hooge, by means of mere sunlight and
the rubbish of a back-yard, awakes in us an enlarging thrill of joy.
In music the most indefinite and profound mysteries of the soul are
revealed and placed outside us as a gracious and marvellous orb; the
very secret of the soul is brought forth and set in the audible world.
That is why no other art smites us with so powerfully religious an
appeal as music; no other art tells us such old forgotten secrets about
ourselves.

    “O! what is this that knows the road I came?”

It is in the mightiest of all instincts, the primitive sexual
traditions of the races before man was, that music is rooted.

There are perhaps two instincts, a motor and a sensory, lying at the
bottom of art and the delight in art. All the constructive instincts
of living things, from bees and ants and worms and birds upwards, have
gone to mould our delight in the fashioning of a whole, and in the
contemplation of its fashion. The same process was carried on into
human life. The primitive potter who took clay and wrought with her
hands, and dinted with her nails, the cup or pot or jar, wrought it
through long ages ever more lovely and perfect, embodying therein all
that she knew of the earth’s uses and saw of its beauty, and by a true
instinct she called her work a living creature. The baskets that early
men wove, and the weapons that they carved for themselves, and their
rhythmical cries in war-dance or worship, are part of a chain that
presents itself again in Gothic cathedrals or Greek and Elizabethan
dramas.

Even stronger than this motor instinct of art is the sensory delight
in beauty which has its root in the attraction of sex. Not indeed the
only root; all the things in the world that give light and heat and
food and shelter and help gather around themselves some garment of
loveliness, and so become the stuff of art; the sun and the reindeer
are among the very first things to which men tried to give artistic
expression. But the sexual instinct is more poignant and overmastering,
more ancient than any as a source of beauty. Colour and song and
strength and skill--such are the impressions that male and female
have graved on each other’s hearts in their moments of most intense
emotional exaltation. Their reflections have been thrown on the whole
world. When the youth awakes to find a woman is beautiful, he finds, to
his amazement, that the world also is beautiful. Who can say in what
lowly organism was stored the first of those impressions of beauty, the
reflections of sexual emotion, to which all creators of beauty--whether
in the form of the Venus of Milo, the Madonna di San Sisto, Chopin’s
music, Shelley’s lyrics--can always appeal, certain of response? One
might name finally as the highest, most complex summit of art reached
in our own time--a summit on which art is revealed in its supreme
religious form--Wagner’s “Parsifal.” These things sprang from love, as
surely as the world would have been wellnigh barren of beauty had the
sexual method of reproduction never replaced all others. Beauty is the
child of love; the world, at least all in it worth living for, was the
creation of love.

Yet another art, more subtle and complex, has played a large part
in the history of religion--the art of metaphysic. The savage finds
religious gratification in the exercise of his coarser senses,
in singing or dancing or drinking; the man of large and refined
intellectual development, a Plato, a Spinoza, a Kant, finds it in
philosophy. Such men, indeed, are few, but by force of intelligence
they have been enabled to thrust their pictures of the world on
inferior minds; their arts have become articles. But every man who has
reached the stage of development in which he can truly experience the
joy of the philosophic emotion will construct his own philosophy. A
philosophy is the house of the mind, and no two philosophies can be
alike because no two minds are alike. But the emotion is the same, the
emotion of expansive joy in a house not built with hands, in which the
soul has made for herself a large and harmonious dwelling.

(2.) It is true that souls remain for ever apart. The lover seeks to be
absorbed altogether in the heaven of the loved personality, but in the
end the heaven remains unsealed.

 “_Adfigunt avide corpus junguntque salivas oris et inspirant
 pressantes dentibus ora, nequiquam._”

And yet a large or lovely personality is not the less an outlook
towards the infinite. We cannot think of certain men of immense range
or power or sweetness--St. Francis, Leonardo, Napoleon, Darwin--without
experiencing a movement of liberation. To pronounce the names of such
men is of the nature of an act of worship. I cannot for a moment
think of Shakespeare without a thrill of exultation at such gracious
plenitude of power. No person, probably, ever made so ardent a personal
appeal to men as Jesus. He discovered a whole new world of emotional
life, a new expansion of joy, a kingdom in which slave and harlot took
precedence of priest and king. To the men for whom that new emotional
world was fresh and living, torture and shame and death counted as
nothing beside so large a possession of inward gladness. The weakest
and lowest became heroes and saints in the effort to guard a pearl of
so great price. There are few more inspiring figures in the history
of man than the white body of the slave-girl Blandina, that hung from
the stake day after day with the beasts in the amphitheatre at Lyons,
torn and bleeding, yet, _instar generosi cujusdam athletæ_, with the
undying cry on her lips, _Christiana sum!_ It is open to everyone to
give liberating impulses to his fellows. It is the distinction of Jesus
that he has, for us, permanently expanded the bounds of individuality.
We all breathe deeper and freer because of that semi-ideal carpenter’s
son. “_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_,” said the physician in
the old story, by the bedside of a wretched patient. “_Non est corpus
tam vile pro quo mortuus est Christus_,” unexpectedly returned the
dying man. The charm of Jesus can never pass away when it is rightly
apprehended.

But it is not alone the large mystery of exceptional personalities
which calls out this response. To certain finely-tempered spirits no
human thing is too mean to fail in making this emotional appeal. The
chief religious significance of Walt Whitman lies in his revelation
of the emotional value of the entire common human personality and
all that belongs to it. The later Athenians (as also Goethe) placed
above all things the harmonious development of the individual in its
higher forms. It still remained to show the loveliness of the complete
ordinary personality. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” cannot in this respect
be over-estimated.[14]

[14] The late William Cyples, in his charming and neglected _magnum
opus_, “The Process of Human Experience” (p. 462), rightly traces this
form of religion to the feeling generated between lovers, friends,
parent and children. “A few have at intervals walked in the world,” he
adds, “who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel
... it has proved sufficient for them even to wish enough to help their
race; instantly these secret delights have risen in their hearts.
Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the
infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial
madness. Beggars’ rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing,
because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial
acts, but only welcome services. It was the humblest, the easiest, the
readiest of duties to lay down life for the ignorant, the ill-behaved,
the unkind,--for any and all who did but wear the familiar human shape.
That this ecstasy of humanity should rise so much higher than any other
is according to the plain working of the law of accumulation of finer
consciousness by complexity in the occasioning activity. Remember by
how much man is the subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many
points he can attach relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in
his results. All other things are dull, meagre, tame beside him. If the
most part of us are only as dross to one another, in place of being of
this priceless value, it can only be from the lack of mutual services
among us. Without these how can we but want sufficient adaptiveness
of mood,--how can we help groaning under the weight of instincts half
organized or wholly unfulfilled?”

(3.) There is a religion of science. It is rarer than has sometimes
been supposed, and among men of science, probably, it is seldom
found. Strauss’s “Old Faith and New” is one of the chief attempts
by a man of science to present the scientific attitude as food for
the religious consciousness. The result is dreary in the extreme,
in the end almost ludicrous. Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the
Unknowable is a distinct though faint approximation to the religious
relationship. Positivism, with its quasi-scientific notions, was
founded on a curiously narrow conception of the nature of religion,
and its religious sterility is probably inevitable. The man of science
has little to do with magnificent generalizations; he is concerned
chiefly with the patient investigation of details; it is but rarely
that he feels called upon, like Kepler or Newton, for any emotional
response to the grandeur and uniformity of law. Yet to many this vision
of universal law has come as a light moving over chaos, a glad new
discovery of the vastness and yet the homeliness of the world.

An æsthetic emotion is not necessarily religious, even within the field
of inanimate nature. So also the elusive tints, the subtle perfumes
of things, so far from liberating the soul, may excite a tormenting
desire to grasp and appropriate what is so lovely and so intangible.
Still, there is a distinct class of emotions aroused by nature which
is of the religious order. A large expanse of air or sea or undulating
land, or the placid infinity of the star-lit sky, seems necessary to
impart that enlarging and pacifying sense of nature alike to poets
and peasants. Some sight or sound of nature, either habitually, or
under some special conditions in the percipient, may strike upon the
soul and liberate it at once from the bonds of commonplace actuality.
Perhaps no modern man has better expressed the religious aspects of
nature than Thoreau. Of the American wood-thrush Thoreau can rarely
speak without using the language of religion. “All that was ripest and
fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted
to us in the strain of the wood-thrush.... Whenever a man hears it,
he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there
is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not
shut against him. Most other birds sing, from the level of my ordinary
cheerful hours, a carol, but this bird never fails to speak to me out
of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal vigour and beauty.”
Generally, however, this emotion appears to be associated, not so much
with isolated beautiful objects, as with great vistas in which beauty
may scarcely inhere--

                          “all waste
    And solitary places; where we taste
    The pleasure of believing what we see
    Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”

It is indeed myself that I unconsciously project into the large and
silent world around me; the exhilaration I feel is a glad sense of the
vast new bounds of my nature. That is why, at the appearance of another
human being, I sink back immediately into the limits of my own normal
individuality. I am no longer conterminous with the world around me; I
cannot absorb or control another individuality like my own. I become a
self-conscious human being in the presence of another self-conscious
human being.

(4.) The supreme expression of the religious consciousness lies always
in an intuition of union with the world, under whatever abstract or
concrete names the infinite not-self may be hidden. The perpetual
annunciation of this union has ever been the chief gladness of life.
It comes in the guise of a κάθαρσις of egoism, a complete renunciation
of the limits of individuality--of all the desires and aims that seem
to converge in the single personality--and a joyous acceptance of what
has generally seemed an immense external Will, now first dimly or
clearly realized. In every age this intuition has found voice--voice
that has often grown wild and incoherent with the torrent of expansive
emotion that impelled it. It is this intuition which is the “emptiness”
of Lâo-tsze, the freedom from all aims that centre in self: “It is
only by doing nothing that the kingdom can be made one’s own.” This
is the great good news of the Upanishads: the _âtman_, the soul, may
attain to a state of _yoga_, of union, with the supreme _âtman_; free,
henceforth, from doubts and desires which pass over it as water passes
over the leaf of the lotus without wetting it; acting, henceforth, only
as acts the potter’s wheel when the potter has ceased to turn it: “If
I know that my own body is not mine, and yet that the whole earth is
mine, and again that it is both mine and thine--no harm can happen
then.” The Buddhist’s Nirvana, whether interpreted as a state to be
attained before or after death, has the same charm; it opens up the
kingdom of the Universe to man; it offers to the finite a home in the
infinite. This is the great assertion of Christ, “I and my Father are
one;” and whenever Christianity has reached its highest expression,
from Paul’s day to our own, it has but sung over again the old refrain
of joy at the “new birth” into eternal life--the union, as it is
said, of the soul through Christ with God--a tender Father, a great
sustaining Power on which the soul may rest and be at peace:

    “E la sua volontade è nostra pace.”

And that again is but in another form the Sufiism of Jelal-ed-din--the
mystic union of the human bridegroom with the Divine Bride. Even the
austere Imperial Stoic becomes lyrical as this intuition comes to
him: “Everything is harmonious with me which is harmonious to thee,
O Universe!” As far back as we can trace, the men of all races, each
in his own way and with his own symbols, have raised this shout of
exultation. There is no larger freedom for man.

       *       *       *       *       *

It seemed well to name at least the chief implications contained in
a broadly generalized statement of man’s religious relation to the
universe. It is important to remember that they are but an individual
mode of representation. I can only say that I am conscious of myself
in varying attitudes or relations. The terms of those relationships,
stated with however much probability, will ever remain matter for
dispute. Moreover, various attitudes reveal various metaphysical
implications.

The scientific attitude, for example, has a series of implications of
its own. In its solvents all things are analyzed and atomized; the
“soul” of our religious world--the vast pulsating centre, at the bottom
of which, according to the profound saying of the old mystic, lies
that unutterable sigh which we call God--is resolved into a momentary
focus of ever-shifting rays of force; it is but an incident in a huge
evolution of shifting forces which we may, if we like, personify as
Nature, but which, none the less, we cannot conceive as a whole. The
scientific attitude has its own implications, and their far-reaching
significance, their immense value for the individual and for the race,
can scarcely be overrated.

Again, the moral attitude is equally distinct. The criminal after a
successful piece of villainy may feel a thrill of ecstasy. It is indeed
well known that criminals in every country are the children of (more
or less superstitious) religion. We may regard morality as grounded
in the sense of personality, gradually extending by imagination and
sympathy to every individual. Or we may regard it as springing, in a
sense of adhesiveness, from the family and resulting relationships,
and thence growing into a consciousness of the oneness of all human
interests, the individuals finding themselves to be, according to
that Stoic conception which has moulded European laws and is still a
leavening influence in European ethics, members one with another in
the same natural body of humanity. In any case, as a moral being the
individual finds himself dependent on other individuals, and with
a duty, therefore, laid upon him to live harmoniously with those
individuals; there being no response forthcoming to the demands of his
own nature unless he also responds to the demands of other natures.
Religion, however, knows nothing of the scientific “nature” or of the
ethical “man;” its impulse is from within and of free grace.

At the dawn of civilization, it is true, religion and morals are
inextricably mingled; they only become disentangled by a gradual
evolution. The Toda who regards as sacred an ancient cattle-bell is
obeying an impulse of adoration whose foundation is, probably, largely
ethical, for the bull is intimately connected with the beginnings of
civilization. A religious impulse will sometimes have an ethical
element; morals will sometimes find an ally in religion. But religion
with its internal criterion and morals with its more external criterion
remain essentially distinct, sometimes antagonistic: “to reject
religion,” Thoreau said, “is the first step towards moral excellence.”
That is but a puny religion that is based on morals; on the other hand,
the morals that rests on religion will sooner or later collapse with it
in a common ruin. That has been too often seen. Religions change: every
man is free to have his own, or to have none. No man, scarcely even a
Crusoe, is free to have no morals, and the ideal morality cannot widely
vary for any two societies.

Yet religion cannot live nobly without science or without morals. It is
only by a strenuous devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to
the moral structure of life, that religion--so made conscious of its
nature and its limits--can be rendered healthful.

    “None can usurp this height....
    But those to whom the miseries of the world
    Are misery, and will not let them rest;”

so spake Moneta to Keats, among all English poets the purest artist.

A man takes sides with religion, or with science, or with
morals; oftener he spends the brief moments of his existence in
self-preservation, fighting now on one side, now on the other. But
for a little while we are allowed to enter the house of life and to
gather around its fire. Why pull each other’s hair and pinch each
other’s arms like naughty children? Well would it be to warm ourselves
at the fire together, to clasp hands, to gain all the joy that comes of
comradeship, before we are called out, each of us, into the dark, alone.

The other elements fall away from religion, leaving the emotional,
deeper and more fundamental than either of the others; just as the
brain itself is controlled by the sympathetic system which outlives it
and holds in its hands the centres of life. That element underlay the
crude imaginings of the primitive man who first created a spiritual
world out of the stuff of his dreams and his primitive delight in the
most marvellous object he saw, the sun, that as he truly divined is the
source not only of light but of life; just as it underlies also our
more complex imaginings to-day. In religion, we are appealing not to
any narrow or superficial element of the man, but to something which is
more primitive than the intellectual efflorescence of the brain, the
central fire of life itself.

Our supreme business in life--not as we made it, but as it was made
for us when the world began--is to carry and to pass on as we received
it, or better, the sacred lamp of organic being that we bear within
us. Science and morals are subservient to the reproductive activity;
that is why they are so imperative. The rest is what we will, play,
art, consolation--in one word, religion. If religion is not science
or morals, it is the sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our
being. Life has been defined as, even physically and chemically, a
tension. All our lives long we are struggling against that tension, but
we can truly escape from it only by escaping from life itself. Religion
is the stretching forth of our hands toward the illimitable. It is an
intuition of the final deliverance, a half-way house on the road to
that City which we name mysteriously Death.


THE WALTER SCOTT PRESS, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.




PRESS OPINIONS ON “THE NEW SPIRIT.”


“It is easy to dislike his book, it is possible to dislike it
furiously; but the book is so honest, so earnest, so stimulating in its
tolerant but convinced unconventionality, that it claims for itself a
like sincerity and seriousness in the reader.... Mr. Ellis has produced
a book which will be hotly discussed, no doubt, for it is nothing if
not initiative, we might almost say revolutionary; but it is not a book
to be disregarded.... It has sincerity and it has power; and sincerity
and power compel at least attention.”--_Speaker._

“Mr. Havelock Ellis has discovered a ‘New Spirit.’ We have read him
with care and patience, and we should be sorry to describe it; we only
know that it is not intoxicating.”--_Scots Observer._

“Welcome is warmly due to this fresh, buoyant, and sincere volume of
essays by Mr. Havelock Ellis.... There are parts of the study of Heine
which are not unworthy to be named--it is high praise--with Matthew
Arnold’s inimitable paper upon that writer, a paper almost as classic
as Heine himself.... The last word upon so suggestive and finished a
piece of work ought to be one of ungrudging praise.”--_Academy._

“Mr. Carlyle described, it seems to us, Mr. Havelock Ellis himself with
great exactness in the person of a certain biographer of Voltaire, ‘an
inquiring, honest-hearted character, many of whose statements must have
begun to astonish even himself.’ Mr. Ellis must be very ‘inquiring,’
for we have seldom met with one who knows so many things that other
people do not know.”--_Athenæum._

“Each of these essays is a thorough and well-considered piece of
work, admirable in information, firm in grasp, stimulating in style,
appreciative in matter, and the survey afforded is broad.... It
is an altogether unusual work, both for its ambition and for its
matter; it brings the reader near to some of the marked ideas of the
time.”--_Nation._

“The points of the New Spirit are its passion for getting things
right in the matter of property and in the matter of true human
worth.”--_Daily News._

“The only coherent constituent of the New Spirit which this book
professes to set forth, is a vehement hatred, amounting to a passion,
against conventional unveracities, and a determination that they should
be swept away.... We cannot imagine anything of which it could be more
necessary for human nature, so taught [by our Lord], to purge itself,
than the New Spirit of Havelock Ellis.”--_Spectator._

“Mr. Havelock Ellis has written an interesting and significant book,
which it is quite easy to ridicule, but which certainly deserves a fair
hearing.... Apparently these writers are chosen because they all agree
in a hatred of shams, in looking facts in the face, and in demanding
provision for the healthy satisfaction of animal wants.... Mr. Ellis
writes with force and insight; but, whether from brevity or want of
caution, he leaves with regard to these subjects an impression which he
would probably not himself desire to produce.”--_Murray’s Magazine._

“The concluding chapter, wherein Mr. Ellis expresses his own ‘intimate
thought and secret emotion,’ is one of the best utterances of the New
Spirit which we have ever read.”--_Echo._

“Un volume de haute critique littéraire qui rappelle le style fort et
la méthode stricte de Hennequin.”--_Mercure de France._

“A more foolish, unwholesome, perverted piece of sentimental cant we
have never wasted our time over.”--_World._

“Excellent examples of appreciative criticism of an exceedingly
interesting series of authors, of whom every one ought to know
at least as much as Mr. Ellis here tells us so freshly and
vivaciously.”--_Scottish Leader._

“We only refer to this unpleasant compilation of cool impudence and
effrontery to warn our readers against it.”--_Dundee Advertiser._

“Beautiful both in thought and expression. But Mr. Ellis seems to have
laid aside altogether the wise restraint which characterises his volume
on ‘The Criminal.’... The scientific spirit, of which at other times he
has shown himself a distinguished exponent, should have prevented him
from such error.”--_Arbroath Herald._

“Ardent, enthusiastic, and eloquent.”--_Boston Literary World._

“It is not often that the weary and heart-sore reviewer, struggling to
keep abreast of the Protean outpourings of the press, falls in with
anything so well informed, so rich in thought and suggestion as _The
New Spirit_.”--_Wit and Wisdom._




_AUTHORISED VERSION._

_Crown 8vo, Cloth, Price 6s._

PEER GYNT: A Dramatic Poem.

BY HENRIK IBSEN.

TRANSLATED BY

WILLIAM AND CHARLES ARCHER.

_This Translation, though unrhymed, preserves throughout the various
rhythms of the original._


“In _Brand_ the hero is an embodied protest against the poverty
of spirit and half-heartedness that Ibsen rebelled against in his
countrymen. In _Peer Gynt_ the hero is himself the embodiment of that
spirit. In _Brand_ the fundamental antithesis, upon which, as its
central theme, the drama is constructed, is the contrast between the
spirit of compromise on the one hand, and the motto ‘everything or
nothing’ on the other. And _Peer Gynt_ is the very incarnation of a
compromising dread of decisive committal to any one course. In _Brand_
the problem of self-realisation and the relation of the individual
to his surroundings is obscurely struggling for recognition, and in
_Peer Gynt_ it becomes the formal theme upon which all the fantastic
variations of the drama are built up. In both plays alike the problems
of heredity and the influence of early surroundings are more than
touched upon; and both alike culminate in the doctrine that the only
redeeming power on earth or in heaven is the power of love.”--Mr. P. H.
WICKSTEED.




_Foolscap 8vo, Cloth, Price 3s. 6d._

THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL

(Or “REVIZÓR.”)

A RUSSIAN COMEDY.

BY NIKOLAI VASILIYEVICH GOGOL.

Translated from the original Russian, with Introduction and Notes, by
A. A. SYKES, B.A., Trinity College, Cambridge.


Though one of the most brilliant and characteristic of Gogol’s works,
and well-known on the Continent, the present is the first translation
of his _Revizór_, or Inspector-General, which has appeared in English.
A satire on Russian administrative functionaries, the _Revizór_ is a
comedy marked by continuous gaiety and invention, full of “situation,”
each development of the story accentuating the satire and emphasising
the characterisation, the whole play being instinct with life and
interest. Every here and there occurs the note of caprice, of
naïveté, of unexpected fancy, characteristically Russian. The present
translation will be found to be admirably fluent, idiomatic, and
effective.




New Illustrated Edition.

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PRICE 3s. 6d.

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MASTERPIECE,

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_WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS_

BY PAUL FRENZÉNY.


“As you read on you say, not, ‘This is like life,’ but, ‘This is
life.’ It has not only the complexion, the very line, of life, but its
movement, its advances, its strange pauses, its seeming reversions to
former conditions, and its perpetual change, its apparent isolations,
its essential solidarity. It is a world, and you live in it while you
read, and long afterward.”--_W. D. Howells._




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Hints to Travellers--Everyday Expressions--Arriving at and Leaving
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and Restaurant--At an Hotel--Paying an Hotel Bill--Enquiries in
a Town--On Board Ship--Embarking and Disembarking--Excursion
by Carriage--Enquiries as to Diligences--Enquiries as to
Boats--Engaging Apartments--Washing List and Days of Week--Restaurant
Vocabulary--Telegrams and Letters, etc., etc.

 The contents of these little handbooks are so arranged as to permit
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 considered absolutely essential have been purposely excluded, nothing
 being introduced which might confuse the traveller rather than assist
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 18 Great Musical Composers. By G. F. Ferris. Edited, with
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 19 The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Edited by Alice Zimmern.

 20 The Teaching of Epictetus. Translated from the Greek, with
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 21 Selections from Seneca. With Introduction by Walter Clode.

 22 Specimen Days in America. By Walt Whitman. Revised by the Author,
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 23 Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers. By Walt Whitman. (Published by
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 25 Defoe’s Captain Singleton. Edited, with Introduction, by H.
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 27 Prose Writings of Heine. With Introduction by Havelock Ellis.

 28 Reynolds’s Discourses. With Introduction by Helen Zimmern.

 29 Papers of Steele and Addison. Edited by Walter Lewin.

 30 Burns’s Letters. Selected and Arranged, with Introduction, by J.
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 31 Volsunga Saga. WILLIAM MORRIS. With Introduction by H. H. Sparling.

 32 Sartor Resartus. By Thomas Carlyle. With Introduction by Ernest
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 33 Select Writings of Emerson. With Introduction by Percival Chubb.

 34 Autobiography of Lord Herbert. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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 35 English Prose, from Maundeville to Thackeray. Chosen and Edited by
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 36 The Pillars of Society, and Other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen. Edited,
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 37 Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats.

 38 Essays of Dr. Johnson, with Biographical Introduction and Notes by
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 39 Essays of William Hazlitt. Selected and Edited, with Introduction
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 40 Landor’s Pentameron, and Other Imaginary Conversations. Edited,
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 41 Poe’s Tales and Essays. Edited, with Introduction by Ernest Rhys.

 42 Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver Goldsmith. Edited, with Preface, by
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 43 Political Orations, from Wentworth to Macaulay. Edited, with
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 44 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

 45 The Poet at the Breakfast-table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

 46 The Professor at the Breakfast-table. By Oliver Wendell Holmes.

 47 Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son. Selected, with
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 48 Stories from Carleton. Selected, with Introduction, by W. Yeats.

 49 Jane Eyre. By Charlotte Brontë. Edited by Clement K. Shorter.

 50 Elizabethan England. Edited by Lothrop Withington, with a Preface
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 51 The Prose Writings of Thomas Davis. Edited by T. W. Rolleston.

 52 Spence’s Anecdotes. A Selection. Edited with an Introduction and
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 53 More’s Utopia, and Life of Edward V. Edited, with an Introduction,
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 54 Sadi’s Gulistan, or Flower Garden. Translated, with an Essay, by
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 55 English Fairy and Folk Tales. Edited by E. Sidney Hartland.

 56 Northern Studies. By Edmund Gosse. With a Note by Ernest Rhys.

 57 Early Reviews of Great Writers. Edited by E. Stevenson.

 58 Aristotle’s Ethics. With George Henry Lewes’s Essay on Aristotle
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 59 Landor’s Pericles and Aspasia. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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 60 Annals of Tacitus. Thomas Gordon’s Translation. Edited, with an
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 61 Essays of Elia. By Charles Lamb. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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 62 Balzac’s Shorter Stories. Translated by William Wilson and the
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 63 Comedies of De Musset. Edited, with an Introductory Note, by S. L.
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 64 Coral Reefs. By Charles Darwin. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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 65 Sheridan’s Plays. Edited, with an Introduction, by Rudolf Dircks.

 66 Our Village. By Miss Mitford. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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 67 Master Humphrey’s Clock, and Other Stories. By Charles Dickens.
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 68 Tales from Wonderland. By Rudolph Baumbach. Translated by Helen B.
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 69 Essays and Papers by Douglas Jerrold. Edited by Walter Jerrold.

 70 Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By Mary Wollstonecraft.
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 71 “The Athenian Oracle.” A Selection. Edited by John Underhill, with
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 72 Essays of Sainte-Beuve. Translated and Edited, with an
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 73 Selections from Plato. From the Translation of Sydenham and Taylor.
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 74 Heine’s Italian Travel Sketches, Etc. Translated by Elizabeth A.
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 75 Schiller’s Maid of Orleans. Translated, with an Introduction, by
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 76 Selections from Sydney Smith. Edited, with an Introduction, by
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 77 The New Spirit. By Havelock Ellis.

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GREAT WRITERS.

A NEW SERIES OF CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES.

Edited by Prof. E. S. ROBERTSON and FRANK T. MARZIALS.

A Complete Bibliography to each Volume, by J. P. ANDERSON, British
Museum, London.

Cloth, Uncut Edges, Gilt Top. Price 1/6.

VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED--


LIFE OF LONGFELLOW. By PROF. ERIC S. ROBERTSON.

 “A most readable little work.”--_Liverpool Mercury._

LIFE OF COLERIDGE. By HALL CAINE.

 “Brief and vigorous, written throughout with spirit and great literary
 skill.”--_Scotsman._

LIFE OF DICKENS. By FRANK T. MARZIALS.

 “Notwithstanding the mass of matter that has been printed relating
 to Dickens and his works ... we should, until we came across this
 volume, have been at a loss to recommend any popular life of England’s
 most popular novelist as being really satisfactory. The difficulty is
 removed by Mr. Marzials’s little book.”--_Athenæum._

LIFE OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. By J. KNIGHT.

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 best yet presented to the public.”--_The Graphic._

LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON. By COLONEL F. GRANT.

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 good taste, and accuracy.”--_Illustrated London News._

LIFE OF DARWIN. By G. T. BETTANY.

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LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By A. BIRRELL.

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LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. By R. GARNETT, LL. D.

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LIFE OF ADAM SMITH. By R. B. HALDANE, M.P.

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LIFE OF KEATS. By W. M. ROSSETTI.

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LIFE OF SHELLEY. By WILLIAM SHARP.

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LIFE OF SMOLLETT. By DAVID HANNAY.

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 masters of the English novel.”--_Saturday Review._

LIFE OF GOLDSMITH. By AUSTIN DOBSON.

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 humorous and pathetic vicissitudes, is here retold, as none could tell
 it better.”--_Daily News._

LIFE OF SCOTT. By PROFESSOR YONGE.

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LIFE OF BURNS. By PROFESSOR BLACKIE.

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 about Burns.”--_Pall Mall Gazette._

LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO. By FRANK T. MARZIALS.

 “Mr. Marzials’s volume presents to us, in a more handy form than any
 English or even French handbook gives, the summary of what is known
 about the life of the great poet.”--_Saturday Review._

LIFE OF EMERSON. By RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D.

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 Review._

LIFE OF GOETHE. By JAMES SIME.

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LIFE OF CONGREVE. By EDMUND GOSSE.

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LIFE OF BUNYAN. By CANON VENABLES.

 “A most intelligent, appreciative, and valuable memoir.”--_Scotsman._

LIFE OF CRABBE. By T. E. KEBBEL.

 “No English poet since Shakespeare has observed certain aspects of
 nature and of human life more closely.”--_Athenæum._

LIFE OF HEINE. By WILLIAM SHARP.

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 of recent knowledge and criticism than any other English
 work.”--_Scotsman._

LIFE OF MILL. By W. L. COURTNEY.

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LIFE OF SCHILLER. By HENRY W. NEVINSON.

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LIFE OF CAPTAIN MARRYAT. By DAVID HANNAY.

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LIFE OF LESSING. By T. W. ROLLESTON.

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LIFE OF MILTON. By RICHARD GARNETT LL.D.

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 Leader._

LIFE OF BALZAC. By FREDERICK WEDMORE.

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 whose greatness is to be measured by comparison with his successors,
 is a piece of careful and critical composition, neat and nice in
 style.”--_Daily News._

LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT. By OSCAR BROWNING.

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 was much to be desired, and Mr. Browning has done his work with
 vivacity, and not without skill.”--_Manchester Guardian._

LIFE OF JANE AUSTEN. By GOLDWIN SMITH.

 “Mr. Goldwin Smith has added another to the not inconsiderable roll
 of eminent men who have found their delight in Miss Austen.... His
 little book upon her, just published by Walter Scott, is certainly a
 fascinating book to those who already know her and love her well; and
 we have little doubt that it will prove also a fascinating book to
 those who have still to make her acquaintance.”--_Spectator._

LIFE OF BROWNING. By WILLIAM SHARP.

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 respect it seems to us what a biography should be.”--_Public Opinion._

LIFE OF BYRON. By HON. RODEN NOEL.

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LIFE OF HAWTHORNE. By MONCURE CONWAY.

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LIFE OF SCHOPENHAUER. By PROFESSOR WALLACE.

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 is, perhaps, excessively lenient in dealing with the man, and it
 cannot be said to be at all ferociously critical in dealing with the
 philosophy.”--_Saturday Review._

LIFE OF SHERIDAN. By LLOYD SANDERS.

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 praise than the work deserves.”--_Manchester Examiner._

LIFE OF THACKERAY. By HERMAN MERIVALE and F. T. MARZIALS.

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 with its excellent bibliography, is one which neither the student nor
 the general reader can well afford to miss.”--_Pall Mall Gazette._

LIFE OF CERVANTES. By W. E. WATTS.

 “We can commend this book as a worthy addition to the useful series to
 which it belongs.”--_London Daily Chronicle._

LIFE OF VOLTAIRE. By FRANCIS ESPINASSE.

       *       *       *       *       *

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IBSEN’S FAMOUS PROSE DRAMAS. EDITED BY WILLIAM ARCHER.

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before: it is too terrible.... Yet we must return to Ibsen, with his
remorseless surgery, his remorseless electric-light, until we, too,
have grown strong and learned to face the naked--if necessary, the
flayed and bleeding--reality._”--SPEAKER (London).

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THE CANTERBURY POETS.

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  =THE CHRISTIAN YEAR=             By the Rev. John Keble.
  =COLERIDGE=                      Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
  =LONGFELLOW=                     Edited by Eva Hope.
  =CAMPBELL=                       Edited by John Hogben.
  =SHELLEY=                        Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
  =WORDSWORTH=                     Edited by A. J. Symington.
  =BLAKE=                          Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
  =WHITTIER=                       Edited by Eva Hope.
  =POE=                            Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
  =CHATTERTON=                     Edited by John Richmond.
  =BURNS.= Poems                   Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
  =BURNS.= Songs                   Edited by Joseph Skipsey.
  =MARLOWE=                        Edited by Percy E. Pinkerton.
  =KEATS=                          Edited by John Hogben.
  =HERBERT=                        Edited by Ernest Rhys.
  =HUGO=                           Translated by Dean Carrington.
  =COWPER=                         Edited by Eva Hope.
  =SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS, Etc.=      Edited by William Sharp.
  =EMERSON=                        Edited by Walter Lewin.
  =SONNETS OF THIS CENTURY=        Edited by William Sharp.
  =WHITMAN=                        Edited by Ernest Rhys.
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  =GOLDSMITH=                      Edited by William Tirebuck.
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  =BYRON (2 Vols.)=                Edited by Mathilde Blind.
  =THE SONNETS OF EUROPE=          Edited by S. Waddington.
  =RAMSAY=                         Edited by J. Logie Robertson.
  =DOBELL=                         Edited by Mrs. Dobell.
  =DAYS OF THE YEAR=               With Introduction by William Sharp.
  =POPE=                           Edited by John Hogben.
  =HEINE=                          Edited by Mrs. Kroeker.
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  =CHAUCER=                        Edited by Frederick Noël Paton.
  =POEMS OF WILD LIFE=             Edited by Charles G. D. Roberts, M.A.
  =PARADISE REGAINED=              Edited by J. Bradshaw, M.A., LL.D.
  =CRABBE=                         Edited by E. Lamplough.
  =DORA GREENWELL=                 Edited by William Dorling.
  =FAUST=                          Edited by Elizabeth Craigmyle.
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  =HUNT AND HOOD=                  Edited by J. Harwood Panting.
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  =WOMEN POETS=                    Edited by Mrs. Sharp.
  =LOVE LYRICS=                    Edited by Percy Hulburd.
  =AMERICAN HUMOROUS VERSE=        Edited by James Barr.
  =MINOR SCOTCH LYRICS=            Edited by Sir George Douglas.
  =CAVALIER LYRISTS=               Edited by Will H. Dircks.
  =GERMAN BALLADS=                 Edited by Elizabeth Craigmyle.
  =SONGS OF BERANGER=              Translated by William Toynbee.
  =POEMS OF THE HON. RODEN NOEL.=  With an Introduction by Robert Buchanan.




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THE

Music of the Poets:

A MUSICIANS’ BIRTHDAY BOOK.

EDITED BY ELEONORE D’ESTERRE KEELING.

This is a unique Birthday Book. Against each date are given the names
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London: WALTER SCOTT, 24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber's Note

Duplicate headings have been removed.

The following apparent errors have been corrected:

p. 19 "intervene," changed to "intervene."

p. 42 "fouguese" changed to "fougueuse"

p. 122 "brothers. and" changed to "brothers, and"

p. 190 "songs shoot" changed to "songs, shoot"

p. 191 "Sebastopool" changed to "Sebastopol"

p. 216 "unforgetable" changed to "unforgettable"

(advertisement) "7 Prose Writings of Heine" changed to "27 Prose
Writings of Heine"

(advertisement) "work." changed to "work.”

(advertisement) "contains." changed to "contains.”"

(advertisement) "CHILDREN OF POETS" changed to "CHILDREN OF POETS."

(advertisement) "Breakfast Table" changed to "Breakfast-Table"

(advertisement) "WILLIAMARCHER" changed to "WILLIAM ARCHER"


The following are used inconsistently in the text:

after-thought and afterthought

child-like and childlike

life-like and lifelike

now-a-days and nowadays

over-mastering and overmastering

stand-point and standpoint

sun-rise and sunrise