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GREAT CLASSICS

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TIMOTHY DWIGHT, D.D. LLD.
RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
ARTHUR RICHMOND MARSH. A.B.
PAVL VAN DYKE, D.D.
ALBERT ELLERY BERGH

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[Illustration: SHAKESPEARE BEFORE SIR THOMAS LUCY.
_Photogravure from a painting by T. Brooks._

This picture brings vividly before us an interesting incident of
Shakespeare's early days. He has just been caught red-handed in the
crime of poaching, and is now brought before Sir Thomas Lucy to answer
to the gamekeeper's charge. Though this incident seems well
authenticated, little is definitely known of this period of the great
dramatist's life. But we do know that that energy, which later achieved
so much, in his youth ran to waste in all kinds of lawless pleasures.
The artist here depicts Sir Thomas Lucy sitting stern and grave as he
listens to the constable's charge against Shakespeare. A slaughtered
deer has been brought in, as testimony against him. Shakespeare himself,
though seeming fully aware of the gravity of his offence, appears
nevertheless composed and prepared to answer the charge. Though the
magistrate may not be favorably impressed by the dauntless independence
of Shakespeare's bearing, we may be sure he excites the admiration of
the feminine members of the household, who are watching him with
interest. All the accessories of carved woodwork, leaded casements, and
tapestried walls interest us as depicting the interior of a typical
manor-house of the period.]


HISTORY OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE

HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
HENRY VAN LAUN

WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY

J. SCOTT CLARK, A. M.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

REVISED EDITION

VOLUME I





DEDICATION

Even at the present day, the historian of Civilization in Europe and in
France is amongst us, at the head of those historical studies which he
formerly encouraged so much. I myself have experienced his kindness,
learned by his conversation, consulted his books, and profited by that
intellectual and impartial breadth, that active and liberal sympathy,
with which he receives the labors and thoughts of others, even when
these ideas are not like his own. I consider it a duty and an honor to
inscribe this work to M. Guizot.

H. A. TAINE.




SPECIAL INTRODUCTION


The publication of M. Taine's "History of English Literature," in 1864,
and its translation into English, in 1872, mark an epoch in educational
history, especially in that of America. Prior to the appearance of this
work, the total knowledge of British writers gained in the school and
college life of the ordinary American youth was generally derived in the
form of blind memorization from one text-book. This book was a
combination of minute biographical detail with the generalities and
abstractions of criticism. The student, and the general reader as well,
did not really study the great writers at all; he simply memorized what
someone had written about them; and he tried, generally in vain, to
comprehend the real concrete significance of such critical terms as
"bald, nervous, sonorous," etc. But with the distribution of M.
Taine's great work came the beginning of better things. It was the first
step in an evolution by no means yet completed--a movement paralleled in
the development of methods of scientific study during the last four
decades. Forty years ago the pupil did not study oxygen, electricity, or
cellulose; he simply memorized what someone had written _about_ these
elements. He never touched and rarely saw the things themselves, and he
counted himself fortunate if his instructor had the energy and the
facilities to perform before the wondering class a few stock
experiments. But all this has been changed. It is now universally
recognized that the only sound method of studying any science is the
laboratory method; that is, the study of the thing itself in all its
manifestations. In methods of studying literature the progress towards a
true scientific, that is, a laboratory method, has been much slower, but
it seems almost equally sure. We are just now in the intermediate stage,
where we study "editions with notes." Our educators, as a rule, have yet
to learn that to memorize biographical data and the mere generalities
and negations of criticism, or to trace out obscure allusions and
doubtful meanings, is not to study a writer in any broad or fruitful
sense. But the movement towards a true scientific method is already well
begun; and, as we have said, to M. Taine belongs the honor of taking the
initial step.

With Taine's work in hand the thoughtful reader may realize to a large
extent the significance of Leslie Stephen's memorable dictum: "The whole
art of criticism consists in learning to know the human being who is
partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words." M. Taine's
pages continually attest his deep conviction that "the style is the
man," in a very comprehensive sense. In his Introduction to his "History
of English Literature," we find such statements as these:--"You study
the document only to know the man, just as you study the fossil shell
only to know the animal behind it; Genuine history is brought into
existence only when the historian begins to unravel... the living man,
toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and
features, his gestures and dress, distinct and complete as he from whom
we have just parted in the street; Twenty select phrases from Plato
and Aristophanes will teach you much more than a multitude of
dissertations and commentaries; The true critic is present at the
drama which was enacted in the soul of the artist or the writer; the
choice of a word, the brevity or length of a sentence, the nature
of a metaphor, the accent of a verse, the development of an
argument--everything is a symbol to him;... in short he works out its
(the text's) psychology; there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for
truth, as there is for muscular movement or animal heat." To put M.
Taine's great and characteristic merit into a sentence, we may say that
he was the first writer on English literature to apply to it the
fundamental principle, patent to every person of reflection, that we
necessarily think in concrete terms, and that, therefore, a treatise
must be valuable just in proportion to the concreteness of its
presentation.

In order to show how great was the advance made by M. Taine's work over
its predecessors, let us take a classic English writer at random and
compare the treatment given him by M. Taine with that given in the
text-book already mentioned. Suppose we open to the discussion of
Addison. In the latter work we are told that he was born in 1672 and
died in 1719; that he was a son of Lancelot Addison, a clergyman of some
reputation for learning; that Addison studied at the Charter House,
where he formed a friendship with Richard Steele; that he afterwards
entered Oxford; that he wrote various short poems and one long one, of
which six whole lines are given as a specimen. We are told, also, that
Addison held, in succession, certain political offices; that he
contributed one-sixth of the papers found in Steele's "Tatler," more
than one-half of those in the "Spectator," and one-third of those in the
"Guardian"; that he published a drama called "Cato," which, the book
informs us, is "cold, solemn, and pompous, written with scrupulous
regard for the classical unities." We learn, further, that Addison
married a countess, and died at the early age of forty-seven; that he
had a quarrel with Pope; that his papers published in the "Tatler," the
"Spectator," and the "Guardian" are marked by "fertility of invention
and singular felicity of treatment"; that their variety is wonderful,
and that everything is treated "with singular appropriateness and
unforced energy"; that "there is a singular harmony between the language
and the thought" (whatever that may mean); that Addison's delineations
of the characters of men are wonderfully delicate; that he possessed
humor in its highest and most delicate perfection; that his hymns
breathe a fervent and tender spirit of piety. Contrary to the usage of
its author, the text-book gives the whole sixteen lines of Addison's
most famous hymn--the longest illustrative quotation in the whole four
hundred pages--one blessed little oasis in a vast desert of dry
biographical minutiæ and the abstract generalities of criticism. In the
eight pages devoted to Addison there are not more than ten lines of real
criticism; and these consist, for the most part, of what, to the
ordinary reader, are meaningless adjectives or high-sounding epithets.
Yet this is one of the very best chapters in the book. It is certainly a
fair specimen of the barren method generally prevalent before the
appearance of M. Taine's work.

Now let us compare his treatment of Addison. In the first place,
scattered through the eighteen pages devoted to that writer
(single-volume edition) we find no less than twenty-two illustrative
passages, varying in length from six to 176 lines of very fine print. In
his general treatment M. Taine begins by tracing the physical, social,
and moral environment of Addison, thus leading us up to the
consideration of the man and the writer by a natural process of
evolution. We are first shown what kind of a man to expect, and then we
are made acquainted with him. And all this is done with the most vivid
and brilliant touches. Mere biographical details are either ignored or
given incidental mention. The opening paragraph is a _tableau vivant_,
which we see Addison at Oxford, "studious, peaceful, loving solitary
walks under the elm avenues." We are told how, from boyhood, "his memory
is stuffed with Latin verses"; how "this limited culture, leaving him
weaker, made him more refined" how "he acquired a taste for the elegance
and refinement, the triumphs and the artifices, of style"; how he became
"an epicure in literature"; how "he naturally loved beautiful things"; how
"Addison, good and just himself, trusted in God, also a being good and
just"; how he writes his lay sermons; how "he cannot suffer languishing
or lazy habits"; how "he is full of epigrams against flirtations,
extravagant toilets, useless visits"; how "he explains God, reducing him
to a mere magnified man"; with what literal precision he describes
Heaven; how he "inserts prayers in his papers and forbids oaths"; how he
made morality fashionable.

These illustrations of M. Taine's method might be multiplied
indefinitely, but enough have surely been quoted to demonstrate how
vastly more vivid and concrete is the idea of Addison, the man and the
writer, gained by this method in comparison with that which was in
general vogue before the publication of M. Taine's book. In the one case
the reader has come into contact with a mere abstraction--a man of
straw, with not a single feature that impresses itself on the
imagination or the memory. In the other, he has come into communion with
a real living soul--a man "of like passions with ourselves."

But the very qualities of the great French critic which make his book so
helpful are the source of his defects as a writer. These qualities are
national quite as much as individual. It is a truism that the French
people lead the world in the field of criticism as applied to both
literature and art. This superiority is strikingly illustrated also in
St. Beuve, and is due to a certain quickness of perception, a certain
power of concrete illustration, that seems inherent in the race of
cultivated Frenchmen. M. Taine himself well defines this ethnic trait
when he speaks of "France, with her Parisian culture, with her
drawing-room manners, with her untiring analysis of characters and
actions, her irony so ready to hit upon a weakness, her _finesse_ so
practised in the discrimination of modes of thought." This national
talent is almost invariably associated with a nervous, sanguine
temperament, which easily tends to extremes of expression. We are
therefore compelled to read M. Taine with some degree of caution when we
are seeking exact statement and strict limitation.

Again, M. Taine is sometimes inaccurate or unjust from a lack of
sympathy. He sometimes finds it impossible to rid himself of his Gallic
predilections and aversions, especially when treating of the Puritan
character or the stolid English morality. He cannot appreciate the
religious conditions that surround his subject. He is always the
Frenchman discussing the English writer. He cannot forbear to contrast
the effect or the reception accorded to an author's work in England with
that which it would have received in France; as when he says, concerning
Addison's lay sermons in the "Spectator": "I know very well what success
a newspaper full of sermons would have in France"; and again: "If a
Frenchman was forbidden to swear, he would probably laugh at the first
word of the admonition." A little farther on he objects to what he
calls, with certainly picturesque concreteness, "the sticky plaster of
his (Addison's) morality"--an expression that has led to Minto's sharp
retort that Addison's morality was something which it is quite
impossible for the Gallic conscience to conceive. Another illustration
of that bias which compels us to be somewhat on our guard in reading
Taine is found in his treatment of Milton. Although we may admit that
the great Puritan poet peopled his paradise with characters having
altogether too strong a British tinge, we are almost shocked to hear
Taine and his disciple, Edmond Scherer, dilate upon Milton's Adam as
"your true paterfamilias, with a vote; an M. P., an old Oxford man,"
etc., etc., or to hear them exclaim, "What a great many votes she (Eve)
will gain among the country squires when Adam stands for Parliament!"
Quite as striking is M. Taine's inability to understand Wordsworth.

But, after making these and all other due admissions concerning Taine's
work, the fact stands that his "History of English Literature" meets
fully Lowell's quaint definition of a classic, when he says, "After all,
to be delightful is a classic." In reading this work we never feel that
we have in our hands a text-book or even a history. It is rather a
living, moving panorama. We see again the old miracles and moralities,
with their queer shifts and their stark incongruities; we see the
drawing-rooms and hear the conversation of the reign of Queen Anne, and
walk through Fleet Street with Johnson. In a word, we realize in no
small degree the full meaning of Leslie Stephen's dictum, in that we
really feel that we know, in some degree at least, "the human being who
is partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words."

Of course, no introduction to this work would be complete without some
reference to the psychological theory on which it is based. We have
reserved this point to the last because, for the general reader, what
Taine says and how he says it, are far more interesting considerations
than any theories on which the book may be based. In a word, the author
held that both the character and the style of a writer are the outgrowth
of his social and natural environment. And this environment, in Taine's
opinion, affects not only the individual but the national character as
manifested in the national literature. In discussing any literary
production he would first ask: To what race and nation does the author
belong? What is the influence of his geographical position and of his
nation's advance in civilization? What about the duration of the
literary phase represented by the writer in question? In developing this
theory of the influence of environment M. Taine doubtless sometimes
treats as permanent scientific factors influences and circumstances that
are in their very nature variable. Yet this application of the theory is
as consistent and plausible as it is everywhere apparent. A few
illustrations of his psychological theory will make more plain than much
abstract discussion the almost fatalistic nature of his method. For
example, after vividly portraying the political and social conditions
that had surrounded Milton from his birth, the French critic asks: "Can
we expect urbanity here?" Again, in tracing Dryden's beginnings, he
says: "Such circumstances announce and prepare, not an artist, but a man
of letters." Much might be written of the detailed application of M.
Taine's psychological theory. But the reader has already been too long
detained from a perusal of the riches that fill the following pages.
Charles Lamb once wrote: "I prefer the affections to the sciences." The
majority of the readers of M. Taine will doubtless find so much to enjoy
in his brilliant pages that they will care little for his theories, and
will not allow certain defects in his sympathies to mar their enjoyment
of this monumental work.

J. SCOTT CLARK




CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. Historical documents serve only as a clue to reconstruct the visible
individual

II. The outer man is only a clue to study the inner, invisible man

III. The state and the actions of the inner and invisible man have their
causes in certain general ways of thought and feeling

IV. Chief causes of thought and feeling. Their historical effects

V. The three primordial forces.--Race

Surroundings

Epoch

VI. History is a mechanical and psychological problem. Within certain
limits man can foretell

Primordial Causes

VII. Law of formation of a group. Examples and indications

VIII. General problem and future of history. Psychological method.
Value of literature. Purpose in writing this book


BOOK I.--THE SOURCE

CHAPTER FIRST

The Saxons

SECTION I.--The Coast of the North Sea
SECTION II.--The Northern Barbarians
SECTION III.--Saxon Ideas
SECTION IV.--Saxon Heroes
SECTION V.--Pagan Poems
SECTION VI.--Christian Poems
SECTION VII.--Primitive Saxon Authors
SECTION VIII.--Virility of the Saxon Race

CHAPTER SECOND

The Normans

SECTION I.--The Feudal Man
SECTION II.--Normans and Saxons Contrasted
SECTION III.--French Forms of Thought
SECTION IV.--The Normans in England
SECTION V.--The English Tongue--Early English Literary Impulses
SECTION VI.--Feudal Civilization
SECTION VII.--Persistence of Saxon Ideas
SECTION VIII.--The English Constitution
SECTION IX.--Piers Plowman and Wyclif

CHAPTER THIRD

The New Tongue

SECTION I.--The First Great Poet
SECTION II.--The Decline of the Middle Ages
SECTION III.--The Poetry of Chaucer
SECTION IV.--Characteristics of the Canterbury Tales
SECTION V.--The Art of Chaucer
SECTION VI.--Scholastic Philosophy


BOOK II.--THE RENAISSANCE

CHAPTER FIRST

The Pagan Renaissance

_PART I.--Manners of the Time_

SECTION I.--Ideas of the Middle Ages
SECTION II.--Growth of New Ideas
SECTION III.--Popular Festivals
SECTION IV.--Influence of Classic Literature

_PART II.--Poetry_

SECTION I.--Renaissance of Saxon Genius
SECTION II.--The Earl of Surrey
SECTION III.--Surrey's Style
SECTION IV.--Development of Artistic Ideas
SECTION V.--Wherein Lies the Strength of the Poetry of this Period
SECTION VI--Edmund Spenser
SECTION VII.--Spenser in his Relation to the Renaissance

_PART III.--Prose_

SECTION I.--The Decay of Poetry
SECTION II.--The Intellectual Level of the Renaissance
SECTION III.--Robert Burton
SECTION IV.--Sir Thomas Browne
SECTION V.--Francis Bacon

CHAPTER SECOND

The Theatre

SECTION I.--The Public and the Stage
SECTION II.--Manners of the Sixteenth Century
SECTION III.--Some Aspects of the English Mind
SECTION IV.--The Poets of the Period
SECTION V.--Formation of the Drama
SECTION VI.--Furious Passions--Exaggerated Characters
SECTION VII.--Female Characters

CHAPTER THIRD

Ben Jonson

SECTION I.--The Man--His Life
SECTION II.--His Freedom and Precision of Style
SECTION III.--The Dramas Catiline and Sejanus
SECTION IV.--Comedies
SECTION V.--Limits of Jonson's Talent--His Smaller Poems--His Masques
SECTION VI.--General Idea of Shakespeare

CHAPTER FOURTH

Shakespeare

SECTION I.--Life and Character of Shakespeare
SECTION II.--Shakespeare's Style--Copiousness--Excesses
SECTION III.--Shakespeare's Language And Manners
SECTION IV.--Dramatis Personæ
SECTION V.--Men of Wit
SECTION VI.--Shakespeare's Women
SECTION VII.--Types of Villains
SECTION VIII.--Principal Characters
SECTION IX.--Characteristics of Shakespeare's Genius

INDEX




[Illustration: HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE PAINE.
_Photogravure from an engraving._

This picture shows the eminent French critic as he appeared thirty years
ago. At that period his fame as a literary savant was spreading to the
four quarters of the world, and he was lecturing daily to the crowds of
students who had flocked to Paris to study literature under his
guidance. In personal appearance he was unlike the traditional scholar,
but resembled, in his quick, nervous energy and plain business-like
ways, a keen-witted man of affairs. He was simple in dress, as the
picture shows, and it is a noteworthy fact that the honors he received
never caused him to lose his self-poise, or to cease his severe studies,
which he carried on with diligence to the very day of his death. His
face denotes the cool, critical, and well-balanced scholar, with the
initiative to enter new fields of thought, and the will-power to impress
his opinions upon others.]




ILLUSTRATIONS

SHAKESPEARE BEFORE SIR THOMAS LUCY
Photogravure from the original painting

ADOLPHE HIPPOLYTE TAINE
Photogravure from an engraving

GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Photogravure from an old engraving

THE NEW PSALTER OF THE VIRGIN MARY
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Fifteenth Century

TITLE-PAGE OF THE HYPNEROTOMACHIA
Fac-simile example of Printing and Engraving in the Sixteenth Century




HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE




INTRODUCTION


I. Historical documents serve only as a clue to reconstruct the visible
individual


History, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in
France, has undergone a transformation, owing to a study of literatures.

The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of
the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a
transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a
particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that,
through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and
thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found
successful.

We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have
accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they
were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and
that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give
them their place in history, and one of the highest. This place has been
assigned to them, and hence all is changed in history—the aim, the
method, the instrumentalities, and the conceptions of laws and of
causes. It is this change as now going on, and which must continue to go
on, that is here attempted to be set forth.

On turning over the large stiff pages of a folio volume, or the yellow
leaves of a manuscript, in short, a poem, a code of laws, a confession
of faith, what is your first comment? You say to yourself that the work
before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like a fossil
shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in a stone by
an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell was an animal
and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell
unless to form some idea of the animal? In the same way do you study the
document in order to comprehend the man; both shell and document are
dead fragments and of value only as indications of the complete living
being. The aim is to reach this being; this is what you strive to
reconstruct. It is a mistake to study the document as if it existed
alone by itself. That is treating things merely as a pedant, and you
subject yourself to the illusions of a book-worm. At bottom mythologies
and languages are not existences; the only realities are human beings
who have employed words and imagery adapted to their organs and to suit
the original cast of their intellects. A creed is nothing in itself. Who
made it? Look at this or that portrait of the sixteenth century, the
stern, energetic features of an archbishop or of an English martyr.
Nothing exists except through the individual; it is necessary to know
the individual himself. Let the parentage of creeds be established, or
the classification of poems, or the growth of constitutions, or the
transformations of idioms, and we have only cleared the ground. True
history begins when the historian has discerned beyond the mists of ages
the living, active man, endowed with passions, furnished with habits,
special in voice, feature, gesture, and costume, distinctive and
complete, like anybody that you have just encountered in the street. Let
us strive then, as far as possible, to get rid of this great interval of
time which prevents us from observing the man with our eyes, the eyes of
our own head. What revelations do we find in the calendered leaves of a
modern poem? A modern poet, a man like De Musset, Victor Hugo,
Lamartine, or Heine, graduated from a college and travelled, wearing a
dress-coat and gloves, favored by ladies, bowing fifty times and
uttering a dozen witticisms in an evening, reading daily newspapers,
generally occupying an apartment on the second story, not over-cheerful
on account of his nerves, and especially because, in this dense
democracy in which we stifle each other, the discredit of official rank
exaggerates his pretensions by raising his importance, and, owing to the
delicacy of his personal sensations, leading him to regard himself as a
Deity. Such is what we detect behind modern meditations and sonnets.

Again, behind a tragedy of the seventeenth century there is a poet, one,
for example, like Racine, refined, discreet, a courtier, a fine talker,
with majestic perruque and ribboned shoes, a monarchist and zealous
Christian, "God having given him the grace not to blush in any society
on account of zeal for his king or for the Gospel," clever in
interesting the monarch, translating into proper French "the _gaulois_
of Amyot," deferential to the great, always knowing how to keep his
place in their company, assiduous and respectful at Marly as at
Versailles, amid the formal creations of a decorative landscape and the
reverential bows, graces, intrigues, and finesses of the braided
seigniors who get up early every morning to obtain the reversion of an
office, together with the charming ladies who count on their fingers the
pedigrees which entitle them to a seat on a footstool. On this point
consult Saint-Simon and the engravings of Pérelle, the same as you have
just consulted Balzac and the water-color drawings of Eugène Lami.

In like manner, on reading a Greek tragedy, our first care is to figure
to ourselves the Greeks, that is to say, men who lived half-naked in the
gymnasiums or on a public square under a brilliant sky, in full view of
the noblest and most delicate landscape, busy in rendering their bodies
strong and agile, in conversing together, in arguing, in voting, in
carrying out patriotic piracies, and yet idle and temperate, the
furniture of their houses consisting of three earthen jars and their
food of two pots of anchovies preserved in oil, served by slaves who
afford them the time to cultivate their minds and to exercise their
limbs, with no other concern than that of having the most beautiful
city, the most beautiful processions, the most beautiful ideas, and the
most beautiful men. In this respect, a statue like the "Meleager" or the
"Theseus" of the Parthenon, or again a sight of the blue and lustrous
Mediterranean, resembling a silken tunic out of which islands arise like
marble bodies, together with a dozen choice phrases selected from the
works of Plato and Aristophanes, teach us more than any number of
dissertations and commentaries.

And so again, in order to understand an Indian Purana, one must begin by
imagining the father of a family who, "having seen a son on his son's
knees," follows the law and, with axe and pitcher, seeks solitude under
a banyan trees, talks no more, multiplies his fastings, lives naked with
four fires around him under the fifth fire, that terrible sun which
endlessly devours and resuscitates all living things; who fixes his
imagination in turn for weeks at a time on the foot of Brahma, then on
his knee, on his thigh, on his navel, and so on, until, beneath the
strain of this intense meditation, hallucinations appear, when all the
forms of being, mingling together and transformed into each other,
oscillate to and fro in this vertiginous brain until the motionless man,
with suspended breath and fixed eyeballs, beholds the universe melting
away like vapor over the vacant immensity of the Being in which he hopes
for absorption. In this case the best of teachings would be a journey in
India; but, for lack of a better one, take the narratives of travellers
along with works in geography, botany, and ethnology. In any event,
there must be the same research. A language, a law, a creed, is never
other than an abstraction; the perfect thing is found in the active man,
the visible corporeal figure which eats, walks, fights, and labors. Set
aside the theories of constitutions and their results, of religions and
their systems, and try to observe men in their workshops or offices, in
their fields along with their own sky and soil, with their own homes,
clothes, occupations and repasts, just as you see them when, on landing
in England or in Italy, you remark their features and gestures, their
roads and their inns, the citizen on his promenades and the workman
taking a drink. Let us strive as much as possible to supply the place of
the actual, personal, sensible observation that is no longer
practicable, this being the only way in which we can really know the
man; let us make the past present; to judge of an object it must be
present; no experience can be had of what is absent. Undoubtedly, this
sort of reconstruction is always imperfect; only an imperfect judgment
can be based on it; but let us do the best we can; incomplete knowledge
is better than none at all, or than knowledge which is erroneous, and
there is no other way of obtaining knowledge approximatively of bygone
times than by seeing approximatively the men of former times.

Such is the first step in history. This, step was taken in Europe at the
end of the last century when the imagination took fresh flight under the
auspices of Lessing and Walter Scott, and a little later in France under
Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and others. We now come to
the second step.




II. The outer man is only a clue to study the inner, invisible man


On observing the visible man with your own eyes what do you try to find
in him? The invisible man. These words which your ears catch, those
gestures, those airs of the head, his attire and sensible operations of
all kinds, are, for you, merely so many expressions; these express
something, a soul. An inward man is hidden beneath the outward man, and
the latter simply manifests the former. You have observed the house in
which he lives, his furniture, his costume, in order to discover his
habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement or rusticity, his
extravagance or economy, his follies or his cleverness. You have
listened to his conversation and noted the inflections of his voice, the
attitudes he has assumed, so as to judge of his spirit, self-abandonment
or gayety, his energy or his rigidity. You consider his writings, works
of art, financial and political schemes, with a view to measure the
reach and limits of his intelligence, his creative power and
self-command, to ascertain the usual order, kind, and force of his
conceptions, in what way he thinks and how he resolves. All these
externals are so many avenues converging to one centre, and you follow
these only to reach that centre; here is the real man, namely, that
group of faculties and of sentiments which produces the rest. Behold a
new world, an infinite world; for each visible action involves an
infinite train of reasonings and emotions, new or old sensations which
have combined to bring this into light and which, like long ledges of
rock sunk deep in the earth, have cropped out above the surface and
attained their level. It is this subterranean world which forms the
second aim, the special object of the historian. If his critical
education suffices, he is able to discriminate under every ornament in
architecture, under every stroke of the brush in a picture, under each
phrase of literary composition, the particular sentiment out of which
the ornament, the stroke, and the phrase have sprung; he is a spectator
of the inward drama which has developed itself in the breast of the
artist or writer; the choice of words, the length or shortness of the
period, the species of metaphor, the accent of a verse, the chain of
reasoning--all are to him an indication; while his eyes are reading the
text his mind and soul are following the steady flow and ever-changing
series of emotions and conceptions from which this text has issued; he
is working out its psychology. Should you desire to study this
operation, regard the promoter and model of all the high culture of the
epoch, Goethe, who, before composing his "Iphigenia" spent days in
making drawings of the most perfect statues and who, at last, his eyes
filled with the noble forms of antique scenery and his mind penetrated
by the harmonious beauty of antique life, succeeded in reproducing
internally, with such exactness, the habits and yearnings of Greek
imagination as to provide us with an almost twin sister of the
"Antigone" of Sophocles and of the goddesses of Phidias. This exact and
demonstrated divination of bygone sentiments has, in our days, given a
new life to history. There was almost complete ignorance of this in the
last century; men of every race and of every epoch were represented as
about alike, the Greek, the barbarian, the Hindoo, the man of the
Renaissance and the man of the eighteenth century, cast in the same mold
and after the same pattern, and after a certain abstract conception
which served for the whole human species. There was a knowledge of man
but not of men. There was no penetration into the soul itself; nothing
of the infinite diversity and wonderful complexity of souls had been
detected; it was not known that the moral organization of a people or of
an age is as special and distinct as the physical structure of a family
of plants or of an order of animals. History to-day, like zoölogy, has
found its anatomy, and whatever branch of it is studied, whether
philology, languages or mythologies, it is in this way that labor must
be given to make it produce new fruit. Among so many writers who, since
Herder, Ottfried Müller, and Goethe have steadily followed and
rectified this great effort, let the reader take two historians and two
works, one "The Life and Letters of Cromwell" by Carlyle, and the other
the "Port Royal" of Sainte-Beuve. He will see how precisely, how
clearly, and how profoundly we detect the soul of a man beneath his
actions and works; how, under an old general and in place of an
ambitious man vulgarly hypocritical, we find one tormented by the
disordered reveries of a gloomy imagination, but practical in instinct
and faculties, thoroughly English and strange and incomprehensible to
whoever has not studied the climate and the race; how, with about a
hundred scattered letters and a dozen or more mutilated speeches, we
follow him from his farm and his team to his general's tent and to his
Protector's throne, in his transformation and in his development, in his
struggles of conscience and in his statesman's resolutions, in such a
way that the mechanism of his thought and action becomes visible and the
ever renewed and fitful tragedy, within which racked this great gloomy
soul, passes like the tragedies of Shakespeare into the souls of those
who behold them. We see how, behind convent disputes and the obstinacy
of nuns, we recover one of the great provinces of human psychology; how
fifty or more characters, rendered invisible through the uniformity of a
narration careful of the properties, come forth in full daylight, each
standing out clear in its countless diversities; how, underneath
theological dissertations and monotonous sermons, we discern the
throbbings of ever-breathing hearts, the excitements and depressions of
the religious life, the unforeseen reaction and pell-mell stir of
natural feeling, the infiltrations of surrounding society, the
intermittent triumphs of grace, presenting so many shades of difference
that the fullest description and most flexible style can scarcely garner
in the vast harvest which the critic has caused to germinate in this
abandoned field. And the same elsewhere. Germany, with its genius, so
pliant, so broad, so prompt in transformations, so fitted for the
reproduction of the remotest and strangest states of human thought;
England, with its matter-of-fact mind, so suited to the grappling with
moral problems, to making them clear by figures, weights, and measures,
by geography and statistics, by texts and common sense; France, at
length, with its Parisian culture and drawing-room habits, with its
unceasing analysis of characters and of works, with its ever ready irony
at detecting weaknesses, with its skilled finesse in discriminating
shades of thought--all have ploughed over the same ground, and we now
begin to comprehend that no region of history exists in which this deep
sub-soil should not be reached if we would secure adequate crops between
the furrows.

Such is the second step, and we are now in train to follow it out. Such
is the proper aim of contemporary criticism. No one has done this work
so judiciously and on so grand a scale as Sainte-Beuve; in this respect,
we are all his pupils; literary, philosophic, and religious criticism in
books, and even in the newspapers, is to-day entirely changed by his
method. Ulterior evolution must start from this point. I have often
attempted to expose what this evolution is; in my opinion, it is a new
road open to history and which I shall strive to describe more in
detail.




III. The state and the actions of the inner and invisible man have their
causes in certain general ways of thought and feeling


After having observed in a man and noted down one, two, three, and then
a multitude of, sentiments, do these suffice and does your knowledge of
him seem complete? Does a memorandum book constitute a psychology? It is
not a psychology, and here, as elsewhere, the search for causes must
follow the collection of facts. It matters not what the facts may be,
whether physical or moral, they always spring from causes; there are
causes for ambition, for courage, for veracity, as well as for
digestion, for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice and virtue are
products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact grows out of the
simple facts with which it is affiliated and on which it depends. We
must therefore try to ascertain what simple facts underlie moral
qualities the same as we ascertain those that underlie physical
qualities, and, for example, let us take the first fact that comes to
hand, a religious system of music, that of a Protestant church. A
certain inward cause has inclined the minds of worshippers towards these
grave, monotonous melodies, a cause much greater than its effect; that
is to say, a general conception of the veritable outward forms of
worship which man owes to God; it is this general conception which has
shaped the architecture of the temple, cast out statues, dispensed with
paintings, effaced ornaments, shortened ceremonies, confined the members
of a congregation to high pews which cut off the view, and governed the
thousand details of decoration, posture, and all other externals. This
conception itself again proceeds from a more general cause, an idea of
human conduct in general, inward and outward, prayers, actions,
dispositions of every sort that man is bound to maintain toward the
Deity; it is this which has enthroned the doctrine of grace, lessened
the importance of the clergy, transformed the sacraments, suppressed
observances, and changed the religion of discipline into one of
morality. This conception, in its turn, depends on a third one, still
more general, that of moral perfection as this is found in a perfect
God, the impeccable judge, the stern overseer, who regards every soul as
sinful, meriting punishment, incapable of virtue or of salvation, except
through a stricken conscience which He provokes and the renewal of the
heart which He brings about. Here is the master conception, consisting
of duty erected into the absolute sovereign of human life, and which
prostrates all other ideals at the feet of the moral ideal. Here we
reach what is deepest in man; for, to explain this conception, we must
consider the race he belongs to, say the German, the Northman, the
formation and character of his intellect, his ways in general of
thinking and feeling, that tardiness and frigidity of sensation which
keeps him from rashly and easily falling under the empire of sensual
enjoyments, that bluntness of taste, that irregularity and those
outbursts of conception which arrest in him the birth of refined and
harmonious forms and methods; that disdain of appearances, that yearning
for truth, that attachment to abstract, bare ideas which develop
conscience in him at the expense of everything else. Here the search
comes to an end. We have reached a certain primitive disposition, a
particular trait belonging to sensations of all kinds, to every
conception peculiar to an age or to a race, to characteristics
inseparable from every idea and feeling that stir in the human breast.
Such are the grand causes, for these are universal and permanent causes,
present in every case and at every moment, everywhere, and always
active, indestructible, and inevitably dominant in the end, since,
whatever accidents cross their path, being limited and partial, end in
yielding to the obscure and incessant repetition of their energy; so
that the general structure of things and all the main features of events
are their work, all religions and philosophies, all poetic and
industrial systems, all forms of society and of the family, all, in
fine, being imprints bearing the stamp of their seal.




IV. Chief causes of thought and feeling. Their historical effects


There is, then, a system in human ideas and sentiments, the prime motor
of which consists in general traits, certain characteristics of thought
and feeling common to men belonging to a particular race, epoch, or
country. Just as crystals in mineralogy, whatever their diversity,
proceed from a few simple physical forms, so do civilizations in
history, however these may differ, proceed from a few spiritual forms.
One is explained by a primitive geometrical element as the other is
explained by a primitive psychological element. In order to comprehend
the entire group of mineralogical species we must first study a regular
solid in the general, its facets and angles, and observe in this
abridged form the innumerable transformations of which it is
susceptible. In like manner, if we would comprehend the entire group of
historic varieties we must consider beforehand a human soul in the
general, with its two or three fundamental faculties, and, in this
abridgment, observe the principal forms it may present. This sort of
ideal tableau, the geometrical as well as psychological, is not very
complex, and we soon detect the limitations of organic conditions to
which civilizations, the same as crystals, are forcibly confined. What
do we find in man at the point of departure? Images or representations
of objects, namely, that which floats before him internally, lasts a
certain time, is effaced, and then returns after contemplating this or
that tree or animal, in short, some sensible object. This forms the
material basis of the rest and the development of this material basis is
twofold, speculative or positive, just as these representations end in a
general conception or in an active resolution. Such is man, summarily
abridged. It is here, within these narrow confines, that human
diversities are encountered, now in the matter itself and again in the
primordial twofold development. However insignificant in the elements
they are of vast significance in the mass, while the slightest change in
the factors leads to gigantic changes in the results. According as the
representation is distinct, as if stamped by a coining-press, or
confused and blurred; according as it concentrates in itself a larger or
smaller number of the characters of an object; according as it is
violent and accompanied with impulsions or tranquil and surrounded with
calmness, so are all the operations and the whole running-gear of the
human machine entirely transformed. In like manner again, according as
the ulterior development of the representation varies, so does the whole
development of the man vary. If the general conception in which this
ends is merely a dry notation in Chinese fashion, language becomes a
kind of algebra, religion and poetry are reduced to a minimum,
philosophy is brought down to a sort of moral and practical common
sense, science to a collection of recipes, classifications, and
utilitarian mnemonics, the mind itself taking a wholly positive turn.
If, on the contrary, the general conception in which the representation
culminates is a poetic and figurative creation, a living symbol, as with
the Aryan races, language becomes a sort of shaded and tinted epic in
which each word stands as a personage, poesy and religion assume
magnificent and inexhaustible richness, and metaphysics develops with
breadth and subtlety without any consideration of positive bearings; the
whole intellect, notwithstanding the deviation and inevitable weaknesses
of the effort, is captivated by the beautiful and sublime, thus
conceiving an ideal type which, through its nobleness and harmony,
gathers to itself all the affections and enthusiasms of humanity. If, on
the other hand, the general conception in which the representation
culminates is poetic but abrupt, is reached not gradually but by sudden
intuition, if the original operation is not a regular development but a
violent explosion--then, as with the Semitic races, metaphysical power
is wanting; the religious conception becomes that of a royal God,
consuming and solitary; science cannot take shape, the intellect grows
rigid and too headstrong to reproduce the delicate ordering of nature;
poetry cannot give birth to aught but a series of vehement, grandiose
exclamations, while language no longer renders the concatenation of
reasoning and eloquence, man being reduced to lyric enthusiasm, to
ungovernable passion, and to narrow and fanatical action. It is in this
interval between the particular representation and the universal
conception that the germs of the greatest human differences are found.
Some races, like the classic, for example, pass from the former to the
latter by a graduated scale of ideas regularly classified and more and
more general; others, like the Germanic, traverse the interval in leaps,
with uniformity and after prolonged and uncertain groping. Others, like
the Romans and the English, stop at the lowest stages; others, like the
Hindoos and Germans, mount to the uppermost. If, now, after considering
the passage from the representation to the idea, we regard the passage
from the representation to the resolution, we find here elementary
differences of like importance and of the same order, according as the
impression is vivid, as in Southern climes, or faint, as in Northern
climes, as it ends in instantaneous action as with barbarians, or
tardily as with civilized nations, as it is capable or not of growth, of
inequality, of persistence and of association. The entire system of
human passion, all the risks of public peace and security, all labor and
action, spring from these sources. It is the same with the other
primordial differences; their effects embrace an entire civilization,
and may be likened to those algebraic formulæ which, within narrow
bounds, describe beforehand the curve of which these form the law. Not
that this law always prevails to the end; sometimes, perturbations
arise, but, even when this happens, it is not because the law is
defective, but because it has not operated alone. New elements have
entered into combination with old ones; powerful foreign forces have
interfered to oppose primitive forces. The race has emigrated, as with
the ancient Aryans, and the change of climate has led to a change in the
whole intellectual economy and structure of society. A people has been
conquered like the Saxon nation, and the new political structure has
imposed on it customs, capacities, and desires which it did not possess.
The nation has established itself permanently in the midst of
downtrodden and threatening subjects, as with the ancient Spartans,
while the necessity of living, as in an armed encampment, has violently
turned the whole moral and social organization in one unique direction.
At all events, the mechanism of human history is like this. We always
find the primitive mainspring consisting of some widespread tendency of
soul and intellect, either innate and natural to the race or acquired by
it and due to some circumstance forced upon it. These great given
mainsprings gradually produce their effects, that is to say, at the end
of a few centuries they place the nation in a new religious, literary,
social, and economic state; a new condition which, combined with their
renewed effort, produces another condition, sometimes a good one,
sometimes a bad one, now slowly, now rapidly, and so on; so that the
entire development of each distinct civilization may be considered as
the effect of one permanent force which, at every moment, varies its
work by modifying the circumstances where it acts.




V. The three primordial forces.--Race


Three different sources contribute to the production of this elementary
moral state, race, environment, and epoch. What we call race consists of
those innate and hereditary dispositions which man brings with him into
the world and which are generally accompanied with marked differences of
temperament and of bodily structure. They vary in different nations.
Naturally, there are varieties of men as there are varieties of cattle
and horses, some brave and intelligent, and others timid and of limited
capacity; some capable of superior conceptions and creations, and others
reduced to rudimentary ideas and contrivances; some specially fitted for
certain works, and more richly furnished with certain instincts, as we
see in the better endowed species of dogs, some for running and others
for fighting, some for hunting and others for guarding houses and
flocks. We have here a distinct force; so distinct that, in spite of the
enormous deviations which both the other motors impress upon it, we
still recognize, and which a race like the Aryan people, scattered from
the Ganges to the Hebrides, established under all climates, ranged along
every degree of civilization, transformed by thirty centuries of
revolutions, shows nevertheless in its languages, in its religions, in
its literatures, and in its philosophies, the community of blood and of
intellect which still to-day binds together all its offshoots. However
they may differ, their parentage is not lost; barbarism, culture and
grafting, differences of atmosphere and of soil, fortunate or
unfortunate occurrences, have operated in vain; the grand
characteristics of the original form have lasted, and we find that the
two or three leading features of the primitive imprint are again
apparent under the subsequent imprints with which time has overlaid
them. There is nothing surprising in this extraordinary tenacity.
Although the immensity of the distance allows us to catch only a glimpse
in a dubious light of the origin of species,[1] the events of history
throw sufficient light on events anterior to history to explain the
almost unshaken solidity of primordial traits. At the moment of
encountering them, fifteen, twenty, and thirty centuries before our era,
in an Aryan, Egyptian, or Chinese, they represent the work of a much
greater number of centuries, perhaps the work of many myriads of
centuries. For, as soon as an animal is born it must adapt itself to its
[surroundings]; it breathes in another way, it renews itself differently,
it is otherwise stimulated according as the atmosphere, the food, and
the temperature are different. A different climate and situation create
different necessities and hence activities of a different kind; and
hence, again, a system of different habits, and, finally a system of
different aptitudes and instincts. Man, thus compelled to put himself in
equilibrium with circumstances, contracts a corresponding temperament
and character, and his character, like his temperament, are acquisitions
all the more stable because of the outward impression being more deeply
imprinted in him by more frequent repetitions and transmitted to his
offspring by more ancient heredity. So that at each moment of time, the
character of a people may be considered as a summary of all antecedent
actions and sensations; that is to say, as a quantity and as a weighty
mass, not infinite,[2] since all things in nature are limited, but
disproportionate to the rest and almost impossible to raise, since each
minute of an almost infinite past has contributed to render it heavier,
and, in order to turn the scale, it would require, on the other side, a
still greater accumulation of actions and sensations. Such is the first
and most abundant source of these master faculties from which historic
events are derived; and we see at once that if it is powerful it is
owing to its not being a mere source, but a sort of lake, and like a
deep reservoir wherein other sources have poured their waters for a
multitude of centuries.

When we have thus verified the internal structure of a race we must
consider the environment in which it lives. For man is not alone in the
world; nature envelops him and other men surround him; accidental and
secondary folds come and overspread the primitive and permanent fold,
while physical or social circumstances derange or complete the natural
groundwork surrendered to them. At one time climate has had its effect.
Although the history of Aryan nations can be only obscurely traced from
their common country to their final abodes, we can nevertheless affirm
that the profound difference which is apparent between the Germanic
races on the one hand, and the Hellenic and Latin races on the other,
proceeds in great part from the differences between the countries in
which they have established themselves--the former in cold and moist
countries, in the depths of gloomy forests and swamps, or on the borders
of a wild ocean, confined to melancholic or rude sensations, inclined to
drunkenness and gross feeding, leading a militant and carnivorous life;
the latter, on the contrary, living amidst the finest scenery, alongside
of a brilliant, sparkling sea inviting navigation and commerce, exempt
from the grosser cravings of the stomach, disposed at the start to
social habits and customs, to political organization, to the sentiments
and faculties which develop the art of speaking, the capacity for
enjoyment and invention in the sciences, in art, and in literature. At
another time, political events have operated, as in the two Italian
civilizations: the first one tending wholly to action, to conquest, to
government, and to legislation, through the primitive situation of a
city of refuge, a frontier emporium, and of an armed aristocracy which,
importing and enrolling foreigners and the vanquished under it, sets two
hostile bodies facing each other, with no outlet for its internal
troubles and rapacious instincts but systematic warfare; the second one,
excluded from unity and political ambition on a grand scale by the
permanency of its municipal system, by the cosmopolite situation of its
pope and by the military intervention of neighboring states, and
following the bent of its magnificent and harmonious genius, is wholly
carried over to the worship of voluptuousness and beauty. Finally, at
another time, social conditions have imposed their stamp as, eighteen
centuries ago, by Christianity, and twenty-five centuries ago by
Buddhism, when, around the Mediterranean as in Hindostan, the extreme
effects of Aryan conquest and organization led to intolerable
oppression, the crushing of the individual, utter despair, the whole
world under the ban of a curse, with the development of metaphysics and
visions, until man, in this dungeon of despondency, feeling his heart
melt, conceived of abnegation, charity, tender love, gentleness,
humility, human brotherhood, here in the idea of universal nothingness,
and there under that of the fatherhood of God. Look around at the
regulative instincts and faculties implanted in a race; in brief, the
turn of mind according to which it thinks and acts at the present day;
we shall find most frequently that its work is due to one of these
prolonged situations, to these enveloping circumstances, to these
persistent gigantic pressures brought to bear on a mass of men who, one
by one, and all collectively, from one generation to another, have been
unceasingly bent and fashioned by them, in Spain a crusade of eight
centuries against the Mohammedans, prolonged yet longer even to the
exhaustion of the nation through the expulsion of the Moors, through the
spoliation of the Jews, through the establishment of the Inquisition,
through the Catholic wars; in England, a political establishment of
eight centuries which maintains man erect and respectful, independent
and obedient, all accustomed to struggling together in a body under the
sanction of law; in France, a Latin organization which, at first imposed
on docile barbarians, then levelled to the ground under the universal
demolition, forms itself anew under the latent workings of national
instinct, developing under hereditary monarchs and ending in a sort of
equalized, centralized, administrative republic under dynasties exposed
to revolutions. Such are the most efficacious among the observable
causes which mold the primitive man; they are to nations what education,
pursuit, condition, and abode are to individuals, and seem to comprise
all, since the external forces which fashion human matter, and by which
the outward acts on the inward, are comprehended in them.

There is, nevertheless, a third order of causes, for, with the forces
within and without, there is the work these have already produced
together, which work itself contributes towards producing the ensuing
work; beside the permanent impulsion and the given environment there is
the acquired momentum. When national character and surrounding
circumstances operate it is not on a _tabula rasa_, but on one already
bearing imprints. According as this _tabula_ is taken at one or at
another moment so is the imprint different, and this suffices to render
the total effect different. Consider, for example, two moments of a
literature or of an art, French tragedy under Corneille and under
Voltaire, and Greek drama under Æschylus and under Euripides, Latin
poetry under Lucretius and under Claudian, and Italian painting under Da
Vinci and under Guido. Assuredly, there is no change of general
conception at either of these two extreme points; ever the same human
type must be portrayed or represented in action; the cast of the verse,
the dramatic structure, the physical form have all persisted. But there
is this among these differences, that one of the artists is a precursor
and the other a successor, that the first one has no model and the
second one has a model; that the former sees things face to face, and
that the latter sees them through the intermediation of the former, that
many departments of art have become more perfect, that the simplicity
and grandeur of the impression have diminished, that what is pleasing
and refined in form has augmented--in short, that the first work has
determined the second. In this respect, it is with a people as with a
plant; the same sap at the same temperature and in the same soil
produces, at different stages of its successive elaborations, different
developments, buds, flowers, fruits, and seeds, in such a way that the
condition of the following is always that of the preceding and is born
of its death. Now, if you no longer regard a brief moment, as above, but
one of those grand periods of development which embraces one or many
centuries like the Middle Ages, or our last classic period, the
conclusion is the same. A certain dominating conception has prevailed
throughout; mankind, during two hundred years, during five hundred
years, have represented to themselves a certain ideal figure of man, in
mediæval times the knight and the monk, in our classic period the
courtier and refined talker; this creative and universal conception has
monopolized the entire field of action and thought, and, after spreading
its involuntarily systematic works over the world, it languished and
then died out, and now a new idea has arisen, destined to a like
domination and to equally multiplied creations. Note here that the
latter depends in part on the former, and that it is the former, which,
combining its effect with those of national genius and surrounding
circumstances, will impose their bent and their direction on new-born
things. It is according to this law that great historic currents are
formed, meaning by this, the long rule of a form of intellect or of a
master idea, like that period of spontaneous creations called the
Renaissance, or that period of oratorical classifications called the
Classic Age, or that series of mystic systems called the Alexandrine and
Christian [epoch], or that series of mythological efflorescences found at
the origins of Germany, India, and Greece. Here as elsewhere, we are
dealing merely with a mechanical problem: the total effect is a compound
wholly determined by the grandeur and direction of the forces which
produce it. The sole difference which separates these moral problems
from physical problems lies in this, that in the former the directions
and grandeur cannot be estimated by or stated in figures with the same
precision as in the latter. If a want, a faculty, is a quantity capable
of degrees, the same as pressure or weight, this quantity is not
measurable like that of the pressure or weight. We cannot fix it in an
exact or approximative formula; we can obtain or give of it only a
literary impression; we are reduced to noting and citing the prominent
facts which make it manifest and which nearly, or roughly, indicate
about what grade on the scale it must be ranged at. And yet,
notwithstanding the methods of notation are not the same in the moral
sciences as in the physical sciences, nevertheless, as matter is the
same in both, and is equally composed of forces, directions and
magnitudes, we can still show that in one as in the other, the final
effect takes place according to the same law. This is great or small,
according as the fundamental forces are great or small and act more or
less precisely in the same sense, according as the distinct effects of
race, environment and epoch combine to enforce each other or combine to
neutralize each other. Thus are explained the long impotences and the
brilliant successes which appear irregularly and with no apparent reason
in the life of a people; the causes of these consist in internal
concordances and contrarieties. There was one of these concordances
when, in the seventeenth century, the social disposition and
conversational spirit innate in France encountered drawing-room
formalities and the moment of oratorical analysis; when, in the
nineteenth century, the flexible, profound genius of Germany encountered
the age of philosophic synthesis and of cosmopolite criticism. One of
these contrarieties happened when, in the seventeenth century, the
blunt, isolated genius of England awkwardly tried to don the new polish
of urbanity, and when, in the sixteenth century, the lucid, prosaic
French intellect tried to gestate a living poesy. It is this secret
concordance of creative forces which produced the exquisite courtesy and
noble cast of literature under Louis XIV and Bossuet, and the grandiose
metaphysics and broad critical sympathy under Hegel and Goethe. It is
this secret contrariety of creative forces which produced the literary
incompleteness, the licentious plays, the abortive drama of Dryden and
Wycherly, the poor Greek importations, the gropings, the minute beauties
and fragments of Ronsard and the Pleiad. We may confidently affirm that
the unknown creations toward which the current of coming ages is bearing
us will spring from and be governed by these primordial forces; that, if
these forces could be measured and computed we might deduce from them,
as from a formula, the characters of future civilization; and that if,
notwithstanding the evident rudeness of our notations, and the
fundamental inexactitude of our measures, we would nowadays form some
idea of our general destinies, we must base our conjectures on an
examination of these forces. For, in enumerating them, we run through
the full circle of active forces; and when the race, the environment,
and the moment have been considered--that is to say the inner
mainspring, the pressure from without, and the impulsion already
acquired--we have exhausted not only all real causes but again all
possible causes of movement.




VI. History is a mechanical and psychological problem. Within certain
limits man can foretell


There remains to be ascertained in what way these causes, applied to a
nation or to a century, distribute their effects. Like a spring issuing
from an elevated spot and diffusing its waters, according to the height,
from ledge to ledge, until it finally reaches the low ground, so does
the tendency of mind or of soul in a people, due to race, epoch, or
environment, diffuse itself in different proportions, and by regular
descent, over the different series of facts which compose its
civilization.[3] In preparing the geographical map of a country,
starting at its watershed, we see the slopes, just below this common
point, dividing themselves into five or six principal basins, and then
each of the latter into several others, and so on until the whole
country, with its thousands of inequalities of surface, is included in
the ramifications of this network. In like manner, in preparing the
psychological map of the events and sentiments belonging to a certain
human civilization, we find at the start five or six well determined
provinces--religion, art, philosophy, the state, the family, and
industries; next, in each of these provinces, natural departments, and
then finally, in each of these departments, still smaller territories
until we arrive at those countless details of life which we observe
daily in ourselves and around us. If, again, we examine and compare
together these various groups of facts we at once find that they are
composed of parts and that all have parts in common. Let us take first
the three principal products of human intelligence--religion, art, and
philosophy. What is a philosophy but a conception of nature and of its
[primordial causes] under the form of abstractions and formulas? What
underlies a religion and an art if not a conception of this same nature,
and of these same primordial causes, under the form of more or less
determinate symbols, and of more or less distinct personages, with this
difference, that in the first case we believe that they exist, and in
the second case that they do not exist. Let the reader consider some of
the great creations of the intellect in India, in Scandinavia, in
Persia, in Rome, in Greece, and he will find that art everywhere is a
sort of philosophy become sensible, religion a sort of poem regarded as
true, and philosophy a sort of art and religion, desiccated and reduced
to pure abstractions. There is, then, in the centre of each of these
groups a common element, the conception of the world and its origin, and
if they differ amongst each other it is because each combines with the
common element a distinct element; here the power of abstraction, there
the faculty of personifying with belief, and, finally, the talent for
personifying without belief. Let us now take the two leading products of
human association, the Family and the State. What constitutes the State
other than the sentiment of obedience by which a multitude of men
collect together under the authority of a chief? And what constitutes
the Family other than the sentiment of obedience by which a wife and
children act together under the direction of a father and husband? The
Family is a natural, primitive, limited state, as the State is an
artificial, ulterior, and expanded Family, while beneath the differences
which arise from the number, origin, and condition of its members, we
distinguish, in the small as in the large community, a like fundamental
disposition of mind which brings them together and unites them. Suppose,
now, that this common element receives from the environment, the epoch,
and the race peculiar characteristics, and it is clear that all the
groups into which it enters will be proportionately modified. If the
sentiment of obedience is merely one of fear,[4] you encounter, as in
most of the Oriental states, the brutality of despotism, a prodigality
of vigorous punishments, the exploitation of the subject, servile
habits, insecurity of property, impoverished production, female slavery,
and the customs of the harem. If the sentiment of obedience is rooted in
the instinct of discipline, sociability, and honor, you find, as in
France, a complete military organization, a superb administrative
hierarchy, a weak public spirit with outbursts of patriotism, the
unhesitating docility of the subject along with the hotheadedness of the
revolutionist, the obsequiousness of the courtier along with the reverse
of the gentleman, the charm of refined conversation along with home and
family bickerings, conjugal equality together with matrimonial
incompatibilities under the necessary constraints of the law. If,
finally, the sentiment of obedience is rooted in the instinct of
subordination and in the idea of duty, you perceive, as in Germanic
nations, the security and contentment of the household, the firm
foundations of domestic life, the slow and imperfect development of
worldly matters, innate respect for established rank, superstitious
reverence for the past, maintenance of social inequalities, natural and
habitual deference to the law. Similarly in a race, just as there is a
difference of aptitude for general ideas, so will its religion, art, and
philosophy be different. If man is naturally fitted for broader
universal conceptions and inclined at the same time to their
derangement, through the nervous irritability of an overexcited
organization, we find, as in India, a surprising richness of gigantic
religious creations, a splendid bloom of extravagant transparent epics,
a strange concatenation of subtle, imaginative philosophic systems, all
so intimately associated and so interpenetrated with a common sap, that
we at once recognize them, by their amplitude, by their color, and by
their disorder, as productions of the same climate and of the same
spirit. If, on the contrary, the naturally sound and well-balanced man
is content to restrict his conceptions to narrow bounds in order to cast
them in more precise forms, we see, as in Greece, a theology of artists
and narrators, special gods that are soon separated from objects and
almost transformed at once into substantial personages, the sentiment of
universal unity nearly effaced and scarcely maintained in the vague
notion of destiny, a philosophy, rather than subtle and compact,
grandiose and systematic, narrow metaphysically[5] but incomparable in
its logic, sophistry, and morality, si poesy and arts superior to
anything we have seen in lucidity, naturalness, proportion, truth, and
beauty. If, finally, man is reduced to narrow conceptions deprived of
any speculative subtlety, and at the same time finds that he is absorbed
and completely hardened by practical interests, we see, as in Rome,
rudimentary deities, mere empty names, good for denoting the petty
details of agriculture, generation, and the household, veritable
marriage and farming labels, and, therefore, a null or borrowed
mythology, philosophy, and poesy. Here, as elsewhere, comes in the law
of mutual dependencies.[6] A civilization is a living unit, the parts of
which hold together the same as the parts of an organic body. Just as in
an animal, the instincts, teeth, limbs, bones, and muscular apparatus
are bound together in such a way that a variation of one determines a
corresponding variation in the others, and out of which a skilful
naturalist, with a few bits, imagines and reconstructs an almost
complete body, so, in a civilization, do religion, philosophy, the
family scheme, literature and the arts form a system in which each local
change involves a general change, so that an experienced historian, who
studies one portion apart from the others, sees beforehand and partially
predicts the characteristics of the rest. There is nothing vague in this
dependence. The regulation of all this in the living body consists,
first, of the tendency to manifest a certain primordial type, and, next,
the necessity of its possessing organs which can supply its wants and
put itself in harmony with itself in order to live. The regulation in a
civilization consists in the presence in each great human creation of an
elementary producer equally present in other surrounding creations, that
is, some faculty and aptitude, some efficient and marked disposition,
which, with its own peculiar character, introduces this with that into
all operations in which it takes part, and which, according to its
variations, causes variation in all the works in which it cooperates.




VII. Law of formation of a group. Examples and indications


Having reached this point, we can obtain a glimpse of the principal
features of human transformation, and can now search for the general
laws which regulate not only events, but classes of events; not only
this religion or that literature, but the whole group of religions or of
literatures. If, for example, it is admitted that a religion is a
metaphysical poem associated with belief; if it is recognized, besides,
that there are certain races and certain environments in which belief,
poetic faculty, and metaphysical faculty display themselves in common
with unwonted vigor; if we consider that Christianity and Buddhism were
developed at periods of grand systematizations and in the midst of
sufferings like the oppression which stirred up the fanatics of
Cevennes; if, on the other hand, it is recognized that primitive
religions are born at the dawn of human reason, during the richest
expansion of human imagination, at times of the greatest _naïveté_ and
of the greatest credulity; if we consider, again, that Mohammedanism
appeared along with the advent of poetic prose and of the conception of
material unity, amongst a people destitute of science and at the moment
of a sudden development of the intellect--we might conclude that
religion is born and declines, is reformed and transformed, according as
circumstances fortify and bring together, with more or less precision
and energy, its three generative instincts; and we would then comprehend
why religion is endemic in India among specially exalted imaginative and
philosophic intellects; why it blooms out so wonderfully and so grandly
in the Middle Ages, in an oppressive society, amongst new languages and
literatures; why it develops again in the sixteenth century with a new
character and an heroic enthusiasm, at the time of an universal
renaissance and at the awakening of the Germanic races; why it swarms
out in so many bizarre sects in the rude democracy of America and under
the bureaucratic despotism of Russia; why, in fine, it is seen spreading
out in the Europe of to-day in such different proportions and with such
special traits, according to such differences of race and of
civilizations. And so for every kind of human production, for letters,
music, the arts of design, philosophy, the sciences, state industries,
and the rest. Each has some moral tendency for its direct cause, or a
concurrence of moral tendencies; given the cause, it appears; the cause
withdrawn, it disappears; the weakness or intensity of the cause is the
measure of its own weakness or intensity. It is bound to that like any
physical phenomenon to its condition, like dew to the chilliness of a
surrounding atmosphere, like dilatation to heat. Couples exist in the
moral world as they exist in the physical world, as rigorously linked
together and as universally diffused. Whatever in one case produces,
alters, or suppresses the first term, produces, alters, and suppresses
the second term as a necessary consequence. Whatever cools the
surrounding atmosphere causes the fall of dew. Whatever develops
credulity, along with poetic conceptions of the universe, engenders
religion. Thus have things come about, and thus will they continue to
come about. As soon as the adequate and necessary condition of one of
these vast apparitions becomes known to us our mind has a hold on the
future as well as on the past. We can confidently state under what
circumstances it will reappear, foretell without rashness many portions
of its future history, and sketch with precaution some of the traits of
its ulterior development.




VIII. General problem and future of history. Psychological method.
Value of literature. Purpose in writing this book


History has reached this point at the present day, or rather it is
nearly there, on the threshold of this inquest. The question as now
stated is this: Given a literature, a philosophy, a society, an art, a
certain group of arts, what is the moral state of things which produces
it? And what are the conditions of race, epoch, and environment the best
adapted to produce this moral state? There is a distinct moral state for
each of these formations and for each of their branches; there is one
for art in general as well as for each particular art; for architecture,
painting, sculpture, music, and poetry, each with a germ of its own in
the large field of human psychology; each has its own law, and it is by
virtue of this law that we see each shoot up, apparently haphazard,
singly and alone, amidst the miscarriages of their neighbors, like
painting in Flanders and Holland in the seventeenth century, like poetry
in England in the sixteenth century, like music in Germany in the
eighteenth century. At this moment, and in these countries, the
conditions for one art and not for the others are fulfilled, and one
branch only has bloomed out amidst the general sterility. It is these
laws of human vegetation which history must now search for; it is this
special psychology of each special formation which must be got at; it is
the composition of a complete table of these peculiar conditions that
must now be worked out. There is nothing more delicate and nothing more
difficult. Montesquieu undertook it, but in his day the interest in
history was too recent for him to be successful; nobody, indeed, had any
idea of the road that was to be followed, and even at the present day we
scarcely begin to obtain a glimpse of it. Just as astronomy, at bottom,
is a mechanical problem, and physiology, likewise, a chemical problem,
so is history, at bottom, a problem of psychology. There is a particular
system of inner impressions and operations which fashions the artist,
the believer, the musician, the painter, the nomad, the social man; for
each of these, the filiation, intensity, and interdependence of ideas
and of emotions are different; each has his own moral history, and his
own special organization, along with some master tendency and with some
dominant trait. To explain each of these would require a chapter devoted
to a profound internal analysis, and that is a work that can scarcely be
called sketched out at the present day. But one man, Stendhal, through a
certain turn of mind and a peculiar education, has attempted it, and
even yet most of his readers find his works paradoxical and obscure. His
talent and ideas were too premature. His admirable insight, his profound
sayings carelessly thrown out, the astonishing precision of his notes
and logic, were not understood; people were not aware that, under the
appearances and talk of a man of the world, he explained the most
complex of internal mechanisms; that his finger touched the great
mainspring, that he brought scientific processes to bear in the history
of the heart, the art of employing figures, of decomposing, of deducing;
that he was the first to point out fundamental causes such as
nationalities, climates, and temperaments; in short, that he treated
sentiments as they should be treated, that is to say, as a naturalist
and physicist, by making classifications and estimating forces. On
account of all this he was pronounced dry and eccentric and allowed to
live in isolation, composing novels, books of travel and taking notes,
for which he counted upon, and has obtained, about a dozen or so of
readers. And yet his works are those in which we of the present day may
find the most satisfactory efforts that have been made to clear the road
I have just striven to describe. Nobody has taught one better how to
observe with one's own eyes, first, to regard humanity around us and
life as it is, and next, old and authentic documents; how to read more
than merely the black and white of the page; how to detect under old
print and the scrawl of the text the veritable sentiment and the train
of thought, the mental state in which the words were penned. In his
writings, as in those of Sainte-Beuve and in those of the German
critics, the reader will find how much is to be derived from a literary
document; if this document is rich and we know how to interpret it, we
will find in it the psychology of a particular soul, often that of an
age, and sometimes that of a race. In this respect, a great poem, a good
novel, the confessions of a superior man, are more instructive than a
mass of historians and histories; I would give fifty volumes of charters
and a hundred diplomatic files for the memoirs of Cellini, the epistles
of Saint Paul, the table-talk of Luther, or the comedies of
Aristophanes. Herein lies the value of literary productions. They are
instructive because they are beautiful; their usefulness increases with
their perfection; and if they provide us with documents, it is because
they are monuments. The more visible a book renders sentiments the more
literary it is, for it is the special office of literature to take note
of sentiments. The more important the sentiments noted in a book the
higher its rank in literature, for it is by representing what sort of a
life a nation or an epoch leads, that a writer rallies to himself the
sympathies of a nation or of an epoch. Hence, among the documents which
bring before our eyes the sentiments of preceding generations, a
literature, and especially a great literature, is incomparably the best.
It resembles those admirable instruments of remarkable sensitiveness
which physicists make use of to detect and measure the most profound and
delicate changes that occur in a human body. There is nothing
approaching this in constitutions or religions; the articles of a code
or of a catechism do no more than depict mind in gross and without
finesse; if there are documents which show life and spirit in politics
and in creeds, they are the eloquent discourses of the pulpit and the
tribune, memoirs and personal confessions, all belonging to literature,
so that, outside of itself, literature embodies whatever is good
elsewhere. It is mainly in studying literatures that we are able to
produce moral history, and arrive at some knowledge of the psychological
laws on which events depend.

I have undertaken to write a history of a literature and to ascertain
the psychology of a people; in selecting this one, it is not without a
motive. A people had to be taken possessing a vast and complete
literature, which is rarely found. There are few nations which,
throughout their existence, have thought and written well in the full
sense of the word. Among the ancients, Latin literature is null at the
beginning, and afterward borrowed and an imitation. Among the moderns,
German literature is nearly a blank for two centuries.[7] Italian and
Spanish literatures come to an end in the middle of the seventeenth
century. Ancient Greece, and modern France and England, alone offer a
complete series of great and expressive monuments. I have chosen the
English because, as this still exists and is open to direct observation,
it can be better studied than that of an extinct civilization of which
fragments only remain; and because, being different, it offers better
than that of France very marked characteristics in the eyes of a
Frenchman. Moreover, outside of what is peculiar to English
civilization, apart from a spontaneous development, it presents a forced
deviation due to the latest and most effective conquest to which the
country was subject; the three given conditions out of which it
issues--race, climate, and the Norman conquest--are clearly and
distinctly visible in its literary monuments; so that we study in this
history the two most potent motors of human transformation, namely,
nature and constraint, and we study them, without any break or
uncertainty, in a series of authentic and complete monuments. I have
tried to define these primitive motors, to show their gradual effects,
and explain how their insensible operation has brought religions and
literary productions into full light, and how the inward mechanism is
developed by which the barbarous Saxon became the Englishman of the
present day.




[Footnote 1: Darwin, "The Origin of Species." Prosper Lucas, "De
l'Hérédité."]

[Footnote 2: Spinosa, "Ethics," part IV., axiom.]

[Footnote 3: For this scale of coordinate effects consult, "Langues
Sémitiques," by Renan, ch. I; "Comparison des civilisations Grecque
et Romaine," vol. I., ch. I., 3d ed., by Mommsen; "Conséquences
de la démocratie," vol. III., by De Tocqueville.]

[Footnote 4: "L'Esprit des Lois," by Montesquieu; the essential
principles of the three governments.]

[Footnote 5: The birth of the Alexandrine philosophy is due to contact
with the Orient. Aristotle's metaphysical views stand alone. Moreover,
with him as with Plato, they afford merely a glimpse. By way of
contrast see systematic power in Plotinus, Proclus, Schelling, and
Hegel, or again in the admirable boldness of Brahmanic and Buddhist
speculation.]

[Footnote 6: I have very often made attempts to state this law,
especially in the preface to "Essais de Critique et d'Histoire."]

[Footnote 7: From 1550 to 1750.]




BOOK I.--THE SOURCE




CHAPTER FIRST


The Saxons


SECTION I.--The Coast of the North Sea


As you coast the North Sea from the Scheldt to Jutland, you will mark in
the first place that the characteristic feature is the want of slope;
marsh, waste, shoal; the rivers hardly drag themselves along, swollen
and sluggish, with long, black-looking waves; the flooding stream oozes
over the banks, and appears further on in stagnant pools. In Holland the
soil is but a sediment of mud; here and there only does the earth cover
it with a crust, shallow and brittle, the mere alluvium of the river,
which the river seems ever about to destroy. Thick clouds hover above,
being fed by ceaseless exhalations. They lazily turn their violet
flanks, grow black, suddenly descend in heavy showers; the vapor, like a
furnace-smoke, crawls forever on the horizon. Thus watered, plants
multiply; in the angle between Jutland and the continent, in a fat muddy
soil, "the verdure is as fresh as that of England."[8] Immense forests
covered the land even after the eleventh century. The sap of this humid
country, thick and potent, circulates in man as in the plants; man's
respiration, nutrition, sensations and habits affect also his faculties
and his frame.

The land produced after this fashion has one enemy, to wit, the sea.
Holland maintains its existence only by virtue of its dykes. In 1654
those in Jutland burst, and fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were
swallowed up. One need only see the blast of the North swirl down upon
the low level of the soil, wan and ominous:[9] the vast yellow sea
dashes against the narrow belt of flat coast which seems incapable of a
moment's resistance; the wind howls and bellows; the sea-mews cry; the
poor little ships flee as fast as they can, bending almost to the
gunwale, and endeavor to find a refuge in the mouth of the river, which
seems as hostile as the sea. A sad and precarious existence, as it were
face to face with a beast of prey. The Frisians, in their ancient laws,
speak already of the league they have made against "the ferocious
ocean." Even in a calm this sea is unsafe. "Before me rolleth a waste of
water... and above me go rolling the storm-clouds, the formless dark
gray daughters of air, which from the sea, in cloudy buckets scoop up
the water, ever wearied lifting and lifting, and then pour it again in
the sea, a mournful, wearisome business. Over the sea, flat on his face,
lies the monstrous terrible North wind, sighing and sinking his voice as
in secret, like an old grumbler, for once in good humor, unto the ocean
he talks, and he tells her wonderful stories."[10] Rain, wind, and surge
leave room for naught but gloomy and melancholy thoughts. The very joy
of the billows has in it an inexplicable restlessness and harshness.
From Holland to Jutland, a string of small deluged islands[11] bears
witness to their ravages; the shifting sands which the tide drifts up
obstruct and impede the banks and entrance of the rivers.[12] The first
Roman fleet, a thousand sail, perished there; to this day ships wait a
month or more in sight of port, tossed upon the great white waves, not
daring to risk themselves in the shifting winding channel, notorious for
its wrecks. In winter a breast-plate of ice covers the two streams; the
sea drives back the frozen masses as they descend; they pile themselves
with a crash upon the sandbanks, and sway to and fro; now and then you
may see a vessel, seized as in a vice, split in two beneath their
violence. Picture, in this foggy clime, amid hoar-frost and storm, in
these marshes and forests, half-naked savages, a kind of wild beasts,
fishers and hunters, but especially hunters of men; these are they,
Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians;[13] later on, Danes, who during the
fifth and the ninth centuries, with their swords and battle-axes, took
and kept the island of Britain.

A rude and foggy land, like their own, except in the depth of its sea
and the safety of its coasts, which one day will call up real fleets and
mighty vessels; green England--the word rises to the lips and expresses
all. Here also moisture pervades everything; even in summer the mist
rises; even on clear days you perceive it fresh from the great
sea-girdle, or rising from vast but ever slushy meadows, undulating with
hill and dale, intersected with hedges to the limit of the horizon. Here
and there a sunbeam strikes on the higher grasses with burning flash,
and the splendor of the verdure dazzles and almost blinds you. The
overflowing water straightens the flabby stems; they grow up, rank,
weak, and filled with sap; a sap ever renewed, for the gray mists creep
under a stratum of motionless vapor, and at distant intervals the rim of
heaven is drenched by heavy showers. "There are yet commons as at the
time of the Conquest, deserted, abandoned,[14] wild, covered with furze
and thorny plants, with here and there a horse grazing in solitude.
Joyless scene, unproductive soil![15] What a labor it has been to
humanize it! What impression it must have made on the men of the South,
the Romans of Cæsar! I thought, when I saw it, of the ancient Saxons,
wanderers from West and North, who came to settle in this land of marsh
and fogs, on the border of primeval forests, on the banks of these great
muddy streams, which roll down their slime to meet the waves.[16] They
must have lived as hunters and swineherds; growing, as before, brawny,
fierce, gloomy. Take civilization from this soil, and there will remain
to the inhabitants only war, the chase, gluttony, drunkenness. Smiling
love, sweet poetic dreams, art, refined and nimble thought, are for the
happy shores of the Mediterranean. Here the barbarian, ill housed in his
mud-hovel, who hears the rain pattering whole days among the oak
leaves--what dreams can he have, gazing upon his mud-pools and his
sombre sky?"




SECTION II.--The Northern Barbarians


Huge white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen
hair; ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong
drinks; of a cold temperament, slow to love,[17] home-stayers, prone to
brutal drunkenness: these are to this day the features which descent and
climate preserve in the race, and these are what the Roman historians
discovered in their former country. There is no living, in these lands,
without abundance of solid food; bad weather keeps people at home;
strong drinks are necessary to cheer them; the senses become blunted,
the muscles are braced, the will vigorous. In every country the body of
man is rooted deep into the soil of nature; and in this instance still
deeper, because, being uncultivated, he is less removed from nature. In
Germany storm-beaten, in wretched boats of hide, amid the hardships and
dangers of seafaring life, they were pre-eminently adapted for endurance
and enterprise, inured to misfortune, scorners of danger. Pirates at
first: of all kinds of hunting the man-hunt is most profitable and most
noble; they left the care of the land and flocks to the women and
slaves; seafaring, war, and pillage[18] was their whole idea of a
freeman's work. They dashed to sea in their two-sailed barks, landed
anywhere, killed everything; and having sacrificed in honor of their
gods the tithe of their prisoners, and leaving behind them the red light
of their burnings, went farther on to begin again. "Lord," says a
certain litany, "deliver us from the fury of the Jutes. Of all
barbarians[19] these are strongest of body and heart, the most
formidable,"--we may add, the most cruelly ferocious. When murder
becomes a trade, it becomes a pleasure. About the eighth century, the
final decay of the great Roman corpse which Charlemagne had tried to
revive, and which was settling down into corruption, called them like
vultures to the prey. Those who had remained in Denmark, with their
brothers of Norway, fanatical pagans, incensed against the Christians,
made a descent on all the surrounding coasts. Their sea-kings,[20] "who
had never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof, who had never drained
the ale-horn by an inhabited hearth," laughed at wind and storms, and
sang: "The blast of the tempest aids our oars; the bellowing of heaven,
the howling of the thunder, hurt us not; the hurricane is our servant,
and drives us whither we wish to go. We hewed with our swords," says a
song attributed to Ragnar Lodbrog; "was it not like that hour when my
bright bride I seated by me on the couch?" One of them, at the monastery
of Peterborough, kills with his own hand all the monks, to the number of
eighty-four; others, having taken King Ælla, divided his ribs from the
spine, drew his lungs out, threw salt into his wounds. Harold Harefoot,
having seized his rival Alfred, with six hundred men, had them maimed,
blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled.[21] Torture and carnage,
greed of danger, fury of destruction, obstinate and frenzied bravery of
an over-strong temperament, the unchaining of the butcherly
instincts--such traits meet us at every step in the old Sagas. The
daughter of the Danish Jarl, seeing Egil taking his seat near her,
repels him with scorn, reproaching him with "seldom having provided the
wolves with hot meat, with never having seen for the whole autumn a
raven croaking over the carnage." But Egil seized her and pacified her
by singing: "I have marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has
followed me. Furiously we fought, the fire passed over the dwellings of
men; we have sent to sleep in blood those who kept the gates." From such
table-talk, and such maidenly tastes, we may judge of the rest.[22]

Behold them now in England, more settled and wealthier: do you expect to
find them much changed? Changed it may be, but for the worse, like the
Franks, like all barbarians who pass from action to enjoyment. They are
more gluttonous, carving their hogs, filling themselves with flesh,
swallowing down deep draughts of mead, ale, spiced wines, all the
strong, coarse drinks which they can procure, and so they are cheered
and stimulated. Add to this the pleasure of the fight. Not easily with
such instincts can they attain to culture; to find a natural and ready
culture, we must look amongst the sober and sprightly populations of the
south. Here the sluggish and heavy[23] temperament remains long buried
in a brutal life; people of the Latin race never at a first glance see
in them aught but large gross beasts, clumsy and ridiculous when not
dangerous and enraged. Up to the sixteenth century, says an old
historian, the great body of the nation were little else than herdsmen,
keepers of cattle and sheep; up to the end of the eighteenth drunkenness
was the recreation of the higher ranks; it is still that of the lower;
and all the refinement and softening influence of civilization have not
abolished amongst them the use of the rod and the fist. If the
carnivorous, warlike, drinking savage, proof against the climate, still
shows beneath the conventions of our modern society and the softness of
our modern polish, imagine what he must have been when, landing with his
band upon a wasted or desert country, and becoming for the first time a
settler, he saw extending to the horizon the common pastures of the
border country, and the great primitive forests which furnished stags
for the chase and acorns for his pigs. The ancient histories tell us
that they had a great and a coarse appetite.[24] Even at the time of the
Conquest the custom of drinking to excess was a common vice with men of
the highest rank, and they passed in this way whole days and nights
without intermission. Henry of Huntingdon, in the twelfth century,
lamenting the ancient hospitality, says that the Norman kings provided
their courtiers with only one meal a day, while the Saxon kings used to
provide four. One day, when Athelstan went with his nobles to visit his
relative Ethelfleda, the provision of mead was exhausted at the first
salutation, owing to the copiousness of the draughts; but Dunstan,
forecasting the extent of the royal appetite, had furnish the house so
that the cup-bearers, as is the custom at royal feasts, were able the
whole day to serve it out in horns and other vessels, and the liquor was
not found to be deficient. When the guests were satisfied, the harp
passed from hand to hand, and the rude harmony of their deep voices
swelled under the vaulted roof. The monasteries themselves in Edgard's
time kept up games, songs, and dances till midnight. To shout, to drink,
to gesticulate, to feel their veins heated and swollen with wine, to
hear and see around them the riotous orgies, this was the first need of
the barbarians.[25] The heavy human brute gluts himself with sensations
and with noise.

For such appetites there was a stronger food--I mean blows and battle.
In vain they attached themselves to the soil, became tillers of the
ground, in distinct communities and distinct regions, shut[26] in their
march with their kindred and comrades, bound together, separated from
the mass, enclosed by sacred landmarks, by primeval oaks on which they
cut the figures of birds and beasts, by poles set up in the midst of the
marsh, which whosoever removed was punished with cruel tortures. In vain
these Marches and Ga's[27] were grouped into states, and finally formed
a half-regulated society, with assemblies and laws, under the lead of a
single king; its very structure indicates the necessities to supply
which it was created. They united in order to maintain peace; treaties
of peace occupy their Parliaments; provisions for peace are the matter
of their laws. War was waged daily and everywhere; the aim of life was,
not to be slain, ransomed, mutilated, pillaged, hanged, and of course,
if it was a woman, violated.[28] Every man was obliged to appear armed,
and to be ready, with his burgh or his township, to repel marauders, who
went about in bands.[29] The animal was yet too powerful, too impetuous,
too untamed. Anger and covetousness in the first place brought him upon
his prey. Their history, I mean that of the Heptarchy, is like a history
of "kites and crows."[30] They slew the Britons or reduced them to
slavery, fought the remnant of the Welsh, Irish, and Picts, massacred
one another, were hewn down and cut to pieces by the Danes. In a hundred
years, out of fourteen kings of Northumbria, seven were slain and six
deposed. Penda of Mercia killed five kings, and in order to take the
town of Bamborough, demolished all the neighboring villages, heaped
their ruins into an immense pile, sufficient to burn all the
inhabitants, undertook to exterminate the Northumbrians, and perished
himself by the sword at the age of eighty. Many amongst them were put to
death by the thanes; one thane was burned alive; brothers slew one
another treacherously. With us civilization has interposed, between the
desire and its fulfilment, the counteracting and softening preventive of
reflection and calculation; here, the impulse is sudden, and murder and
every kind of excess spring from it instantaneously. King Edwy[31]
having married Elgiva, his relation within the prohibited degrees,
quitted the hall where he was drinking on the very day of his
coronation, to be with her. The nobles thought themselves insulted, and
immediately Abbot Dunstan went himself to seek the young man. "He found
the adulteress," says the monk Osbern, "her mother, and the king
together on the bed of debauch. He dragged the king thence violently,
and setting the crown upon his head, brought him back to the nobles."
Afterwards Elgiva sent men to put out Dunstan's eyes, and then, in a
revolt, saved herself and the king by hiding in the country; but the men
of the North having seized her, "hamstrung her, and then subjected her
to the death which she deserved."[32] Barbarity follows barbarity. At
Bristol, at the time of the Conquest, as we are told by a historian of
the time,[33] it was the custom to buy men and women in all parts of
England, and to carry them to Ireland for sale in order to make money.
The buyers usually made the young women pregnant, and took them to
market in that condition, in order to insure a better price. "You might
have seen with sorrow long files of young people of both sexes and of
the greatest beauty, bound with ropes, and daily exposed for sale. ...
They sold in this manner as slaves their nearest relatives, and even
their own children." And the chronicler adds that, having abandoned this
practice, they "thus set an example to all the rest of England." Would
you know the manners of the highest ranks, in the family of the last
king?[34] At a feast in the king's hall, Harold was serving Edward the
Confessor with wine, when Tostig, his brother, moved by envy, seized him
by the hair. They were separated. Tostig went to Hereford, where Harold
had ordered a royal banquet to be prepared. There he seized his
brother's attendants, and cutting off their heads and limbs, he placed
them in the vessels of wine, ale, mead, and cider, and sent a message to
the king: "If you go to your farm, you will find there plenty of salt
meat, but you will do well to carry some more with you." Harold's other
brother, Sweyn, had violated the abbess Elgiva, assassinated Beorn the
thane, and being banished from the country had turned pirate. When we
regard their deeds of violence, their ferocity, their cannibal jests, we
see that they were not far removed from the sea-kings, or from the
followers of Odin, who ate raw flesh, hung men as victims on the sacred
trees of Upsala, and killed themselves to make sure of dying as they had
lived, in blood. A score of times the old ferocious instinct reappears
beneath the thin crust of Christianity. In the eleventh century,
Siward,[35] the great Earl of Northumberland, was afflicted with a
dysentery; and feeling his death near, exclaimed, "What a shame for me
not to have been permitted to die in so many battles, and to end thus by
a cow's death! At least put on my breastplate, gird on my sword, set my
helmet on my head, my shield in my left hand, my battle-axe in my right,
so that a stout warrior, like myself, may die as a warrior." They did as
he bade, and thus died he honorably in his armor. They had made one
step, and only one, from barbarism.




SECTION III.--Saxon Ideas


Under this native barbarism there were noble dispositions, unknown to
the Roman world, which were destined to produce a better people out of
its ruins. In the first place, "a certain earnestness, which leads them
out of frivolous sentiments to noble ones."[36] From their origin in
Germany this is what we find them, severe in manners, with grave
inclinations and a manly dignity. They live solitary, each one near the
spring or the wood which has taken his fancy.[37] Even in villages the
cottages were detached; they must have independence and free air. They
had no taste for voluptuousness; love was tardy, education severe, their
food simple; all the recreation they indulged in was the hunting of the
aurochs, and a dance amongst naked swords. Violent intoxication and
perilous wagers were their weakest points; they sought in preference not
mild pleasures, but strong excitement. In everything, even in their rude
and masculine instincts, they were men. Each in his own home, on his
land and in his hut, was his own master, upright and free, in no wise
restrained or shackled. If the commonweal received anything from him, it
was because he gave it. He gave his vote in arms in all great
conferences, passed judgment in the assembly, made alliances and wars on
his own account, moved from place to place, showed activity and
daring.[38] The modern Englishman existed entire in this Saxon. If he
bends, it is because he is quite willing to bend; he is no less capable
of self-denial than of independence; self-sacrifice is not uncommon, a
man cares not for his blood or his life. In Homer the warrior often
gives way, and is not blamed if he flees. In the Sagas, in the Edda, he
must be over-brave; in Germany the coward is drowned in the mud, under a
hurdle. Through all outbreaks of primitive brutality gleams obscurely
the grand idea of duty, which is, the self-constraint exercised in view
of some noble end. Marriage was pure amongst them, chastity instinctive.
Amongst the Saxons the adulterer was punished by death; the adulteress
was obliged to hang herself, or was stabbed by the knives of her
companions. The wives of the Cimbrians, when they could not obtain from
Marius assurance of their chastity, slew themselves with their own
hands. They thought there was something sacred in a woman; they married
but one, and kept faith with her. In fifteen centuries the idea of
marriage is unchanged amongst them. The wife, on entering her husband's
home, is aware that she gives herself altogether,[39] "that she will
have but one body, one life with him; that she will have no thought, no
desire beyond; that she will be the companion of his perils and labors;
that she will suffer and dare as much as he, both in peace and war." And
he, like her, knows that he gives himself. Having chosen his chief, he
forgets himself in him, assigns to him his own glory, serves him to the
death. "He is infamous as long as he lives, who returns from the field
of battle without his chief."[40] It was on this voluntary subordination
that feudal society was based. Man in this race can accept a superior,
can be capable of devotion and respect. Thrown back upon himself by the
gloom and severity of his climate, he has discovered moral beauty while
others discover sensuous beauty. This kind of naked brute, who lies all
day by his fireside, sluggish and dirty, always eating and drinking,[41]
whose rusty faculties cannot follow the clear and fine outlines of
happily created poetic forms, catches a glimpse of the sublime in his
troubled dreams. He does not see it, but simply feels it; his religion
is already within, as it will be in the sixteenth century, when he will
cast off the sensuous worship imported from Rome, and hallow the faith
of the heart.[42] His gods are not enclosed in walls; he has no idols.
What he designates by divine names is something invisible and grand,
which floats through nature, and is conceived beyond nature,[43] a
mysterious infinity which the sense cannot touch, but which "reverence
alone can feel"; and when, later on, the legends define and alter this
vague divination of natural powers, one idea remains at the bottom of
this chaos of giant-dreams, namely, that the world is a warfare, and
heroism the highest good.

In the beginning, say the old Icelandic legends,[44] there were two
worlds, Niflheim the frozen, and Muspell the burning. From the falling
snow-flakes was born the giant Ymir. "There was in times of old, where
Ymir dwelt, nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves; earth existed not, nor
heaven above; 'twas a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere." There was but
Ymir, the horrible frozen Ocean, with his children, sprung from his feet
and his armpits; then their shapeless progeny, Terrors of the abyss,
barren Mountains, Whirlwinds of the North, and other malevolent beings,
enemies of the sun and of life; then the cow Andhumbla, born also of
melting snow, brings to light, whilst licking the hoar-frost from the
rocks, a man Bur, whose grandsons kill the giant Ymir. "From his flesh
the earth was formed, and from his bones the hills, the heaven from the
skull of that ice-cold giant, and from his blood the sea; but of his
brains the heavy clouds are all created." Then arose war between the
monsters of winter and the luminous fertile gods, Odin the founder,
Baldur the mild and benevolent, Thor the summer-thunder, who purifies
the air, and nourishes the earth with showers. Long fought the gods
against the frozen Jötuns, against the dark bestial powers, the Wolf
Fenrir, the great Serpent, whom they drown in the sea, the treacherous
Loki, whom they bind to the rocks, beneath a viper whose venom drops
continually on his face. Long will the heroes who by a bloody death
deserve to be placed "in the halls of Odin, and there wage a combat
every day," assist the gods in their mighty war. A day will, however,
arrive when gods and men will be conquered. Then


"trembles Yggdrasil's ash yet standing; groans that ancient tree, and
the Jötun Loki is loosed. The shadows groan on the ways of Hel,[45]
until the fire of Surt has consumed the tree. Hrym steers from the east,
the waters rise, the mundane snake is coiled in jötun-rage. The worm
beats the water, and the eagle screams; the pale of beak tears
carcasses; (the ship) Naglfar is loosed. Surt from the South comes with
flickering flame; shines from his sword the Val-god's sun. The stony
hills are dashed together, the giantesses totter; men tread the path of
Hel, and heaven is cloven. The sun darkens, earth in ocean sinks, fall
from heaven the bright stars, fire's breath assails the all-nourishing
tree, towering fire plays against heaven itself."[46]


The gods perish, devoured one by one by the monsters; and the celestial
legend, sad and grand now like the life of man, bears witness to the
hearts of warriors and heroes.

There is no fear of pain, no care for life; they count it as dross when
the idea has seized upon them. The trembling of the nerves, the
repugnance of animal instinct which starts back before wounds and death,
are all lost in an irresistible determination. See how in their epic[47]
the sublime springs up amid the horrible, like a bright purple flower
amid a pool of blood. Sigurd has plunged his sword into the dragon
Fafnir, and at that very moment they looked on one another; and Fafnir
asks, as he dies, "Who art thou? and who is thy father? and what thy
kin, that thou wert so hardy as to bear weapons against me? A hardy
heart urged me on thereto, and a strong hand and this sharp sword....
Seldom hath hardy eld a faint-heart youth." After this triumphant
eagle's cry Sigurd cuts out the worm's heart; but Regin, brother of
Fafnir, drinks blood from the wound, and falls asleep. Sigurd, who was
roasting the heart, raises his finger thoughtlessly to his lips.
Forthwith he understands the language of the birds. The eagles scream
above him in the branches. They warn him to mistrust Regin. Sigurd cuts
off the latter's head, eats of Fafnir's heart, drinks his blood and his
brother's. Amongst all these murders their courage and poetry grow.
Sigurd has subdued Brynhild, the untamed maiden, by passing through the
flaming fire; they share one couch for three nights, his naked sword
betwixt them. "Nor the damsel did he kiss, nor did the Hunnish king to
his arm lift her. He the blooming maid to Giuki's son delivered,"
because, according to his oath, he must send her to her betrothed
Gunnar. She, setting her love upon him, "Alone she sat without, at eve
of day, began aloud with herself to speak: 'Sigurd must be mine; I must
die, or that blooming youth clasp in my arms.'" But seeing him married,
she brings about his death. "Laughed then Brynhild, Budli's daughter,
once only, from her whole soul, when in her bed she listened to the loud
lament of Giuki's daughter." She put on her golden corslet, pierced
herself with the sword's point, and as a last request said:


"Let in the plain be raised a pile so spacious, that for us all like
room may be; let them burn the Hun (Sigurd) on the one side of me, on
the other side my household slaves, with collars splendid, two at our
heads, and two hawks; let also lie between us both the keen-edged sword,
as when we both one couch ascended; also five female thralls, eight male
slaves of gentle birth fostered with me."[48]


All were burnt together; yet Gudrun the widow continued motionless by
the corpse, and could not weep. The wives of the jarls came to console
her, and each of them told her own sorrows, all the calamities of great
devastations and the old life of barbarism.


"Then spoke Giaflang, Giuki's sister: 'Lo, up on earth I live most
loveless, who of five mates must see the ending, of daughters twain and
three sisters, of brethren eight, and abide behind lonely.' Then spake
Herborg, Queen of Hunland: 'Crueller tale have I to tell of my seven
sons, down in the Southlands, and the eight man, my mate, felled in the
death-mead. Father and mother, and four brothers on the wide sea the
winds and death played with; the billows beat on the bulwark boards.
Alone must I sing o'er them, alone must I array them, alone must my
hands deal with their departing; and all this was in one season's
wearing, and none was left for love or solace. Then was I bound a prey
of the battle when that same season wore to its ending; as a tiring may
must I bind the shoon of the duke's high dame, every day at dawning.
From her jealous hate gat I heavy mocking, cruel lashes she laid upon
me."[49]


All was in vain; no word could draw tears from those dry eyes. They were
obliged to lay the bloody corpse before her, ere her tears would come.
Then tears flowed through the pillow; as "the geese withal that were in
the home-field, the fair fowls the may owned, fell a-screaming." She
would have died, like Sigrun, on the corpse of him whom alone she had
loved, if they had not deprived her of memory by a magic potion. Thus
affected, she departs in order to marry Atli, king of the Huns; and yet
she goes against her will, with gloomy forebodings: for murder begets
murder; and her brothers, the murderers of Sigurd, having been drawn to
Atli's court, fall in their turn into a snare like that which they had
themselves laid. Then Gunnar was bound, and they tried to make him
deliver up the treasure. He answers with a barbarian's laugh:


"'Högni's heart in my hand shall lie, cut bloody from the breast of the
valiant chief, the king's son, with a dull-edged knife.' They the heart
cut out from Hialli's breast; on a dish, bleeding, laid it, and it to
Gunnar bare. Then said Gunnar, lord of men: 'Here have I the heart of
the timid Hialli, unlike the heart of the bold Högni; for much it
trembles as in the dish it lies; it trembled more by half while in his
breast it lay.' Högni laughed when to his heart they cut the living
crest-crasher; no lament uttered he. All bleeding on a dish they laid
it, and it to Gunnar bare. Calmly said Gunnar, the warrior Niflung:
'Here have I the heart of the bold Högni, unlike the heart of the timid
Hialli; for it little trembles as in the dish it lies: it trembled less
while in his breast it lay. So far shalt thou, Atli! be from the eyes of
men as thou wilt from the treasures be. In my power alone is all the
hidden Niflung's gold, now that Högni lives not. Ever was I wavering
while we both lived: now am I so no longer, as I alone survive.'"[50]


It was the last insult of the self-confident man, who values neither his
own life nor that of another, so that he can satiate his vengeance. They
cast him into the serpent's den, and there he died, striking his harp
with his foot. But the inextinguishable flame of vengeance passed from
his heart to that of his sister. Corpse after corpse fall on each other;
a mighty fury hurls them open-eyed to death. She killed the children she
had by Atli, and one day on his return from the carnage, gave him their
hearts to eat, served in honey, and laughed coldly as she told him on
what he had fed. "Uproar was on the benches, portentous the cry of men,
noise beneath the costly hangings. The children of the Huns wept; all
wept save Gudrun, who never wept or for her bear-fierce brothers, or for
her dear sons, young, simple."[51] Judge from this heap of ruin and
carnage to what excess the will is strung. There were men amongst them,
Berserkirs,[52] who in battle seized with a sort of madness, showed a
sudden and superhuman strength, and ceased to feel their wounds. This is
the conception of a hero as engendered by this race in its infancy. Is
it not strange to see them place their happiness in battle, their beauty
in death? Is there any people, Hindoo, Persian, Greek, or Gallic, which
has formed so tragic a conception of life? Is there any which has
peopled its infantine mind with such gloomy dreams? Is there any which
has so entirely banished from its dreams the sweetness of enjoyment, and
the softness of pleasure? Endeavors, tenacious and mournful endeavors,
an ecstasy of endeavors--such was their chosen condition. Carlyle said
well, that in the sombre obstinacy of an English laborer still survives
the tacit rage of the Scandinavian warrior. Strife for strife's
sake--such is their pleasure. With what sadness, madness, destruction,
such a disposition breaks its bonds, we shall see in Shakespeare and
Byron; with what vigor and purpose it can limit and employ itself when
possessed by moral ideas, we shall see in the case of the Puritans.




SECTION IV.--Saxon Heroes


They have established themselves in England; and however disordered the
society which binds them together, it is founded, as in Germany, on
generous sentiment. War is at every door, I am aware, but warlike
virtues are within every house; courage chiefly, then fidelity. Under
the brute there is a free man, and a man of spirit. There is no man
amongst them who, at his own risk,[53] will not make alliance, go forth
to fight, undertake adventures. There is no group of free men amongst
them, who, in their Witenagemote, is not forever concluding alliances
one with another. Every clan, in its own district, forms a league of
which all the members, "brothers of the sword," defend each other, and
demand revenge for the spilling of blood, at the price of their own.
Every chief in his hall reckons that he has friends, not mercenaries, in
the faithful ones who drink his beer, and who, having received as marks
of his esteem and confidence, bracelets, swords, and suits of armor,
will cast themselves between him and danger on the day of battle.[54]
Independence and boldness rage amongst this young nation with violence
and excess; but these are of themselves noble things; and no less noble
are the sentiments which serve them for discipline--to wit, an
affectionate devotion, and respect for plighted faith. These appear in
their laws, and break forth in their poetry. Amongst them greatness of
heart gives matter for imagination. Their characters are not selfish and
shifty, like those of Homer. They are brave hearts, simple and strong,
faithful to their relatives, to their master in arms, firm and steadfast
to enemies and friends, abounding in courage, and ready for sacrifice.
"Old as I am," says one, "I will not budge hence. I mean to die by my
lord's side, near this man I have loved so much. He kept his word, the
word he had given to his chief, to the distributor of gifts, promising
him that they should return to the town, safe and sound to their homes,
or that they would fall both together, in the thick of the carnage,
covered with wounds. He lies by his master's side, like a faithful
servant." Though awkward in speech, their old poets find touching words
when they have to paint these manly friendships. We cannot without
emotion hear them relate how the old "king embraced the best of his
thanes, and put his arms about his neck, how the tears flowed down the
cheeks of the gray-haired chief.... The valiant man was so dear to him.
He could not stop the flood which mounted from his breast. In his heart,
deep in the chords of his soul, he sighed in secret after the beloved
man." Few as are the songs which remain to us, they return to this
subject again and again. The wanderer in a reverie dreams about his
lord:[55] It seems to him in his spirit as if he kisses and embraces
him, and lays head and hands upon his knees, as oft before in the olden
time, when he rejoiced in his gifts. Then he wakes--a man without
friends. He sees before him the desert tracks, the seabirds dipping in
the waves, stretching wide their wings, the frost and the snow, mingled
with falling hail. Then his heart's wounds press more heavily. The exile
says:


"In blithe habits full oft we, too, agreed that nought else should
divide us except death alone; at length this is changed, and as if it
had never been is now our friendship. To endure enmities man orders me
to dwell in the bowers of the forest, under the oak-tree in this earthy
cave. Cold is this earth-dwelling: I am quite wearied out. Dim are the
dells, high up are the mountains, a bitter city of twigs, with briars
overgrown, a joyless abode.... My friends are in the earth; those loved
in life, the tomb holds them. The grave is guarding, while I above alone
am going. Under the oak-tree, beyond this earth-cave, there I must sit
the long summer-day."


Amid their perilous mode of life, and the perpetual appeal to arms,
there exists no sentiment more warm than friendship, nor any virtue
stronger than loyalty.

Thus supported by powerful affection and trysted word, society is kept
wholesome. Marriage is like the state. We find women associating with
the men, at their feasts, sober and respected.[56] She speaks, and they
listen to her; no need for concealing or enslaving her, in order to
restrain or retain her. She is a person and not a thing. The law demands
her consent to marriage, surrounds her with guarantees, accords her
protection. She can inherit, possess, bequeath, appear in courts of
justice, in county assemblies, in the great congress of the elders.
Frequently the name of the queen and of several other ladies is
inscribed in the proceedings of the Witenagemote. Law and tradition
maintain her integrity, as if she were a man, and side by side with men.
Her affections captivate her, as if she were a man, and side by side
with men. In Alfred[57] there is a portrait of the wife, which for
purity and elevation equals all that we can devise with our modern
refinements. "Thy wife now lives for thee--for thee alone. She has
enough of all kind of wealth for this present life, but she scorns them
all for thy sake alone. She has forsaken them all, because she had not
thee with them. Thy absence makes her think that all she possesses is
nought. Thus, for love of thee, she is wasted away, and lies near death
for tears and grief." Already, in the legends of the Edda, we have seen
the maiden Sigrun at the tomb of Helgi, "as glad as the voracious hawks
of Odin, when they of slaughter know, of warm prey," desiring to sleep
still in the arms of death, and die at last on his grave. Nothing here
like the love we find in the primitive poetry of France, Provence,
Spain, and Greece. There is an absence of gayety, of delight; outside of
marriage it is only a ferocious appetite, an outbreak of the instinct of
the beast. It appears nowhere with its charm and its smile; there is no
love-song in this ancient poetry. The reason is, that with them love is
not an amusement and a pleasure, but a promise and a devotion. All is
grave, even sombre, in civil relations as well as in conjugal society.
As in Germany, amid the sadness of a melancholic temperament and the
savagery of a barbarous life, the most tragic human faculties, the deep
power of love and the grand power of will, are the only ones that sway
and act.

This is why the hero, as in Germany, is truly heroic. Let us speak of
him at length; we possess one of their poems, that of Beowulf, almost
entire. Here are the stories, which the thanes, seated on their stools,
by the light of their torches, listened to as they drank the ale of
their king: we can glean thence their manners and sentiments, as in the
Iliad and the Odyssey those of the Greeks. Beowulf is a hero, a
knight-errant before the days of chivalry, as the leaders of the German
bands were feudal chiefs before the institution of feudalism.[58] He has
"rowed upon the sea, his naked sword hard in his hand, amidst the fierce
waves and coldest of storms, and the rage of winter hurtled over the
waves of the deep." The sea-monsters, "the many-colored foes, drew him
to the bottom of the sea, and held him fast in their gripe." But he
reached "the wretches with his point and with his war-bill. The mighty
sea-beast received the war-rush through his-hands," and he slew nine
Nicors (sea-monsters). And now behold him, as he comes across the waves
to succor the old King Hrothgar, who with his vassals sits afflicted in
his great mead-hall, high and curved with pinnacles. For "a grim
stranger, Grendel, a mighty haunter of the marshes," had entered his
hall during the night, seized thirty of the thanes who were asleep, and
returned in his war-craft with their carcasses; for twelve years the
dreadful ogre, the beastly and greedy creature, father of Orks and
Jötuns, devoured men and emptied the best of houses. Beowulf, the great
warrior, offers to grapple with the fiend, and foe to foe contend for
life, without the bearing of either sword or ample shield, for he has
"learned also that the wretch for his cursed hide recketh not of
weapons," asking only that if death takes him, they will bear forth his
bloody corpse and bury it; mark his fen-dwelling, and send to Hygelác,
his chief, the best of war-shrouds that guards his breast.

He is lying in the hall, "trusting in his proud strength; and when the
mists of night arose, lo, Grendel comes, tears open the door," seized a
sleeping warrior: "he tore him unawares, he bit his body, he drank the
blood from the veins, he swallowed him with continual tearings." But
Beowulf seized him in turn, and "raised himself upon his elbow."


"The lordly hall thundered, the ale was spilled,... both were enraged;
savage and strong warders; the house resounded; then was it a great
wonder that the wine-hall withstood the beasts of war, that it fell not
upon the earth, the fair palace; but it was thus fast.... The noise
arose, new enough; a fearful terror fell on the North Danes, on each of
those who from the wall heard the outcry, God's denier sing his dreadful
lay, his song of defeat, lament his wound.[59]... The foul wretch
awaited the mortal wound; a mighty gash was evident upon his shoulder;
the sinews sprung asunder, the junctures of the bones burst; success in
war was given to Beowulf. Thence must Grendel fly sick unto death, among
the refuges of the fens, to seek his joyless dwelling. He all the better
knew that the end of his life, the number of his days was gone by."[60]


For he had left on the ground, "hand, arm, and shoulder"; and "in the
lake of Nicors, where he was driven, the rough wave was boiling with
blood, the foul spring of waves all mingled, hot with poison; the dye,
discolored with death, bubbled with warlike gore." There remained a
female monster, his mother, who, like him, "was doomed to inhabit the
terror of waters, the cold streams," who came by night, and amidst drawn
swords tore and devoured another man, Æschere, the king's best friend.
A lamentation arose in the palace, and Beowulf offered himself again.
They went to the den, a hidden land, the refuge of the wolf, near the
windy promontories, where a mountain stream rusheth downwards under the
darkness of the hills, a flood beneath the earth; the wood fast by its
roots overshadoweth the water; there may one by night behold a marvel,
fire upon the flood; the stepper over the heath, when wearied out by the
hounds, sooner will give up his soul, his life upon the brink, than
plunge therein to hide his head. Strange dragons and serpents swam
there; "from time to time the horn sang a dirge, a terrible song."
Beowulf plunged into the wave, descended, passed monsters who tore his
coat of mail, to the ogress, the hateful manslayer, who, seizing him in
her grasp, bore him off to her dwelling. A pale gleam shone brightly,
and there, face to face, the good champion perceived


"the she-wolf of the abyss, the mighty sea-woman; he gave the war-onset
with his battle-bill; he held not back the swing of the sword, so that
on her head the ring-mail sang aloud a greedy war-song.... The beam of
war would not bite. Then caught the prince of the War-Geáts Grendel's
mother by the shoulders... twisted the homicide, so that she bent upon
the floor... She drew her knife broad, brown-edged (and tried to
pierce), the twisted breast-net which protected his life.... Then saw he
among the weapons a bill fortunate in victory, an old gigantic sword,
doughty of edge, ready for use, the work of giants. He seized the belted
hilt; the warrior of the Scyldings, fierce and savage whirled the
ring-mail; despairing of life, he struck furiously, so that it grappled
hard with her about the neck; it broke the bone-rings, the bill passed
through all the doomed body; she sank upon the floor; the sword was
bloody, the man rejoiced in his deed; the beam shone, light stood
within, even as from heaven mildly shines the lamp of the
firmament."[61]


Then he saw Grendel dead in a corner of the hall; and four of his
companions, having with difficulty raised the monstrous head, bore it by
the hair to the palace of the king.

That was his first labor; and the rest of his life was similar. When he
had reigned fifty years on earth, a dragon, who had been robbed of his
treasure, came from the hill and burned men and houses "with waves of
fire. Then did the refuge of earls command to make for him a
variegated shield, all of iron; he knew well enough that a shield of
wood could not help him, lindenwood opposed to fire.... The prince of
rings was then too proud to seek the wide flier with a troop, with a
large company; he feared not for himself that battle, nor did he make
any account of the dragon's war, his laboriousness and valor." And yet
he was sad, and went unwillingly, for he was "fated to abide the end."
Then "he was ware of a cavern, a mound under the earth, nigh to the sea
wave, the clashing of waters, which cave was full within of embossed
ornaments and wires. ... Then the king, hard in war, sat upon the
promontory, whilst he, the prince of the Geáts, bade farewell to his
household comrades. ... I, the old guardian of my people, seek a feud."
He "let words proceed from his breast," the dragon came, vomiting fire;
the blade bit not his body, and the king "suffered painfully, involved
in fire." His comrades had "turned to the wood, to save their lives,"
all save Wiglaf, who "went through the fatal smoke," knowing well "that
it was not the old custom" to abandon relation and prince, "that he
alone... shall suffer distress, shall sink in battle. The worm came
furious, the foul insidious stranger, variegated with waves of fire,...
hot and warlike fierce, he clutched the whole neck with bitter banes; he
was bloodied with life-gore, the blood boiled in waves."[62] They, with
their swords, carved the worm in the midst. Yet the wound of the king
became burning and swelled; "he soon discovered that poison boiled in
his breast within, and sat by the wall upon a stone"; "he looked upon
the work of giants, how the eternal cavern held within stone arches fast
upon pillars." Then he said--


"I have held this people fifty years; there was not any king of my
neighbors, who dared to greet me with warriors, to oppress me with
terror.... I held mine own well, I sought not treacherous malice, nor
swore unjustly many oaths; on account of all this, I, sick with mortal
wounds, may have joy.... Now do thou go immediately to behold the hoard
under the hoary stone, my dear Wiglaf.... Now, I have purchased with my
death a hoard of treasures; it will be yet of advantage at the need of
the people.... I give thanks... that I might before my dying day obtain
such for my peoples... longer may I not here be."[63]


This is thorough and real generosity, not exaggerated and pretended, as
it will be later on in the romantic imaginations of babbling clerics,
mere composers of adventure. Fiction as yet is not far removed from
fact; the man breathes manifest beneath the hero. Rude as the poetry is,
its hero is grand; he is so, simply by his deeds. Faithful, first to his
prince, then to his people, he went alone, in a strange land, to venture
himself for the delivery of his fellow-men; he forgets himself in death,
while thinking only that it profits others. "Each one of us," he says in
one place, "must abide the end of his present life." Let, therefore,
each do justice, if he can, before his death. Compare with him the
monsters whom he destroys, the last traditions of the ancient wars
against inferior races, and of the primitive religion; think of his life
of danger, nights upon the waves, man grappling with the brute creation;
man's indomitable will crushing the breasts of beasts; man's powerful
muscles which, when exerted, tear the flesh of the monsters; you will
see reappear through the mist of legends, and under the light of poetry,
the valiant men who, amid the madness of war and the raging of their own
mood, began to settle a people and to found a state.




SECTION V.--Pagan Poems


One poem nearly whole and two or three fragments are all that remain of
this lay-poetry of England. The rest of the pagan current, German and
barbarian, was arrested or overwhelmed, first by the influx of the
Christian religion, then by the conquest of the Norman-French. But what
remains more than suffices to show the strange and powerful poetic
genius of the race, and to exhibit beforehand the flower in the bud.

If there has ever been anywhere a deep and serious poetic sentiment, it
is here. They do not speak, they sing, or rather they shout. Each little
verse is an acclamation, which breaks forth like a growl; their strong
breasts heave with a groan of anger or enthusiasm, and a vehement or
indistinct phrase or expression rises suddenly, almost in spite of them,
to their lips. There is no art, no natural talent, for describing singly
and in order the different parts of an object or an event. The fifty
rays of light which every phenomenon emits in succession to a regular
and well-directed intellect, come to them at once in a glowing and
confused mass, disabling them by their force and convergence. Listen to
their genuine war-chants, unchecked and violent, as became their
terrible voices. To this day, at this distance of time, separated as
they are by manners, speech, ten centuries, we seem to hear them still:


"The army goes forth: the birds sing, the cricket chirps, the
war-weapons sound, the lance clangs against the shield. Now shineth the
moon, wandering under the sky. Now arise deeds of woe, which the enmity
of this people prepares to do.... Then in the court came the tumult of
war-carnage. They seized with their hands the hollow wood of the shield.
They smote through the bones of the head. The roofs of the castle
resounded, until Garulf fell in battle, the first of earth-dwelling men,
son of Guthlaf. Around him lay many brave men dying. The raven whirled
about, dark and sombre, like a willow leaf. There was a sparkling of
blades, as if all Finsburg were on fire. Never have I heard of a more
worthy battle in war."[64]


This is the song on Athelstan's victory at Brunanburh:


"Here Athelstan king, of earls the lord, the giver of the bracelets of
the nobles, and his brother also, Edmund the ætheling, the Elder a
lasting glory won by slaughter in battle, with the edges of swords, at
Brunanburh. The wall of shields they cleaved, they hewed the noble
banners: with the rest of the family, the children of Edward....
Pursuing, they destroyed the Scottish people and the ship-fleet.... The
field was colored with the warriors' blood! After that the sun on
high,... the greatest star! glided over the earth, God's candle bright!
till the noble creature hastened to her setting. There lay soldiers many
with darts struck down, Northern men over their shields shot. So were
the Scots; weary of ruddy battle.... The screamers of war they left
behind; the raven to enjoy, the dismal kite, and the black raven with
horned beak, and the hoarse toad; the eagle, afterwards to feast on the
white flesh; the greedy battle-hawk, and the grey beast, the wolf in the
wood."[65]


Here all is imagery. In their impassioned minds events are not bald,
with the dry propriety of an exact description; each fits in with its
pomp of sound, shape, coloring; it is almost a vision which is raised,
complete, with its accompanying emotions, joy, fury, excitement. In
their speech, arrows are "the serpents of Hel, shot from bows of horn";
ships are "great sea-steeds," the sea is "a chalice of waves," the
helmet is "the castle of the head"; they need an extraordinary speech to
express their vehement sensations, so that after a time, in Iceland,
where this kind of poetry was carried on to excess, the earlier
inspiration failed, art replaced nature, the Skalds were reduced to a
distorted and obscure jargon. But whatever be the imagery, here, as in
Iceland, though unique, it is too feeble. The poets have not satisfied
their inner emotion, if it is only expressed by a single word. Time
after time they return to and repeat their idea. "The sun on high, the
great star, God's brilliant candle, the noble creature!" Four times
successively they employ the same thought, and each time under a new
aspect. All its different aspects rise simultaneously before the
barbarian's eyes, and each word was like a fit of the semi-hallucination
which possessed him. Verily, in such a condition, the regularity of
speech and of ideas is disturbed at every turn. The succession of
thought in the visionary is not the same as in a reasoning mind. One
color induces another; from sound he passes to sound; his imagination is
like a diorama of unexplained pictures. His phrases recur and change; he
emits the word that comes to his lips without hesitation; he leaps over
wide intervals from idea to idea. The more his mind is transported, the
quicker and wider the intervals traversed. With one spring he visits the
poles of his horizon, and touches in one moment objects which seemed to
have the world between them. His ideas are entangled without order;
without notice, abruptly, the poet will return to the idea he has
quitted, and insert it in the thought to which he is giving expression.
It is impossible to translate these incongruous ideas, which quite
disconcert our modern style. At times they are unintelligible.[66]
Articles, particles, everything capable of illuminating thought, of
marking the connection of terms, of producing regularity of ideas, all
rational and logical artifices, are neglected.[67] Passion bellows forth
like a great shapeless beast; and that is all. It rises and starts in
little abrupt lines; it is the acme of barbarism. Homer's happy poetry
is copiously developed, in full narrative, with rich and extended
imagery. All the details of a complete picture are not too much for him;
he loves to look at things, he lingers over them, rejoices in their
beauty, dresses them in splendid words; he is like the Greek girls, who
thought themselves ugly if they did not bedeck arms and shoulders with
all the gold coins from their purse, and all the treasures from their
caskets; his long verses flow by with their cadences, and spread out
like a purple robe under an Ionian sun. Here the clumsy-fingered poet
crowds and clashes his ideas in a narrow measure; if measure there be,
he barely observes it; all his ornament is three words beginning with
the same letter. His chief care is to abridge, to imprison thought in a
kind of mutilated cry.[68] The force of the internal impression, which,
not knowing how to unfold itself, becomes condensed and doubled by
accumulation; the harshness of the outward expression, which,
subservient to the energy and shocks of the inner sentiment, seek only
to exhibit it intact and original, in spite of and at the expense of all
order and beauty—such are the characteristics of their poetry, and
these also will be the characteristics of the poetry which is to follow.




SECTION VI.--Christian Poems


A race so constituted was predisposed to Christianity, by its gloom, its
aversion to sensual and reckless living, its inclination for the serious
and sublime. When their sedentary habits had reconciled their souls to a
long period of ease, and weakened the fury which fed their sanguinary
religion, they readily inclined to a new faith. The vague adoration of
the great powers of nature, which eternally fight for mutual
destruction, and, when destroyed, rise up again to the combat, had long
since disappeared in the dim distance. Society, on its formation,
introduced the idea of peace and the need for justice, and the war-gods
faded from the minds of men, with the passions which had created them. A
century and a half after the invasion by the Saxons,[69] Roman
missionaries, bearing a silver cross with a picture of Christ, came in
procession chanting a litany. Presently the high priest of the
Northumbrians declared in presence of the nobles that the old gods were
powerless, and confessed that formerly "he knew nothing of that which he
adored"; and he among the first, lance in hand, assisted to demolish
their temple. Then a chief rose in the assembly, and said:


"You remember, it may be, O king, that which sometimes happens in winter
when you are seated at table with your earls and thanes. Your fire is
lighted, and your hall warmed, and without is rain and snow and storm.
Then comes a swallow flying across the hall; he enters by one door, and
leaves by another. The brief moment while he is within is pleasant to
him; he feels not rain nor cheerless winter weather; but the moment is
brief--the bird flies away in the twinkling of an eye, and he passes
from winter to winter. Such, methinks, is the life of man on earth,
compared with the uncertain time beyond. It appears for a while; but
what is the time which comes after—the time which was before? We know
not. If, then, this new doctrine may teach us somewhat of greater
certainty, it were well that we should regard it."


This restlessness, this feeling of the infinite and dark beyond, this
sober, melancholy eloquence, were the harbingers of spiritual life.[70]
We find nothing like it amongst the nations of the south, naturally
pagan, and preoccupied with the present life. These utter barbarians
embrace Christianity straightway, through sheer force of mood and clime.
To no purpose are they brutal, heavy, shackled by infantine
superstitions, capable, like King Canute, of buying for a hundred golden
talents the arm of Augustine. They possess the idea of God. This grand
God of the Bible, omnipotent and unique, who disappears almost entirely
in the Middle Ages,[71] obscured by His court and His family, endures
amongst them in spite of absurd or grotesque legends. They do not blot
Him out under pious romances, by the elevation of the saints, or under
feminine caresses, to benefit the infant Jesus and the Virgin. Their
grandeur and their severity raise them to His high level; they are not
tempted, like artistic and talkative nations, to replace religion by a
fair and agreeable narrative. More than any race in Europe, they
approach, by the simplicity and energy of their conceptions, the old
Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm is their natural condition; and their new
Deity fills them with admiration, as their ancient deities inspired them
with fury. They have hymns, genuine odes, which are but a concrete of
exclamations. They have no development; they are incapable of
restraining or explaining their passion; it bursts forth, in raptures,
at the vision of the Almighty. The heart alone speaks here--a strong,
barbarous heart. Cædmon, their old poet,[72] says Bede, was a more
ignorant man than the others, who knew no poetry; so that in the hall,
when they handed him the harp, he was obliged to withdraw, being unable
to sing like his companions. Once, keeping night-watch over the stable,
he fell asleep. A stranger appeared to him, and asked him to sing
something, and these words came into his head: "Now we ought to praise
the Lord of heaven, the power of the Creator, and His skill, the deeds
of the Father of glory; how he, being eternal God, is the author of all
marvels; who, almighty guardian of the human race, created first for the
sons of men the heavens as the roof of their dwelling, and then the
earth." Remembering this when he woke,[73] he came to the town, and they
brought him before the learned men, before the abbess Hilda, who, when
they had heard him, thought that he had received a gift from heaven, and
made him a monk in the abbey. There he spent his life listening to
portions of Holy Writ, which were explained to him in Saxon, "ruminating
over them like a pure animal, turned them into most sweet verse." Thus
is true poetry born. These men pray with all the emotion of a new soul;
they kneel; they adore; the less they know the more they think. Someone
has said that the first and most sincere hymn is this one word O! Theirs
were hardly longer; they only repeated time after time some deep
passionate word, with monotonous vehemence. "In heaven art Thou, our aid
and succor, resplendent with happiness! All things bow before Thee,
before the glory of Thy Spirit. With one voice they call upon Christ;
they all cry: Holy, holy art Thou, King of the angels of heaven, our
Lord! and Thy judgments are just and great; they reign forever and in
all places, in the multitude of Thy works." We are reminded of the songs
of the servants of Odin, tonsured now, and clad in the garments of
monks. Their poetry is the same; they think of God, as of Odin, in a
string of short, accumulated, passionate images, like a succession of
lightning-flashes; the Christian hymns are a sequel to the pagan. One of
them, Adhelm, stood on a bridge leading to the town where he lived, and
repeated warlike and profane odes as well as religious poetry, in order
to attract and instruct the men of his time. He could do it without
changing his key. In one of them, a funeral song, Death speaks. It was
one of the last Saxon compositions, containing a terrible Christianity,
which seems at the same time to have sprung from the blackest depths of
the Edda. The brief metre sounds abruptly, with measured stroke, like
the passing bell. It is as if we hear the dull resounding responses
which roll through the church, while the rain beats on the dim glass,
and the broken clouds sail mournfully in the sky; and our eyes, glued to
the pale face of a dead man feel beforehand the horror of the damp grave
into which the living are about to cast him.


"For thee was a house built ere thou wert born; for thee was a mould
shapen ere thou of thy mother earnest. Its height is not determined, nor
its depth measured; nor is it closed up (however long it may be) until I
thee bring where thou shalt remain; until I shall measure thee and the
sod of the earth. Thy house is not highly built; it is unhigh and low.
When thou art in it, the heel-ways are low, the sideways unhigh. The
roof is built thy breast full high; so thou shalt in earth dwell full
cold, dim, and dark. Doorless is that house, and dark it is within.
There thou art fast detained, and Death holds the key. Loathly is that
earth-house, and grim to dwell in. There thou shalt dwell, and worms
shall share thee. Thus thou art laid, and leavest thy friends. Thou hast
no friend that will come to thee, who will ever inquire how that house
liketh thee, who shall ever open for thee the door, and seek thee, for
soon thou becomest loathly and hateful to look upon."[74]


Has Jeremy Taylor a more gloomy picture? The two religious poetries,
Christian and pagan, are so like, that one might mingle their
incongruities, images, and legends. In Beowulf, altogether pagan, the
Deity appears as Odin, more mighty and serene, and differs from the
other only as a peaceful Bretwalda[75] differs from an adventurous and
heroic bandit-chief. The Scandinavian monsters, Jötuns, enemies of the
Æsir,[76] have not vanished; but they descend from Cain, and the giants
drowned by the flood.[77] Their new hell is nearly the ancient
Nástrand,[78] "a dwelling deadly cold, full of bloody eagles and pale
adders"; and the dreadful last day of judgment, when all will crumble
into dust, and make way for a purer world, resembles the final
destruction of Edda, that "twilight of the gods," which will end in a
victorious regeneration, an everlasting joy "under a fairer sun."

By this natural conformity they were able to make their religious poems
indeed poems. Power in spiritual productions arises only from the
sincerity of personal and original sentiment. If they can relate
religious tragedies, it is because their soul was tragic, and in a
degree biblical. They introduce into their verses, like the old prophets
of Israel, their fierce vehemence, their murderous hatreds, their
fanaticism, all the shudderings of their flesh and blood. One of them,
whose poem is mutilated, has related the history of Judith--with what
inspiration we shall see. It needed a barbarian to display in such
strong light excesses, tumult, murder, vengeance, and combat.


"Then was Holofernes exhilarated with wine; in the halls of his guests
he laughed and shouted, he roared and dinned. Then might the children of
men afar off hear how the stern one stormed and clamored, animated and
elated with wine. He admonished amply that they should bear it well to
those sitting on the bench. So was the wicked one over all the day, the
lord and his men, drunk with wine, the stern dispenser of wealth; till
that they swimming lay over drunk, all his nobility, as they were
death-slain."[79]


The night having arrived, he commands them to bring into his tent "the
illustrious virgin"; then, going to visit her, he falls drunk on his
bed. The moment was come for "the maid of the Creator, the holy woman."


"She took the heathen man fast by his hair; she drew him by his limbs
towards her disgracefully; and the mischiefful odious man at her
pleasure laid; so as the wretch she might the easiest well command. She
with the twisted locks struck the hateful enemy, meditating hate, with
the red sword, till she had half cut off his neck; so that he lay in a
swoon, drunk and mortally wounded. He was not then dead, not entirely
lifeless. She struck then earnest, the woman illustrious in strength,
another time the heathen hound, till that his head rolled forth upon the
floor. The foul one lay without a coffer; backward his spirit turned
under the abyss, and there was plunged below, with sulphur fastened;
forever afterward wounded by worms. Bound in torments, hard imprisoned,
in hell he burns. After his course he need not hope, with darkness
overwhelmed, that he may escape from that mansion of worms; but there he
shall remain; ever and ever, without end, henceforth in that
cavern-house, void of the joys of hope."[80]


Had anyone ever heard a sterner accent of satisfied hate? When Clovis
listened to the Passion play, he cried, "Why was I not there with my
Franks!" So here the old warrior instinct swelled into flame over the
Hebrew wars. As soon as Judith returned,


"Men under helms (went out) from the holy city at the dawn itself. They
dinned shields; men roared loudly. At this rejoiced the lank wolf in the
wood, and the wan raven, the fowl greedy of slaughter, both from the
west, that the sons of men for them should have thought to prepare their
fill on corpses. And to them flew in their paths the active devourer,
the eagle, hoary in his feathers. The willowed kite, with his horned
beak, sang the song of Hilda. The noble warriors proceeded, they in
mail, to the battle, furnished with shields, with swelling banners. ...
They then speedily let fly forth showers of arrows, the serpents of
Hilda, from their horn bows; the spears on the ground hard stormed. Loud
raged the plunderers of battle; they sent their darts into the throng of
the chiefs.... They that awhile before the reproach of the foreigners,
the taunts of the heathen endured."[81]


Amongst all these unknown poets[82] there is one whose name we know,
Cædmon, perhaps the old Cædmon who wrote the first hymn; like him, at
all events, who, paraphrasing the Bible with a barbarian's vigor and
sublimity, has shown the grandeur and fury of the sentiment with which
the men of these times entered into their new religion. He also sings
when he speaks; when he mentions the ark, it is with a profusion of
poetic names, "the floating house, the greatest of floating chambers,
the wooden fortress, the moving roof, the cavern, the great sea-chest,"
and many more. Every time he thinks of it, he sees it with his mind,
like a quick luminous vision, and each time under a new aspect, now
undulating on the muddy waves, between two ridges of foam, now casting
over the water its enormous shadow, black and high like a castle, "now
enclosing in its cavernous sides" the endless swarm of caged beasts.
Like the others, he wrestles with God in his heart; triumphs like a
warrior over destruction and victory; and in relating the death of
Pharaoh, can hardly speak from anger, or see, because the blood mounts
to his eyes.


"The folk was affrighted, the flood-dread seized on their sad souls;
ocean wailed with death, the mountain heights were with blood
be-steamed, the sea foamed gore, crying was in the waves, the water full
of weapons, a death-mist rose; the Egyptians were turned back; trembling
they fled, they felt fear: would that host gladly find their homes;
their vaunt grew sadder: against them, as a cloud, rose the fell rolling
of the waves; there came not any of that host to home, but from behind
enclosed them fate with the wave. Where ways ere lay sea raged. Their
might was merged, the streams stood, the storm rose high to heaven; the
loudest army-cry the hostile uttered; the air above was thickened with
dying voices.... Ocean raged, drew itself up on high, the storms rose,
the corpses rolled."[83]


Is the song of the Exodus more abrupt, more vehement, or more savage?
These men can speak of the creation like the Bible, because they speak
of destruction like the Bible. They have only to look into their own
hearts in order to discover an emotion sufficiently strong to raise
their souls to the height of their Creator. This emotion existed already
in their pagan legends; and Cædmon, in order to recount the origin of
things, has only to turn to the ancient dreams, such as have been
preserved in the prophecies of the Edda.


"There had not here as yet, save cavern-shade, aught been; but this wide
abyss stood deep and dim, strange to its Lord, idle and useless; on
which looked with his eyes the King firm of mind, and beheld these
places void of joys; saw the dark cloud lower in eternal night, swart
under heaven, dark and waste, until this worldly creation through the
word existed of the Glory-King.... The earth as yet was not green with
grass; ocean cover'd, swart in eternal night, far and wide the dusky
ways."[84]


In this manner will Milton hereafter speak, the descendant of the Hebrew
seers, last of the Scandinavian seers, but assisted in the development
of his thought by all the resources of Latin culture and civilization.
And yet he will add nothing to the primitive sentiment. Religious
instinct is not acquired; it belongs to the blood, and is inherited with
it. So it is with other instincts; pride in the first place, indomitable
self-conscious energy, which sets man in opposition to all domination,
and inures him against all pain. Milton's Satan exists already in
Cædmon's, as the picture exists in the sketch; because both have their
model in the race; and Caedmon found his originals in the northern
warriors, as Milton did in the Puritans:


"Why shall I for his favor serve, bend to him in such vassalage? I may
be a god as he. Stand by me, strong associates, who will not fail me in
the strife. Heroes stern of mood, they have chosen me for chief,
renowned warriors! with such may one devise counsel, with such capture
his adherents; they are my zealous friends, faithful in their thoughts;
I may be their chieftain, sway in this realm; thus to me it seemeth not
right that I in aught need cringe to God for any good; I will no longer
be his vassal."[85]


He is overcome: shall he be subdued? He is cast into the place "where
torment they suffer, burning heat intense, in midst of hell, fire, and
broad flames; so also the bitter seeks smoke and darkness"; will he
repent? At first he is astonished, he despairs; but it is a hero's
despair.


"This narrow place is most unlike that other that we ere knew,[86] high
in heaven's kingdom, which my master bestow'd on me.... Oh, had I power
of my hands, and might one season be without, be one winter's space,
then with this host I--But around me lie iron bonds, presseth this cord
of chain: I am powerless! me have so hard the clasps of hell, so firmly
grasped! Here is a vast fire above and underneath, never did I see a
loathlier landskip; the flame abateth not, hot over hell. Me hath the
clasping of these rings, this hard-polish'd band, impeded in my course,
debarr'd me from my way; my feet are bound, my hands manacled,... so
that with aught I cannot from these limb-bonds escape."[87]


As there is nothing to be done against God, it is His new creature, man,
whom he must attack. To him who has lost everything, vengeance is left;
and if the conquered can enjoy this, he will find himself happy; "he
will sleep softly, even under his chains."




SECTION VII.--Primitive Saxon Authors


Here the foreign culture ceased. Beyond Christianity it could not graft
upon this barbarous stock any fruitful or living branch. All the
circumstances which elsewhere mellowed the wild sap, failed here. The
Saxons found Britain abandoned by the Romans; they had not yielded, like
their brothers on the Continent, to the ascendancy of a superior
civilization; they had not become mingled with the inhabitants of the
land; they had always treated them like enemies or slaves, pursuing like
wolves those who escaped to the mountains of the west, treating like
beasts of burden those whom they had conquered with the land. While the
Germans of Gaul, Italy, and Spain became Romans, the Saxons retained
their language, their genius and manners, and created in Britain a
Germany outside of Germany. A hundred and fifty years after the Saxon
invasion, the introduction of Christianity and the dawn of security
attained by a society inclining to peace, gave birth to a kind of
literature; and we meet with the venerable Bede, and later on, Alcuin,
John Scotus Erigena, and some others, commentators, translators,
teachers of barbarians, who tried not to originate but to compile, to
pick out and explain from the great Greek and Latin encyclopædia
something which might suit the men of their time. But the wars with the
Danes came and crushed this humble plant, which, if left to itself,
would have come to nothing.[88] When Alfred[89] the Deliverer became
king, "there were very few ecclesiastics," he says, "on this side of the
Humber, who could understand in English their own Latin prayers, or
translate any Latin writing into English. On the other side of the
Humber I think there were scarce any; there were so few that, in truth,
I cannot remember a single man south of the Thames, when I took the
kingdom, who was capable of it." He tried, like Charlemagne, to instruct
his people, and turned into Saxon for their use several works, above all
some moral books, as the "de Consolatione" of Boethius; but this very
translation bears witness to the barbarism of his audience. He adapts
the text in order to bring it down to their intelligence; the pretty
verses of Boethius, somewhat pretentious, labored, elegant, crowded with
classical allusions of a refined and compact style worthy of Seneca,
become an artless, long-drawn-out and yet desultory prose, like a
nurse's fairy tale, explaining everything, recommencing and breaking off
its phrases, making ten turns about a single detail; so low was it
necessary to stoop to the level of this new intelligence, which had
never thought or known anything. Here follows the Latin of Boethius, so
affected, so pretty, with the English translation affixed:


"Quondam funera conjugis
Vates Threicius gemens,
Postquam flebilibus modis
Silvas currere, mobiles
Amnes stare coegerat,
Junxitque intrepidum latus
Sævis cerva leonibus,
Nec visum timuit lepus
Jam cantu placidum canem;
Cum flagrantior intima
Fervor pectoris ureret,
Nec qui cuncta subegerant
Mulcerent dominum modi;
Immites superos querens,
Infernas adiit domos.
Illic blanda sonantibus
Chordis carmina temperans,
Quidquid praecipuis Deæ
Matris fontibus hauserat,
Quod luctus dabat impotens,
Quod luctum geminans amor,
Deflet Tartara commovens,
Et dulci veniam prece
Umbrarum dominos rogat.
Stupet tergeminus novo
Captus carmine janitor;
Quæ sontes agitant metu
Ultrices scelerum Deæ
Jam mœstæ lacrymis madent.
Non Ixionium caput
Velox præcipitat rota,
Et longa site perditus
Spernit flumina Tantalus.
Vultur dum satur est modis
Non traxit Tityi jecur.
Tandem, vincimur, arbiter
Umbrarum miserans ait.
Donemus comitem viro,
Emptam carmine conjugem.
Sed lex dona coerceat,
Nec, dum Tartara liquerit,
Fas sit lumina flectere.
Quis legem det amantibus!
Major lex fit amor sibi.
Heu! noctis prope terminos
Orpheus Eurydicem suam
Vidit, perdidit, occidit.
Vos hæc fabula respicit,
Quicunque in superum diem
Mentem ducere quæritis.
Nam qui tartareum in specus
Victus lumina flexerit,
Quidquid præcipuum trahit
Perdit, dum videt inferos."

--_Book III. Metre 12._


The English translation follows:


"It happened formerly that there was a harper in the country called
Thrace, which was in Greece. The harper was inconceivably good. His name
was Orpheus. He had a very excellent wife, called Eurydice. Then began
men to say concerning the harper, that he could harp so that the wood
moved, and the stones stirred themselves at the sound, and wild beasts
would run thereto, and stand as if they were tame; so still, that though
men or hounds pursued them, they shunned them not. Then said they, that
the harper's wife should die, and her soul should be led to hell. Then
should the harper become so sorrowful that he could not remain among the
men, but frequented the wood, and sat on the mountains, both day and
night, weeping and harping, so that the woods shook, and the rivers
stood still, and no hart shunned any lion, nor hare any hound; nor did
cattle know any hatred, or any fear of others, for the pleasure of the
sound. Then it seemed to the harper that nothing in this world pleased
him. Then thought he that he would seek the gods of hell, and endeavor
to allure them with his harp, and pray that they would give him back his
wife. When he came thither, then should there come towards him the dog
of hell, whose name was Cerberus--he should have three heads—and began
to wag his tail, and play with him for his harping. Then was there also
a very horrible gatekeeper, whose name should be Charon. He had also
three heads, and he was very old. Then began the harper to beseech him
that he would protect him while he was there, and bring him thence again
safe. Then did he promise that to him, because he was desirous of the
unaccustomed sound. Then went he further until he met the fierce
goddesses, whom the common people call Parcæ, of whom they say, that
they know no respect for any man, but punish every man according to his
deeds; and of whom they say, that they control every man's fortune. Then
began he to implore their mercy. Then began they to weep with him. Then
went he farther, and all the inhabitants of hell ran towards him, and
led him to their king: and all began to speak with him, and to pray that
which he prayed. And the restless wheel which Ixion, the king of the
Lapithæ, was bound to for his guilt, that stood still for his harping.
And Tantalus the king, who in this world was immoderately greedy, and
whom that same vice of greediness followed there, he became quiet. And
the vulture should cease, so that he tore not the liver of Tityus the
king, which before therewith tormented him. And all the punishments of
the inhabitants of hell were suspended, whilst he harped before the
king. When he long and long had harped, then spoke the king of the
inhabitants of hell, and said, Let us give the man his wife, for he has
earned her by his harping. He then commanded him that he should well
observe that he never looked backwards after he departed hence; and
said, if he looked backwards, that he should lose the woman. But men can
with great difficulty, if at all, restrain love! Wellaway! What! Orpheus
then led his wife with him till he came to the boundary of light and
darkness. Then went his wife after him. When he came forth into the
light, then looked be behind his back towards the woman. Then was she
immediately lost to him. This fable teaches every man who desires to fly
the darkness of hell, and to come to the light of the true good, that he
look not about him to his old vices, so that he practise them again as
fully as he did before. For whosoever with full will turns his mind to
the vices which he had before forsaken, and practises them, and they
then fully please him, and he never thinks of forsaking them; then loses
he all his former good unless he again amend it."[90]


A man speaks thus when he wishes to impress upon the mind of his hearers
an idea which is not clear to them. Boethius had for his audience
senators, men of culture, who understood as well as we the slightest
mythological allusion. Alfred is obliged to take them up and develop
them, like a father or a master, who draws his little boy between his
knees, and relates to him names, qualities, crimes and their
punishments, which the Latin only hints at. But the ignorance is such
that the teacher himself needs correction. He takes the Parcæ for the
Erinyes, and gives Charon three heads like Cerberus. There is no
adornment in his version; no delicacy as in the original. Alfred has
hard work to make himself understood. What, for instance, becomes of the
noble Platonic moral, the apt interpretation after the style of
Iamblichus and Porphyry? It is altogether dulled. He has to call
everything by its name, and turn the eyes of his people to tangible and
visible things. It is a sermon suited to his audience of thanes; the
Danes whom he had converted by the sword needed a clear moral. If he had
translated for them exactly the last words of Boethius, they would have
opened wide their big stupid eyes and fallen asleep.

For the whole talent of an uncultivated mind lies in the force and
oneness of its sensations. Beyond that it is powerless. The art of
thinking and reasoning lies above it. These men lost all genius when
they lost their fever-heat. They lisped awkwardly and heavily dry
chronicles, a sort of historical almanacs. You might think them
peasants, who, returning from their toil, came and scribbled with chalk
on a smoky table the date of a year of scarcity, the price of corn, the
changes in the weather, a death. Even so, side by side with the meagre
Bible chronicles, which set down the successions of kings, and of Jewish
massacres, are exhibited the exaltation of the psalms and the transports
of prophecy. The same lyric poet can be alternately a brute and a
genius, because his genius comes and goes like a disease, and instead of
having it he simply is ruled by it.


"AD. 611. This year Cynegils succeeded to the government in Wessex, and
held it one-and-thirty winters. Cynegils was the son of Ceol, Ceol of
Cutha, Cutha of Cynric.

"614. This year Cynegils and Cnichelm fought at Bampton, and slew two
thousand and forty-six of the Welsh.

"678. This year appeared the comet-star in August, and shone every
morning during three months like a sunbeam. Bishop Wilfrid being driven
from his bishopric by King Everth, two bishops were consecrated in his
stead.

"901. This year died Alfred, the son of Ethelwulf, six nights before the
mass of All Saints. He was king over all the English nation, except that
part that was under the power of the Danes. He held the government one
year and a half less than thirty winters; and then Edward his son took
to the government.

"902. This year there was the great fight at the Holme, between the men
of Kent and the Danes.

"1077. This year were reconciled the King of the Franks, and William,
King of England. But it was continued only a little while. This year was
London burned, one night before the Assumption of St. Mary, so terribly
as it never was before since it was built."[91]


It is thus the poor monks speak, with monotonous dryness, who, after
Alfred's time, gather up and take note of great visible events; sparsely
scattered we find a few moral reflections, a passionate emotion, nothing
more. In the tenth century we see King Edgar give a manor to a bishop,
on condition that he will put into Saxon the monastic regulation written
in Latin by Saint Benedict. Alfred himself was almost the last man of
culture; he, like Charlemagne, became so only by dint of determination
and patience. In vain the great spirits of this age endeavor to link
themselves to the relics of the fine, ancient civilization, and to raise
themselves above the chaotic and muddy ignorance in which the others
flounder. They rise almost alone, and on their death the rest sink again
into the mire. It is the human beast that remains master; the mind
cannot find a place amidst the outbursts and the desires of the flesh,
gluttony and brute force. Even in the little circle where he moves, his
labor comes to nought. The model which he proposed to himself oppresses
and enchains him in a cramping imitation; he aspires but to be a good
copyist; he produces a gathering of centos which he calls Latin verses;
he applies himself to the discovery of expressions, sanctioned by good
models; he succeeds only in elaborating an emphatic, spoiled Latin,
bristling with incongruities. In place of ideas, the most profound
amongst them serve up the defunct doctrines of defunct authors. They
compile religious manuals and philosophical manuals from the Fathers.
Erigena, the most learned, goes to the extent of reproducing the old
complicated dreams of Alexandrian metaphysics. How far these
speculations and reminiscences soar above the barbarous crowd which
howls and bustles in the depths below, no words can express. There was a
certain king of Kent in the seventh century who could not write. Imagine
bachelors of theology discussing before an audience of wagoners, not
Parisian wagoners, but such as survive in Auvergne or in the Vosges.
Among these clerks, who think like studious scholars in accordance with
their favorite authors, and are doubly separated from the world as
scholars and monks, Alfred alone, by his position as a layman and a
practical man, descends in his Saxon translations and his Saxon verses
to the common level; and we have seen that his effort, like that of
Charlemagne, was fruitless. There was an impassable wall between the old
learned literature and the present chaotic barbarism. Incapable, yet
compelled, to fit into the ancient mould, they gave it a twist. Unable
to reproduce ideas, they reproduced a metre. They tried to eclipse their
rivals in versification by the refinement of their composition, and the
prestige of a difficulty overcome. So, in our own colleges, the good
scholars imitate the clever divisions and symmetry of Claudian rather
than the ease and variety of Vergil. They put their feet in irons, and
showed their smartness by running in shackles; they weighted themselves
with rules of modern rhyme and rules of ancient metre; they added the
necessity of beginning each verse with the same letter that began the
last. A few, like Adhelm, wrote square acrostics, in which the first
line, repeated at the end, was found also to the left and right of the
piece. Thus made up of the first and last letters of each verse, it
forms a border to the whole piece, and the morsel of verse is like a
piece of tapestry. Strange literary tricks, which changed the poet into
an artisan. They bear witness to the difficulties which then impeded
culture and nature, and spoiled at once the Latin form and the Saxon
genius.

Beyond this barrier, which drew an impassable line between civilization
and barbarism, there was another, no less impassable, between the Latin
and Saxon genius. The strong German imagination, in which glowing and
obscure visions suddenly meet and abruptly overflow, was in contrast
with the reasoning spirit, in which ideas gather and are developed only
in a regular order; so that if the barbarian, in his classical attempts,
retained any part of his primitive instincts, he succeeded only in
producing a grotesque and frightful monster. One of them, this very
Adhelm, a relative of King Ina, who sang on the town-bridge profane and
sacred hymns alternately, too much imbued with Saxon poesy, simply to
imitate the antique models, adorned his Latin prose and verse with all
the "English magnificence."[92] You might compare him to a barbarian who
seizes a flute from the skilled hands of a player of Augustus's court,
in order to blow on it with inflated lungs, as if it were the bellowing
horn of an aurochs. The sober speech of the Roman orators and senators
becomes in his hands full of exaggerated and incoherent images; he
violently connects words, uniting them in a sudden and extravagant
manner; he heaps up his colors, and utters extraordinary and
unintelligible nonsense, like that of the later Skalds; in short, he is
a latinized Skald, dragging into his new tongue the ornaments of
Scandinavian poetry, such as alliteration, by dint of which he
congregates in one of his epistles fifteen consecutive words, all
beginning with the same letter; and in order to make up his fifteen, he
introduces a barbarous Græcism amongst the Latin words.[93] Amongst the
others, the writers of legends, you will meet many times with
deformation of Latin, distorted by the outburst of a too vivid
imagination; it breaks out even in their scholastic and scientific
writing. Here is part of a dialogue between Alcuin and prince Pepin, a
son of Charlemagne, and he uses like formulas the little poetic and bold
phrases which abound in the national poetry. "What is winter? the
banishment of summer. What is spring? the painter of the earth. What is
the year? the world's chariot. What is the sun? the splendor of the
world, the beauty of heaven, the grace of nature, the honor of day, the
distributor of the hours. What is the sea? the path of audacity, the
boundary of the earth, the receptacle of the rivers, the fountain of
showers." More, he ends his instructions with enigmas, in the spirit of
the Skalds, such as we still find in the old manuscripts with the
barbarian songs. It was the last feature of the national genius, which,
when it labors to understand a matter, neglects dry, clear, consecutive
deduction, to employ grotesque, remote, oft-repeated imagery, and
replaces analysis by intuition.




SECTION VIII.--Virility of the Saxon Race


Such was this race, the last born of the sister races, which, in the
decay of the other two, the Latin and the Greek, brings to the world a
new civilization, with a new character and genius. Inferior to these in
many respects, it surpasses them in not a few. Amidst the woods and mire
and snows, under a sad, inclement sky, gross instincts have gained the
day during this long barbarism. The German has not acquired gay humor,
unreserved facility, the feeling for harmonious beauty; his great
phlegmatic body continues savage and stiff, greedy and brutal; his rude
and unpliable mind is still inclined to savagery, and restive under
culture. Dull and congealed, his ideas cannot expand with facility and
freedom, with a natural sequence and an instinctive regularity. But this
spirit, void of the sentiment of the beautiful, is all the more apt for
the sentiment of the true. The deep and incisive impression which he
receives from contact with objects, and which as yet he can only express
by a cry, will afterwards liberate him from the Latin rhetoric, and will
vent itself on things rather than on words. Moreover, under the
constraint of climate and solitude, by the habit of resistance and
effort, his ideal is changed. Manly and moral instincts have gained the
empire over him; and amongst them the need of independence, the
disposition for serious and strict manners, the inclination for devotion
and veneration, the worship of heroism. Here are the foundations and the
elements of a civilization, slower but sounder, less careful of what is
agreeable and elegant, more based on justice and truth.[94] Hitherto at
least the race is intact, intact in its primitive coarseness; the Roman
cultivation could neither develop nor deform it. If Christianity took
root, it was owing to natural affinities, but it produced no change in
the native genius. Now approaches a new conquest, which is to bring this
time men, as well as ideas. The Saxons, meanwhile, after the wont of
German races, vigorous and fertile, have within the past six centuries
multiplied enormously. They were now about two millions, and the Norman
army numbered sixty thousand.[95] In vain these Normans become
transformed, gallicized; by their origin, and substantially in
themselves they are still the relatives of those whom they conquered. In
vain they imported their manners and their poesy, and introduced into
the language a third part of its words; this language continues
altogether German in element and in substance.[96] Though the grammar
changed, it changed integrally, by an internal action, in the same sense
as its continental cognates. At the end of three hundred years the
conquerors themselves were conquered; their speech became English; and
owing to frequent intermarriage, the English blood ended by gaining the
predominance over the Norman blood in their veins. The race finally
remains Saxon. If the old poetic genius disappears after the Conquest,
it is as a river disappears, and flows for a while underground. In five
centuries it will emerge once more.




[Footnote 8: Malte-Brun, IV. 398. Not counting bays, gulfs, and canals,
the sixteenth part of the country is covered by water. The dialect
of Jutland bears still a great resemblance to English.]

[Footnote 9: See Ruysdaal's painting in Mr. Baring's collection.
Of the three Saxon islands, North Strandt, Busen, and Heligoland,
North Strandt was inundated by the sea in 1300, 1483, 1532, 1615,
and almost destroyed in 1634. Busen is a level plain, beaten by
storms, which it has been found necessary to surround by a dyke.
Heligoland was laid waste by the sea in 800, 1300, 1500, 1649, the
last time so violently that only a portion of it remained.--Turner,
"History of Anglo-Saxons," 1852, I. 97.]

[Footnote 10: Heine, "The North Sea," translated by Charles G.
Leland. See Tacitus, "Annals," book 2, for the impressions of the
Romans, "truculentia cœli."]

[Footnote 11: Watten, Platen, Sande, Düneninseln.]

[Footnote 12: Nine or ten miles out near Heligoland, are the
nearest soundings of about fifty fathoms.]

[Footnote 13: Palgrave, "Saxon Commonwealth," vol. I.]

[Footnote 14: "Notes of a Journey in England."]

[Footnote 15: Léonce de Lavergne, "De l'Agriculture anglaise."
"The soil is much worse than that of France."]

[Footnote 16: There are at least four rivers in England	passing
by the name of "Ouse," which is only another form of "ooze."--Tr.]

[Footnote 17: Tacitus, "De moribus Germanorum," passim: Diem
noctemque continuare potando, nulli proborum.--Sera juvenum
Venus.--Totos dies juxta focum atque ignem agunt. Dargaud, "Voyage
en Danemark. They take six meals per day, the first at five
o'clock in the morning. One should see the faces and meals at
Hamburg and at Amsterdam."]

[Footnote 18: Bede, v. 10. Sidonius, VIII. 6. Lingard, "History
of England," 1854, I. chap. 2.]

[Footnote 19: Zozimos, III. 147. Amm. Marcellinus, XXVIII. 526.]

[Footnote 20: Aug. Thierry, "Hist. S. Edmundi," VI. 441. See
Ynglingasaga, and especially Egil's Saga.]

[Footnote 21: Lingard, "History of England," I. 164, says, however,
"Every tenth man out of the six hundred received his liberty,
and of the rest a few were selected for slavery."--Tr.]

[Footnote 22: Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Danes, up the gaps that
exist in the history of Norwegians, Icelanders are one and the
same people. Their language, laws, religion, poetry, differ
but little. The more northern continue longest in their primitive
manners. Germany in the fourth and fifth centuries, Denmark and
Norway in the seventh and eighth. Iceland in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, present the same condition, and the muniments of each
country will fill up the gaps that exist in the history of the others.]

[Footnote 23: Tacitus, De moribus Germanotum, XXII: Gens nec
astuta nec callida.]

[Footnote 24: William of Malmesbury. Henry of Huntingdon, VI. 365.]

[Footnote 25: Tacitus, "De moribus Germanorum," XXII., XXIII.]

[Footnote 26: Kemble, "Saxons in England," 1849, I. 70, II. 184.
"The Acts of an Anglo-Saxon parliament are a series of treaties
of peace between all the associations which make up the State;
a continual revision and renewal of the alliances offensive and
defensive of all the free men. They are universally mutual contracts
for the maintenance of the frid or peace."]

[Footnote 27: A large district; the word is still existing in
German, as Rheingau, Breiasgau.--Tr.]

[Footnote 28: Turner, "History of the Anglo-Saxons," II. 440,
Laws of Ina.]

[Footnote 29: Such a band consisted of thirty-five men or more.]

[Footnote 30: Milton's expression. Lingard's History, I. chap. 3.
This history bears much resemblance to that of the Franks in Gaul.
See Gregory of Tours. The Saxons, like the Franks, somewhat softened,
but rather degenerated, were pillaged and massacred by those of their
Northern brothers who still remained in a savage state.]

[Footnote 31: Vita S. Dunstani, "Anglia Sacra," II.]

[Footnote 32: It is amusing to compare the story of Edwy and Elgiva
in Turner, II. 216, etc., and then Lingard, I. 132, etc. The
first accuses Dunstan, the other defends him.--Tr.]

[Footnote 33: "Life of Bishop Wolstan."]

[Footnote 34: Tantæ sævitiæ erant fratres illi quod, cum alicujus
nitidam villam conspicerent, dominatorem de nocte interfici juberent,
totamque progeniem illius possessionemque defuncti obtinerent.
Turner, III. 27. Henry of Huntingdon, VI. 367.]

[Footnote 35: "Pene gigas statura," says the chronicler. Henry of
Huntingdon, VI. 367. Kemble, I. 393. Turner, II. 318.]

[Footnote 36: Grimm, "Mythology," 53, Preface.]

[Footnote 37: Tacitus, XX. XXIII., XI., XII. et passim. We may
still see the traces of this taste in English dwellings.]

[Footnote 38: Ibid. XIII.]

[Footnote 39: Tacitus, XIX., VIII., XVI. Kemble, I. 232.]

[Footnote 40: Tacitus, XIV.]

[Footnote 41: "In omni domo, nudi et sordidi... Plus per otium
transigunt, dediti somno, ciboque, otos dies juxta focum atque
ignem agunt."]

[Footnote 42: Grimm, 53, Preface. Tacitus, X.]

[Footnote 43: "Deorum nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod
sola reverentia vident." Later on, at Upsala for instance, they
had images (Adam of Bremen, "Historia Ecclesiastica"). Wuotan (Odin),
signifies etymologically the All-Powerful, him who penetrates
and circulates through everything (Grimm, "Mythology").]

[Footnote 44: "Sæmundar Edda, Snorra Edda," ed. Copenhagen, three
vols., passim. Mr. Bergmann has translated several of these poems
into French, which Mr. Taine quotes. The translator has generally
made use of the edition of Mr. Thorpe, London, 1866.]

[Footnote 45: Hel, the goddess of death, born of Loki and Angrboda.--Tr.]

[Footnote 46: Thorpe, "The Edda of Sæmund, the Vala's Prophecy,"
str. 48-56, p. 9 et passim.]

[Footnote 47: "Fafnismâl Edda." This epic is common to the Northern
races, as is the Iliad to the Greek populations, and is found almost
entire in Germany in the Nibelungen Lied. The translator has also
used Magnusson and Morris's poetical version of the "Völsunga
Saga," and certain songs of the "Elder Edda," London, 1870.]

[Footnote 48: "Thorpe, The Edda of Sæmund, Third Lay of Sigurd
Fafnicide," str. 62-64, p. 83.]

[Footnote 49: Magnusson and Morris, "Story of the Volsungs and
Nibelungs, Lamentation of Guaran," p. 118 et passim.]

[Footnote 50: Thorpe, "The Edda of Sæmund, Lay of Atli," str.
21-27, p. 117.]

[Footnote 51: Ibid., str. 38, p. 119.]

[Footnote 52: This word signifies men who fought without a breastplate,
perhaps in shirts only; Scottice, "Baresarks."--Tr.]

[Footnote 53: See the "Life of Sweyn," of Hereward, etc., even up
to the time of the Conquest.]

[Footnote 54: Beowulf, passim. Death of Byrhtnoth.]

[Footnote 55: "The Wanderer, the Exile's Song, Codex Exoniensis,"
published by Thorpe.]

[Footnote 56: Turner, "History of the Anglo-saxons", III. 63.]

[Footnote 57: Alfred borrows his portrait from Boethius, but
almost entirely rewrites it.]

[Footnote 58: Kemble thinks that the origin of this poem is very
ancient, perhaps contemporary with the invasion of the Angles
and Saxons, but that the version we possess is later than the
seventh century.--Kemble's "Beowulf," text and translation, 1833.
The characters are Danish.]

[Footnote 59: Kemble's "Beowulf," XI. p. 32.]

[Footnote 60: Ibid. XII. p. 34.]

[Footnote 61: "Beowulf," XXII., XXIII. p. 62 et passim.]

[Footnote 62: "Beowulf," XXXIII., XXXVI. p. 94 et passim.]

[Footnote 63: Ibid, XXXVII., XXXVIII. p. 110 et passim. I have
throughout always used the very words of Kemble's translation.--Tr.]

[Footnote 64: Conybeare's "Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,"
1826, "Battle of Finsborough," p. 175. The complete collection of
Anglo-Saxon poetry has been published by M. Grein.]

[Footnote 65: Turner, "History of Anglo-Saxons," III. book 9,
ch. I. p. 245.]

[Footnote 66: The cleverest Anglo-Saxon scholars, Turner, Conybeare,
Thorpe, recognize this difficulty.]

[Footnote 67: Turner, III. 231 et passim. The translations in French,
however literal, do injustice to the text; that language is too clear,
too logical. No Frenchman can understand this extraordinary phase of
intellect, except by taking a dictionary, and deciphering some pages
of Anglo-Saxon for a fortnight.]

[Footnote 68: Turner remarks that the same idea expressed by King
Alfred, in prose and then in verse takes in the first case seven
words, in the second five.--"History of the Anglo-Saxons," III. 235.]

[Footnote 69: 596-625. Aug. Thierry, I. 81; Bede, XII. 2.]

[Footnote 70: Jouffroy, "Problem of Human Destiny."]

[Footnote 71: Michelet, preface to "La Renaissance"; Didron,
"Histoire de Dieu."]

[Footnote 72: About 630. See "Codex Exoniensis," Thorpe.]

[Footnote 73: Bede, IV. 24.]

[Footnote 74: Conybeare's "Illustrations," p. 271.]

[Footnote 75: Bretwalda was a species of warking, or temporary and
elective chief of all the Saxons.--Tr.]

[Footnote 76: The Æsir (sing. As) are the gods of the Scandinavian
nations, of whom Odin was the chief.--Tr.]

[Footnote 77: Kemble, I. I. XII. In this chapter he has collected
many features which show the endurance of the ancient mythology.]

[Footnote 78: Nástrand is the strand or shore of the dead.--Tr.]

[Footnote 79: Turner, "History of Anglo-Saxons," III. book 9, ch. 3,
p. 271.]

[Footnote 80: Ibid. III. book o, ch. 3, p. 272.]

[Footnote 81: Turner, "History of Anglo-Saxons," III. book 9, ch. 3,
p. 274.]

[Footnote 82: Grein, "Bibliothek der Angelsæchsischen poesie."]

[Footnote 83: Thorpe, "Cædmon," 1832, XLVII. p. 206.]

[Footnote 84: Ibid. II. p. 7. A likeness exists between this song
and corresponding portions of the Edda.]

[Footnote 85: Ibid. IV. p. 18.]

[Footnote 86: This is Milton's opening also. (See "Paradise Lost,"
book I. verse 242, etc.) One would think that he must have had some
knowledge of Cædmon from the translation of Junius.]

[Footnote 87: Thorpe, "Cædmon," IV. p. 23.]

[Footnote 88: They themselves feel their impotence and decrepitude.
Bede, dividing the history of the world into six periods, says that
the fifth, which stretches from the return out of Babylon to the
birth of Christ, is the senile period; the sixth is the present,
"ætas decrepita, totius morte sæculi consummanda."]

[Footnote 89: Died in 901; Adhelm died 709, Bede died 735, Alcuin
lived under Charlemagne, Erigena under Charles the Bald (843-877).]

[Footnote 90: Fox's "Alfred's Boethius," chap. 35, sec. 6, 1864.]

[Footnote 91: All these extracts are taken from Ingram's "Saxon
Chronicle," 1823.]

[Footnote 92: William of Malmesbury's expression.]

[Footnote 93: Primitus (pantorum procerum prætorumque pio potissimum
paternoque præsertim privilegio) panegyricum poemataque passim
prosatori sub polo promulgantes, stridula vocum symphonia ac melodiæ
cantilenæque carmine modulaturi hymnizemus.]

[Footnote 94: In Iceland, the country of the fiercest sea-kings,
crimes are unknown; prisons have been turned to other uses;
fines are the only punishment.]

[Footnote 95: Following Doomsday Book, Mr. Turner reckons at
three hundred thousand the heads of families mentioned. If each
family consisted of five persons, that would make one million
five hundred thousand people. He adds five hundred thousand
for the four northern counties, for London and several large
towns, for the monks and provincial clergy not enumerated....
We must accept these figures with caution. Still they agree
with those of Mackintosh, George Chalmers, and several others.
Many facts show that the Saxon population was very numerous,
and quite out of proportion to the Norman population.]

[Footnote 96: Warton, "History of English Poetry," 1840, 3 vols.,
Preface.]




CHAPTER SECOND


The Normans


SECTION I.--The Feudal Man


A century and a half had passed on the Continent since, amid the
universal decay and dissolution, a new society had been formed, and new
men had risen up. Brave men had at length made a stand against the
Norsemen and the robbers. They had planted their feet in the soil, and
the moving chaos of the general subsidence had become fixed by the
effort of their great hearts and of their arms. At the mouths of the
rivers, in the defiles of the mountains, on the margin of the waste
borders, at all perilous passes, they had built their forts, each for
himself, each on his own land, each with his faithful band; and they had
lived like a scattered but watchful army, encamped and confederate in
their castles, sword in hand in front of the enemy. Beneath this
discipline a formidable people had been formed, fierce hearts in strong
bodies,[97] intolerant of restraint, longing for violent deeds, born for
constant warfare because steeped in permanent warfare, heroes and
robbers, who, as an escape from their solitude, plunged into adventures,
and went, that they might conquer a country or win Paradise, to Sicily,
to Portugal, to Spain, to Palestine, to England.




SECTION II.--Normans and Saxons Contrasted


On September 27, 1066, at the mouth of the Somme, there was a great
sight to be seen; four hundred large sailing vessels, more than a
thousand transports, and sixty thousand men, were on the point of
embarking.[98] The sun shone splendidly after long rain; trumpets
sounded, the cries of this armed multitude rose to heaven; as far as the
eye could see, on the shore, in the wide-spreading river, on the sea
which opens out thence broad and shining, masts and sails extended like
a forest; the enormous fleet set out wafted by the south wind.[99] The
people which it carried were said to have come from Norway, and they
might have been taken for kinsmen of the Saxons, with whom they were to
fight; but there were with them a multitude of adventurers, crowding
from all quarters, far and near, from north and south, from Maine and
Anjou, from Poitou and Brittany, from Ile-de-France and Flanders, from
Aquitaine and Burgundy;[100] and, in short, the expedition itself was
French.

How comes it that, having kept its name, it had changed its nature? and
what series of renovations had made a Latin out of a German people? The
reason is, that this people, when they came to Neustria, were neither a
national body, nor a pure race. They were but a band; and as such,
marrying the women of the country, they introduced foreign blood into
their children. They were a Scandinavian band, but swelled by all the
bold knaves and all the wretched desperadoes who wandered about the
conquered country;[101] and as such they received foreign blood into
their veins. Moreover, if the nomadic band was mixed, the settled band
was much more so; and peace by its transfusions, like war by its
recruits, had changed the character of the primitive blood. When Rollo,
having divided the land amongst his followers, hung the thieves and
their abettors, people from every country gathered to him. Security,
good stern justice, were so rare, that they were enough to repeople a
land.[102] He invited strangers, say the old writers, "and made one
people out of so many folk of different natures." This assemblage of
barbarians, refugees, robbers, immigrants, spoke Romance or French so
quickly, that the second Duke, wishing to have his son taught Danish,
had to send him to Bayeux, where it was still spoken. The great masses
always form the race in the end, and generally the genius and language.
Thus this people, so transformed, quickly became polished; the composite
race showed itself of a ready genius, far more wary than the Saxons
across the Channel, closely resembling their neighbors of Picardy,
Champagne, and Ile-de-France. "The Saxons," says an old writer,[103]
"vied with each other in their drinking feats, and wasted their income
by day and night in feasting, whilst they lived in wretched hovels; the
French and Normans, on the other hand, living inexpensively in their
fine, large houses, were besides refined in their food and studiously
careful in their dress." The former, still weighted by the German
phlegm, were gluttons and drunkards, now and then aroused by poetical
enthusiasm; the latter, made sprightlier by their transplantation and
their alloy, felt the cravings of the mind already making themselves
manifest. "You might see amongst them churches in every village, and
monasteries in the cities, towering on high, and built in a style
unknown before," first in Normandy, and later in England.[104] Taste had
come to them at once--that is, the desire to please the eye, and to
express a thought by outward representation, which was quite a new idea:
the circular arch was raised on one or on a cluster of columns; elegant
mouldings were placed about the windows; the rose window made its
appearance, simple, yet, like the flower which gives it its name "_rose
des buissons_"; and the Norman style unfolded itself, original yet
proportioned between the Gothic, whose richness it foreshadowed, and the
Romance, whose solidity it recalled.

With taste, just as natural and just as quickly, was developed the
spirit of inquiry. Nations are like children; with some the tongue is
readily loosened, and they comprehend at once; with others it is
loosened with difficulty, and they are slow of comprehension. The men we
are here speaking of had educated themselves nimbly, as Frenchmen do.
They were the first in France who unravelled the language, regulating it
and writing it so well, that to this day we understand their codes and
their poems. In a century and a half they were so far cultivated as to
find the Saxons "unlettered and rude."[105] That was the excuse they
made for banishing them from the abbeys and all valuable ecclesiastical
offices. And, in fact, this excuse was rational, for they instinctively
hated gross stupidity. Between the Conquest and the death of King John,
they established five hundred and fifty-seven schools in England. Henry
Beauclerk, son of the Conqueror, was trained in the sciences; so were
Henry II and his three sons; Richard, the eldest of these, was a poet.
Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, a subtle logician, ably
argued the Real Presence; Anselm, his successor, the first thinker of
the age, thought he had discovered a new proof of the existence of God,
and tried to make religion philosophical by adopting as his maxim,
"_Crede ut intelligas._" The notion was doubtless grand, especially in
the eleventh century; and they could not have gone more promptly to
work. Of course the science I speak of was but scholastic, and these
terrible folios slay more understandings than they confirm. But people
must begin as they can; and syllogism, even in Latin, even in theology,
is yet an exercise of the mind and a proof of the understanding. Among
the continental priests who settled in England, one established a
library; another, founder of a school, made the scholars perform the
play of Saint Catherine; a third wrote in polished Latin, "epigrams as
pointed as those of Martial." Such were the recreations of an
intelligent race, eager for ideas, of ready and flexible genius, whose
clear thought was not clouded, like that of the Saxon brain, by drunken
hallucinations and the vapors of a greedy and well-filled stomach. They
loved conversations, tales of adventure. Side by side with their Latin
chroniclers, Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, thoughtful men
already, who could not only relate, but criticise here and there, there
were rhyming chronicles in the vulgar tongue, as those of Geoffroy
Gaimar, Bénoît de Sainte-Maure, Robert Wace. Do not imagine that their
verse-writers were sterile of words or lacking in details. They were
talkers, tale-tellers, speakers above all, ready of tongue, and never
stinted in speech. Not singers by any means; they speak--this is their
strong point, in their poems as in their chronicles. They were the
earliest who wrote the "Song of Roland"; upon this they accumulated a
multitude of songs concerning Charlemagne and his peers, concerning
Arthur and Merlin, the Greeks and Romans, King Horn, Guy of Warwick,
every prince and every people. Their minstrels (_trouvères_), like
their knights, draw in abundance from Welsh, Franks, and Latins, and
descend upon East and West in the wide field of adventure. They address
themselves to a spirit of inquiry, as the Saxons to enthusiasm, and
dilute in their long, clear, and flowing narratives the lively colors of
German and Breton traditions; battles, surprises, single combats,
embassies, speeches, processions, ceremonies, huntings, a variety of
amusing events, employ their ready and wandering imaginations. At first,
in the "Song of Roland," it is still kept in check; it walks with long
strides, but only walks. Presently its wings have grown; incidents are
multiplied; giants and monsters abound, the natural disappears, the song
of the jongleur grows a poem under the hands of the _trouvère_; he
would speak, like Nestor of old, five, even six years running, and not
grow tired or stop. Forty thousand verses are not too much to satisfy
their gabble; a facile mind, copious, inquisitive, descriptive, such is
the genius of the race. The Gauls, their fathers, used to delay
travellers on the road to make them tell their stories, and boasted,
like these, "of fighting well and talking with ease."

With chivalric poetry, they are not wanting in chivalry; principally, it
may be, because they are strong, and a strong man loves to prove his
strength by knocking down his neighbors; but also from a desire of fame,
and as a point of honor. By this one word honor the whole spirit of
warfare is changed. Saxon poets painted war as a murderous fury, as a
blind madness which shook flesh and blood, and awakened the instincts of
the beast of prey; Norman poets describe it as a tourney. The new
passion which they introduce is that of vanity and gallantry; Guy of
Warwick dismounts all the knights in Europe, in order to deserve the
hand of the prude and scornful Félice. The tourney itself is but a
ceremony, somewhat brutal I admit, since it turns upon the breaking of
arms and limbs, but yet brilliant and French. To show skill and courage,
display the magnificence of dress and armor, be applauded by and please
the ladies--such feelings indicate men of greater sociality, more under
the influence of public opinion, less the slaves of their own passions,
void both of lyric inspiration and savage enthusiasm, gifted by a
different genius, because inclined to other pleasures.

Such were the men who at this moment were disembarking in England to
introduce their new manners and a new spirit, French at bottom, in mind
and speech, though with special and provincial features; of all the most
matter-of-fact, with an eye to the main chance, calculating, having the
nerve and the dash of our own soldiers, but with the tricks and
precautions of lawyers; heroic undertakers of profitable enterprises;
having gone to Sicily and Naples, and ready to travel to Constantinople
or Antioch, so it be to take a country or bring back money; subtle
politicians, accustomed in Sicily to hire themselves to the highest
bidder, and capable of doing a stroke of business in the heat of the
Crusade, like Bohémond, who, before Antioch, speculated on the dearth
of his Christian allies, and would only open the town to them under
condition of their keeping it for himself; methodical and persevering
conquerors, expert in administration, and fond of scribbling on paper,
like this very William, who was able to organize such an expedition, and
such an army, and kept a written roll of the same, and who proceeded to
register the whole of England in his Domesday Book. Sixteen days after
the disembarkation, the contrast between the two nations was manifested
at Hastings by its visible effects.

The Saxons "ate and drank the whole night. You might have seen them
struggling much, and leaping and singing," with shouts of laughter and
noisy joy.[106] In the morning they packed behind their palisades the
dense masses of their heavy infantry, and with battle-axe hung round
their neck awaited the attack. The wary Normans weighed the chances of
heaven and hell, and tried to enlist God upon their side. Robert Wace,
their historian and compatriot, is no more troubled by poetical
imagination than they were by warlike inspiration; and on the eve of the
battle his mind is as prosaic and clear as theirs.[107] The same spirit
showed itself in the battle. They were for the most part bowmen and
horsemen, well skilled, nimble, and clever. Taillefer, the _jongleur_,
who asked for the honor of striking the first blow, went singing, like a
true French volunteer, performing tricks all the while.[108] Having
arrived before the English, he cast his lance three times in the air,
then his sword, and caught them again by the handle; and Harold's clumsy
foot-soldiers, who only knew how to cleave coats of mail by blows from
their battle-axes, "were astonished, saying to one another that it was
magic." As for William, amongst a score of prudent and cunning actions,
he performed two well-calculated ones, which, in this sore
embarrassment, brought him safe out of his difficulties. He ordered his
archers to shoot into the air; the arrows wounded many of the Saxons in
the face and one of them pierced Harold in the eye. After this he
simulated flight; the Saxons, intoxicated with joy and wrath, quitted
their entrenchments, and exposed themselves to the lances of his
horsemen. During the remainder of the contest they only make a stand by
small companies, fight with fury, and end by being slaughtered. The
strong, mettlesome, brutal race threw themselves on the enemy like a
savage bull; the dexterous Norman hunters wounded them adroitly, knocked
them down, and placed them under the yoke.




SECTION III.--French Forms of Thought


What then is this French race, which by arms and letters make such a
splendid entrance upon the world, and is so manifestly destined to rule,
that in the East, for example, their name of Franks will be given to all
the nations of the West? Wherein consists this new spirit, this
precocious pioneer, this key of all Middle-Age civilization? There is in
every mind of the kind a fundamental activity which, when incessantly
repeated, moulds its plan, and gives it its direction; in town or
country, cultivated or not, in its infancy and its age, it spends its
existence and employs its energy in conceiving an event or an object.
This is its original and perpetual process; and whether it change its
region, return, advance, prolong, or alter its course, its whole motion
is but a series of consecutive steps; so that the least alteration in
the size, quickness, or precision of its primitive stride transforms and
regulates the whole course, as in a tree the structure of the first
shoot determines the whole foliage, and governs the whole growth.[109]
When the Frenchman conceives an event or an object, he conceives quickly
and distinctly; there is no internal disturbance, no previous
fermentation of confused and violent ideas, which, becoming concentrated
and elaborated, end in a noisy outbreak. The movement of his
intelligence is nimble and prompt, like that of his limbs; at once and
without effort he seizes upon his idea. But he seizes that alone; he
leaves on one side all the long entangling off-shoots whereby it is
entwined and twisted amongst its neighboring ideas; he does not
embarrass himself with nor think of them; he detaches, plucks, touches
but slightly, and that is all. He is deprived, or if you prefer it, he
is exempt from those sudden half-visions which disturb a man, and open
up to him instantaneously vast deeps and far perspectives. Images are
excited by internal commotion; he, not being so moved, imagines not. He
is only moved superficially; he is without large sympathy; he does not
perceive an object as it is, complex and combined, but in parts, with a
discursive and superficial knowledge. That is why no race in Europe is
less poetical. Let us look at their epics; none are more prosaic. They
are not wanting in number: "The Song of Roland, Garin le Loherain,"
"Ogier le Danois,"[110] "Berthe aux grands Pieds." There is a library of
them. Though their manners are heroic and their spirit fresh, though
they have originality, and deal with grand events, yet, spite of this,
the narrative is as dull as that of the babbling Norman chroniclers.
Doubtless when Homer relates he is as clear as they are, and he develops
as they do: but his magnificent titles of rosy-fingered Morn, the
wide-bosomed Air, the divine and nourishing Earth, the earth-shaking
Ocean, come in every instant and expand their purple bloom over the
speeches and battles, and the grand abounding similes which interrupt
the narrative tell of a people more inclined to enjoy beauty than to
proceed straight to fact. But here we have facts, always facts, nothing
but facts; the Frenchman wants to know if the hero will kill the
traitor, the lover wed the maiden; he must not be delayed by poetry or
painting. He advances nimbly to the end of the story, not lingering for
dreams of the heart or wealth of landscape. There is no splendor, no
color, in his narrative; his style is quite bare, and without figures;
you may read ten thousand verses in these old poems without meeting one.
Shall we open the most ancient, the most original, the most eloquent, at
the most moving point, the "Song of Roland," when Roland is dying? The
narrator is moved, and yet his language remains the same, smooth,
accentless, so penetrated by the prosaic spirit, and so void of the
poetic! He gives an abstract of motives, a summary of events, a series
of causes for grief, a series of causes for consolation.[111] Nothing
more. These men regard the circumstance or the action by itself, and
adhere to this view. Their idea remains exact, clear, and simple, and
does not raise up a similar image to be confused with the first, to
color or transform itself. It remains dry; they conceive the divisions
of the object one by one, without ever collecting them, as the Saxons
would, in an abrupt, impassioned, glowing semi-vision. Nothing is more
opposed to their genius than the genuine songs and profound hymns, such
as the English monks were singing beneath the low vaults of their
churches. They would be disconcerted by the unevenness and obscurity of
such language. They are not capable of such an access of enthusiasm and
such excess of emotion. They never cry out, they speak, or rather they
converse, and that at moments when the soul, overwhelmed by its trouble,
might be expected to cease thinking and feeling. Thus Amis, in a
mystery-play, being leprous, calmly requires his friend Amille to slay
his two sons, in order that their blood may heal him of his leprosy; and
Amille replies still more calmly.[112] If ever they try to sing, even in
heaven, "a roundelay high and clear," they will produce little rhymed
arguments, as dull as the dullest talk.[113] Pursue this literature to
its conclusion; regard it, like that of the Skalds, at the time of its
decadence, when its vices, being exaggerated, display, like those of the
Skalds, only still more strongly the kind of mind which produced it. The
Skalds fall off into nonsense; it loses itself into babble and
platitude. The Saxon could not master his craving for exaltation; the
Frenchman could not restrain the volubility of his tongue. He is too
diffuse and too clear; the Saxon is too obscure and brief. The one was
excessively agitated and carried away; the other explains and develops
without measure. From the twelfth century the Gestes spun out degenerate
into rhapsodies and psalmodies of thirty or forty thousand verses.
Theology enters into them; poetry becomes an interminable, intolerable
litany, where the ideas, expounded, developed, and repeated _ad
infinitum_, without one outburst of emotion or one touch of originality,
flow like a clear and insipid stream, and send off their reader, by dint
of their monotonous rhymes, into a comfortable slumber. What a
deplorable abundance of distinct and facile ideas! We meet with it again
in the seventeenth century, in the literary gossip which took place at
the feet of men of distinction; it is the fault and the talent of the
race. With this involuntary art of perceiving, and isolating
instantaneously and clearly each part of every object, people can speak,
even for speaking's sake, and forever.

Such is the primitive process; how will it be continued? Here appears a
new trait in the French genius, the most valuable of all. It is
necessary to comprehension that the second idea shall be contiguous to
the first; otherwise that genius is thrown out of its course and
arrested; it cannot proceed by irregular bounds; it must walk step by
step, on a straight road; order is innate in it; without study, and in
the first place, it disjoints and decomposes the object or event,
however complicated and entangled it may be, and sets the parts one by
one in succession to each other, according to their natural connection.
True, it is still in a state of barbarism; yet its intelligence is a
reasoning faculty, which spreads, though unwittingly. Nothing is more
clear than the style of the old French narratives and of the earliest
poems: we do not perceive that we are following a narrator, so easy is
the gait, so even the road he opens to us, so smoothly and gradually
every idea glides into the next; and this is why he narrates so well.
The chroniclers Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, the fathers of
prose, have an ease and clearness approached by none, and beyond all, a
charm, a grace, which they had not to go out of their way to find. Grace
is a national possession in France, and springs from the native delicacy
which has a horror of incongruities; the instinct of Frenchmen avoids
violent shocks in works of taste as well as in works of argument; they
desire that their sentiments and ideas shall harmonize, and not clash.
Throughout they have this measured spirit, exquisitely refined.[114]
They take care, on a sad subject, not to push emotion to its limits;
they avoid big words. Think how Joinville relates in six lines the death
of the poor sick priest who wished to finish celebrating the mass, and
"nevermore did sing, and died." Open a mystery-play, "Théophilus," or
that of the "Queen of Hungary," for instance: when they are going to
burn her and her child, she says two short lines about "this gentle dew
which is so pure an innocent," nothing more. Take a fabliau, even a
dramatic one: when the penitent knight, who has undertaken to fill a
barrel with his tears, dies in the hermit's company, he asks from him
only one last gift: "Do but embrace me, and then I'll die in the arms of
my friend." Could a more touching sentiment be expressed in more sober
language? We must say of their poetry what is said of certain pictures:
This is made out of nothing. Is there in the world anything more
delicately graceful than the verses of Guillaume de Lorris? Allegory
clothes his ideas so as to dim their too great brightness; ideal,
figures, half transparent, float about the lover, luminous, yet in a
cloud, and lead him amidst all the delicate and gentle-hued ideas to the
rose, whose "sweet odor embalms all the plain." This refinement goes so
far, that in Thibaut of Champagne and in Charles of Orleans it turns to
affectation and insipidity. In them all impressions grow more slender;
the perfume is so weak that one often fails to catch it; on their knees
before their lady they whisper their waggeries and conceits; they love
politely and wittily, they arrange ingeniously in a bouquet their
"painted words," all the flowers of "fresh and beautiful language"; they
know how to mark fleeting ideas in their flight, soft melancholy, vague
reverie; they are as elegant as talkative, and as charming as the most
amiable abbés of the eighteenth century. This lightness of touch is
proper to the race, and appears as plainly under the armor and amid the
massacres of the Middle Ages as mid the courtesies and the musk-scented,
wadded coats of the last court. You will find it in their coloring as in
their sentiments. They are not struck by the magnificence of nature,
they see only her pretty side; they paint the beauty of a woman by a
single feature, which is only polite, saying, "She is more gracious than
the rose in May." They do not experience the terrible emotion, ecstasy,
sudden oppression of heart which is displayed in the poetry of
neighboring nations; they say discreetly, "She began to smile, which
vastly became her." They add, when they are in a descriptive humor,
"that she had a sweet and perfumed breath," and a body "white as
new-fallen snow on a branch." They do not aspire higher; beauty pleases,
but does not transport them. They enjoy agreeable emotions, but are not
fitted for deep sensations. The full rejuvenescence of being, the warm
air of spring which renews and penetrates all existence, suggests but a
pleasing couplet; they remark in passing, "Now is winter gone, the
hawthorn blossoms, the rose expands," and so pass on about their
business. It is a light gladsomeness, soon gone, like that which an
April landscape affords. For an instant the author glances at the mist
of the streams rising about the willow trees, that pleasant vapor which
imprisons the brightness of the morning; then, humming a burden of a
song, he returns to his narrative. He seeks amusement, and herein lies
his power.

In life, as in literature, it is pleasure he aims at, not sensual
pleasure or emotion. He is lively, not voluptuous; dainty, not a
glutton. He takes love for a pastime, not for an intoxication. It is a
pretty fruit which he plucks, tastes, and leaves. And we must remark yet
further, that the best of the fruit in his eyes is the fact of its being
forbidden. He says to himself that he is duping a husband, that "he
deceives a cruel woman, and thinks he ought to obtain a pope's
indulgence for the deed."[115] He wishes to be merry--it is the state he
prefers, the end and aim of his life; and especially to laugh at other
people. The short verse of his fabliaux gambols and leaps like a
schoolboy released from school, over all things respected or
respectable; criticising the Church, women, the great, the monks.
Scoffers, banterers, our fathers have abundance both of expression and
matter; and the matter comes to them so naturally, that without culture,
and surrounded by coarseness, they are as delicate in their raillery as
the most refined. They touch upon ridicule lightly, they mock without
emphasis, as it were innocently; their style is so harmonious, that at
first sight we make a mistake, and do not see any harm in it. They seem
artless; they look so very demure; only a word shows the imperceptible
smile: it is the ass, for example, which they call the high priest, by
reason of his padded cassock and his serious air, and who gravely begins
"to play the organ." At the close of the history, the delicate sense of
comicality has touched you, though you cannot say how. They do not call
things by their names, especially in love matters; they let you guess
it; they assume that you are as sharp and knowing as themselves.[116] A
man might discriminate, embellish at times, perhaps refine upon them,
but their first traits are incomparable. When the fox approaches the
raven to steal the cheese, he begins as a hypocrite, piously and
cautiously, and as one of the family. He calls the raven his "good
father Don Rohart, who sings so well"; he praises his voice, "so sweet
and fine. You would be the best singer in the world if you kept clear
of nuts." Reynard is a rogue, an artist in the way of invention, not a
mere glutton; he loves roguery for its own sake; he rejoices in his
superiority, and draws out his mockery. When Tibert, the cat, by his
counsel hung himself at the bell-rope, wishing to ring it, he uses
irony, enjoys and relishes it, pretends to wax impatient with the poor
fool whom he has caught, calls him proud, complains because the other
does not answer, and because he wishes to rise to the clouds-and visit
the saints. And from beginning to end this long epic of Reynard the Fox
is the same; the raillery never ceases, and never fails to be agreeable.
Reynard has so much wit that he is pardoned for everything. The
necessity for laughter is national--so indigenous to the French, that a
stranger cannot understand, and is shocked by it. This pleasure does not
resemble physical joy in any respect, which is to be despised for its
grossness; on the contrary, it sharpens the intelligence, and brings to
light many a delicate or ticklish idea. The fabliaux are full of truths
about men, and still more about women, about people of low rank, and
still more about those of high rank; it is a method of philosophizing by
stealth and boldly, in spite of conventionalism, and in opposition to
the powers that be. This taste has nothing in common either with open
satire, which is offensive because it is cruel; on the contrary, it
provokes good humor. We soon see that the jester is not ill-disposed,
that he does not wish to wound: if he stings, it is as a bee, without
venom; an instant later he is not thinking of it; if need be, he will
take himself as an object of his pleasantry; all he wishes is to keep up
in himself and in us sparkling and pleasing ideas. Do we not see here in
advance an abstract of the whole French literature, the incapacity for
great poetry, the sudden and durable perfection of prose, the excellence
of all the moods of conversation and eloquence, the reign and tyranny of
taste and method, the art and theory of development and arrangement, the
gift of being measured, clear, amusing, and piquant? We have taught
Europe how ideas fall into order, and which ideas are agreeable; and
this is what our Frenchmen of the eleventh century are about to teach
their Saxons during five or six centuries, first with the lance, next
with the stick, next with the birch.




SECTION IV.--The Normans in England


Consider, then, this Frenchman or Norman, this man from Anjou or Maine,
who in his well-knit coat of mail, with sword and lance, came to seek
his fortune in England. He took the manor of some slain Saxon, and
settled himself in it with his soldiers and comrades, gave them land,
houses, the right of levying taxes, on condition of their fighting under
him and for him, as men-at-arms, marshals, standard-bearers; it was a
league in case of danger. In fact, they were in a hostile and conquered
country, and they have to maintain themselves. Each one hastened to
build for himself a place of refuge, castle or fortress,[117] well
fortified, of solid stone, with narrow windows, strengthened with
battlements, garrisoned by soldiers, pierced with loopholes. Then these
men went to Salisbury, to the number of sixty thousand, all holders of
land, having at least enough to maintain a man with horse or arms.
There, placing their hands in William's they promised him fealty and
assistance; and the king's edict declared that they must be all united
and bound together like brothers in arms, to defend and succor each
other. They are an armed colony, stationary, like the Spartans amongst
the Helots; and they make laws accordingly. When a Frenchman is found
dead in any district, the inhabitants are to give up the murderer, or
failing to do so, they must pay forty-seven marks as a fine; if the dead
man is English, it rests with the people of the place to prove it by the
oath of four near relatives of the deceased. They are to beware of
killing a stag, boar, or fawn; for an offence against the forest-laws
they will lose their eyes. They have nothing of all their property
assured to them except as alms, or on condition of paying tribute, or by
taking the oath of allegiance. Here a free Saxon proprietor is made a
body-slave on his own estate.[118] Here a noble and rich Saxon lady
feels on her shoulder the weight of the hand of a Norman valet, who is
become by force her husband or her lover. There were Saxons of one sol,
or of two sols, according to the sum which they gained for their
masters; they sold them, hired them, worked them on joint account, like
an ox or an ass. One Norman abbot has his Saxon predecessors dug up,
their bones thrown without the gates. Another keeps men-at-arms, who
bring his recalcitrant monks to reason by blows of their swords.
Imagine, if you can, the pride of these new lords, conquerors,
strangers, masters, nourished by habits of violent activity, and by the
savagery, ignorance, and passions of feudal life. "They thought they
might do whatsoever they pleased," say the old chroniclers. "They shed
blood indiscriminately, snatched the morsel of bread from the mouth of
the wretched, and seized upon all the money, the goods, the land."[119]
Thus "all the folk in the low country were at great pains to seem humble
before Ivo Taillebois, and only to address him with one knee on the
ground; but although they made a point of paying him every honor, and
giving him all and more than all which they owed him in the way of rent
and service, he harassed, tormented, tortured, imprisoned them, set his
dogs upon their cattle, ... broke the legs and backbones of their beasts
of burden, ... and sent men to attack their servants on the road with
sticks and swords."[120] The Normans would not and could not borrow any
idea or custom from such boors;[121] they despised them as coarse and
stupid. They stood amongst them, as the Spaniards amongst the Americans
in the sixteenth century, superior in force and culture, more versed in
letters, more expert in the arts of luxury. They preserved their manners
and their speech. England, to all outward appearance--the court of the
king, the castles of the nobles, the palaces of the bishops, the houses
of the wealthy--was French; and the Scandinavian people, of whom sixty
years ago the Saxon kings used to have poems sung to them, thought that
the nation had forgotten its language, and treated it in their laws as
though it were no longer their sister.

It was a French literature, then, which was at this time domiciled
across the channel,[122] and the conquerors tried to make it purely
French, purged from all Saxon alloy. They made such a point of this that
the nobles in the reign of Henry II sent their sons to France, to
preserve them from barbarisms. "For two hundred years," says
Higden,[123] "children in scole, agenst the usage and manir of all other
nations beeth compelled for to leve hire own langage, and for to
construe hir lessons and hire thynges in Frensche." The statutes of the
universities obliged the students to converse either in French or Latin.
"Gentilmen children beeth taught to speke Frensche from the tyme that
they bith rokked in hire cradell; and uplondissche men will likne
himself to gentylmen, and fondeth with greet besynesse for to speke
Frensche." Of course the poetry is French. The Norman brought his
minstrel with him; there was Taillefer, the _jongleur_, who sang the
"Song of Roland" at the battle of Hastings; there was Adeline, the
_jongleuse_, received an estate in the partition which followed the
Conquest. The Norman who ridicules the Saxon kings, who dug up the Saxon
saints and cast them without the walls of the church, loved none but
French ideas and verses. It was into French verse that Robert Wace
rendered the legendary history of the England which was conquered, and
the actual history of the Normandy in which he continued to live. Enter
one of the abbeys where the minstrels come to sing, "where the clerks
after dinner and supper read poems, the chronicles of kingdoms, the
wonders of the world,"[124] you will only find Latin or French verses,
Latin or French prose. What becomes of English? Obscure, despised, we
hear it no more, except in the mouths of degraded franklins, outlaws of
the forest, swineherds, peasants, the lowest orders. It is no longer, or
scarcely written; gradually we find in the Saxon Chronicle that the
idiom alters, is extinguished; the Chronicle itself ceases within a
century after the Conquest.[125] The people who have leisure or security
enough to read or write are French; for them authors devise and compose;
literature always adapts itself to the taste of those who can appreciate
and pay for it. Even the English[126] endeavor to write in French: thus
Robert Grostête, in his allegorical poem on Christ; Peter Langtoft, in
his "Chronicle of England," and in his "Life of Thomas à Becket"; Hugh
de Rotheland, in his poem of "Hippomedon"; John Hoveden, and many
others. Several write the first half of the verse in English, and the
second in French; a strange sign of the ascendancy which is moulding and
oppressing them. Even in the fifteenth century[127] many of these poor
folk are employed in this task; French is the language of the court,
from it arose all poetry and elegance; he is but a clodhopper who is
inapt at that style. They apply themselves to it as our old scholars did
to Latin verses; they are gallicized as those were latinized, by
constraint, with a sort of fear, knowing well that they are but
schoolboys and provincials. Gower, one of their best poets, at the end
of his French works, excuses himself humbly for not having "_de
Français la faconde. Pardonnez moi_," he says, "_que de ce je forsvoie;
je suis Anglais._"

And yet, after all, neither the race nor the tongue has perished. It is
necessary that the Norman should learn English, in order to command his
tenants; his Saxon wife speaks it to him, and his sons receive it from
the lips of their nurse; the contagion is strong, for he is obliged to
send them to France, to preserve them from the jargon which on his
domain threatens to overwhelm and spoil them. From generation to
generation the contagion spreads; they breathe it in the air, with the
foresters in the chase, the farmers in the field, the sailors on the
ships: for these coarse people, shut in by their animal existence, are
not the kind to learn a foreign language; by the simple weight of their
dullness they impose their idiom on their conquerors, at all events such
words as pertain to living things. Scholarly speech, the language of
law, abstract and philosophical expressions--in short, all words
depending on reflection and culture may be French, since there is
nothing to prevent it. This is just what happens; these kind of ideas
and this kind of speech are not understood by the commonalty, who, not
being able to touch them, cannot change them. This produces a French, a
colonial French, doubtless perverted, pronounced with closed mouth, with
a contortion of the organs of speech, "after the school of
Stratford-atte-Bow"; yet it is still French. On the other hand, as
regards the speech employed about common actions and visible objects, it
is the people, the Saxons, who fix it; these living words are too firmly
rooted in his experience to allow of being parted with, and thus the
whole substance of the language comes from him. Here, then, we have the
Norman who, slowly and constrainedly, speaks and understands English, a
deformed, gallicized English, yet English, in sap and root; but he has
taken his time about it, for it has required two centuries. It was only
under Henry III that the new tongue is complete, with the new
constitution; and that, after the like fashion, by alliance and
intermixture; the burgesses come to take their seats in Parliament with
the nobles, at the same time that Saxon words settle down in the
language side by side with French words.




SECTION V.--The English Tongue--Early English Literary Impulses


So was modern English formed, by compromise, and the necessity of being
understood. But we can well imagine that these nobles, even while
speaking the rising dialect, have their hearts full of French tastes and
ideas; France remains the home of their mind, and the literature which
now begins, is but translation. Translators, copyists, imitators--there
is nothing else. England is a distant province, which is to France what
the United States were, thirty years ago, to Europe: she exports her
wool, and imports her ideas. Open the "Voyage and Travaile of Sir John
Maundeville,"[128] the oldest prose-writer, the Villehardouin of the
country: his book is but the translation of a translation.[129] He
writes first in Latin, the language of scholars; then in French, the
language of society; finally he reflects, and discovers that the barons,
his compatriots, by governing the Saxon churls, have ceased to speak
their own Norman, and that the rest of the nation never knew it; he
translates his manuscript into English, and, in addition, takes care to
make it plain, feeling that he speaks to less expanded understandings.
He says in French: "_Il advint une fois que Mahomet allait dans une
chapelle où il y avait un saint ermite. Il entra en la chapelle où il y
avait une petite huisserie et basse, et était bien petite la chapelle;
et alors devint la porte si grande qu'il semblait que ce fut la porte
d'un palais._"

He stops, corrects himself, wishes to explain himself better for his
readers across the Channel, and says in English: "And at the Desertes of
Arabye, he wente into a Chapelle where a Eremyte duelte. And whan he
entred in to the Chapelle that was but a lytille and a low thing, and
had but a lytill Dore and a low, than the Entree began to wexe so gret
and so large, and so highe, as though it had ben of a gret Mynstre, or
the Zate of a Paleys."[130] You perceive that he amplifies, and thinks
himself bound to clinch and drive in three or four times in succession
the same idea, in order to get it into an English brain; his thought is
drawn out, dulled, spoiled in the process. Like every copy, the new
literature is mediocre, and repeats what it imitates, with fewer merits
and greater faults.

Let us see, then, what our Norman baron gets translated for him; first,
the chronicles of Geoffroy Gaimar and Robert Wace, which consist of the
fabulous history of England continued up to their day, a dull-rhymed
rhapsody, turned into English in a rhapsody no less dull. The first
Englishman who attempts it is Layamon,[131] a monk of Ernely, still
fettered in the old idiom, who sometimes happens to rhyme, sometimes
fails, altogether barbarous and childish, unable to develop a continuous
idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases, after the
fashion of the ancient Saxons; after him a monk, Robert of
Gloucester,[132] and a canon, Robert of Brunne, both as insipid and
clear as their French models, having become gallicized, and adopted the
significant characteristics of the race, namely, the faculty and habit
of easy narration, of seeing moving spectacles without deep emotion, of
writing prosaic poetry, of discoursing and developing, of believing that
phrases ending in the same sounds form real poetry. Our honest English
versifiers, like their preceptors in Normandy and Ile-de-France,
garnished with rhymes their dissertations and histories, and called them
poems. At this epoch, in fact, on the Continent, the whole learning of
the schools descends into the street; and Jean de Meung, in his poem of
"La Rose," is the most tedious of doctors. So in England, Robert of
Brunne transposes into verse the "Manuel des péchés" of Bishop
Grostête; Adam Davie,[133] certain Scripture histories; Hampole[134]
composes the "Pricke of Conscience." The titles alone make one yawn:
what of the text?


"Mankynde mad ys do Goddus wylle,
And alle Hys byddyngus to fulfille;
For of al Hys makyng more and les,
Man most principal creature es.
Al that He made for man hit was done,
As ye schal here after sone."[135]


There is a poem! You did not think so; call it a sermon, if you will
give it its proper name. It goes on, well divided, well prolonged,
flowing, but void of meaning; the literature which surrounds and
resembles it bears witness of its origin by its loquacity and its
clearness.

It bears witness to it by other and more agreeable features. Here and
there we find divergences more or less awkward into the domain of
genius; for instance, a ballad full of quips against Richard, King of
the Romans, who was taken at the battle of Lewes. Sometimes, charm is
not lacking, nor sweetness either. No one has ever spoken so bright and
so well to the ladies as the French of the Continent, and they have not
quite forgotten this talent while settling in England. You perceive it
readily in the manner in which they celebrate the Virgin. Nothing could
be more different from the Saxon sentiment, which is altogether
biblical, than the chivalric adoration of the sovereign Lady, the
fascinating Virgin and Saint, who was the real deity of the Middle Ages.
It breathes in this pleasing hymn:


"Blessed beo thu, lavedi,
Ful of hovene blisse;
Swete flur of parais,
Moder of milternisse....
I-blessed beo thu, Lavedi,
So fair and so briht;
Al min hope is uppon the,
Bi day and bi nicht....
Bricht and scene quen of storre,
So me liht and lere.
In this false fikele world,
So me led and steore."[136]


There is but a short and easy step between this tender worship of the
Virgin and the sentiments of the court of love. The English rhymesters
take it; and when they wish to praise their earthly mistresses, they
borrow, here as elsewhere, the ideas and the very form of French verse.
One compares his lady to all kinds of precious stones and flowers;
others sing truly amorous songs, at times sensual.


"Bytuene Mershe and Aueril,
When spray biginneth to springe.
The lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud to synge,
Ich libbe in loue longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge.
He may me blysse bringe,
Icham in hire baundoun.
An hendy hap ich abbe yhent,
Ichot from heuene it is me sent.
From alle wymmen my love is lent,
And lyht on Alisoun."[137]


Another sings:


"Suete lemmon, y preye the, of loue one speche,
Whil y lyue in world so wyde other nulle y seche.
With thy loue, my suete leof, mi bliss thou mihtes eche
A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche."[138]


Is not this the lively and warm imagination of the south? they speak of
springtime and of love, "the fine and lovely weather" like _trouvères_,
even like _troubadours._ The dirty, smoke-grimed cottage, the black
feudal castle, where all but the master lie higgledy-piggledy on the
straw in the great stone hall, the cold rain, the muddy earth, make the
return of the sun and the warm air delicious.


"Sumer is i-cumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu:
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springeth the wde nu.
Sing cuccu, cuccu.
Awe bleteth after lomb,
Llouth after calue cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth:
Murie sing cuccu,
Cuccu, cuccu.
Wel singes thu cuccu;
Ne swik thu nauer nu.
Sing, cuccu nu,
Sing, cuccu."[139]


Here are glowing pictures, such as Guillaume de Lorris was writing at
the same time, even richer and more lifelike, perhaps because the poet
found here for inspiration that love of country life which in England is
deep and national. Others, more imitative, attempt pleasantries like
those of Rutebeuf and the fabliaux, frank quips,[140] and even
satirical, loose waggeries. Their true aim and end is to hit out at the
monks. In every French country or country which imitates France, the
most manifest use of convents is to furnish material for sprightly and
scandalous stories. One writes, for instance, of the kind of life the
monks lead at the abbey of Cocagne:


"There is a wel fair abbei,
Of white monkes and of grei.
Ther beth bowris and halles:
Al of pasteiis beth the wallis,
Of fleis, of fisse, and rich met,
The likfullist that man may et.
Fluren cakes beth the schingles alle.
Of cherche, cloister, boure, and halle.
The pinnes beth fat podinges
Rich met to princes and kinges....
Though paradis be miri and bright
Cokaign is of fairir sight,...
Another abbei is ther bi,
Forsoth a gret fair nunnerie....
When the someris dai is hote
The young nunnes takith a bote...
And doth ham forth in that river
Both with ores and with stere....
And each monk him takith on,
And snellich berrith forth har prei
To the mochil grei abbei,
And techith the nunnes an oreisun,
With iamblene up and down."


This is the triumph of gluttony and feeding. Moreover many things could
be mentioned in the Middle Ages which are now unmentionable. But it was
the poems of chivalry, which represented to him the bright side of his
own mode of life, that the baron preferred to have translated. He
desired that his _trouvère_ should set before his eyes the magnificence
which he displayed, and the luxury and enjoyments which he has
introduced from France. Life at that time, without and even during war,
was a great pageant, a brilliant and tumultuous kind of fête. When
Henry II travelled, he took with him a great number of horsemen,
foot-soldiers, baggage-wagons, tents, pack-horses, comedians, courtesans
and their overseers, cooks, confectioners, posture-makers, dancers,
barbers, go-betweens, hangers-on.[141] In the morning when they start,
the assemblage begins to shout, sing, hustle each other, make racket and
rout, "as if hell were let loose." William Longchamps, even in time of
peace, would not travel without a thousand horses by way of escort. When
Archbishop à Becket came to France, he entered the town with two
hundred knights, a number of barons and nobles, and an army of servants,
all richly armed and equipped, he himself being provided with
four-and-twenty suits; two hundred and fifty children walked in front,
singing national songs; then dogs, then carriages, then a dozen
pack-horses, each ridden by an ape and a man; then equerries with
shields and war-horses; then more equerries, falconers, a suit of
domestics, knights, priests; lastly, the archbishop himself, with his
private friends. Imagine these processions, and also these
entertainments; for the Normans, after the Conquest, "borrowed from the
Saxons the habit of excess in eating and drinking."[142] At the marriage
of Richard Plantagenet, Earl of Cornwall, they provided thirty thousand
dishes.[143] They also continued to be gallant, and punctiliously
performed the great precept of the love courts; for in the Middle Ages
the sense of love was no more idle than the others. Moreover,
tournaments were plentiful; a sort of opera prepared for their own
entertainment. So ran their life, full of adventure and adornment, in
the open air and in the sunlight, with show of cavalcades and arms; they
act a pageant, and act it with enjoyment. Thus the King of Scots, having
come to London with a hundred knights, at the coronation of Edward I,
they all dismounted, and made over their horses and superb caparisons to
the people; as did also five English lords, imitating their example. In
the midst of war they took their pleasure. Edward III, in one of his
expeditions against the King of France, took with him thirty falconers,
and made his campaign alternately hunting and fighting.[144] Another
time, says Froissart, the knights who joined the army carried a plaster
over one eye, having vowed not to remove it until they had performed an
exploit worthy of their mistresses. Out of the very exuberancy of spirit
they practised the art of poetry; out of the buoyancy of their
imagination they made a sport of life. Edward III built at Windsor a
hall and a round table; and at one of his tourneys in London, sixty
ladies, seated on palfreys, led, as in a fairy tale, each her knight by
a golden chain. Was not this the triumph of the gallant and frivolous
French fashions? Edward's wife Philippa sat as a model to the artists
for their Madonnas. She appeared on the field of battle; listened to
Froissart, who provided her with moral-plays, love-stories, and "things
fair to listen to." At once goddess, heroine, and scholar, and all this
so agreeably, was she not a true queen of refined chivalry? Now, as also
in France under Louis of Orleans and the Dukes of Burgundy, this most
elegant and romanesque civilization came into full bloom, void of common
sense, given up to passion, bent on pleasure, immoral and brilliant,
but, like its neighbors of Italy and Provence, for lack of serious
intention, it could not last.

Of all these marvels the narrators make display in their stories. Here
is a picture of the vessel which took the mother of King Richard into
England:


"Swlk on ne seygh they never non;
All it was whyt of huel-bon,
And every nayl with gold begrave:
Off pure gold was the stave.
Her mast was of yvory;
Off samyte the sayl wytterly.
Her ropes wer off tuely sylk,
Al so whyt as ony mylk.
That noble schyp was al withoute,
With clothys of golde sprede aboute;
And her loof and her wyndas,
Off asure forsothe it was."[145]


On such subjects they never run dry. When the King of Hungary wishes to
console his afflicted daughter, he proposes to take her to the chase in
the following style:


"To-morrow ye shall in hunting fare:
And ride, my daughter, in a chair;
It shall be covered with velvet red,
And cloths of fine gold all about your head,
With damask white and azure blue,
Well diapered with lilies new.
Your pommels shall be ended with gold,
Your chains enamelled many a fold,
Your mantle of rich degree,
Purple pall and ermine free.
Jennets of Spain that ben so light,
Trapped to the ground with velvet bright.
Ye shall have harp, sautry, and song,
And other mirths you among.
Ye shall have Rumney and Malespine,
Both hippocras and Vernage wine;
Montrese and wine of Greek,
Both Algrade and despice eke,
Antioch and Bastarde,
Pyment also and garnarde;
Wine of Greek and Muscadel,
Both clare, pyment, and Rochelle,
The reed your stomach to defy,
And pots of osey set you by.
You shall have venison ybake,
The best wild fowl that may be take;
A leish of harehound with you to streek,
And hart, and hind, and other like.
Ye shall be set at such a tryst,
That hart and hynd shall come to you fist,
Your disease to drive you fro,
To hear the bugles there yblow.
Homeward thus shall ye ride,
On hawking by the river's side,
With gosshawk and with gentle falcon,
With bugle-horn and merlion.
When you come home your menie among,
Ye shall have revel, dance, and song;
Little children, great and small,
Shall sing as does the nightingale.
Then shall ye go to your evensong,
With tenors and trebles among.
Threescore of copes of damask bright,
Full of pearls they shall be pight.
Your censors shall be of gold,
Indent with azure many a fold;
Your quire nor organ song shall want,
With contre-note and descant.
The other half on organs playing,
With young children full fain singing.
Then shall ye go to your supper,
And sit in tents in green arber,
With cloth of arras pight to the ground,
With sapphires set of diamond.
A hundred knights, truly told,
Shall play with bowls in alleys cold,
Your disease to drive away;
To see the fishes in pools play,
To a drawbridge then shall ye,
Th' one half of stone, th' other of tree;
A barge shall meet you full right,
With twenty-four oars full bright,
With trumpets and with clarion,
The fresh water to row up and down....
Forty torches burning bright
At your bridge to bring you light.
Into your chamber they shall you bring,
With much mirth and more liking.
Your blankets shall be of fustian,
Your sheets shall be of cloth of Rennes.
Your head sheet shall be of pery pight,
With diamonds set and rubies bright.
When you are laid in bed so soft,
A cage of gold shall hang aloft,
With long paper fair burning,
And cloves that be sweet smelling.
Frankincense and olibanum,
That when ye sleep the taste may come;
And if ye no rest can take,
All night minstrels for you shall wake."[146]


Amid such fancies and splendors the poets delight and lose themselves,
and the woof, like the embroideries of their canvas, bears the mark of
this love of decoration. They weave it out of adventures, of
extraordinary and surprising events. Now it is the life of King Horn,
who, thrown into a boat when a lad, is wrecked upon the coast of
England, and, becoming a knight, reconquers the kingdom of his father.
Now it is the history of Sir Guy, who rescues enchanted knights, cuts
down the giant Colbrand, challenges and kills the Sultan in his tent. It
is not for me to recount these poems, which are not English, but only
translations; still, here as in France, there are many of them; they
fill the imagination of the young society, and they grow in
exaggeration, until, falling to the lowest depth of insipidity and
improbability, they are buried forever by Cervantes. What would people
say of a society which had no literature but the opera with its
unrealities? Yet it was a literature of this kind which formed the
intellectual food of the Middle Ages. People then did not ask for truth,
but entertainment, and that vehement and hollow, full of glare and
startling events. They asked for impossible voyages, extravagant
challenges, a racket of contests, a confusion of magnificence and
entanglement of chances. For introspective history they had no liking,
cared nothing for the adventures of the heart, devoted their attention
to the outside. They remained children to the last, with eyes glued to a
series of exaggerated and colored images, and, for lack of thinking, did
not perceive that they had learnt nothing.

What was there beneath this fanciful dream? Brutal and evil human
passions, unchained at first by religious fury, then delivered up to
their own devices, and, beneath a show of external courtesy, as vile as
ever. Look at the popular king, Richard Cœur de Lion, and reckon up his
butcheries and murders: "King Richard," says a poem, "is the best king
ever mentioned in song."[147] I have no objection; but if he has the
heart of a lion, he has also that brute's appetite. One day, under the
walls of Acre, being convalescent, he had a great desire for some pork.
There was no pork. They killed a young Saracen, fresh and tender, cooked
and salted him, and the king ate him and found him very good; whereupon
he desired to see the head of the pig. The cook brought it in trembling.
The king falls a-laughing, and says the army has nothing to fear from
famine, having provisions ready at hand. He takes the town, and
presently Saladin's ambassadors come to sue for pardon for the
prisoners. Richard has thirty of the most noble beheaded, and bids his
cook boil the heads, and serve one to each ambassador, with a ticket
bearing the name and family of the dead man. Meanwhile, in their
presence, he eats his own with a relish, bids them tell Saladin how the
Christians make war, and ask him if it is true that they fear him. Then
he orders the sixty thousand prisoners to be led into the plain:


"They were led into the place full even.
There they heard angels of heaven;
They said: 'Seigneures, tuez, tuez!
Spares hem nought, and beheadeth these!'
King Richard heard the angels' voice,
And thanked God and the holy cross."


Thereupon they behead them all. When he took a town, it was his wont to
murder everyone, even children and women. Such was the devotion of the
Middle Ages, not only in romances, as here, but in history. At the
taking of Jerusalem the whole population, seventy thousand persons, were
massacred.

Thus even in chivalrous stories the fierce and unbridled instincts of
the bloodthirsty brute break out. The authentic narratives show it.
Henry II, irritated at a page, attempted to tear out his eyes.[148] John
Lackland let twenty-three hostages die in prison of hunger. Edward II
caused at one time twenty-eight nobles to be hanged and disemboweled,
and was himself put to death by the insertion of a red-hot iron into his
bowels. Look in Froissart for the debaucheries and murders in France as
well as in England, of the Hundred Years' War, and then for the
slaughters of the Wars of the Roses. In both countries feudal
independence ended in civil war, and the Middle Age founders under its
vices. Chivalrous courtesy, which cloaked the native ferocity,
disappears like some hangings suddenly consumed by the breaking out of a
fire; at that time in England they killed nobles in preference, and
prisoners, too, even children, with insults, in cold blood. What, then,
did man learn in this civilization and by this literature? How was he
humanized? What precepts of justice, habits of reflection, store of true
judgments, did this culture interpose between his desires and his
actions, in order to moderate his passion? He dreamed, he imagined a
sort of elegant ceremonial in order the better to address lords and
ladies; he discovered the gallant code of little Jehan de Saintré. But
where is the true education? Wherein has Froissart profited by all his
vast experience? He was a fine specimen of a babbling child; what they
called his poesy, the _poèsie neuve_, is only a refined gabble, a
senile puerility. Some rhetoricians, like Christine de Pisan, try to
round their periods after an ancient model; but all their literature
amounts to nothing. No one can think. Sir John Maundeville, who
travelled all over the world a hundred and fifty years after
Villehardouin, is as contracted in his ideas as Villehardouin himself.
Extraordinary legends and fables, every sort of credulity and ignorance,
abound in his book. When he wishes to explain why Palestine has passed
into the hands of various possessors instead of continuing under one
government, he says that it is because God would not that it should
continue longer in the hands of traitors and sinners, whether Christians
or others. He has seen at Jerusalem, on the steps of the temple, the
footmarks of the ass which our Lord rode on Palm Sunday. He describes
the Ethiopians as a people who have only one foot, but so large that
they can make use of it as a parasol. He instances one island "where be
people as big as gyants, of 28 feet long, and have no clothing but
beasts' skins"; then another island "where there are many evil and foul
women, but have precious stones in their eyes, and have such force that
if they behold any man with wrath, they slay him with beholding, as the
basilisk doth." The good man relates; that is all: doubt and
common-sense scarcely exist in the world he lives in. He has neither
judgment nor reflection; he piles facts one on top of another, with no
further connection; his book is simply a mirror which reproduces
recollections of his eyes and ears. "And all those who will say a Pater
and an Ave Maria in my behalf, I give them an interest and a share in
all the holy pilgrimages I ever made in my life." That is his farewell,
and accords with all the rest. Neither public morality nor public
knowledge has gained anything from these three centuries of culture.
This French culture, copied in vain throughout Europe, has but
superficially adorned mankind, and the varnish with which it decked them
is already tarnished everywhere or scales off. It was worse in England,
where the thing was more superficial and the application worse than in
France, where foreign hands laid it on, and where it could only half
cover the Saxon crust, where that crust was worn away and rough. That is
the reason why, during three centuries, throughout the whole first
feudal age, the literature of the Normans in England, made up of
imitations, translations, and clumsy copies, ends in nothing.




SECTION VI.--Feudal Civilization


Meantime, what has become of the conquered people? Has the old stock, on
which the brilliant Continental flowers were grafted, engendered no
literary shoot of its own? Did it continue barren during all this time
under the Norman axe, which stripped it of all its buds? It grew very
feebly, but it grew nevertheless. The subjugated race is not a
dismembered nation, dislocated, uprooted, sluggish, like the populations
of the Continent, which, after the long Roman oppression, were given up
to the unrestrained invasion of barbarians; it increased, remained fixed
in its own soil, full of sap: its members were not displaced; it was
simply lopped in order to receive on its crown a cluster of foreign
branches. True, it had suffered, but at last the wound closed, the saps
mingled. Even the hard, stiff ligatures with which the Conqueror bound
it, henceforth contributed to its fixity and vigor. The land was mapped
out; every title verified, defined in writing;[149] every right or
tenure valued; every man registered as to his locality, and also his
condition, duties, descent, and resources, so that the whole nation was
enveloped in a network of which not a mesh would break. Its future
development had to be within these limits. Its constitution was settled,
and in this positive and stringent enclosure men were compelled to
unfold themselves and to act. Solidarity and strife; these were the two
effects of the great and orderly establishment which shaped and held
together, on one side the aristocracy of the conquerors, on the other
the conquered people; even as in Rome the systematic fusing of conquered
peoples into the plebs, and the constrained organization of the
patricians in contrast with the plebs, enrolled the private individuals
in two orders, whose opposition and union formed the state. Thus, here
as in Rome, the national character was moulded and completed by the
habit of corporate action, the respect for written law, political and
practical aptitude, the development of combative and patient energy. It
was the Domesday Book which, binding this young society in a rigid
discipline, made of the Saxon the Englishman of our own day.

Gradually and slowly, amidst the gloomy complainings of the chroniclers,
we find the new man fashioned by action, like a child who cries because
steel stays, though they improve his figure, give him pain. However
reduced and downtrodden the Saxons were, they did not all sink into the
populace. Some,[150] almost in every county, remained lords of their
estates, on the condition of doing homage for them to the king. Many
became vassals of Norman barons, and remained proprietors on this
condition. A greater number became socagers, that is, free proprietors,
burdened with a tax, but possessed of the right of alienating their
property; and the Saxon villeins found patrons in these, as the plebs
formerly did in the Italian nobles who were transplanted to Rome. The
patronage of the Saxons who preserved their integral position was
effective, for they were not isolated: marriages from the first united
the two races, as it had the patricians and plebeians of Rome;[151] a
Norman brother-in-law to a Saxon, defended himself in defending him. In
those turbulent times, and in an armed community, relatives and allies
were obliged to stand shoulder to shoulder in order to keep their
ground. After all, it was necessary for the new-comers to consider their
subjects, for these subjects had the heart and courage of men: the
Saxons, like the plebeians at Rome, remembered their native rank and
their original independence. We can recognize it in the complaints and
indignation of the chroniclers, in the growling and menaces of popular
revolt, in the long bitterness with which they continually recalled
their ancient liberty, in the favor with which they cherished the daring
and rebellion of outlaws. There were Saxon families at the end of the
twelfth century who had bound themselves by a perpetual vow to wear long
beards from father to son in memory of the national custom and of the
old country. Such men, even though fallen to the condition of socagers,
even sunk into villeins, had a stiffer neck than the wretched colonists
of the Continent, trodden down and moulded by four centuries of Roman
taxation. By their feelings as well as by their condition, they were the
broken remains, but also the living elements, of a free people. They did
not suffer the extremities of oppression. They constituted the body of
the nation, the laborious, courageous body which supplied its energy.
The great barons felt that they must rely upon them in their resistance
to the king. Very soon, in stipulating for themselves, they stipulated
for all freemen,[152] even for merchants and villeins. Thereafter "No
merchant shall be dispossessed of his merchandise, no villein of the
instruments of his labor; no freeman, merchant, or villein shall be
taxed unreasonably for a small crime; no freeman shall be arrested, or
imprisoned, or disseized of his land, or outlawed, or destroyed in any
manner, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the
land." Thus protected they raise themselves and act. In each county
there was a court, where all freeholders, small or great, came to
deliberate about the municipal affairs, administer justice, and appoint
tax-assessors. The red-bearded Saxon, with his clear complexion and
great white teeth, came and sat by the Norman's side; these were
franklins like the one whom Chaucer describes:


"A Frankelein was in this compagnie;
White was his herd, as is the dayesie.
Of his complexion he was sanguin,
Wel loved he by the morwe a sop in win.
To liven in delit was ever his wone,
For he was Epicures owen sone,
That held opinion that plein delit
Was veraily felicite parfite.
An housholder, and that a grete was he,
Seint Julian he was in his contree.
His brede, his ale, was alway after on;
A better envyned man was no wher non.
Withouten bake mete never his hous,
Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke,
Of all deintees that men coud of thinke;
After the sondry sesons of the yere,
So changed he his mete and his soupere.
Ful many a fat partrich had he in mewe,
And many a breme, and many a luce in stewe.
Wo was his coke but if his sauce were
Poinant and sharpe, and redy all his gere.
His table, dormant in his halle alway
Stode redy covered alle the longe day.
At sessions ther was he lord and sire.
Ful often time he was knight of the shire.
An anelace and a gipciere all of silk,
Heng at his girdle, white as morwe milk.
A shereve hadde he ben, and a contour.
Was no wher swiche a worthy vavasour."[153]


With him occasionally in the assembly, oftenest among the audience, were
the yeomen, farmers, foresters, tradesmen, his fellow-countrymen,
muscular and resolute men, not slow in the defence of their property,
and in supporting him who would take their cause in hand, with voice,
fist and weapons. Is it likely that the discontent of such men to whom
the following description applies could be overlooked?


"The Miller was a stout carl for the nones,
Ful bigge he was of braun and eke of bones;
That proved wel, for over all ther he came,
At wrastling he wold bere away the ram.
He was short shuldered brode, a thikke gnarre,
Ther n'as no dore, that he n'olde heve of barre,
Or breke it at a renning with his hede.
His berd as any sowe or fox was rede,
And therto brode, as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A wert, and thereon stode a tufte of heres,
Rede as the bristles of a sowes eres:
His nose-thirles blacke were and wide.
A swerd and bokeler bare he by his side.
His mouth as wide was as a forneis,
He was a jangler and a goliardeis,
And that was most of sinne, and harlotries.
Wel coude he stelen corne and tollen thries.
And yet he had a thomb of gold parde.
A white cote and a blew hode wered he.
A baggepipe wel coude he blowe and soune,
And therwithall he brought us out of toune."[154]


Those are the athletic forms, the square build, the jolly John Bulls of
the period, such as we yet find them, nourished by meat and porter,
sustained by bodily exercise and boxing. These are the men we must keep
before us, if we will understand how political liberty has been
established in this country. Gradually they find the simple knights,
their colleagues in the county court, too poor to be present with the
great barons at the royal assemblies, coalescing with them. They become
united by community of interests, by similarity of manners, by nearness
of condition; they take them for their representatives, they elect
them.[155] They have now entered upon public life, and the advent of a
new reinforcement gives them a perpetual standing in their changed
condition. The towns laid waste by the Conquest are gradually repeopled.
They obtain or exact charters; the townsmen buy themselves out of the
arbitrary taxes that were imposed on them; they get possession of the
land on which their houses are built; they unite themselves under mayors
and aldermen. Each town now, within the meshes of the great feudal net,
is a power. The Earl of Leicester, rebelling against the king, summons
two burgesses from each town to Parliament,[156] to authorize and
support him. From that time the conquered race, both in country and
town, rose to political life. If they were taxed, it was with their
consent; they paid nothing which they did not agree to. Early in the
fourteenth century their united deputies composed the House of Commons;
and already, at the close of the preceding century, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, speaking in the name of the king, said to the pope, "It is
the custom of the kingdom of England, that in all affairs relating to
the state of this kingdom, the advice of all who are interested in them
should be taken."




SECTION VII.--Persistence of Saxon Ideas


If they have acquired liberties, it is because they have obtained them
by force; circumstances have assisted, but character has done more. The
protection of the great barons and the alliance of the plain knights
have strengthened them; but it was by their native roughness and energy
that they maintained their independence. Look at the contrast they offer
at this moment to their neighbors. What occupies the mind of the French
people? The fabliaux, the naughty tricks of Reynard, the art of
deceiving Master Isengrin, of stealing his wife, of cheating him out of
his dinner, of getting him beaten by a third party without danger to
one's self; in short, the triumph of poverty and cleverness over power
united to folly. The popular hero is already the artful plebeian,
chaffing, light-hearted, who, later on, will ripen into Panurge and
Figaro, not apt to withstand you to your face, too sharp to care for
great victories and habits of strife, inclined by the nimbleness of his
wit to dodge round an obstacle; if he but touch a man with the tip of
his finger, that man tumbles into the trap. But here we have other
customs: it is Robin Hood, a valiant outlaw, living free and bold in the
green forest, waging frank and open war against sheriff and law.[157] If
ever a man was popular in his country, it was he. "It is he," says an
old historian, "whom the common people love so dearly to celebrate in
games and comedies, and whose history, sung by fiddlers, interests them
more than any other." In the sixteenth century he still had his
commemoration day, observed by all the people in the small towns and in
the country. Bishop Latimer, making his pastoral tour, announced one day
that he would preach in a certain place. On the morrow, proceeding to
the church, he found the doors closed, and waited more than an hour
before they brought him the key. At last a man came and said to him,
"Syr, thys ys a busye day with us; we cannot heare you: it is Robyn
Hoodes Daye. The parishe are gone abrode to gather for Robyn Hoode.... I
was fayne there to geve place to Robyn Hoode."[158] The bishop was
obliged to divest himself of his ecclesiastical garments and proceed on
his journey, leaving his place to archers dressed in green, who played
on a rustic stage the parts of Robin Hood, Little John, and their band.
In fact, he was the national hero. Saxon in the first place and waging
war against the men of law, against bishops and archbishops, whose sway
was so heavy; generous, moreover, giving to a poor ruined knight
clothes, horse, and money to buy back the land he had pledged to a
rapacious abbot; compassionate too, and kind to the poor, enjoining his
men not to injure yeomen and laborers; but above all, rash, bold, proud,
who would go and draw his bow before the sheriff's eyes and to his face;
ready with blows, whether to give or take. He slew fourteen out of
fifteen foresters who came to arrest him; he slays the sheriff, the
judge, the town gatekeeper; he is ready to slay as many more as like to
come; and all this joyously, jovially, like an honest fellow who eats
well, has a hard skin, lives in the open air, and revels in animal life.


"In somer when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is fulle mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song."


That is how many ballads begin; and the fine weather, which makes the
stags and oxen butt with their horns, inspires them with the thought of
exchanging blows with sword or stick. Robin dreamed that two yeomen were
thrashing him, and he wants to go and find them, angrily repelling
Little John, who offers to go first:


"Ah John, by me thou settest noe store,
And that I farley finde:
How offt send I my men before,
And tarry myselfe behinde?

"It is no cunnin a knave to ken,
An a man but heare him speake;
An it were not for bursting of my bowe,
John, I thy head wold breake."[159]...


He goes alone, and meets the robust yeoman, Guy of Gisborne,


"He that had neyther beene kythe nor kin,
Might have seen a full fayre fight,
To see how together these yeomen went
With blades both browne and bright,

"To see how these yeomen together they fought
Two howres of a summer's day;
Yett neither Robin Hood nor sir Guy
Them fettled to flye away."[160]


You see Guy the yeoman is as brave as Robin Hood; he came to seek him in
the wood, and drew the bow almost as well as he. This old popular poetry
is not the praise of a single bandit, but of an entire class, the
yeomanry. "God haffe mersy on Robin Hodys solle, and saffe all god
yemanry." That is how many ballads end. The brave yeoman, inured to
blows, a good archer, clever at sword and stick, is the favorite. There
were also, redoubtable, armed townsfolk, accustomed to make use of their
arms. Here they are at work:


"'O that were a shame,' said jolly Robin,
'We being three, and thou but one,'
The pinder[161] leapt back then thirty good foot,
'Twas thirty good foot and one.

"He leaned his back fast unto a thorn,
And his foot against a stone,
And there he fought a long summer's day,
A summer's day so long.

"Till that their swords on their broad bucklers
Were broke fast into their hands."[162]


Often even Robin does not get the advantage:


"'I pass not for length,' bold Arthur reply'd,
'My staff is of oke so free;
Eight foot and a half, it will knock down a calf,
And I hope it will knock down thee.'

"Then Robin could no longer forbear,
He gave him such a knock,
Quickly and soon the blood came down
Before it was ten a clock.

"Then Arthur he soon recovered himself,
And gave him such a knock on the crown,
That from every side of bold Robin Hood's head
The blood came trickling down.

"Then Robin raged like a wild boar,
As soon as he saw his own blood:
Then Bland was in hast, he laid on so fast,
As though he had been cleaving of wood.

"And about and about and about they went,
Like two wild bores in a chase,
Striving to aim each other to maim,
Leg, arm, or any other place.

"And knock for knock they lustily dealt,
Which held for two hours and more,
Till all the wood rang at every bang,
They ply'd their work so sore.

"Hold thy hand, hold thy hand,' said Robin Hood,
'And let thy quarrel fall;
For here we may thrash our bones all to mesh,
And get no coyn at all.

"And in the forrest of merry Sherwood,
Hereafter thou shalt be free.'
'God a mercy for nought, my freedom I bought,
I may thank my staff, and not thee.'"[163]...


"Who are you, then?" says Robin:


"'I am a tanner,' bold Arthur reply'd,
'In Nottingham long I have wrought;
And if thou'lt come there, I vow and swear,
I will tan thy hide for nought.'

"'God a mercy, good fellow,' said jolly Robin,
'Since thou art so kind and free;
And if thou wilt tan my hide for nought,
I will do as much for thee.'"[164]


With these generous offers, they embrace; a free exchange of honest
blows always prepares the way for friendship. It was so Robin Hood tried
Little John, whom he loved all his life after. Little John was seven
feet high, and being on a bridge, would not give way. Honest Robin would
not use his bow against him, but went and cut a stick seven feet long;
and they agreed amicably to fight on the bridge until one should fall
into the water. They fall to so merrily that "their bones ring." In the
end Robin falls, and he feels only the more respect for Little John.
Another time, having a sword with him, he was thrashed by a tinker who
had only a stick. Full of admiration, he gives him a hundred pounds.
Again he was thrashed by a potter, who refused him toll; then by a
shepherd. They fight to amuse themselves. Even nowadays boxers give each
other a friendly grip before setting to; they knock one another about in
this country honorably, without malice, fury, or shame. Broken teeth,
black eyes, smashed ribs, do not call for murderous vengeance: it would
seem that the bones are more solid and the nerves less sensitive in
England than elsewhere. Blows once exchanged, they take each other by
the hand, and dance together on the green grass:


"Then Robin took them both by the hands,
And danc'd round about the oke tree.
'For three merry men, and three merry men,
And three merry men we be.'"


Moreover, these people, in each parish, practised the bow every Sunday,
and were the best archers in the world; from the close of the fourteenth
century the general emancipation of the villeins multiplied their number
greatly, and you can now understand how, amidst all the operations and
changes of the great central powers, the liberty of the subject
survived. After all, the only permanent and unalterable guarantee, in
every country and under every constitution, is this unspoken declaration
in the heart of the mass of the people, which is well understood on all
sides: "If any man touches my property, enters my house, obstructs or
molests me, let him beware. I have patience, but I have also strong
arms, good comrades, a good blade, and, on occasion, a firm resolve,
happen what may, to plunge my blade up to its hilt in his throat."




SECTION VIII.--The English Constitution


Thus thought Sir John Fortescue, Chancellor of England under Henry VI,
exiled in France during the Wars of the Roses, one of the oldest
prose-writers, and the first who weighed and explained the constitution
of his country.[165] He says:


"It is cowardise and lack of hartes and corage that kepeth the Frenchmen
from rysyng, and not povertye;[166] which corage no Frenche man hath
like to the English man. It hath ben often seen in Englond that iij or
iv thefes, for povertie, hath sett upon vij or viij true men, and robbyd
them al. But it hath not ben seen in Fraunce, that vij or viij thefes
have ben hardy to robbe iij or iv true men. Wherfor it is right seld
that Frenchmen be hangyd for robberye, for that they have no hertys to
do so terryble an acte. There be therfor mo men hangyd in Englond, in a
yere, for robberye and manslaughter, than ther be hangid in Fraunce for
such cause of crime in vij yers."[167]


This throws a startling and terrible light on the violent condition of
this armed community, where sudden attacks are an every-day matter, and
everyone, rich and poor, lives with his hand on his sword. There were
great bands of malefactors under Edward I, who infested the country, and
fought with those who came to seize them. The inhabitants of the towns
were obliged to gather together with those of the neighboring towns,
with hue and cry, to pursue and capture them. Under Edward III there
were barons who rode about with armed escorts and archers, seizing the
manors, carrying off ladies and girls of high degree, mutilating,
killing, extorting ransoms from people in their own houses, as if they
were in an enemy's land, and sometimes coming before the judges at the
sessions in such guise and in so great force that the judges were afraid
and dared not administer justice.[168] Read the letters of the Paston
family, under Henry VI and Edward IV, and you will see how private war
was at every door, how it was necessary for a man to provide himself
with men and arms, to be on the alert for defence of his property, to be
self-reliant, to depend on his own strength and courage. It is this
excess of vigor and readiness to fight which, after their victories in
France, set them against one another in England, in the butcheries of
the Wars of the Roses. The strangers who saw them were astonished at
their bodily strength and courage, at the great pieces of beef "which
feed their muscles, at their military habits, their fierce obstinacy, as
of savage beasts."[169] They are like their bulldogs, an untamable race,
who in their mad courage "cast themselves with shut eyes into the den of
a Russian bear, and get their head broken like a rotten apple." This
strange condition of a militant community, so full of danger, and
requiring so much effort, does not make them afraid. King Edward having
given orders to send disturbers of the peace to prison without legal
proceedings, and not to liberate them, on bail or otherwise, the Commons
declared the order "horribly vexatious"; resist it, refuse to be too
much protected. Less peace, but more independence. They maintain the
guarantees of the subject at the expense of public security, and prefer
turbulent liberty to arbitrary order. Better suffer marauders whom they
could fight, than magistrates under whom they would have to bend.

This proud and persistent notion gives rise to, and fashions Fortescue's
whole work:


"Ther be two kynds of kyngdomys, of the which that one ys a lordship
callid in Latyne Dominium regale, and that other is callid Dominium
politicum et regale."


The first is established in France, and the second in England.


"And they dyversen in that the first may rule his people by such lawys
as he makyth hymself, and therefor, he may set upon them talys, and
other impositions, such as he wyl hymself, without their assent. The
secund may not rule hys people by other laws than such as they assenten
unto; and therfor he may set upon them non impositions without their own
assent."[170]


In a state like this, the will of the people is the prime element of
life. Sir John Fortescue says further:


"A king of England cannot at his pleasure make any alterations in the
laws of the land, for the nature of his government is not only regal,
but political."

"In the body politic, the first thing which lives and moves is the
intention of the people, having in it the blood, that is, the prudential
care and provision for the public good, which it transmits and
communicates to the head, as to the principal part, and to all the rest
of the members of the said body politic, whereby it subsists and is
invigorated. The law under which the people is incorporated may be
compared to the nerves or sinews of the body natural.... And as the
bones and all the other members of the body preserve their functions and
discharge their several offices by the nerves, so do the members of the
community by the law. And as the head of the body natural cannot change
its nerves or sinews, cannot deny to the several parts their proper
energy, their due proportion and aliment of blood, neither can a king
who is the head of the body politic change the laws thereof, nor take
from the people what is theirs by right, against their consents.... For
he is appointed to protect his subjects in their lives, properties, and
laws, for this very end and purpose he has the delegation of power from
the people."


Here we have all the ideas of Locke in the fifteenth century, so
powerful is practice to suggest theory! so quickly does man discover, in
the enjoyment of liberty, the nature of liberty! Fortescue goes further;
he contrasts, step by step, the Roman law, that inheritance of all Latin
peoples, with the English law, that heritage of all Teutonic peoples:
one the work of absolute princes, and tending altogether to the
sacrifice of the individual; the other the work of the common will,
tending altogether to protect the person. He contrasts the maxims of the
imperial jurisconsults, who accord "force of law to all which is
determined by the prince," with the statutes of England, which "are not
enacted by the sole will of the prince,... but with the concurrent
consent of the whole kingdom, by their representatives in Parliament,...
more than three hundred select persons." He contrasts the arbitrary
nomination of imperial officers with the election of the sheriff, and
says:


"There is in every county a certain officer, called the king's sheriff,
who, amongst other duties of his office, executes within his county all
mandates and judgments of the king's courts of justice: he is an annual
officer; and it is not lawful for him, after the expiration of his year,
to continue to act in his said office, neither shall he be taken in
again to execute the said office within two years thence next ensuing.
The manner of his election is thus: Every year, on the morrow of
All-Souls, there meet in the King's Court of Exchequer all the king's
counsellors, as well lords spiritual and temporal, as all other the
king's justices, all the barons of the Exchequer, the Master of the
Rolls, and certain other officers, when all of them, by common consent,
nominate three of every county knights or esquires, persons of
distinction, and such as they esteem fittest qualified to bear the
office of sheriff of that county for the year ensuing. The king only
makes choice of one out of the three so nominated and returned, who, in
virtue of the king's letters patent, is constituted High Sheriff of that
county."


He contrasts the Roman procedure, which is satisfied with two witnesses
to condemn a man, with the jury, the three permitted challenges, the
admirable guarantees of justice with which the uprightness, number,
repute, and condition of the juries surround the sentence. About the
juries he says:


"Twelve good and true men being sworn, as in the manner above related,
legally qualified, that is, having, over and besides their movables,
possessions in land sufficient, as was said, wherewith to maintain their
rank and station; neither inspected by, nor at variance with either of
the parties; all of the neighborhood; there shall be read to them, in
English, by the Court, the record and nature of the plea."[171]


Thus protected, the English commons cannot be other than flourishing.
Consider, on the other hand, he says to the young prince whom he is
instructing, the condition of the commons in France. By their taxes, tax
on salt, on wine, billeting of soldiers, they are reduced to great
misery. You have seen them on your travels....


"The same Commons be so impoverishid and distroyyd, that they may unneth
lyve. Thay drink water, thay eate apples, with bred right brown made of
rye. They eate no fleshe, but if it be selden, a litill larde, or of the
entrails or heds of bests sclayne for the nobles and merchants of the
land. They weryn no wollyn, but if it be a pore cote under their
uttermost garment, made of grete convass, and cal it a frok. Their hosyn
be of like canvas, and passen not their knee, wherfor they be gartrid
and their thyghs bare. Their wifs and children gone bare fote. ... For
sum of them, that was wonte to pay to his lord for his tenement which he
hyrith by the year a scute payth now to the kyng, over that scute, fyve
skuts. Wher thrugh they be artyd by necessite so to watch, labour and
grub in the ground for their sustenance, that their nature is much
wasted, and the kynd of them brought to nowght. Thay gone crokyd and ar
feeble, not able to fight nor to defend the realm; nor they have wepon,
nor monye to buy them wepon withal.... This is the frute first of hyre
Jus regale.... But blessed be God, this land ys rulid under a better
lawe, and therfor the people thereof be not in such penurye, nor therby
hurt in their persons, but they be wealthie and have all things
necessarie to the sustenance of nature. Wherefore they be myghty and
able to resyste the adversaries of the realms that do or will do them
wrong. Loo, this is the fruit of Jus politicum et regale, under which we
lyve."[172] "Everye inhabiter of the realme of England useth and
enjoyeth at his pleasure all the fruites that his land or cattel
beareth, with al the profits and commodities which by his owne travayle,
or by the labour of others, hae gaineth; not hindered by the iniurie or
wrong deteinement of anye man, but that hee shall bee allowed a
reasonable recompence.[173]... Hereby it commeth to passe that the men
of that lande are riche, havying aboundaunce of golde and silver, and
other thinges necessarie for the maintenaunce of man's life. They drinke
no water, unless it be so, that some for devotion, and uppon a zeale of
penaunce, doe abstaine from other drinks. They eate plentifully of all
kindes of fleshe and fishe. They weare fine woolen cloth in all their
apparel; they have also aboundaunce of bed-coveringes in their houses,
and of all other woolen stuffe. They have greate store of all
hustlementes and implementes of householde, they are plentifully
furnished with al instruments of husbandry, and all other things that
are requisite to the accomplishment of a quiet and wealthy lyfe,
according to their estates and degrees. Neither are they sued in the
lawe, but onely before ordinary iudges, where by the lawes of the lande
they are iustly intreated. Neither are they arrested or impleaded for
their moveables or possessions, or arraigned of any offence, bee it
never so great and outragious, but after the lawes of the land, and
before the iudges aforesaid."[174]


All this arises from the constitution of the country and the
distribution of the land. Whilst in other countries we find only a
population of paupers, with here and there a few lords, England is
covered and filled with owners of lands and fields; so that "therein so
small a thorpe cannot bee founde, wherein dwelleth not a knight, an
esquire, or suche a housholder as is there commonly called a franklayne,
enryched with greate possessions. And also other freeholders, and many
yeomen able for their livelodes to make a jurye in fourme
afore-mentioned. For there bee in that lande divers yeomen, which are
able to dispend by the yeare above a hundred poundes."[175] Harrison
says:[176]


"This sort of people, have more estimation than labourers and the common
sort of artificers, and these commonlie live wealthilie, keepe good
houses, and travell to get riches. They are for the most part farmers to
gentlemen," and keep servants of their own. "These were they that in
times past made all France afraid. And albeit they be not called master,
as gentlemen are, or sir, as to knights apperteineth, but onelie John
and Thomas, etc., yet have they beene found to have done verie good
service; and the kings of England, in foughten battels, were wont to
remaine among them (who were their footmen) as the French kings did
among their horssemen: the prince thereby showing where his chiefe
strength did consist."


Such men, says Fortescue, might form a legal jury, and vote, resist, be
associated, do everything wherein a free government consists; for they
were numerous in every district; they were not down-trodden like the
timid peasants of France; they had their honor and that of their family
to maintain; "they be well provided with arms; they remember that they
have won battles in France."[177] Such is the class, still obscure, but
more rich and powerful every century, which, founded by the down-trodden
Saxon aristocracy, and sustained by the surviving Saxon character,
ended, under the lead of the inferior Norman nobility and under the
patronage of the superior Norman nobility, in establishing and settling
a free constitution, and a nation worthy of liberty.




SECTION IX.--Piers Plowman and Wyclif


When, as here, men are endowed with a serious character, have a resolute
spirit, and possess independent habits, they deal with their conscience
as with their daily business, and end by laying hands on church as well
as state. Already for a long time the exactions of the Roman See had
provoked the resistance of the people,[178] and the higher clergy became
unpopular. Men complained that the best livings were given by the pope
to non-resident strangers; that some Italian, unknown in England,
possessed fifty or sixty benefices in England; that English money poured
into Rome; and that the clergy, being judged only by clergy, gave
themselves up to their vices, and abused their state of immunity. In the
first years of Henry III's reign there were nearly a hundred murders
committed by priests then alive. At the beginning of the fourteenth
century the ecclesiastical revenue was twelve times greater than the
civil; about half the soil was in the hands of the clergy. At the end of
the century the commons declared that the taxes paid to the church were
five times greater than the taxes paid to the crown; and some years
afterwards,[179] considering that the wealth of the clergy only served
to keep them in idleness and luxury, they proposed to confiscate it for
the public benefit. Already the idea of the Reformation had forced
itself upon them. They remembered how in the ballads Robin Hood ordered
his folk to spare the yeomen, laborers, even knights, if they are good
fellows, but never to let abbots or bishops escape. The prelates were
grievously oppressing the people by means of their privileges,
ecclesiastical courts, and tithes; when suddenly, amid the pleasant
banter or the monotonous babble of the Norman versifiers, we hear the
indignant voice of a Saxon, a man of the people and a victim of
oppression, thundering against them.

It is the vision of Piers Plowman, written, it is supposed, by a secular
priest of Oxford.[180] Doubtless the traces of French taste are
perceptible. It could not be otherwise; the people from below can never
quite prevent themselves from imitating the people above, and the most
unshackled popular poets, Burns and Béranger, too often preserve an
academic style. So here a fashionable machinery, the allegory of the
Roman de la Rose, is pressed into service. We have Do-well,
Covetousness, Avarice, Simony, Conscience, and a whole world of talking
abstractions. But, in spite of these vain foreign phantoms, the body of
the poem is national, and true to life. The old language reappears in
part; the old metre altogether; no morer rhymes, but barbarous
alliterations; no more jesting, but a harsh gravity, a sustained
invective, a grand and sombre imagination, heavy Latin texts, hammered
down as by a Protestant hand. Piers Plowman went to sleep on the Malvern
hills, and there had a wonderful dream:


"Thanne gan I meten--a merveillous swevene,
That I was in a wildernesse--wiste I nevere where;
And as I biheeld into the eest,--an heigh to the sonne,
I seigh a tour on a toft,--trieliche y-maked,
A deep dale bynethe--a dongeon thereinne
With depe diches and derke--and dredfulle of sighte.
A fair feeld ful of folk--fond I ther bitwene,
Of alle manere of men,--the meene and the riche,
Werchynge and wandrynge--as the world asketh.
Some putten hem to the plough,--pleiden ful selde,
In settynge and sowynge--swonken ful harde,
And wonnen that wastours--with glotonye dystruyeth."[181]


A gloomy picture of the world, like the frightful dreams which occur so
often in Albert Durer and Luther. The first reformers were persuaded
that the earth was given over to evil; that the devil had on it his
empire and his officers; that Antichrist, seated on the throne of Rome,
displayed ecclesiastical pomps to seduce souls and cast them into the
fire of hell. So here Anti-christ, with raised banner, enters a convent;
bells are rung; monks in solemn procession go to meet him, and receive
with congratulations their lord and father.[182] With seven great
giants, the seven deadly sins, he besieges Conscience; and the assault
is led by Idleness, who brings with her an army of more than a thousand
prelates: for vices reign, more hateful from being in holy places, and
employed in the church of God in the devil's service.


"Ac now is Religion a rydere--a romere aboute,
A ledere of love-dayes--and a lond-buggere,
A prikere on a palfrey--fro manere to manere....
And but if his knave knele--that shal his coppe brynge,
He loureth on hym, and asketh hym--who taughte hym curteisie."[183]


But this sacrilegious show has its day, and God puts His hand on men in
order to warn them. By order of Conscience, Nature sends forth a host of
plagues and diseases from the planets:


"Kynde Conscience tho herde,--and cam out of the planetes,
And sente forth his forreyours--feveres and fluxes,
Coughes and cardiaclescrampes and tooth-aches,
Reumes and radegundes,--and roynous scabbes,
Biles and bocches,--and brennynge agues,
Frenesies and foule yveles,--forageres of kynde....
There was 'Harrow! and Help!--Here cometh Kynde!
With Deeth that is dredful--to undo us alle!'
The lord that lyved after lust--tho aloud cryde....
Deeth cam dryvynge after,--and al to duste passhed
Kynges and knyghtes,--kaysers and popes,...
Manye a lovely lady--and lemmans of knyghtes,
Swowned and swelted for sorwe of hise dyntes."[184]


Here is a crowd of miseries, like those which Milton has described in
his vision of human life; tragic pictures and emotions, such as the
reformers delight to dwell upon. There is a like speech delivered by
John Knox, before the fair ladies of Mary Stuart, which tears the veil
from the human corpse just as coarsely, in order to exhibit its shame.
The conception of the world, proper to the people of the north, all sad
and moral, shows itself already. They are never comfortable in their
country; they have to strive continually against cold or rain. They
cannot live there carelessly, lying under a lovely sky, in a sultry and
clear atmosphere, their eyes filled with the noble beauty and happy
serenity of the land. They must work to live; be attentive, exact, keep
their houses wind and water tight, trudge doggedly through the mud
behind their plough, light their lamps in their shops during the day.
Their climate imposes endless inconvenience, and exacts endless
endurance. Hence arise melancholy and the idea of duty. Man naturally
thinks of life as of a battle, oftener of black death which closes this
deadly show, and leads so many plumed and disorderly processions to the
silence and the eternity of the grave. All this visible world is vain;
there is nothing true but human virtue--the courageous energy with which
man attains to self-command, the generous energy with which he employs
himself in the service of others. On this view, then, his eyes are
fixed; they pierce through worldly gauds, neglect sensual joys, to
attain this. By such inner thoughts and feelings the ideal model is
displaced; a new source of action springs up--the idea of righteousness.
What sets them against ecclesiastical pomp and insolence is neither the
envy of the poor and low, nor the anger of the oppressed, nor a
revolutionary desire to experimentalize abstract truth, but conscience.
They tremble lest they should not work out their salvation if they
continue in a corrupt church; they fear the menaces of God, and dare not
embark on the great journey with unsafe guides. "What is righteousness?"
asked Luther, anxiously, "and how shall I obtain it?" With like anxiety
Piers Plowman goes to seek Dowell, and asks each one to show him where
he shall find him. "With us," say the friars. "Contra quath ich,
_Septies in die cadit justus_, and ho so syngeth certys doth nat wel;"
so he betakes himself to "study and writing," like Luther; the clerks at
table speak much of God and of the Trinity, "and taken Bernarde to
witnesse, and putteth forth presompcions... ac the carful mai crie and
quaken atte gate, bothe a fyngred and a furst, and for defaute spille ys
non so hende to have hym yn. Clerkus and knyghtes carpen of God ofte,
and haveth hym muche in hure mouthe, ac mene men in herte;" and heart,
inner faith, living virtue, are what constitute true religion. This is
what these dull Saxons had begun to discover. The Teutonic conscience,
and English good-sense, too, had been aroused, as well as individual
energy, the resolution to judge and decide alone, by and for one's self.
"Christ is our hede that sitteth on hie, Heddis ne ought we have no mo,"
says a poem, attributed to Chaucer, and which, with others, claims
independence for Christian consciences.[185]


"We ben his membres bothe also,
Father he taught us call him all,
Maisters to call forbad he tho;
Al maisters ben wickid and fals."


No other mediator between man and God. In vain the doctors state that
they have authority for their words; there is a word of greater
authority, to wit, God's. We hear it in the fourteenth century, this
grand "word of God." It quitted the learned schools, the dead languages,
the dusty shelves on which the clergy suffered it to sleep, covered with
a confusion of commentators and Fathers.[186] Wycliff appeared and
translated it like Luther, and in a spirit similar to Luther's. "Cristen
men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shulden studie fast in the Newe
Testament, for it is of ful autorite, and opyn to undirstonding of
simple men, as to the poyntis that be moost nedeful to salvacioun."[187]
Religion must be secular, in order to escape from the hands of the
clergy, who monopolize it; each must hear and read for himself the word
of God; he will then be sure that it has not been corrupted; he will
feel it better, and, more, he will understand it better, for


"ech place of holy writ, both opyn and derk, techit mekenes and charite;
and therfore he that kepith mekenes and charite hath the trewe
undirstondyng and perfectioun of al holi writ.... Therfore no simple man
of wit be aferd unmesurabli to studie in the text of holy writ... and no
clerk be proude of the verrey undirstondyng of holy writ, for whi
undirstonding of hooly writ with outen charite that kepith Goddis
heestis, makith a man depper dampned... and pride and covetise of
clerkis is cause of her blindees and eresie, and priveth them fro verrey
undirstondyng of holy writ."[188]


These are the memorable words that began to circulate in the markets and
in the schools. They read the translated Bible, and commented on it;
they judged the existing Church after it. What judgments these serious
and untainted minds passed upon it, with what readiness they pushed on
to the true religion of their race, we may see from their petition to
Parliament.[189] One hundred and thirty years before Luther, they said
that the pope was not established by Christ, that pilgrimages and
image-worship were akin to idolatry, that external rites are of no
importance, that priests ought not to possess temporal wealth, that the
doctrine of transubstantiation made a people idolatrous, that priests
have not the power of absolving from sin. In proof of all this they
brought forward texts of Scripture. Fancy these brave spirits, simple
and strong souls, who began to read at night in their shops, by
candle-light; for they were shopkeepers--tailors, skinners, and
bakers--who, with some men of letters, began to read, and then to
believe, and finally got themselves burned.[190] What a sight for the
fifteenth century, and what a promise! It seems as though, with liberty
of action, liberty of mind begins to appear; that these common folk will
think and speak; that under the conventional literature, imitated from
France, a new literature is dawning; and that England, genuine England,
half-mute since the Conquest, will at last find a voice.

She had not yet found it. King and peers ally themselves to the Church,
pass terrible statutes, destroy books, burn heretics alive, often with
refinement of torture--one in a barrel, another hung by an iron chain
around his waist. The temporal wealth of the clergy had been attacked,
and therewith the whole English constitution; and the great
establishment above crushed out with its whole weight the revolutionists
from below. Darkly, in silence, while the nobles were destroying each
other in the Wars of the Roses, the commons went on working and living,
separating themselves from the established Church, maintaining their
liberties, amassing wealth, but not going further.[191] Like a vast rock
which underlies the soil, yet crops up here and there at distant
intervals, they barely show themselves. No great poetical or religious
work displays them to the light. They sang; but their ballads, first
ignored, then transformed, reach us only in a late edition. They prayed;
but beyond one or two indifferent poems, their incomplete and repressed
doctrine bore no fruit. We may well see from the verse, tone, and drift
of their ballads that they are capable of the finest poetic
originality,[192] but their poetry is in the hands of yeomen and
harpers. We perceive, by the precocity and energy of their religious
protests, that they are capable of the most severe and impassioned
creeds; but their faith remains hidden in the shop-parlors of a few
obscure sectaries. Neither their faith nor their poetry has been able to
attain its end or issue. The Renaissance and the Reformation, those two
national outbreaks, are still far off; and the literature of the period
retains to the end, like the highest ranks of English society, almost
the perfect stamp of its French origin and its foreign models.




[Footnote 97: See, amidst other delineations of their manners,
the first accounts of the first Crusade. Godfrey clove a Saracen
down to his waist. In Palestine, a widow was compelled, up to the
age of sixty, to marry again, because no fief could remain without
a defender. A Spanish leader said to his exhausted soldiers after
a battle, "You are too weary and too much wounded, but come and
fight with me against this other band; the fresh wounds which we
shall receive will make us forget those which we have." At this
time, says the General Chronicle of Spain, kings, counts, and
nobles, and all the knights, that they might be ever ready, kept
their horses in the chamber where they slept with their wives.]

[Footnote 98: For difference in numbers of the fleet and men
see Freeman, "History of the Norman Conquest," 3 vols., 1867,
III. 381, 387.--Tr.]

[Footnote 99: For all the details see "Anglo-Norman Chronicles,"
III. 4, as quoted by Aug. Thierry. I have myself seen the locality
and the country.]

[Footnote 100: Of three columns of attack at Hastings, two were
composed of auxiliaries. Moreover, the chroniclers are not at
fault upon this critical point; they agree in stating that England
was conquered by Frenchmen.]

[Footnote 101: It was a Rouen fisherman, a soldier of Rollo, who
killed the Duke of France at the mouth of the Eure. Hastings, the
famous' sea-king, was a laborer's son from the neighborhood of Troyes.]

[Footnote 102: "In the tenth century," says Stendhal, "a man wished
for two things: First, not to be slain; second, to have a good
leather coat." See Fontenelle's "Chronicle."]

[Footnote 103: William of Malmesbury.]

[Footnote 104: Churches in London, Sarum, Norwich, Durham, Chichester
Peterborough, Rochester, Hereford, Gloucester, Oxford, etc.--William
of Malmesbury.]

[Footnote 105: Ordericus Vitalis.]

[Footnote 106: Robert Wace, "Roman du Rou."]

[Footnote 107: Ibid.
Et li Normanz et li Franfceiz
Tote nuit firent oreisons,
Et furent en aflicions.
De lor péchiés confèz se firent
As proveires les regehirent,
Et qui n'en out proveires prèz,
A son veizin se fist confèz,
Pour ço ke samedi esteit
Ke la bataille estre debveit.
Unt Normanz a pramis e voé,
Si com li cler l'orent loé,
Ke à ce jor mez s'il veskeient,
Char ni saunc ne mangereient
Giffrei, éveske de Coustances.
A plusors joint lor pénitances.
Cli reçut li confessions
Et dona l' béneiçons.]

[Footnote 108: Robert Wace, "Roman du Rou"
Taillefer ki moult bien cantout
Sur un roussin qui tot alout
Devant li dus alout cantant
De Kalermaine e de Rolant,
E d'Oliver et des vassals
Ki moururent à Roncevals.
Quant ils orent chevalchié tant
K'as Engleis vindrent aprismant:
"Sires! dist Taillefer, merci!
Je vos ai languement servi.
Tut mon servise me debvez,
Hui, si vos plaist, me le rendez
Por tout guerredun vos requier,
Et si vos voil forment preier,
Otreiez-mei, ke jo n'i faille,
Li primier colp de la bataille."
Et li dus répont: "Je l'otrei."
Et Taillefer point à desrei;
Devant toz li altres se mist,
Un Englez féri, si l'ocist.
De sos le pis, parmie la pance,
Li fist passer ultre la lance,
A terre estendu l'abati.
Poiz trait l'espée, altre féri.
Poiz a crié: "Venez, venez!
Ke fetes-vos? Férez, férez!"
Done l'unt Englez avironé,
Al secund colp k'il ou doné.]

[Footnote 109: The idea of types is applicable throughout all
physical and moral nature.]

[Footnote 110: Danois is a contraction of le d'Ardennois, from
the Ardennes.--Tr.]

[Footnote 111: Genin, "Chanson de Roland":
Co sent Rollans que la mort le trespent,
Devers la teste sur le quer li descent;
Desuz un pin i est alet curant,
Sur l'herbe verte si est culchet adenz;
Desuz lui met l'espée et l'olifan;
Turnat sa teste vers la paîene gent,
Pour ço l'at fait que il voelt veirement
Que Carles diet e trestute sa gent;
Li gentilz quens, qu'il fut mort cunquérant.
Cleimet sa culpe, e menut e suvent,
Pur ses pecchez en puroffrid lo guant.
Li quens Rollans se iut desuz un pin,
Envers Espaigne en ad turnet sun vis,
De plusurs choses a remembrer le prist.
De tantes terres cume li bers cunquist,
De dulce France des humes de sun lign,
De Carlemagne sun seignor ki l'nurrit.
Ne poet muer n'en plurt et ne susprit.
Mais lui meisme ne volt mettre en ubli.
Cleimet sa culpe, si priet Dieu mercit:
"Veire paterne, ki unques ne mentis,
Seint Lazaron de mort resurrexis,
Et Daniel des lions guaresis,
Guaris de mei l'arome de tuz perilz,
Pur les pecchez que en ma vie fis."
Sun destre guant à Deu en puroffrit.
Seint Gabriel de sa main l'ad pris.
Desur sun bras teneit le chef enclin,
Juntes ses mains est alet à sa fin.
Deus i tramist sun angle cherubin,
Et seint Michel qu'on cleimet del péril
Ensemble ad els seint Gabriel i vint,
L'anme del cunte portent en pareis.]

[Footnote 112: Mon trés-chier ami débonnaire,
Vous m'avez une chose ditte
Oui n'est pas à faire petite
Mais que l'on doit moult rersongnier.
Et nonpourquant, sanz eslongnier,
Puisque garison autrement
Ne povez avoir vraiement,
Pour vostre amour les occiray,
Et le sang vous apporteray.]

[Footnote 113: Vraiz Diex, moult est excellente,
Et de grant charité plaine,
Vostre bonté souveraine.
Car vostre grâce présente,
A toute personne humaine,
Vraix Diex, moult est excellente,
Puisqu'elle a cuer et entente,
Et que a ce desir l'amaine
Que de vous servir se paine.]

[Footnote 114: See H. Taine, "La Fontaine and His Fables," p. 15.]

[Footnote 115: La Fontaine, "Contes, Richard Minutolo."]

[Footnote 116: Parler lui veut d'une besogne
Où crois que peu conquerrérois
Si la besogne vous nommois.]

[Footnote 117: At King Stephen's death there were 1,115 castles.]

[Footnote 118: A. Thierry, "Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre," II.]

[Footnote 119: William of Malmesbury. A. Thierry, II. 20, 122-203.]

[Footnote 120: A. Thierry.]

[Footnote 121: "In the year 652," says Warton, I. 3, "it was the common
practice of the Anglo-Saxons to send their youth to the monasteries of
France for education; and not only the language but the manners of the
French were esteemed the most polite accomplishments."]

[Footnote 122: Warton, I. 5.]

[Footnote 123: Trevisa's translation of the Polycronycon.]

[Footnote 124: Statutes of foundation of New College, Oxford. In the
abbey of Glastonbury, in 1247: Liber de excidio Trojæ, gesta Ricardi
regis, gesta Alexandri Magni, etc. In the abbey of Peterborough: Amys
et Amelion, Sir Tristam, Guy de Bourgogne, gesta Otuclis les prophéties
de Merlin, le Charlemagne de Turpin, la destruction de Troie, etc.
Warton, ibid.]

[Footnote 125: In 1154.]

[Footnote 126: Warton, I. 72-78.]

[Footnote 127: In 1400. Warton, II. 248. Gower died in 1408; his
French ballads belong to the end of the fourteenth century.]

[Footnote 128: He wrote in 1356, and died in 1372.]

[Footnote 129: "And for als moche as it is longe time passed that
ther was no generalle Passage ne Vyage over the See, and many Men
desiren for to here speke of the holy Lond, and han thereof gret
Solace and Comfort, I, John Maundevylle, Knyght, alle be it I be
not worthi, that was born in Englond, in the town of Seynt-Albones,
passed the See in the Zeer of our Lord Jesu-Crist 1322, in the
Day of Seynt Michelle, and hidreto have been longe tyme over the
See, and have seyn and gon thorghe manye dyverse londes, and many
Provynces, and Kingdomes, and Iles."

"And zee shulle undirstonde that I have put this Boke out of Latyn
into Frensche, and translated it azen out of Frensche, into Englyssche,
that every Man of my Nacioun may undirstonde it."--Sir John Maundeville's
"Voyage and Travaile," ed. Halliwell, 1866, prologue, p. 4.]

[Footnote 130: Sir John Maundeville's "Voyage and Travaile," ed.
Halliwell, 1866, XII., p. 139. It is confessed that the original
on which Wace depended for his ancient "History of England"
is the Latin compilation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.]

[Footnote 131: Extract from the account of the proceedings at Arthur's
coronation given by Layamon, in his translation of Wace, executed about
1180. Madden's "Layamon," 1847, II. p. 625 et passim:
Tha the king igeten hafde
And al his mon-weorede,
Tha bugen ut of burhge
Theines swithe balde.
Alle tha kinges,
And heore here-thringes.
Alle tha biscopes,
And alle tha clærckes,
All the eorles,
And alle tha beornes.
Alle the theines,
Alle the sweines,
Feire iscrudde,
Helde geond felde.
Summe heo gunnen æruen,
Summe heo gunnen urnen,
Summe heo gunnen lepen,
Summe heo gunnen sceoten,
Summe heo wræstleden
And wither-gome makeden,
Summe heo on uelde
Pleouweden under scelde,
Summe heo driven balles
Wide geond tha feldes.
Monianes kunnes gomen
Ther heo gunnen driuen.
And wha swa mihte iwinne
Wurthscipe of his gomene,
Hine me ladde mid songe
At foren than leod kinge;
And the king, for his gomene,
Gaf him geven gode.
Alle tha quene
The icumen weoren there.
And alle tha lafdies,
Leoneden geond walles.
To bihalden the dugethen.
And that folc plæie.
This ilæste threo dæges,
Swulc gomes and swulc plæges,
Tha, at than veorthe dæie
The king gon to spekene
And agæf his goden cnihten
All heore rihten;
He gef seolver, he gæf gold,
He gef hors, he gef lond,
Castles, and clœthes eke;
His monnen he iquende.]

[Footnote 132: After 1297.]

[Footnote 133: About 1312.]

[Footnote 134: About 1349.]

[Footnote 135: Warton, II. 36.]

[Footnote 136: Time of Henry III., "Reliquiae Antiquæ," edited by
Messrs. Wright and Halliwell, I. 102.]

[Footnote 137: About 1278. Warton, I. 28.]

[Footnote 138: Ibid., I. 31.]

[Footnote 139: Ibid. I. 30.]

[Footnote 140: "Poem of the Owl and Nightingale," who dispute
as to which has the finest voice.]

[Footnote 141: Letter of Peter of Blois.]

[Footnote 142: William of Malmesbury.]

[Footnote 143: At the installation feast of George Nevill, Archbishop
of York, the brother of Guy of Warwick, there were consumed 104
oxen and 6 wild bulls, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, as many hogs, 2000
swine, 500 stags, bucks, and does, 204 kids, 22,802 wild or tame
fowl, 300 quarters of corn, 300 tuns of ale, 100 of wine, a pipe
of hypocras, 12 porpoises and seals.]

[Footnote 144: These prodigalities and refinements grew to excess
under his grandson Richard II.]

[Footnote 145: Warton, I. 156.]

[Footnote 146: Warton, I. 176, spelling modernized.]

[Footnote 147: Warton, I. 123:
"In Fraunce these rhymes were wroht,
Every Englyshe ne knew it not."]

[Footnote 148: See Lingard's "History," II. 55, note 4.--Tr.]

[Footnote 149: Domesday Book. Froude's "History England", 1858, 1. 13:
"Through all these arrangements a single aim is visible, that every
man in England should have his definite place and definite duty
assigned to him, and that no human being should be at liberty to
lead at his own pleasure an unaccountable existence. The discipline
of an army was transferred to the details of social life."]

[Footnote 150: Domesday Book, "tenants-in-chief."]

[Footnote 151: According to Ailred (temp. Hen. II), "a king, many
bishops and abbots, many great earls and noble knights descended
both from English and Norman blood, constituted a support to the
one and an honor to the other. At present," says another author
of the same period, "as the English and Normans dwell together,
and have constantly intermarried, the two nations are so completely
mingled together, that at least as regards freemen, one can scarcely
distinguish who is Norman and who English.... The villeins attached
to the soil," he says again, "are alone of pure Saxon blood."]

[Footnote 152: Magna Charta, 1215.]

[Footnote 153: "Chaucer's Works," ed. Sir H. Nicholas, 6 vols.,
1845, "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," II. p. 11, line 333.]

[Footnote 154: Prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," II. p. 17,
line 547.]

[Footnote 155: From 1214, and also in 1225 and 1254. Guizot, "Origin
of the Representative System in England," pp. 297-299.]

[Footnote 156: In 1264.]

[Footnote 157: Aug. Thierry, IV. 56. Ritson's "Robin Hood," 1832.]

[Footnote 158: Latimer's "Sermons," ed. Arber, 6th Sermon, 1869, p. 173.]

[Footnote 159: Ritson, "Robin Hood Ballads," I. IV. verses 41-48.]

[Footnote 160: Ibid, verses 145-152.]

[Footnote 161: A pinder's task was to pin the sheep in the fold, cattle
in the penfold or pound (Richardson).--Tr.]

[Footnote 162: Ritson, II. 3, verses 17-26.]

[Footnote 163: Ibid. II. 6, verses 58-89.]

[Footnote 164: Ritson, verses 94-101.]

[Footnote 165: "The Difference between an Absolute and Limited
Monarchy--A learned Commendation of the Politic Laws of England"
(Latin). I frequently quote from the second work, which is more
full and complete.]

[Footnote 166: The courage which finds utterance here is coarse;
the English instincts are combative and independent. The French
race, and the Gauls generally, are perhaps the most reckless of
life of any.]

[Footnote 167: "The Difference," etc., 3d ed. 1724, ch. XIII. p. 98.
There are nowadays in France 42 highway robberies as against 738 in
England. In 1843, there were in England four times as many accusations
of crimes and offences as in France, having regard to the number of
inhabitants (Moreau de Jonnès).]

[Footnote 168: Statute of Winchester, 1285; Ordinance of 1378.]

[Footnote 169: Benvenuto Cellini, quoted by Froude, I. 20, "History
of England." Shakespeare, "Henry V," conversation of French lords
before the battle of Agincourt.]

[Footnote 170: "The Difference." etc.]

[Footnote 171: The original of this very famous treatise, "de Laudibus
Legum Angliæ," was written in Latin between 1464 and 1470, first
published in 1537, and translated into English in 1775 by Francis
Gregor. I have taken these extracts from the magnificent edition of Sir
John Fortescue's works published in 1869 for private distribution, and
edited by Thomas Fortescue, Lord Clermont. Some of the pieces quoted,
left in the old spelling, are taken from an older edition, translated
by Robert Mulcaster in 1567.--Tr.]

[Footnote 172: "Of an Absolute and Limited Monarchy," 3d ed. 1724,
ch. III. p. 15.]

[Footnote 173: Commines bears the same testimony.]

[Footnote 174: "De Laudibus," etc., ch. XXXVI.]

[Footnote 175: "The might of the realme most stondyth upon archers
which be not rich men." Compare Hallam, II. 482. All this takes us
back as far as the Conquest, and farther. "It is reasonable to suppose
that the greater part of those who appear to have possessed small
freeholds or parcels of manors were no other than the original nation....
A respectable class of free socagers, having in general full right of
alienating their lands, and holding them probably at a small certain
rent from the lord of the manor, frequently occurs in the Domesday Book."
At all events, there were in Domesday Book Saxons "perfectly exempt
from villenage." This class is mentioned with respect in the treatises
of Glanvil and Bracton. As for the villeins, they were quickly liberated
in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, either by their own energies
or by becoming copyholders. The Wars of the Roses still further raised
the commons; orders were frequently issued, previous to a battle,
to slay the nobles and spare the commoners.]

[Footnote 176: "Description of England," 275.]

[Footnote 177: The following is a portrait of a yeoman, by Latimer, in
the first sermon preached before Edward VI, March 8, 1549: "My father
was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of £3 or
£4 by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept
half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother
milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness, with
himself and his horse; while he came to the place that he should receive
the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness when he went
unto Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able
to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He married my sisters
with £5 or 20 nobles a-piece, so that he brought them up in godliness
and fear of God; he kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some
alms he gave to the poor; and all this did he of the said farm. Where
he that now hath it payeth £16 by the year, or more, and is not able
to do anything for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or
give a cup of drink to the poor."

This is from the sixth sermon, preached before the young king, April
12, 1549: "In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me to
shoot as to learn (me) any other thing; and so, I think, other men did
their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow,
and not to draw with strength of arms, as other nations do, but with
strength of the body. I had my bows bought me according to my age and
strength; as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and
bigger; for men shall never shoot well except they be brought up
in it. It is a goodly art, a wholesome kind of exercise, and much
commended in physic."]

[Footnote 178: In 1246, 1376. Thierry, III. 79.]

[Footnote 179: 1404-1409. The commons declared that with these
revenues the king would be able to maintain 15 earls, 1500 knights,
6,200 squires, and 100 hospitals; each earl receiving annually 300
marks; each knight 100 marks, and the produce of four ploughed lands;
each squire 40 marks, and the produce of two ploughed lands.]

[Footnote 180: About 1362.]

[Footnote 181: "Piers Ploughman's Vision and Creed," ed. T. Wright,
1856, I. p. 2, lines 21-44.]

[Footnote 182: The Archdeacon of Richmond, on his tour in 1216,
came to the priory of Bridlington with ninety-seven horses,
twenty-one dogs, and three falcons.]

[Footnote 183: "Piers Ploughman's Vision," I. p. 191, lines
6,217-6,228.]

[Footnote 184: Ibid. II. Last book, p. 430, lines 14,084-14,135.]

[Footnote 185: "Piers Plowman's Crede; the Plowman's Tale," first printed
in 1550. There were three editions in one year, it was so manifestly
Protestant.]

[Footnote 186: Knighton, about 1400, wrote thus of Wyclif: "Transtulit
de Latino in anglicam linguam, non angelicam. Unde per ipeum fit vulgare,
et magis apertum laicis et mulieribus legere scientibus quam solet esse
clericis admodum litteratis, et bene intelligentibus. Et sic evangelica
margerita spargitur et a porcis conculcatur... (ita) ut laicis commune
æternum quod ante fuerat clericis et ecolesiæ doctoribus talentum
supernum."]

[Footnote 187: Wyclif's Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden, 1850, preface to
Oxford edition, p. 2.]

[Footnote 188: Ibid.]

[Footnote 189: In 1395.]

[Footnote 190: 1401, William Sawtré, the first Lollard burned alive.]

[Footnote 191: Commines, v. ch. 19 and 20: "In my opinion, of all kingdoms
of the world of which I have any knowledge, where the public weal is best
observed, and least violence is exercised on the people, and where no
buildings are overthrown or demolished in war, England is the best; and
the ruin and misfortune falls on them who wage the war.... The kingdom
of England has this advantage beyond other nations, that the people and
the country are not destroyed or burnt, nor the buildings demolished;
and ill-fortune falls on men of war, and especially on the nobles."]

[Footnote 192: See the ballads of "Chevy Chase, The Nut-Brown
Maid," etc. Many of them are admirable little dramas.]




CHAPTER THIRD


The New Tongue


SECTION I.--The First Great Poet


Amid so many barren endeavors, throughout the long impotence of Norman
literature, which was content to copy, and of Saxon literature, which
bore no fruit, a definite language was nevertheless formed, and there
was room for a great writer. Geoffrey Chaucer appeared, a man of mark,
inventive though a disciple, original though a translator, who by his
genius, education, and life, was enabled to know and to depict a whole
world, but above all to satisfy the chivalric world and the splendid
courts which shone upon the heights.[193] He belonged to it, though
learned and versed in all branches of scholastic knowledge; and he took
such a share in it that his life from beginning to end was that of a man
of the world, and a man of action. We find him by turns in King Edward's
army, in the king's train, husband of a maid of honor to the queen, a
pensioner, a placeholder, a member of Parliament, a knight, founder of a
family which was hereafter to become allied to royalty. Moreover, he was
in the king's council, brother-in-law of John of Gaunt, employed more
than once in open embassies or secret missions at Florence, Genoa,
Milan, Flanders, commissioner in France for the marriage of the Prince
of Wales, high up and low down on the political ladder, disgraced,
restored to place. This experience of business, travel, war, and the
court, was not like a book-education. He was at the Court of Edward III,
the most splendid in Europe, amidst tourneys, grand receptions,
magnificent displays; he took part in the pomps of France and Milan;
conversed with Petrarch, perhaps with Boccaccio and Froissart; was actor
in, and spectator of, the finest and most tragical of dramas. In these
few words, what ceremonies and cavalcades are implied! what processions
in armor, what caparisoned horses, bedizened ladies! what display of
gallant and lordly manners! what a varied and brilliant world, well
suited to occupy the mind and eyes of a poet! Like Froissart, and better
than he, Chaucer could depict the castles of the nobles, their
conversations, their talk of love, and anything else that concerned
them, and please them by his portraiture.




SECTION II.--The Decline of the Middle Ages


Two notions raised the Middle Ages above the chaos of barbarism: one
religious, which had fashioned the gigantic cathedrals, and swept the
masses from their native soil to hurl them upon the Holy Land; the other
secular, which had built feudal fortresses, and set the man of courage
erect and armed, within his own domain: the one had produced the
adventurous hero, the other the mystical monk; the one, to wit, the
belief in God, the other the belief in self. Both, running to excess,
had degenerated by the violence of their own strength: the one had
exalted independence into rebellion, the other had turned piety into
enthusiasm: the first made man unfit for civil life, the second drew him
back from natural life: the one, sanctioning disorder, dissolved
society; the other, enthroning infatuation, perverted intelligence.
Chivalry had need to be repressed because it issued in brigandage;
devotion restrained because it induced slavery. Turbulent feudalism grew
feeble, like oppressive theocracy; and the two great master passions,
deprived of their sap and lopped of their stem, gave place by their
weakness to the monotony of habit and the taste for worldliness, which
shot forth in their stead and flourished under their name.

Gradually, the serious element declined, in books as in manners, in
works of art as in books. Architecture, instead of being the handmaid of
faith, became the slave of fantasy. It was exaggerated, became too
ornamental, sacrificing general effect to detail, shot up its steeples
to unreasonable heights, decorated its churches with canopies,
pinnacles, trefoiled gables, open-work galleries. "Its whole aim was
continually to climb higher, to clothe the sacred edifice with a gaudy
bedizenment, as if it were a bride on her wedding morning."[194] Before
this marvellous lacework, what emotion could one feel but a pleased
astonishment? What becomes of Christian sentiment before such scenic
ornamentations? In like manner literature sets itself to play. In the
eighteenth century, the second age of absolute monarchy, we saw on one
side finials and floriated cupolas, on the other pretty _vers de
societé_, courtly and sprightly tales, taking the place of severe
beauty-lines and noble writings. Even so in the fourteenth century, the
second age of feudalism, they had on one side the stone fretwork and
slender efflorescence of aërial forms, and on the other finical verses
and diverting stories, taking the place of the old grand architecture
and the old simple literature. It is no longer the overflowing of a true
sentiment which produces them, but the craving for excitement. Consider
Chaucer, his subjects, and how he selects them. He goes far and wide to
discover them, to Italy, France, to the popular legends, the ancient
classics. His readers need diversity, and his business is to "provide
fine tales": it was in those days the poet's business.[195] The lords at
table have finished dinner, the minstrels come and sing, the brightness
of the torches falls on the velvet and ermine, on the fantastic figures,
the motley, the elaborate embroidery of their long garments; then the
poet arrives, presents his manuscript, "richly illuminated, bound in
crimson velvet, embellished with silver clasps and bosses, roses of
gold": they ask him what his subject is, and he answers "Love."




SECTION III.--The Poetry of Chaucer


In fact, it is the most agreeable subject, fittest to make the evening
hours pass sweetly, amid the goblets filled with spiced wine and the
burning perfumes. Chaucer translated first that great storehouse of
gallantry, the "Roman de la Rose." There is no pleasanter entertainment.
It is about a rose which the lover wished to pluck: the pictures of the
May months, the groves, the flowery earth, the green hedgerows, abound
and display their bloom. Then come portraits of the smiling ladies,
Richesse, Fraunchise, Gaiety, and by way of contrast, the sad
characters, Daunger and Travail, all fully and minutely described, with
detail of features, clothing, attitude; they walk about, as on a piece
of tapestry, amid landscapes, dances, castles, among allegorical groups,
in lively sparkling colors, displayed, contrasted, ever renewed and
varied so as to entertain the sight. For an evil has arisen, unknown to
serious ages--_ennui_; novelty and brilliancy followed by novelty and
brilliancy are necessary to withstand it; and Chaucer, like Boccaccio
and Froissart, enters into the struggle with all his heart. He borrows
from Boccaccio his history of Palamon and Arcite, from Lollius his
history of Troilus and Cressida, and rearranges them. How the two young
Theban knights, Arcite and Palamon, both fall in love with the beautiful
Emily, and how Arcite, victorious in tourney, falls and dies,
bequeathing Emily to his rival; how the fine Trojan knight Troilus wins
the favor of Cressida, and how Cressida abandons him for Diomedes--these
are still tales in verse, tales of love. A little tedious they may be;
all the writings of this age, French, or imitated from French, are born
of too prodigal minds; but how they glide along! A winding stream, which
flows smoothly on level sand, and sparkles now and again in the sun, is
the only image we can compare it to. The characters speak too much, but
then they speak so well! Even when they dispute we like to listen, their
anger and offences are so wholly based on a happy overflow of unbroken
converse. Remember Froissart, how slaughters, assassinations, plagues,
the butcheries of the Jacquerie, the whole chaos of human misery,
disappears in his fine ceaseless humor, so that the furious and grinning
figures seem but ornaments and choice embroideries to relieve the skein
of shaded and colored silk which forms the groundwork of his narrative!
but, in particular, a multitude of descriptions spread their gilding
over all. Chaucer leads you among arms, palaces, temples, and halts
before each beautiful thing. Here:


"The statue of Venus glorious for to see
Was naked fleting in the large see,
And fro the navel doun all covered was
With wawes grene, and bright as any glas.
A citole in hire right hand hadde she,
And on hire hed, ful semely for to see,
A rose gerlond fressh, and wel smelling,
Above hire hed hire doves fleckering."[196]


Further on, the temple of Mars:


"First on the wall was peinted a forest,
In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry barrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold;
In which ther ran a romble and a swough
As though a storme shuld bresten every bough:
And dounward from an hill under a bent.
Ther stood the temple of Mars armipotent,
Wrought all of burned stele, of which th' entree
Was longe and streite, and gastly for to see.
Aud therout came a rage and swiche a vise,
That it made all the gates for to rise.
The northern light in at the dore shone,
For window on the wall ne was ther none,
Thurgh which men mighten any light discerne.
The dore was all of athamant eterne,
Yclenched overthwart and endelong
With yren tough, and for to make it strong,
Every piler the temple to sustene
Was tonne-gret, of yren bright and shene."[197]


Everywhere on the wall were representations of slaughter; and in the
sanctuary


"The statue of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and loked grim as he were wood,...
A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete
With eyen red, and of a man he ete."[198]


Are not these contrasts well designed to rouse the imagination? You will
meet in Chaucer a succession of similar pictures. Observe the train of
combatants who come to joust in the tilting field for Arcite and
Palamon:


"With him ther wenten knightes many on.
Som wol ben armed in an habergeon
And in a brestplate, and in a gipon;
And som wol have a pair of plates large;
And som wol have a Pruce sheld, or a targe,
Som wol ben armed on his legges wele,
And have an axe, and som a mace of stele....
Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon
Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace:
Blake was his berd, and manly was his face.
The cercles of his eyen in his hed
They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red,
And like a griffon loked he about,
With kemped heres on his browes stout;
His limmes gret, his braunes hard and stronge,
His shouldres brode, his armes round and longe.
And as the guise was in his contree,
Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he,
With foure white bolles in the trais.
Instede of cote-armure on his harnais,
With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold,
He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old.
His longe here was kempt behind his bak,
As any ravenes fether it shone for blake.
A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight,
Upon his hed sate ful of stones bright,
Of fine rubins and of diamants.
About his char ther wenten white alauns,
Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere,
To hunten at the leon or the dere,
And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound,
Colered with gold, and torettes filed round.
An hundred lordes had he in his route,
Armed ful wel, with hertes sterne and stoute.
With Arcita, in stories as men find,
The gret Emetrius the king of Inde,
Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele,
Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,
Came riding like the god of armes Mars.
His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars,
Couched with perles, white, and round and grete.
His sadel was of brent gold new ybete;
A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging
Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling.
His crispe here like ringes was yronne,
And that was yelwe, and glitered as the sonne.
His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin,
His lippes round, his color was sanguin....
And as a leon he his loking caste.
Of five and twenty yere his age I caste.
His berd was well begonnen for to spring;
His vois was a trompe thondering.
Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene
A gerlond fresshe and lusty for to sene.
Upon his hond he bare for his deduit
An egle tame, as any lily whit.
An hundred lordes had he with him there,
All armed save hir hedes in all hir gere,
Ful richely in alle manere things....
About this king ther ran on every part
Ful many a tame leon and leopart."[199]


A herald would not describe them better nor more fully. The lords and
ladies of the time would recognize here their tourneys and masquerades.

There is something more pleasant than a fine narrative, and that is a
collection of fine narratives, especially when the narratives are all of
different colorings. Froissart gives us such under the name of
Chronicles; Boccaccio still better; after him the lords of the _Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles_; and, later still, Marguerite of Navarre. What more
natural among people who meet, talk and wish to amuse themselves? The
manners of the time suggest them; for the habits and tastes of society
had begun, and fiction thus conceived only brings into books the
conversations which are heard in the hall and by the wayside. Chaucer
describes a troop of pilgrims, people of every rank, who are going to
Canterbury; a knight, a sergeant of law, an Oxford clerk, a doctor, a
miller, a prioress, a monk, who agree to tell a story all round:


"For trewely comfort ne mirthe is non,
To riden by the way domb as the ston."


They tell their stories accordingly; and on this slender and flexible
thread all the jewels of feudal imagination, real or false, contribute
one after another their motley shapes to form a necklace, side by side
with noble and chivalrous stories: we have the miracle of an infant
whose throat was cut by Jews, the trials of patient Griselda, Canace and
marvellous fictions of Oriental fancy, obscene stories of marriage and
monks, allegorical or moral tales, the fable of the cock and hen, a list
of great unfortunate persons: Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Nebuchadnezzar,
Zenobia, Crœsus, Ugolino, Peter of Spain. I leave out some, for I must
be brief. Chaucer is like a jeweller with his hands full: pearls and
glass beads, sparkling diamonds and common agates, black jet and ruby
roses, all that history and imagination had been able to gather and
fashion during three centuries in the East, in France, in Wales, in
Provence, in Italy, all that had rolled his way, clashed together,
broken or polished by the stream of centuries, and by the great jumble
of human memory, he holds in his hand, arranges it, composes therefrom a
long sparkling ornament, with twenty pendants, a thousand facets, which
by its splendor, variety, contrasts, may attract and satisfy the eyes of
those most greedy for amusement and novelty.




[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER.
_Photogravure from an old engraving._]




He does more. The universal outburst of unchecked curiosity demands a
more refined enjoyment: reverie and fantasy alone can satisfy it; not
profound and thoughtful fantasy as we find it in Shakespeare, nor
impassioned and meditative reverie as we find it in Dante, but the
reverie and fantasy of the eyes, ears, external senses, which in poetry
as in architecture call for singularity, wonders, accepted challenges,
victories gained over the rational and probable, and which are satisfied
only by what is crowded and dazzling. When we look at a cathedral of
that time, we feel a sort of fear. Substance is wanting; the walls are
hollowed out to make room for windows, the elaborate work of the
porches, the wonderful growth of the slender columns, the thin curvature
of arches--everything seems to menace us; support has been withdrawn to
give way to ornament. Without external prop or buttress, and artificial
aid of iron clamp-work, the building would have crumbled to pieces on
the first day; as it is, it undoes itself; we have to maintain on the
spot a colony of masons continually to ward off the continual decay. But
our sight grows dim in following the wavings and twistings of the
endless fretwork; the dazzling rose-window of the portal and the painted
glass throw a checkered light on the carved stalls of the choir, the
gold-work of the altar, the long array of damascened and glittering
copes, the crowd of statues, tier above tier; and amid this violet
light, this quivering purple, amid these arrows of gold which pierce the
gloom, the entire building is like the tail of a mystical peacock. So
most of the poems of the time are barren of foundation; at most a trite
morality serves them for mainstay: in short, the poet thought of nothing
else than displaying before us a glow of colors and a jumble of forms.
They are dreams or visions; there are five or six in Chaucer, and you
will meet more on your advance to the Renaissance. But the show is
splendid. Chaucer is transported in a dream to a temple of glass,[200]
on the walls of which are figured in gold all the legends of Ovid and
Vergil, an infinite train of characters and dresses, like that which, on
the painted glass in the churches, occupied then the gaze of the
faithful. Suddenly a golden eagle, which soars near the sun, and
glitters like a carbuncle, descends with the swiftness of lightning, and
carries him off in his talons above the stars, dropping him at last
before the House of Fame, splendidly built of beryl, with shining
windows and lofty turrets, and situated on a high rock of almost
inaccessible ice. All the southern side was graven with the names of
famous men, but the sun was continuously melting them. On the northern
side, the names, better protected, still remained. On the turrets
appeared the minstrels and "gestiours," with Orpheus, Arion, and the
great harpers, and behind them myriads of musicians, with horns, flutes,
bagpipes, and reeds, on which they played, and which filled the air;
then all the charmers, magicians, and prophets. He enters, and in a high
hall, plated with gold, embossed with pearls, on a throne of carbuncle,
he sees a woman seated, a "noble quene," amidst an infinite number of
heralds, whose embroidered cloaks bore the arms of the most famous
knights in the world, and heard the sounds of instruments, and the
celestial melody of Calliope and her sisters. From her throne to the
gate was a row of pillars, on which stood the great historians and
poets; Josephus on a pillar of lead and iron; Statius on a pillar of
iron stained with tiger's blood; Ovid, "Venus's clerk," on a pillar of
copper; then, on one higher than the rest, Homer and Livy, Dares the
Phrygian, Guido Colonna, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the other historians
of the war of Troy. Must I go on copying this phantasmagoria, in which
confused erudition mars picturesque invention, and frequent banter shows
signs that the vision is only a planned amusement? The poet and his
reader have imagined for half-an-hour decorated halls and bustling
crowds; a slender thread of common-sense has ingeniously crept along the
transparent golden mist which they amuse themselves with following. That
suffices; they are pleased with their fleeting fancies, and ask no more.

Amid this exuberancy of mind, amid these refined cravings, and this
insatiate exaltation of imagination and the senses, there was one
passion, that of love, which, combining all, was developed in excess,
and displayed in miniature the sickly charm, the fundamental and fatal
exaggeration, which are the characteristics of the age, and which,
later, the Spanish civilization exhibits both in its flower and its
decay. Long ago, the courts of love in Provence had established the
theory. "Each one who loves," they said, "grows pale at the sight of her
whom he loves; each action of the lover ends in the thought of her whom
he loves. Love can refuse nothing to love."[201] This search after
excessive sensation had ended in the ecstasies and transports of Guido
Cavalcanti, and of Dante; and in Languedoc a company of enthusiasts had
established themselves, love-penitents, who, in order to prove the
violence of their passion, dressed in summer in furs and heavy garments,
and in winter in light gauze, and walked thus about the country, so that
several of them fell ill and died. Chaucer, in their wake, explained in
his verses the craft of love,[202] the Ten Commandments, the twenty
statutes of love; and praised his lady, his "daieseye," his "Margarite,"
his "vermeil rose"; depicted love in ballads, visions, allegories,
didactic poems, in a hundred guises. This is chivalrous, lofty love, as
it was conceived in the Middle Ages; above all, tender love. Troilus
loves Cressida like a troubadour; without Pandarus, her uncle, he would
have languished, and ended by dying in silence. He will not reveal the
name of her he loves. Pandarus has to tear it from him, perform all the
bold actions himself, plan every kind of stratagem. Troilus, however,
brave and strong in battle, can but weep before Cressida, ask her
pardon, and faint. Cressida, on her side, has every delicate feeling.
When Pandarus brings her Troilus's first letter, she begins by refusing
it, and is ashamed to open it: she opens it only because she is told the
poor knight is about to die. At the first words "all rosy hewed tho woxe
she"; and though the letter is respectful, she will not answer it. She
yields at last to the importunities of her uncle, and answers Troilus
that she will feel for him the affection of a sister. As to Troilus, he
trembles all over, grows pale when he sees the messenger return, doubts
his happiness, and will not believe the assurance which is given him:


"But right so as these holtes and these hayis
That han in winter dead ben and dry,
Revesten hem in grene, whan that May is....
Right in that selfe wise, sooth for to sey,
Woxe suddainly his herte full of joy."[203]


Slowly, after many troubles, and thanks to the efforts of Pandarus, he
obtains her confession; and in this confession what a delightful charm!


"And as the newe abashed nightingale,
That stinteth first, whan she beginneth sing,
Whan that she heareth any heerdes tale,
Or in the hedges any wight stearing,
And after siker doeth her voice outring:
Right so Creseide, whan that her drede stent,
Opened her herte and told him her entent."[204]


He, as soon as he perceived a hope from afar,


"In chaunged voice, right for his very drede,
Which voice eke quoke, and thereto his manere,
Goodly abasht, and now his hewes rede,
Now pale, unto Cresseide his ladie dere,
With looke doun cast, and humble iyolden chere,
Lo, the alderfirst word that him astart
Was twice: 'Mercy, mercy, O my sweet herte!'"[205]


This ardent love breaks out in impassioned accents, in bursts of
happiness. Far from being regarded as a fault, it is the source of all
virtue. Troilus becomes braver, more generous, more upright, through it;
his speech runs now on love and virtue; he scorns all villany; he honors
those who possess merit, succors those who are in distress; and
Cressida, delighted, repeats all day, with exceeding liveliness, this
song, which is like the warbling of a nightingale:


"Whom should I thanken but you, god of love,
Of all this blisse, in which to bathe I ginne?
And thanked be ye, lorde for that I love,
This is the right life that I am inne,
To flemen all maner vice and sinne:
This doeth me so to vertue for to entende
That daie by daie I in my will amende.
And who that saieth that for to love is vice,...
He either is envious, or right nice,
Or is unmightie for his shreudnesse
To loven....
But I with all mine herte and all my might,
As I have saied, woll love unto my last,
My owne dere herte, and all mine owne knight,
In whiche mine herte growen is so fast,
And his in me, that it shall ever last."[206]


But misfortune comes. Her father Calchas demands her back, and the
Trojans decide that they will give her up in exchange for prisoners. At
this news she swoons, and Troilus is about to slay himself. Their love
at this time seems imperishable; it sports with death, because it
constitutes the whole of life. Beyond that better and delicious life
which it created, it seems there can be no other:


"But as God would, of swough she abraide,
And gan to sighe, and Troilus she cride,
And he answerde: 'Lady mine, Creseide,
Live ye yet?' and let his swerde doun glide:
'Ye herte mine, that thanked be Cupide,'
(Quod she), and therwithal she sore sight,
And he began to glade her as he might.

"Took her in armes two and kist her oft,
And her to glad, he did al his entent,
For which her gost, that flikered aie a loft,
Into her wofull herte ayen it went:
But at the last, as that her eye glent
Aside, anon she gan his sworde aspie,
As it lay bare, and gan for feare crie.

"And asked him why had he it out draw,
And Troilus anon the cause her told,
And how himself therwith he wold have slain,
For which Creseide upon him gan behold,
And gan him in her armes faste fold,
And said: 'O mercy God, lo which a dede!
Alas, how nigh we weren bothe dede!'"[207]


At last they are separated, with what vows and what tears! and Troilus,
alone in his chamber, murmurs:


"'Where is mine owne lady lefe and dere?
Where is her white brest, where is it, where?
Where been her armes, and her eyen clere
That yesterday this time with me were?'...
Nor there nas houre in al the day or night,
Whan he was ther as no man might him here,
That he ne sayd: 'O lovesome lady bright,
How have ye faren sins that ye were there?
Welcome ywis mine owne lady dere!'...
Fro thence-forth he rideth up and doune,
And every thing came him to remembraunce,
As he rode forth by the places of the toune,
In which he whilom had all his pleasaunce:
'Lo, yonder saw I mine owne lady daunce,
And in that temple with her eien clere,
Me caught first my right lady dere.
And yonder have I herde full lustely
My dere herte laugh, and yonder play
Saw her ones eke ful blisfully,
And yonder ones to me gan she say,
"Now, good sweete, love me well I pray."
And yonde so goodly gan she me behold,
That to the death mine herte is to her hold,
And at the corner in the yonder house
Herde I mine alderlevest lady dere,
So womanly, with voice melodiouse,
Singen so wel, so goodly, and so clere,
That in my soule yet me thinketh I here
The blissful sowne, and in that yonder place,
My lady first me toke unto her grace.'"[208]


None has since found more true and tender words. These are the charming
"poetic branches" which flourished amid gross ignorance and pompous
parades. Human intelligence in the Middle Age had blossomed on that side
where it perceived the light.

But mere narrative does not suffice to express his felicity and fancy;
the poet must go where "shoures sweet of rain descended soft."


"And every plaine was clothed faire
With new greene, and maketh small floures
To springen here and there in field and in mede,
So very good and wholsome be the shoures,
That it renueth that was old and dede,
In winter time; and out of every sede
Springeth the hearbe, so that every wight
Of this season wexeth glad and light....
In which (grove) were okes great, streight as a line,
Under, the which the grasse so fresh of hew
Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine
Every tree well fro his fellow grew."


He must forget himself in the vague felicity of the country, and, like
Dante, lose himself in ideal light and allegory. The dreams love, to
continue true, must not take too visible a form, nor enter into a too
consecutive history; they must float in a misty distance; the soul in
which they hover can no longer think of the laws of existence; it
inhabits another world; it forgets itself in the ravishing emotion which
troubles it, and sees its well-loved visions rise, mingle, come and go,
as in summer we see the bees on a hill-slope flutter in a haze of light,
and circle round and round the flowers.

"One morning,"[209] a lady sings, "at the dawn of day, I entered an
oak-grove"


"With branches brode, laden with leves new,
That sprongen out ayen the sunne-shene,
Some very red, and some a glad light grenc....[210]

"And I, that all this pleasaunt sight sie,
Thought sodainly I felt so sweet and aire
Of the eglentere, that certainely
There is no hert, I deme, in such dispaire,
Ne with thoughts froward and contraire,
So overlaid, but it should soone have bote,
If it had ones felt this savour sote.

"And as I stood, and cast aside mine eie,
I was ware of the fairest medler tree
That ever yet in all my life I sie,
As full of blossomes as it might be;
Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile
Fro bough to bough; and, as him list, he eet
Here and there of buds and floures sweet....

"And as I sat, the birds harkening thus,
Methought that I heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetest and most delicious
That ever any wight, I trow truly,
Heard in their life, for the armony
And sweet accord was in so good musike,
That the voice to angels most was like."[211]


Then she sees arrive "a world of ladies... in surcotes white of
velvet... set with emerauds... as of great pearles round and orient, and
diamonds fine and rubies red." And all had on their head "a rich fret of
gold... full of stately riche stones set," with "a chapelet of branches
fresh and grene... some of laurer, some of woodbind, some of agnus
castus"; and at the same time came a train of valiant knights in
splendid array, with harness of red gold, shining in the sun, and noble
steeds, with trappings "of cloth of gold, and furred with ermine." These
knights and ladies were the servants of the Leaf, and they sate under a
great oak, at the feet of their queen.

From the other side came a bevy of ladies as resplendent as the first,
but crowned with fresh flowers. These were the servants of the Flower.
They alighted, and began to dance in the meadow. But heavy clouds
appeared in the sky, and a storm broke out. They wished to shelter
themselves under the oak, but there was no more room; they ensconced
themselves as they could in the hedges and among the brushwood; the rain
came down and spoiled their garlands, stained their robes, and washed
away their ornaments; when the sun returned, they went to ask succor
from the queen of the Leaf; she, being merciful, consoled them, repaired
the injury of the rain, and restored their original beauty. Then all
disappears as in a dream.

The lady was astonished, when suddenly a fair dame appeared and
instructed her. She learned that the servants of the Leaf had lived like
brave knights, and those of the Flower had loved idleness and pleasure.
She promises to serve the Leaf, and came away.

Is this an allegory? There is at least a lack of wit. There is no
ingenious enigma; it is dominated by fancy, and the poet thinks only of
displaying in quiet verse the fleeting and brilliant train which had
amused his mind, and charmed his eyes.

Chaucer himself, on the first of May, rises and goes out into the
meadows. Love enters his heart with the balmy air; the landscape is
transfigured, and the birds begin to speak:


"There sate I downe among the faire flours,
And saw the birds trip out of hir bours,
There as they rested them all the night,
They were so joyfull of the dayes light,
They began of May for to done honours.

"They coud that service all by rote,
There was many a lovely note,
Some song loud as they had plained,
And some in other manner voice yfained
And some all out with the ful throte.

"The proyned hem and made hem right gay,
And daunceden, and lepten on her spray,
And evermore two and two in fere,
Right so as they had chosen hem to yere,
In Feverere upon saint Valentines day.

"And the river that I sate upon,
It made such a noise as it ron,
Accordaunt with the birdes armony,
Methought it was the best melody
That might ben yheard of any mon."[212]


This confused harmony of vague noises troubles the sense; a secret
languor enters the soul. The cuckoo throws his monotonous voice like a
mournful and tender sigh between the white ash-tree boles; the
nightingale makes his triumphant notes roll and ring above the leafy
canopy; fancy breaks in unsought, and Chaucer hears them dispute of
Love. They sing alternately an antistrophic song, and the nightingale
weeps for vexation to hear the cuckoo speak in depreciation of Love. He
is consoled, however, by the poet's voice, seeing that he also suffers
with him:


"'For love and it hath doe me much wo.'
'Ye use' (quod she) 'this medicine
Every day this May or thou dine
Go looke upon the fresh daisie,
And though thou be for wo in point to die,
That shall full greatly lessen thee of thy pine.

"'And looke alway that thou be good and trew,
And I wol sing one of the songes new,
For love of thee, as loud as I may crie:'
And than she began this song full hie,
'I shrewe all hem that been of love untrue.'"[213]


To such exquisite delicacies love, as with Petrarch, had carried poetry;
by refinement even, as with Petrarch, it is lost now and then in its
wit, conceits, clinches. But a marked characteristic at once separates
it from Petrarch. If over-excited, it is also graceful, polished, full
of archness, banter, fine sensual gayety, somewhat gossipy, as the
French always paint love. Chaucer follows his true masters, and is
himself an elegant speaker, facile, ever ready to smile, loving choice
pleasures, a disciple of the "Roman de la Rose," and much less Italian
than French.[214] The bent of French character makes of love not a
passion, but a gay banquet, tastefully arranged, in which the service is
elegant, the food exquisite, the silver brilliant, the two guests in
full dress, in good humor, quick to anticipate and please each other,
knowing how to keep up the gayety, and when to part. In Chaucer, without
doubt, this other altogether worldly vein runs side by side with the
sentimental element. If Troilus is a weeping lover, Pandarus is a lively
rascal, who volunteers for a singular service with amusing urgency,
frank immorality, and carries it out carefully, gratuitously,
thoroughly. In these pretty attempts Chaucer accompanies him as far as
possible, and is not shocked. On the contrary, he makes fun out of it.
At the critical moment, with transparent hypocrisy, he shelters himself
behind his "author." If you find the particulars free, he says, it is
not my fault; "so writen clerks in hir bokes old," and "I mote, aftir
min auctour, telle...." Not only is he gay, but he jests throughout the
whole tale. He sees clearly through the tricks of feminine modesty; he
laughs at it archly, knowing full well what is behind; he seems to be
saying, finger on lip: "Hush! let the grand words roll on, you will be
edified presently." We are, in fact, edified; so is he, and in the nick
of time he goes away, carrying the light: "For ought I can aspies, this
light nor I ne serven here of nought. Troilus," says uncle Pandarus,
"if ye be wise, sweveneth not now, lest more folke arise." Troilus takes
care not to swoon; and Cressida at last, being alone with him, speaks
wittily and with prudent delicacy; there is here an exceeding charm, no
coarseness. Their happiness covers all, even voluptuousness, with a
profusion and perfume of its heavenly roses. At most a slight spice of
archness flavors it: "and gode thrift he had full oft." Troilus holds
his mistress in his arms: "with worse hap God let us never mete." The
poet is almost as well pleased as they: for him, as for the men of his
time, the sovereign good is love, not damped, but satisfied; they ended
even by thinking such love a merit. The ladies declared in their
judgments, that when people love, they can refuse nothing to the
beloved. Love has become law; it is inscribed in a code; they combine it
with religion; and there is a sacrament of love, in which the birds in
their anthems sing matins.[215] Chaucer curses with all his heart the
covetous wretches, the business men, who treat is as a madness:


"As would God, tho wretches that despise
Service of love had eares al so long
As had Mida, ful of covetise,...
To teachen hem, that they been in the vice
And lovers not, although they hold hem nice,
... God yeve hem mischaunce,
And every lover in his trouth avaunce."[216]


He clearly lacks severity, so rare in southern literature. The Italians
in the Middle Ages made a virtue of joy; and you perceive that the world
of chivalry, as conceived by the French, expanded morality so as to
confound it with pleasure.




SECTION IV.--Characteristics of the Canterbury Tales


There are other characteristics still more gay. The true Gallic
literature crops up; obscene tales, practical jokes on one's neighbor,
not shrouded in the Ciceronian style of Boccaccio, but related lightly
by a man in good humor;[217] above all, active roguery, the trick of
laughing at your neighbor's expense. Chaucer displays it better than
Rutebeuf, and sometimes better than La Fontaine. He does not knock his
men down; he pricks them as he passes, not from deep hatred or
indignation, but through sheer nimbleness of disposition, and quick
sense of the ridiculous; he throws his gibes at them by handfuls. His
man of law is more a man of business than of the world:


"No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as,
And yet he semed besier than he was."[218]


His three burgesses:


"Everich, for the wisdom that he can
Was shapelich for to ben an alderman.
For catel hadden they ynough and rent,
And eke hir wives wolde it wel assent."[219]


Of the mendicant Friar he says:


"His wallet lay beforne him in his lappe,
Bret-ful of pardon come from Rome al hote."[220]


The mockery here comes from the heart, in the French manner, without
effort, calculation, or vehemence. It is so pleasant and so natural to
banter one's neighbor! Sometimes the lively vein becomes so copious that
it furnishes an entire comedy, indelicate certainly, but so free and
life-like! Here is the portrait of the Wife of Bath, who has buried five
husbands:


"Bold was hire face, and fayre and rede of hew,
She was a worthy woman all hire live;
Housbondes at the chirche dore had she had five,
Withouten other compagnie in youthe....
In all the parish wif ne was ther non,
That to the offring before hire shulde gon,
And if ther did, certain so wroth was she.
That she was out of alle charitee."[221]


What a tongue she has! Impertinent, full of vanity, bold, chattering,
unbridled, she silences everybody, and holds forth for an hour before
coming to her tale. We hear her grating, high-pitched, loud, clear
voice, wherewith she deafened her husbands. She continually harps upon
the same ideas, repeats her reasons, piles them up and confounds them,
like a stubborn mule who runs along shaking and ringing his bells, so
that the stunned listeners remain open-mouthed, wondering that a single
tongue can spin out so many words. The subject was worth the trouble.
She proves that she did well to marry five husbands, and she proves it
clearly, like a woman who knew it, because she had tried it:


"God bad us for to wex and multiplie;
That gentil text can I wel understond;
Eke wel I wot, he sayd, that min husbond
Shuld leve fader and moder, and take to me;
But of no noumbre mention made he,
Of bigamie or of octogamie;
Why shuld men than speke of it vilanie?
Lo here the wise king dan Solomon,
I trow he hadde wives mo than on,
(As wolde God it leful were to me
To be refreshed half so oft as he,)
Which a gift of God had he for alle his wives?...
Blessed be God that I have wedded five.
Welcome the sixthe whan that ever he shall....
He (Christ) spake to hem that wold live parfitly,
And lordings (by your leve), that am nat I;
I wol bestow the flour of all myn age
In th' actes and the fruit of mariage....
An husbond wol I have, I wol not lette,
Which shal be both my dettour and my thrall,
And have his tribulation withall
Upon his flesh, while that I am his wif."[222]


Here Chaucer has the freedom of Molière, and we possess it no longer.
His good wife justifies marriage in terms just as technical as
Sganarelle. It behooves us to turn the pages quickly, and follow in the
lump only this Odyssey of marriages. The experienced wife, who has
journeyed through life with five husbands, knows the art of taming them,
and relates how she persecuted them with jealousy, suspicion, grumbling,
quarrels, blows given and received; how the husband, checkmated by the
continuity of the tempest, stooped at last, accepted the halter, and
turned the domestic mill like a conjugal and resigned ass:


"For as an hors, I coude bite and whine;
I coude plain, and I was in the gilt....
I plained first, so was our werre ystint.
They were ful glad to excusen hem ful blive
Of thing, the which they never agilt hir live....
I swore that all my walking out by night
Was for to espien wenches that he dight....
For though the pope had sitten hem beside,
I wold not spare hem at hir owen bord....
But certainly I made folk swiche chere,
That in his owen grese I made him frie
For anger, and for veray jalousie.
By God, in erth I was his purgatorie,
For which I hope his soule be in glorie."[223]


She saw the fifth first at the burial of the fourth:


"And Jankin oure clerk was on of tho:
As helpe me God, whan that I saw him go
Aftir the bere, me thought he had a paire
Of legges and of feet, so clene and faire,
That all my herte I yave unto his hold.
He was, I trow, a twenty winter old,
And I was fourty, if I shal say soth....
As helpe me God, I was a lusty on,
And faire, and riche, and yonge, and well begon."[224]


"Yonge," what a word! Was human delusion ever more happily painted? How
life-like is all, and how easy the tone. It is the satire of marriage.
You will find it twenty times in Chaucer. Nothing more is wanted to
exhaust the two subjects of French mockery than to unite with the satire
of marriage the satire of religion.

We find it here; and Rabelais is not more bitter. The monk whom Chaucer
paints is a hypocrite, a jolly fellow, who knows good inns and jovial
hosts better than the poor and the hospitals:


"A Frere there was, a wanton and a mery...
Ful wel beloved, and familier was he
With frankeleins over all in his contree,
And eke with worthy wimmen of the toun...
Full swetely herde he confession,
And pleasant was his absolution.
He was an esy man to give penance,
Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance:
For unto a poure ordre for to give
Is signe that a man is wel yshrive....
And knew wel the tavernes in every toun,
And every hosteler and gay tapstere,
Better than a lazar and a beggere....
It is not honest, it may not avance,
As for to delen with no swich pouraille,
But all with riche and sellers of vitaille....
For many a man so hard is of his herte,
He may not wepe, although him sore smerte.
Therfore in stede of weping and praieres,
Men mote give silver to the poure freres."[225]


This lively irony had an exponent before in Jean de Meung. But Chaucer
pushes it further, and gives it life and motion. His monk begs from
house to house, holding out his wallet:


"In every hous he gan to pore and prie,
And begged mele and chese, or elles corn....
'Yeve us a bushel whete, or malt, or reye,
A Goddes kichel, or a trippe of chese,
Or elles what you list, we may not chese;
A Goddes halfpeny, or a masse peny;
Or yeve us of your braun, if ye have any,
A dagon of your blanket, leve dame,
Our suster dere (lo here I write your name).'...
And whan that he was out at dore, anon,
He planed away the names everich on."[226]


He has kept for the end of his circuit, Thomas, one of his most liberal
clients. He finds him in bed, and ill; here is excellent fruit to suck
and squeeze:


"'God wot,' quod he, 'laboured have I ful sore.
And specially for thy salvation,
Have I sayd many a precious orison....
I have this day ben at your chirche at messe...
And ther I saw our dame, a, wher is she?'"[227]


The dame enters:


"This frere ariseth up ful curtisly,
And hire embraceth in his armes narwe,
And kisseth hire swete and chirketh as a sparwe."[228]...


Then, in his sweetest and most caressing voice, he compliments her, and
says:


"'Thanked be God that you yaf soule and lif,
Yet saw I not this day so faire a wif
In all the chirche, God so save me.'"[229]


Have we not here already Tartuffe and Elmire? But the monk is with a
farmer, and can go to work more quickly and directly. When the
compliments ended, he thinks of the substance, and asks the lady to let
him talk alone with Thomas. He must inquire after the state of his soul:


"'I wol with Thomas speke a litel throw:
Thise curates ben so negligent and slow
To gropen tendrely a conscience....
Now, dame,' quod he, 'jeo vous die sanz doute,
Have I nat of a capon but the liver,
And of your white bred nat but a shiver,
And after that a rosted pigges hed
(But I ne wolde for me no beest were ded),
Than had I with you homly suffisance.
I am a man of litel sustenance,
My spirit hath his fostring in the Bible.
My body is ay so redy and penible
To waken, that my stomak is destroied.'"[230]


Poor man, he raises his hands to heaven, and ends with a sigh.

The wife tells him her child died a fortnight before. Straightway he
manufactures a miracle; how could he earn his money in any better way?
He had a revelation of this death in the "dortour" of the convent; he
saw the child carried to paradise; he rose with his brothers, "with many
a tere trilling on our cheke," and they sang a _Te Deum_:


"'For, sire and dame, trusteth me right wel,
Our orisons ben more effectuel,
And more we seen of Cristes secree thinges
Than borel folk, although that they be kinges.
We live in poverte, and in abstinence,
And borel folk in richesse and dispence....
Lazer and Dives liveden diversely,
And divers guerdon hadden they therby.'"[231]


Presently he spurts out a whole sermon, in a loathsome style, and with
an interest which is plain enough. The sick man, wearied, replies that
he has already given half his fortune to all kinds of monks, and yet he
continually suffers. Listen to the grieved exclamation, the true
indignation of the mendicant monk, who sees himself threatened by the
competition of a brother of the cloth to share his client, his revenue,
his booty, his food-supplies:


"The frere answered: 'O Thomas, dost thou so?
What nedeth you diverse freres to seche?
What nedeth him that hath a parfit leche,
To sechen other leches in the toun?
Your inconstance is your confusion.
Hold ye than me, or elles our covent,
To pray for you ben insufficient?
Thomas, that jape n' is not worth a mite,
Your maladie is for we han to lite.'"[232]


Recognize the great orator; he employs even the grand style to keep the
supplies from being cut off:


"'A, yeve that covent half a quarter otes;
And yeve that covent four and twenty grotes;
And yeve that frere a peny, and let him go:
Nay, nay, Thomas, it may no thing be so.
What is a ferthing worth parted on twelve?
Lo, eche thing that is oned in himself
Is more strong, than whan it is yscatered...
Thou woldest han our labour al for nought.'"[233]


Then he begins again his sermon in a louder tone, shouting at each word,
quoting examples from Seneca and the classics, a terrible fluency, a
trick of his trade, which, diligently applied, must draw money from the
patient. He asks for gold, "to make our cloistre,"


"... 'And yet, God wot, uneth the fundament
Parfourmed is, ne of our pavement
N' is not a tile yet within our wones;
By God, we owen fourty pound for stones.
Now help Thomas, for him that harwed helle,
For elles mote we oure bokes selle,
And if ye lacke oure predication,
Than goth this world all to destruction.
For who so fro this world wold us bereve,
So God me save, Thomas, by your leve,
He wold bereve out of this world the sonne.'"[234]


In the end, Thomas in a rage promises him a gift, tells him to put his
hand in the bed and take it, and sends him away duped, mocked, and
covered with filth.

We have descended now to popular farce; when amusement must be had at
any price, it is sought, as here, in broad jokes, even in filthiness. We
can see how these two coarse and vigorous plants have blossomed in the
dung of the Middle Ages. Planted by the sly fellows of Champagne and
Ile-de-France, watered by the _trouvères_, they were destined fully to
expand, speckled and ruddy, in the large hands of Rabelais. Meanwhile
Chaucer plucks his nosegay from it. Deceived husbands, mishaps in inns,
accidents in bed, cuffs, kicks, and robberies, these suffice to raise a
loud laugh. Side by side with noble pictures of chivalry, he gives us a
train of Flemish grotesque figures, carpenters, joiners, friars,
summoners; blows abound, fists descend on fleshy backs; many nudities
are shown; they swindle one another out of their corn, their wives; they
pitch one another out of a window; they brawl and quarrel. A bruise, a
piece of open filthiness, passes in such society for a sign of wit. The
summoner, being rallied by the friar, gives him tit for tat:


"'This Frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
And, God it wot, that is but litel wonder,
Freres and fendes ben but litel asonder.
For parde, ye han often time herd telle
How that a Frere ravished was to helle
In spirit ones by a visoun,
And as an angel lad him up and doun,
To shewen him the peines that ther were,...
And unto Sathanas he lad him doun.
(And now hath Sathanas,' saith he, 'a tayl
Broder than of a Carrike is the sayl.)
Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas, quod he,
....... and let the Frere see
Wher is the nest of Freres in this place.
And er than half a furlong way of space,
Right so as bees out swarmen of an hive,
Out of the devils... ther gonnen to drive.
A twenty thousand Freres on a route,
And thurghout hell they swarmed all aboute,
And com agen, as fast as they may gon.'"[235]


Such were the coarse buffooneries of the popular imagination.




SECTION V.--The Art of Chaucer


It is high time to return to Chaucer himself. Beyond the two notable
characteristics which settle his place in his age and school of poetry,
there are others which take him out of his age and school. If he was
romantic and gay like the rest, it was after a fashion of his own. He
observes characters, notes their differences, studies the coherence of
their parts, endeavors to describe living individualities--a thing
unheard of in his time, but which the renovators in the sixteenth
century, and first among them Shakespeare, will do afterwards. Is it
already the English positive common-sense and aptitude for seeing the
inside of things which begins to appear? A new spirit, almost manly,
pierces through, in literature as in painting, with Chaucer as with Van
Eyck, with both at the same time; no longer the childish imitation of
chivalrous life[236] or monastic devotion, but the grave spirit of
inquiry and craving for deep truths, whereby art becomes complete. For
the first time, in Chaucer as in Van Eyck, the character described
stands out in relief; its parts are connected; it is no longer an
unsubstantial phantom. You may guess its past and foretell its future
action. Its externals manifest the personal and incommunicable details
of its inner nature, and the infinite complexity of its economy and
motion. To this day, after four centuries, that character is
individualjzed and typical; it remains distinct in our memory, like the
creations of Shakespeare and Rubens. We observe this growth in the very
act. Not only does Chaucer, like Boccaccio, bind his tales into a single
history; but in addition--and this is wanting in Boccaccio--he begins
with the portrait of all his narrators, knight, summoner, man of law,
monk, bailiff or reeve, host, about thirty distinct figures, of every
sex, condition, age, each painted with his disposition, face, costume,
turns of speech, little significant actions, habits, antecedents, each
maintained in his character by his talk and subsequent actions, so that
we can discern here, sooner than in any other nation, the germ of the
domestic novel as we write it to-day. Think of the portraits of the
franklin, the miller, the mendicant friar, and wife of Bath. There are
plenty of others which show the broad brutalities, the coarse, tricks,
and the pleasantries of vulgar life, as well as the gross and plentiful
feastings of sensual life. Here and there honest old swashbucklers, who
double their fists, and tuck up their sleeves; or contented beadles,
who, when they have drunk, will speak nothing but Latin. But by the side
of these there are some choice characters; the knight, who went on a
crusade to Granada and Prussia, brave and courteous:


"And though that he was worthy he was wise,
And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
He never yet no vilanie ne sayde
In alle his lif, unto no manere wight,
He was a veray parfit gentil knight."[237]

"With him, ther was his sone, a yonge Squier,
A lover, and a lusty bacheler,
With lockes crull as they were laide in presse.
Of twenty yere of age he was I gesse.
Of his stature he was of even lengthe,
And wonderly deliver, and grete of strengthe.
And he hadde be somtime in chevachie,
In Flaundres, in Artois, and in Picardie,
And borne him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his ladies grace.
Embrouded was he, as it were a mede
Alle ful of fresshe floures, white and rede.
Singing he was, or floyting alle the day,
He was as fresshe, as is the moneth of May.
Short was his goune, with sieves long and wide.
Wel coude he sitte on hors, and fayre ride.
He coude songes make, and wel endite,
Juste and eke dance, and wel pourtraie and write.
So hote he loved, that by nightertale
He slep no more than doth the nightingale.
Curteis he was, lowly and servisable,
And carf befor his fader at the table."[238]


There is also a poor and learned clerk of Oxford; and finer still, and
more worthy of a modern hand, the Prioress, "Madame Eglantine," who as a
nun, a maiden, a great lady, is ceremonious, and shows signs of
exquisite taste. Would a better be found nowadays in a German chapter,
amid the most modest and lively bevy of sentimental and literary
canonesses?


"Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy
Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Eloy;
And she was cleped Madame Eglentine.
Ful wel she sange the service devine,
Entuned in hire nose ful swetely;
And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly
After the scole of Stratford-atte-bowe,
For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe.
At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle;
So lette no morsel from hire lippes falle,
No wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe.
Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe,
Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest.
In curtesie was sette ful moche hire lest.
Hire over lippe wiped she so clene,
That in hire cuppe was no ferthing sene
Of grese, whan she dronken hadde hire draught,
Ful semely after hire mete she raught.
And sikerly she was of grete disport
And ful plesant, and amiable of port,
And peined hire to contrefeten chere
Of court, and ben estatelich of manere,
And to ben holden digne of reverence."[239]


Are you offended by these provincial affectations? Not at all; it is
delightful to behold these nice and pretty ways, these little
affectations, the waggery and prudery, the half-worldly, half-monastic
smile. We inhale a delicate feminine perfume, preserved and grown old
under the stomacher:


"But for to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous
Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde
With rosted flesh, and milk, and wastel brede.
But sore wept she if on of hem were dede,
Or if men smote it with a yerde smert:
And all was conscience and tendre herte."[240]


Many elderly ladies throw themselves into such affections as these for
lack of others. Elderly! what an objectionable word have I employed! She
was not elderly:


"Ful semely hire wimple ypinched was,
Hire nose tretis; hire eyen grey as glas;
Hire mouth ful smale, and therto soft and red;
But sikerly she hadde a fayre forehed.
It was almost a spanne brode I trowe;
For hardily she was not undergrowe.
Ful fetise was hire cloke, as I was ware.
Of small corall aboute hire arm she bare
A pair of bedes, gauded al with grene;
And thereon heng a broche of gold ful shene,
On whiche was first ywritten a crouned A,
And after, Amor vincit omnia."[241]


A pretty ambiguous device, suitable either for gallantry or devotion;
the lady was both of the world and the cloister: of the world, you may
see it in her dress; of the cloister, you gather it from "another Nonne
also with hire hadde she, that was hire chapelleine, and Preestes thre";
from the Ave Maria which she sings, the long edifying stories which she
relates. She is like a fresh, sweet, and ruddy cherry, made to ripen in
the sun, but which, preserved in an ecclesiastical jar, has become
candied and insipid in the syrup.

Such is the power of reflection which begins to dawn, such the high art.
Chaucer studies here, rather than aims at amusement; he ceases to
gossip, and thinks; instead of surrendering himself to the facility of
flowing improvisation, he plans. Each tale is suited to the teller; the
young squire relates a fantastic and Oriental history; the tipsy miller
a loose and comical story; the honest clerk the touching legend of
Griselda. All these tales are bound together, and that much better than
by Boccaccio, by little veritable incidents, which spring from the
characters of the personages, and such as we light upon in our travels.
The horsemen ride on in good humor, in the sunshine, in the open
country; they converse. The miller has drunk too much ale, and will
speak, "and for no man forbere." The cook goes to sleep on his beast,
and they play practical jokes on him. The monk and the summoner getup a
dispute about their respective lines of business. The host restores
peace, makes them speak or be silent, like a man who has long presided
in the inn parlor, and who has often had to check brawlers. They pass
judgment on the stories they listen to: declaring that there are few
Griseldas in the world; laughing at the misadventures of the tricked
carpenter; drawing a lesson from the moral tale. The poem is no longer,
as in the contemporary literature, a mere procession, but a painting in
which the contrasts are arranged, the attitudes chosen, the general
effect calculated, so that it becomes life and motion; we forget
ourselves at the sight, as in the case of every lifelike work; and we
long to get on horseback on a fine sunny morning, and canter along green
meadows with the pilgrims to the shrine of the good saint of Canterbury.

Weigh the value of the words "general effect." According as we plan it
or not, we enter on our maturity or infancy! The whole future lies in
these two words. Savages or half savages, warriors of the Heptarchy or
knights of the Middle Ages; up to this period, no one had reached to
this point. They had strong emotions, tender at times, and each
expressed them according to the original gift of his race, some by short
cries, others by continuous babble. But they did not command or guide
their impressions; they sang or conversed by impulse, at random,
according to the bent of their disposition, leaving their ideas to
present themselves as they might, and when they hit upon order, it was
ignorantly and involuntarily. Here for the first time appears a
superiority of intellect, which at the instant of conception suddenly
halts, rises above itself, passes judgment, and says to itself, "This
phrase tells the same thing as the last--remove it; these two ideas are
disjointed—connect them; this description is feeble--reconsider it."
When a man can speak thus he has an idea, not learned in the schools,
but personal and practical, of the human mind, its process and needs,
and of things also, their composition and combinations; he has a style,
that is, he is capable of making everything understood and seen by the
human mind. He can extract from every object, landscape, situation,
character, the special and significant marks, so as to group and arrange
them, in order to compose an artificial work which surpasses the natural
work in its purity and completeness. He is capable, as Chaucer was, of
seeking out in the old common forest of the Middle Ages, stories and
legends, to replant them in his own soil, and make them send out new
shoots. He has the right and the power, as Chaucer had, of copying and
translating, because by dint of retouching he impresses on his
translations and copies his original mark; he re-creates what he
imitates, because through or by the side of worn-out fancies and
monotonous stories, he can display, as Chaucer did, the charming ideas
of an amiable and elastic mind, the thirty master-forms of the
fourteenth century, the splendid freshness of the verdurous landscape
and spring-time of England. He is not far from conceiving an idea of
truth and life. He is on the brink of independent thought and fertile
discovery. This was Chaucer's position. At the distance of a century and
a half, he has affinity with the poets of Elizabeth[242] by his gallery
of pictures, and with the reformers of the sixteenth century by his
portrait of the good parson.

Affinity merely. He advanced a few steps beyond the threshold of his
art, but he paused at the end of the vestibule. He half opens the great
door of the temple, but does not take his seat there; at most, he sat
down in it only at intervals. In "Arcite and Palamon," in "Troilus and
Cressida," he sketches sentiments, but does not create characters; he
easily and naturally traces the winding course of events and
conversations, but does not mark the precise outline of a striking
figure. If occasionally, as in the description of the temple of Mars,
after the "Thebaid" of Statius, feeling at his back the glowing breeze
of poetry, he draws out his feet, clogged with the mud of the Middle
Ages, and at a bound stands upon the poetic plain on which Statius
imitated Vergil and equalled Lucan, he, at other times, again falls back
into the childish gossip of the _trouvères_, or the dull gabble of
learned clerks--to "Dan Phebus or Apollo-Delphicus." Elsewhere, a
commonplace remark on art intrudes in the midst of an impassioned
description. He uses three thousand verses to conduct Troilus to his
first interview. He is like a precocious and poetical child, who mingles
in his love-dreams quotations from his grammar and recollections of his
alphabet.[243] Even in the "Canterbury Tales" he repeats himself,
unfolds artless developments, forgets to concentrate his passion or his
idea. He begins a jest, and scarcely ends it. He dilutes a bright
coloring in a monotonous stanza. His voice is like that of a boy
breaking into manhood. At first a manly and firm accent is maintained,
then a shrill sweet sound shows that his growth is not finished, and
that his strength is subject to weakness. Chaucer sets out as if to quit
the Middle Ages; but in the end he is there still. To-day he composes
the "Canterbury Tales"; yesterday he was translating the "Roman de la
Rose." To-day he is studying the complicated machinery of the heart,
discovering the issues of primitive education or of the ruling
disposition, and creating the comedy of manners; to-morrow he will have
no pleasure but in curious events, smooth allegories, amorous
discussions, imitated from the French, or learned moralities from the
ancients. Alternately he is an observer and a _trouvère_; instead of
the step he ought to have advanced, he has but made a half-step.

Who has prevented him, and the others who surround him? We meet with the
obstacle in the tales he has translated of Melibeus, of the Parson, in
his "Testament of Love" in short, so long as he writes verse, he is at
his ease; as soon as he takes to prose, a sort of chain winds around his
feet and stops him. His imagination is free, and his reasoning a slave.
The rigid scholastic divisions, the mechanical manner of arguing and
replying, the ergo, the Latin quotations, the authority of Aristotle and
the Fathers, come and weigh down his budding thought. His native
invention disappears under the discipline imposed. The servitude is so
heavy that even in the work of one of his contemporaries, the "Testament
of Love," which, for a long time, was believed to be written by Chaucer,
amid the most touching plaints and the most smarting pains, the
beautiful ideal lady, the heavenly mediator who appears in a vision,
Love, sets her theses, establishes that the cause of a cause is the
cause of the thing caused, and reasons as pedantically as they would at
Oxford. In what can talent, even feeling, end, when it is kept down by
such shackles? What succession of original truths and new doctrines
could be found and proved, when in a moral tale, like that of Melibeus
and his wife Prudence, it was thought necessary to establish a formal
controversy, to quote Seneca and Job, to forbid tears, to bring forward
the weeping Christ to authorize tears, to enumerate every proof, to call
in Solomon, Cassiodorus, and Cato; in short, to write a book for
schools? The public cares only for pleasant and lively thoughts; not
serious and general ideas; these latter are for a special class only. As
soon as Chaucer gets into a reflective mood, straightway Saint Thomas,
Peter Lombard, the manual of sins, the treatise on definition and
syllogism, the army of the ancients and of the Fathers, descend from
their glory, enter his brain, speak in his stead; and the _trouvère's_
pleasant voice becomes the dogmatic and sleep-inspiring voice of a
doctor. In love and satire he has experience, and he invents; in what
regards morality and philosophy he has learning, and copies. For an
instant, by a solitary leap, he entered upon the close observation, and
the genuine study of man; he could not keep his ground, he did not take
his seat, he took a poetic excursion; and no one followed him. The level
of the century is lower; he is on it himself for the most part. He is in
the company of narrators like Froissart, of elegant speakers like
Charles of Orléans, of gossipy and barren verse-writers like Gower,
Lydgate, and Occleve. There is no fruit, but frail and fleeting
blossoms, many useless branches, still more dying or dead branches; such
is this literature. And why? Because it had no longer a root; after
three centuries of effort, a heavy instrument cut it underground. This
instrument was the Scholastic Philosophy.




SECTION VI.--Scholastic Philosophy


Beneath every literature there is a philosophy. Beneath, every work of
art is an idea of nature and of life; this idea leads the poet. Whether
the author knows it or not, he writes in order to exhibit it; and the
characters which he fashions, like the events which he arranges, only
serve to bring to light the dim creative conception which raises and
combines them. Underlying Homer appears the noble life of heroic
paganism and of happy Greece. Underlying Dante, the sad and violent life
of fanatical Catholicism and of the much-hating Italians. From either we
might draw a theory of man and of the beautiful. It is so with others;
and this is how, according to the variations, the birth, blossoms,
decline, or sluggishness of the master-idea, literature varies, is born,
flourishes, degenerates, comes to an end. Whoever plants the one, plants
the other: whoever undermines the one, undermines the other. Place in
all the minds of any age a new grand idea of nature and life, so that
they feel and produce it with their whole heart and strength, and you
will see them, seized with the craving to express it, invent forms of
art and groups of figures. Take away from these minds every grand new
idea of nature and life, and you will see them, deprived of the craving
to express all-important thoughts, copy, sink into silence, or rave.

What has become of all these all-important thoughts? What labor worked
them out? What studies nourished them? The laborers did not lack zeal.
In the twelfth century the energy of their minds was admirable. At
Oxford there were thirty thousand scholars. No building in Paris could
contain the crowd of Abelard's disciples; when he retired to solitude,
they accompanied him in such a multitude that the desert became a town.
No difficulty repulsed them. There is a story of a young boy, who,
though beaten by his master, was wholly bent on remaining with him, that
he might still learn. When the terrible encyclopædia of Aristotle was
introduced, though disfigured and unintelligible it was devoured. The
only question presented to them, that of universals, so abstract and
dry, so embarrassed by Arabic obscurities and Greek subtitles, during
centuries, was seized upon eagerly. Heavy and awkward as was the
instrument supplied to them, I mean syllogism, they made themselves
masters of it, rendered it still more heavy, plunged it into every
object and in every direction. They constructed monstrous books, in
great numbers, cathedrals of syllogism, of unheard-of architecture, of
prodigious finish, heightened in effect by intensity of intellectual
power, which the whole sum of human labor has only twice been able to
match.[244] These young and valiant minds thought they had found the
temple of truth; they rushed at it headlong, in legions, breaking in the
doors, clambering over the walls, leaping into the interior, and so
found themselves at the bottom of a moat. Three centuries of labor at
the bottom of this black moat added not one idea to the human mind.

For consider the questions which they treat of. They seem to be
marching, but are merely marking time. People would say, to see them
moil and toil, that they will educe from heart and brain some great
original creed, and yet all belief was imposed upon them from the
outset. The system was made; they could only arrange and comment upon
it. The conception comes not from them, but from Constantinople.
Infinitely complicated and subtle as it is, the supreme work of Oriental
mysticism and Greek metaphysics, so disproportioned to their young
understanding, they exhaust themselves to reproduce it, and moreover
burden their unpractised hands with the weight of a logical instrument
which Aristotle created for theory and not for practice, and which ought
to have remained in a cabinet of philosophical curiosities, without
being ever carried into the field of action. "Whether the divine essence
engendered the Son, or was engendered by the Father; why the three
persons together are not greater than one alone; attributes determine
persons, not substance, that is, nature; how properties can exist in the
nature of God, and not determine it; if created spirits are local and
can be circumscribed; if God can know more things than He is aware
of";[245]--these are the ideas which they moot: what truth could issue
thence? From hand to hand the chimera grows, and spreads wider its
gloomy wings. "Can God cause that, the place and body being retained,
the body shall have no position, that is, existence in place?--Whether
the impossibility of being engendered is a constituent property of the
First Person of the Trinity--Whether identity, similitude, and equality
are real relations in God."[246] Duns Scotus distinguishes three kinds
of matter: matter which is firstly first, secondly first, thirdly first.
According to him, we must clear this triple hedge of thorny abstractions
in order to understand the production of a sphere of brass. Under such a
regimen, imbecility soon makes its appearance. Saint Thomas himself
considers, "whether the body of Christ arose with its wounds--whether
this body moves with the motion of the host and the chalice in
consecration--whether at the first instant of conception Christ had the
use of free judgment--whether Christ was slain by himself or by
another?" Do you think you are at the limits of human folly? Listen. He
considers "whether the dove in which the Holy Spirit appeared was a real
animal--whether a glorified body can occupy one and the same place at
the same time as another glorified body--whether in the state of
innocence all children were masculine?" I pass over others as to the
digestion of Christ, and some still more untranslatable.[247] This is
the point reached by the most esteemed doctor, the most judicious mind,
the Bossuet of the Middle Ages. Even in this ring of inanities the
answers are laid down. Roscellinus and Abelard were excommunicated,
exiled, imprisoned, because they swerved from it. There is a complete
minute dogma which closes all issues; there is no means of escaping;
after a hundred wriggles and a hundred efforts you must come and tumble
into a formula. If by mysticism you try to fly over their heads, if by
experience you endeavor to creep beneath, powerful talons await you at
your exit. The wise man passes for a magician, the enlightened man for a
heretic. The Waldenses, the Catharists, the disciples of John of Parma,
were burned; Roger Bacon died only just in time, otherwise he might have
been burned. Under this constraint men ceased to think; for he who
speaks of thought, speaks of an effort at invention, an individual
creation, an energetic action. They recite a lesson, or sing a
catechism; even in paradise, even in ecstasy and the divinest raptures
of love, Dante thinks himself bound to show an exact memory and a
scholastic orthodoxy. How then with the rest? Some, like Raymond Lully,
set about inventing an instrument of reasoning to serve in place of the
understanding. About the fourteenth century, under the blows of Occam,
this verbal science began to totter; they saw that its entities were
only words; it was discredited. In 1367, at Oxford, of thirty thousand
students, there remained six thousand;[248] they still set their
"Barbara and Felapton," but only in the way of routine. Each one in turn
mechanically traversed the petty region of threadbare cavils, scratched
himself in the briers of quibbles, and burdened himself with his bundle
of texts; nothing more. The vast body of science which was to have
formed and vivified the whole thought of man, was reduced to a
text-book.

So, little by little, the conception which fertilized and ruled all
others, dried up; the deep spring, whence flowed all poetic streams, was
found empty; science furnished nothing more to the world. What further
works could the world produce? As Spain, later on, renewing the Middle
Ages, after having shone splendidly and foolishly by her chivalry and
devotion, by Lope de Vega and Calderon, Loyola and St. Theresa, became
enervated through the Inquisition and through casuistry, and ended by
sinking into a brutish silence; so the Middle Ages, outstripping Spain,
after displaying the senseless heroism of the Crusades, and the poetical
ecstasy of the cloister, after producing chivalry and saintship, Francis
of Assisi, St. Louis, and Dante, languished under the Inquisition and
the scholastic learning, and became extinguished in idle raving and
inanity.

Must we quote all these good people who speak without having anything to
say? You may find them in Warton;[249] dozens of translators, importing
the poverties of French literature, and imitating imitations; rhyming
chroniclers, most commonplace of men, whom we only read because we must
accept history from every quarter, even from imbeciles; spinners and
spinsters of didactic poems, who pile up verses on the training of
falcons, on heraldry, on chemistry; editors of moralities, who invent
the same dream over again for the hundredth time, and get themselves
taught universal history by the goddess Sapience. Like the writers of
the Latin decadence, these folk only think of copying, compiling,
abridging, constructing in text-books, in rhymed memoranda, the
encyclopædia of their times.

Listen to the most illustrious, the grave Gower--"morall Gower," as he
was called![250] Doubtless here and there he contains a remnant of
brilliancy and grace. He is like an old secretary of a Court of Love,
André le Chapelain or any other, who would pass the day in solemnly
registering the sentences of ladies, and in the evening, partly asleep
on his desk, would see in a half-dream their sweet smile and their
beautiful eyes.[251] The ingenious but exhausted vein of Charles of
Orléans still flows in his French ballads. He has the same fondling
delicacy, almost a little affected. The poor little poetic spring flows
yet in thin, transparent streamlets over the smooth pebbles, and murmurs
with a babble, pretty, but so low that at times you cannot hear it. But
dull is the rest! His great poem, "Confessio Amantis," is a dialogue
between a lover and his confessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Meung,
having for object, like the "Roman de la Rose," to explain and classify
the impediments of love. The superannuated theme is always reappearing,
covered by a crude erudition. You will find here an exposition of
hermetic science, lectures on the philosophy of Aristotle, a treatise on
politics, a litany of ancient and modern legends gleaned from the
compilers, marred in the passage by the pedantry of the schools and the
ignorance of the age. It is a cartload of scholastic rubbish; the sewer
tumbles upon this feeble spirit, which of itself was flowing clearly,
but now, obstructed by tiles, bricks, plaster, ruins from all quarters
of the globe, drags on darkened and sluggish. Gower, one of the most
learned of his time,[252] supposed that Latin was invented by the old
prophetess Carmentis; that the grammarians, Aristarchus, Donatus, and
Didymus, regulated its syntax, pronunciation, and prosody; that it was
adorned by Cicero with the flowers of eloquence and rhetoric; then
enriched by translations from the Arabic, Chaldæan, and Greek; and that
at last, after much labor of celebrated writers, it attained its final
perfection in Ovid, the poet of love. Elsewhere he discovered that
Ulysses learned rhetoric from Cicero, magic from Zoroaster, astronomy
from Ptolemy, and philosophy from Plato. And what a style! so long, so
dull,[253] so drawn out by repetitions, the most minute details,
garnished with references to his text, like a man who, with his eyes
glued to his Aristotle and his Ovid, a slave of his musty parchments,
can do nothing but copy and string his rhymes together. Schoolboys even
in old age, they seem to believe that every truth, all wit, is their
great wood-bound books; that they have no need to find out and invent
for themselves; that their whole business is to repeat; that this is, in
fact, man's business. The scholastic system had enthroned the dead
letter, and peopled the world with dead understandings.

After Gower come Occleve and Lydgate.[254] "My father Chaucer would
willingly have taught me," says Occleve, "but I was dull, and learned
little or nothing." He paraphrased in verse a treatise of Egidius, on
government; these are moralities. There are others, on compassion, after
Augustine, and on the art of dying; then love-tales; a letter from
Cupid, dated from his court in the month of May. Love and
moralities,[255] that is, abstractions and affectation, were the taste
of the time; and so, in the time of Lebrun, of Esménard, at the close
of contemporaneous French literature,[256] they produced collections of
didactic poems, and odes to Chloris. As for the monk Lydgate, he had
some talent, some imagination, especially in high-toned descriptions: it
was the last flicker of a dying literature; gold received a golden
coating, precious stones were placed upon diamonds, ornaments multiplied
and made fantastic; as in their dress and buildings, so in their
style.[257] Look at the costumes of Henry IV and Henry V, monstrous
heart-shaped or horn-shaped head-dresses, long sleeves covered with
ridiculous designs, the plumes, and again the oratories, armorial tombs,
little gaudy chapels, like conspicuous flowers under the naves of the
Gothic perpendicular. When we can no more speak to the soul, we try to
speak to the eyes. This is what Lydgate does, nothing more. Pageants or
shows are required of him, "disguisings" for the company of goldsmiths;
a mask before the king, a May entertainment for the sheriffs of London,
a drama of the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, a
masquerade, a Christmas show; he gives the plan and furnishes the
verses. In this matter he never runs dry; two hundred and fifty-one
poems are attributed to him. Poetry thus conceived becomes a
manufacture; it is composed by the yard. Such was the judgment of the
Abbot of St. Albans, who, having got him to translate a legend in verse,
pays a hundred shillings for the whole, verse, writing, and
illuminations, placing the three works on a level. In fact, no more
thought was required for the one than for the others. His three great
works, "The Fall of Princes, The Destruction of Troy," and "The Siege
of Thebes," are only translations or paraphrases, verbose, erudite,
descriptive, a kind of chivalrous processions, colored for the twentieth
time, in the same manner, on the same vellum. The only point which rises
above the average, at least in the first poem, is the idea of
Fortune,[258] and the violent vicissitudes of human life. If there was a
philosophy at this time, this was it. They willingly narrated horrible
and tragic histories; gather them from antiquity down to their own day;
they were far from the trusting and passionate piety which felt the hand
of God in the government of the world; they saw that the world went
blundering here and there like a drunken man. A sad and gloomy world,
amused by eternal pleasures, oppressed with a dull misery, which
suffered and feared without consolation or hope, isolated between the
ancient spirit in which it had no living hope, and the modern spirit
whose active science it ignored. Fortune, like a black smoke, hovers
over all, and shuts out the sight of heaven. They picture it as follows:


"Her face semyng cruel and terrible
And by disdaynè menacing of loke,...
An hundred handes she had, of eche part...
Some of her handes lyft up men alofte,
To hye estate of worldlye dignitè;
Another hande griped ful unsofte,
Which cast another in grete adversite."[259]


They look upon the great unhappy ones, a captive king, a dethroned
queen, assassinated princes, noble cities destroyed,[260] lamentable
spectacles as exhibited in Germany and France, and of which there will
be plenty in England; and they can only regard them with a harsh
resignation. Lydgate ends by reciting a commonplace of mechanical piety,
by way of consolation. The reader makes the sign of the cross, yawns,
and goes away. In fact, poetry and religion are no longer capable of
suggesting a genuine sentiment. Authors copy, and copy again. Hawes[261]
copies the "House of Fame" of Chaucer, and a sort of allegorical amorous
poem, after the "Roman de la Rose." Barclay[262] translates the "Mirror
of Good Manners" and the "Ship of Fools." Continually we meet with dull
abstractions, used up and barren; it is the scholastic phase of poetry.
If anywhere there is an accent of greater originality, it is in this
"Ship of Fools," and in Lydgate's "Dance of Death," bitter buffooneries,
sad gayeties, which, in the hands of artists and poets, were having
their run throughout Europe. They mock at each other, grotesquely and
gloomily; poor, dull, and vulgar figures, shut up in a ship, or made to
dance on their tomb to the sound of a fiddle, played by a grinning
skeleton. At the end of all this mouldy talk, and amid the disgust which
they have conceived for each other, a clown, a tavern Triboulet,[263]
composer of little jeering and macaronic verses, Skelton[264] makes his
appearance, a virulent pamphleteer, who, jumbling together French,
English, Latin phrases, with slang, and fashionable words, invented
words, intermingled with short rhymes, fabricates a sort of literary
mud, with which he bespatters Wolsey and the bishops. Style, metre,
rhyme, language, art of every kind, is at an end; beneath the vain
parade of official style there is only a heap of rubbish. Yet, as he
says,


"Though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and gagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty, moth-eaten,
Yf ye take welle therewithe,
It hath in it some pithe."


It is full of political animus, sensual liveliness, English and popular
instincts; it lives. It is a coarse life, still elementary, swarming
with ignoble vermin, like that which appears in a great decomposing
body. It is life, nevertheless, with its two great features which it is
destined to display: the hatred of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which
is the Reformation; the return to the senses and to natural life, which
is the Renaissance.




[Footnote 193: Born between 1328 and 1345, died in 1400.]

[Footnote 194: Renan, "De l'Art au Moyen Age."]

[Footnote 195: See Froissart, his life with the Count of Foix
and with King Richard II.]

[Footnote 196: "Knight's Tale," II. p. 59, lines 1957-1964.]

[Footnote 197: "Knight's Tale," II. p. 59, lines 1977-1996.]

[Footnote 198: Ibid., p. 61, lines 2043-2050.]

[Footnote 199: "Knight's Tale," II. p. 63, lines 2120-2188.]

[Footnote 200: The House of Fame.]

[Footnote 201: André le Chapelain, 1170.]

[Footnote 202: Also the "Court of Love," and perhaps "The Assemble
of Ladies" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci."]

[Footnote 203: "Troilus and Cressida," vol, V. bk. 3, p. 12.]

[Footnote 204: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. bk. 3, p. 40.]

[Footnote 205: Ibid. p. 4.]

[Footnote 206: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. IV. bk. 2, p. 292.]

[Footnote 207: Ibid. vol. V. bk. 4, p. 97.]

[Footnote 208: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. bk. 5, p. 119 et passim.]

[Footnote 209: "The Flower and the Leaf," VI. p. 244, lines 6-32.]

[Footnote 210: Ibid. p. 245, line 33.]

[Footnote 211: Ibid. VI. p. 246, lines 78-133.]

[Footnote 212: "The Cuckow and Nightingale," VI. p. 121, lines 67-85.]

[Footnote 213: Ibid. p. 126, lines 230-241.]

[Footnote 214: Stendhal, "On Love: the difference of Love-taste
and Love-passion."]

[Footnote 215: "The Court of Love," about 1353, et seq. See also
the "Testament of Love."]

[Footnote 216: "Troilus and Cressida," vol. V. III. pp. 44, 45.]

[Footnote 217: The story of the pear-tree (Merchant's Tale), and
of the cradle (Reeve's Tale), for instance, in the "Canterbury
Tales."]

[Footnote 218: "Canterbury Tales" prologue, p. 10, line 323.]

[Footnote 219: Ibid. p. 12, line 373.]

[Footnote 220: "Canterbury Tales," prologue, p. 21, line 688.]

[Footnote 221: Ibid. II. prologue, p. 14, line 460.]

[Footnote 222: "Canterbury Tales," ii., Wife of Bath's
Prologue, p. 168, lines 5610-5739.]

[Footnote 223: Ibid. p. 179, lines 5968-6072.]

[Footnote 224: "Canterbury Tales," ii., Wife of Bath's Prologue,
p. 185, lines 6177-6188.]

[Footnote 225: Ibid, prologue, II. p. 7, line 208 et passim.]

[Footnote 226: "Canterbury Tales," The Sompnoures Tale, II. p. 220,
lines 7319-7340.]

[Footnote 227: Ibid. p. 221, line 7366.]

[Footnote 228: Ibid. p. 221, line 7384.]

[Footnote 229: Ibid. p. 222, line 7389.]

[Footnote 230: "Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Tale, p. 222,
lines 7397-7429.]

[Footnote 231: Ibid. p. 223, lines 7450-7460.]

[Footnote 232: Ibid. p. 226, lines 7536-7544.]

[Footnote 233: "Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Tale, p. 226,
lines 7545-7553.]

[Footnote 234: Ibid. p. 230, lines 7685-7695.]

[Footnote 235: "Canterbury Tales," II., The Sompnoures Prologue,
p. 217, lines 7254-7279.]

[Footnote 236: See in "The Canterbury Tales" the Rhyme of Sir Topas,
a parody on the chivalric histories. Each character there seems a
precursor of Cervantes.]

[Footnote 237: Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 3, lines 68-72.]

[Footnote 238: Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 3, lines 79-100.]

[Footnote 239: Prologue to "Canterbury Tales," II. p. 4, lines 118-141.]

[Footnote 240:  Ibid. p. 5, lines 142-150.]

[Footnote 241: Ibid. p. 5, lines 151-162.]

[Footnote 242: Tennyson, in his "Dream of Fair Women," sings:
"Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts, that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still."--Tr.]

[Footnote 243: Speaking of Cressida, IV. book I. p. 236, he says:
"Right as our first letter is now an a,
In beautie first so stood she makeles,
Her goodly looking gladed all the prees,
Nas never seene thing to be praised so derre,
Nor under cloude blacke so bright a sterre."]

[Footnote 244: Under Proclus and under Hegel. Duns Scotus, at the age of
thirty-one, died, leaving beside his sermons and commentaries, twelve
folio volumes, in a small close handwriting, in a style like Hegel's, on
the same subject as Proclus treats of. Similarly with Saint Thomas and the
whole train of schoolmen. No idea can be formed of such a labor before
handling the books themselves.]

[Footnote 245: Peter Lombard, "Book of Sentences." It was the classic
of the Middle Ages.]

[Footnote 246: Duns Scotus, ed. 1639.]

[Footnote 247: Utrum angelus diligat se ipsum dilectione naturali
vel electiva? Utrum in statu innocentiæ fuerit generatio per coitum?
Utrum omnes fuissent nati in sexu masculino? Utrum cognitio angeli
posset dici matutina et vespertina? Utrum martyribus aureola debeatur?
Utrum virgo Maria fuerit virgo in concipiendo? Utrum remanserit virgo post
partum? The reader may look out in the text the reply to these last two
questions. (S. Thomas, "Summa Theologica," ed. 1677.)]

[Footnote 248: The Rev. Henry Anstey, in his Introduction to
"Munimenta Academica," Lond. 1868, says that "the statement
of Richard of Armagh that there were in the thirteenth century
30,000 scholars at Oxford is almost incredible." P. XLVIII.--Tr.]

[Footnote 249: "History of English Poetry," vol. II.]

[Footnote 250: Contemporary with Chaucer. The "Confessio Amantis"
dates from 1393.]

[Footnote 251: "History of Rosiphele. Ballads."]

[Footnote 252: Warton, II. 240.]

[Footnote 253: See, for instance his description of the sun's crown,
the most poetical passage in book VII.]

[Footnote 254: 1420, 1430.]

[Footnote 255: This is the title Froissart (1397) gave to his collection
when presenting it to Richard II.]

[Footnote 256: Lebrun, 1729-1807; Esménard, 1770-1812.]

[Footnote 257: Lydgate, "The Destruction of Troy"--description of
Hector's chapel. Especially read the Pageants or Solemn Entries.]

[Footnote 258: See the Vision of Fortune, a gigantic figure. In
this painting he shows both feeling and talent.]

[Footnote 259: Lydgate, "Fall of Princes." Warton, II. 280.]

[Footnote 260: The War of the Hussites, The Hundred Years' War,
and The War of the Roses.]

[Footnote 261: About 1506. "The Temple of Glass. Passetyme of
Pleasure."]

[Footnote 262: About 1500.]

[Footnote 263: The court fool in Victor Hugo's drama of "Le Roi
s'amuse."--Tr.]

[Footnote 264: Died 1529; Poet-Laureate 1489. His "Bouge of Court,"
his "Crown of Laurel," his "Elegy on the Death of the Earl of
Northumberland," are well written, and belong to official poetry.]




BOOK II.--THE RENAISSANCE




CHAPTER FIRST


The Pagan Renaissance


_PART I.--Manners of the Time_


SECTION I.--Ideas of the Middle Ages


For seventeen centuries a deep and sad thought had weighed upon the
spirit of man, first to overwhelm it, then to exalt and to weaken it,
never losing its hold throughout this long space of time. It was the
idea of the weakness and decay of the human race. Greek corruption,
Roman oppression, and the dissolution of the ancient world, had given
rise to it; it, in its turn, had produced a stoical resignation, an
epicurean indifference, Alexandrian mysticism, and the Christian hope in
the kingdom of God. "The world is evil and lost, let us escape by
insensibility, amazement, ecstasy." Thus spoke the philosophers; and
religion, coming after, announced that the end was near; "Prepare, for
the kingdom of God is at hand." For a thousand years universal ruin
incessantly drove still deeper into their hearts this gloomy thought;
and when man in the feudal state raised himself, by sheer force of
courage and muscles, from the depths of final imbecility and general
misery, he discovered his thought and his work fettered by the crushing
idea, which, forbidding a life of nature and worldly hopes, erected into
ideals the obedience of the monk and the dreams of fanatics.

It grew ever worse and worse. For the natural result of such a
conception, as of the miseries which engender it, and the discouragement
which it gives rise to, is to do away with personal action, and to
replace originality by submission. From the fourth century, gradually
the dead letter was substituted for the living faith. Christians
resigned themselves into the hands of the clergy, they into the hands of
the pope. Christian opinions were subordinated to theologians, and
theologians to the Fathers. Christian faith was reduced to the
accomplishment of works, and works to the accomplishment of ceremonies.
Religion, fluid during the first centuries, was now congealed into a
hard crystal, and the coarse contact of the barbarians had deposited
upon its surface a layer of idolatry; theocracy and the Inquisition, the
monopoly of the clergy and the prohibition of the Scriptures, the
worship of relics and the sale of indulgences began to appear. In place
of Christianity, the church; in place of a free creed, enforced
orthodoxy; in place of moral fervor, fixed religious practices; in place
of the heart and stirring thought, outward and mechanical discipline:
such are the characteristics of the Middle Ages. Under this constraint
thinking society had ceased to think; philosophy was turned into a
text-book, and poetry into dotage; and mankind, slothful and crouching,
delivering up their conscience and their conduct into the hands of their
priests, seemed but as puppets, fit only for reciting a catechism and
mumbling over beads.[265]

At last invention makes another start; and it makes it by the efforts of
the lay society, which rejected theocracy, kept the State free, and
which presently discovered, or rediscovered, one after another, the
industries, sciences, and arts. All was renewed; America and the Indies
were added to the map of the world; the shape of the earth was
ascertained, the system of the universe propounded, modern philology was
inaugurated, the experimental sciences set on foot, art and literature
shot forth like a harvest, religion was transformed; there was no
province of human intelligence and action which was not refreshed and
fertilized by this universal effort. It was so great that it passed from
the innovators to the laggards, and reformed Catholicism in the face of
Protestantism which it formed. It seems as though men had suddenly
opened their eyes and seen. In fact, they attain a new and superior kind
of intelligence. It is the proper feature of this age that men no longer
make themselves masters of objects by bits, or isolated, or through
scholastic or mechanical classifications, but as a whole, in general and
complete views, with the eager grasp of a sympathetic spirit, which
being placed before a vast object, penetrates it in all its parts, tries
it in all its relations, appropriates and assimilates it, impresses upon
itself its living and potent image, so life-like and so powerful, that
it is fain to translate it into externals through a work of art or an
action. An extraordinary warmth of soul, a superabundant and splendid
imagination, reveries, visions, artists, believers, founders,
creators--that is what such a form of intellect produces; for to create
we must have, as had Luther and Loyola, Michel Angelo and Shakespeare,
an idea, not abstract, partial, and dry, but well defined, finished,
sensible--a true creation, which acts inwardly, and struggles to appear
to the light. This was Europe's grand age, and the most notable epoch of
human growth. To this day we live from its sap; we only carry on its
pressure and efforts.




SECTION II.--Growth of New Ideas


When human power is manifested so clearly and in such great works, it is
no wonder if the ideal changes, and the old pagan idea reappears. It
recurs, bringing with it the worship of beauty and vigor, first in
Italy; for this, of all countries in Europe, is the most pagan, and the
nearest to the ancient civilization; thence in France and Spain, and
Flanders, and even in Germany; and finally in England. How is it
propagated? What revolution of manners reunited mankind at this time,
everywhere, under a sentiment which they had forgotten for fifteen
hundred years? Merely that their condition had improved, and they felt
it. The idea ever expresses the actual situation, and the creatures of
the imagination, like the conceptions of the mind, only manifest the
state of society and the degree of its welfare; there is a fixed
connection between what man admires and what he is. While misery
overwhelms him, while the decadence is visible, and hope shut out, he is
inclined to curse his life on earth, and seek consolation in another
sphere. As soon as his sufferings are alleviated, his power made
manifest, his prospects brightened, he begins once more to love the
present life, to be self-confident, to love and praise energy, genius,
all the effective faculties which labor to procure him happiness. About
the twentieth year of Elizabeth's reign, the nobles gave up shield and
two-handed sword for the rapier;[266] a little, almost imperceptible
fact, yet vast, for it is like the change which sixty years ago made us
give up the sword at court, to leave us with our arms swinging about in
our black coats. In fact, it was the close of feudal life, and the
beginning of court life, just as today court life is at an end, and the
democratic reign has begun. With the two-handed swords, heavy coats of
mail, feudal keeps, private warfare, permanent disorder, all the
scourges of the Middle Ages retired, and faded into the past. The
English had done with the Wars of the Roses. They no longer ran the risk
of being pillaged to-morrow for being rich, and hanged the next day for
being traitors; they have no further need to furbish up their armor,
make alliances with powerful nations, lay in stores for the winter,
gather together men-at-arms, scour the country to plunder and hang
others.[267] The monarchy, in England, as throughout Europe, establishes
peace in the community,[268] and with peace appear the useful arts.
Domestic comfort follows civil security; and man, better furnished in
his home, better protected in his hamlet, takes pleasure in his life on
earth, which he has changed, and means to change.

Toward the close of the fifteenth century[269] the impetus was given;
commerce and the woolen trade made a sudden advance, and such an
enormous one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, "whereby
the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and come into
riches and wealthy livings,"[270] so that in 1553, 40,000 pieces of
cloth were exported in English ships. It was already the England which
we see to-day, a land of green meadows, intersected by hedgerows,
crowded with cattle, and abounding in ships--a manufacturing opulent
land, with a people of beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they
enrich themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent that in
half a century the produce of an acre was doubled.[271] They grew so
rich that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I the Commons
represented three times the wealth of the Upper House. The ruin of
Antwerp by the Duke of Parma[272] sent to England "the third part of the
merchants and manufacturers, who made silk, damask, stockings, taffetas,
and serges." The defeat of the Armada and the decadence of Spain opened
the seas to English merchants.[273] The toiling hive, who would dare,
attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was about to
reap its advantages and set out on its voyages, buzzing over the
universe.

At the base and on the summit of society, in all ranks of life, in all
grades of human condition, this new welfare became visible. In 1534,
considering that the streets of London were "very noyous and foul, and
in many places thereof very jeopardous to all people passing and
repassing, as well on horseback as on foot," Henry VIII began the paving
of the city. New streets covered the open spaces where the young men
used to run races and to wrestle. Every year the number of taverns,
theatres, gambling-rooms, bear-gardens, increased. Before the time of
Elizabeth the country-houses of gentlemen were little more than
straw-thatched cottages, plastered with the coarsest clay, lighted only
by trellises. "Howbeit," says Harrison (1580), "such as be latelie
builded are commonlie either of bricke or hard stone, or both; their
roomes large and comelie, and houses of office further distant from
their lodgings." The old wooden houses were covered with plaster,
"which, beside the delectable whitenesse of the stuffe itselfe, is laied
on so even and smoothlie, as nothing in my judgment can be done with
more exactnesse."[274] This open admiration shows from what hovels they
had escaped. Glass was at last employed for windows, and the bare walls
were covered with hangings, on which visitors might see, with delight
and astonishment, plants, animals, figures. They began to use stoves,
and experienced the unwonted pleasure of being warm. Harrison notes
three important changes which had taken place in the farm-houses of his
time:


"One is, the multitude of chimnies lately erected, whereas in their
yoong daies there were not above two or three, if so manie, in most
uplandishe townes of the realme.... The second is the great (although
not generall), amendment of lodging, for our fathers (yea and we
ourselves also) have lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats
covered onelie with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain, or
hop-harlots, and a good round log under their heads, insteed of a
bolster or pillow. If it were so that the good man of the house, had
within seven yeares after his marriage purchased a matteres or
flockebed, and thereto a sacke of chaffe to rest his head upon, he
thought himselfe to be as well lodged as the lord of the towne....
Pillowes (said they) were thought meet onelie for women in childbed....
The third thing is the exchange of vessell, as of treene platters into
pewter, and wodden spoones into silver or tin; for so common was all
sorts of treene stuff in old time, that a man should hardlie find four
peeces of pewter (of which one was peradventure a salt) in a good
farmers house."[275]


It is not possession, but acquisition, which gives men pleasure and
sense of power; they observe sooner a small happiness, new to them, than
a great happiness which is old. It is not when all is good, but when all
is better, that they see the bright side of life, and are tempted to
make a holiday of it. This is why at this period they did make a holiday
of it, a splendid show, so like a picture that it fostered painting in
Italy, so like a piece of acting that it produced the drama in England.
Now that the axe and sword of the civil wars had beaten down the
independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of maintenance had
destroyed the petty royalty of each great feudal baron, the lords
quitted their sombre castles, battlemented fortresses, surrounded by
stagnant water, pierced with narrow windows, a sort of stone
breastplates of no use but to preserve the life of their master. They
flock into new palaces with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with
fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and vast
staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such as were the palaces
of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, half Gothic and half Italian,[276] whose
convenience, splendor, and symmetry announced already habits of society,
and the taste for pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old
manners; the four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity
were reduced to two; gentlemen soon became refined, placing their glory
in the elegance and singularity of their amusements and their clothes.
They dressed magnificently in splendid materials, with the luxury of men
who rustle silk and make gold sparkle for the first time: doublets of
scarlet satin; cloaks of sable, costing a thousand ducats; velvet shoes,
embroidered with gold and silver, covered with rosettes and ribbons;
boots with falling tops, from whence hung a cloud of lace, embroidered
with figures of birds, animals, constellations, flowers in silver, gold,
or precious stones; ornamented shirts costing ten pounds a piece. "It is
a common thing to put a thousand goats and a hundred oxen on a coat, and
to carry a whole manor on one's back."[277] The costumes of the time
were shrines. When Elizabeth died, they found three thousand dresses in
her wardrobe. Need we speak of the monstrous ruffs of the ladies, their
puffed-out dresses, their stomachers stiff with diamonds? Asa singular
sign of the times, the men were more changeable and more bedecked than
they. Harrison says:


"Such is our mutabilitie, that to daie there is none to the Spanish
guise, to morrow the French toies are most fine and delectable, yer long
no such apparell as that which is after the high Alman fashion, by and
by the Turkish maner is generallie best liked of, otherwise the Morisco
gowns, the Barbarian sleeves... and the short French breeches.... And
as these fashions are diverse, so likewise it is a world to see the
costlinesse and the curiositie; the excesse and the vanitie; the pompe
and the braverie; the change and the varietie; and finallie, the
ficklenesse and the follie that is in all degrees."[278]


Folly, it may have been, but poetry likewise. There was something more
than puppyism in this masquerade of splendid costume. The overflow of
inner sentiment found this issue, as also in drama and poetry. It was an
artistic spirit which induced it. There was an incredible outgrowth of
living forms from their brains. They acted like their engravers, who
give us in their frontispieces a prodigality of fruits, flowers, active
figures, animals, gods, and pour out and confuse the whole treasure of
nature in every corner of their paper. They must enjoy the beautiful;
they would be happy through their eyes; they perceive in consequence
naturally the relief and energy of forms. From the accession of Henry
VIII to the death of James I we find nothing but tournaments,
processions, public entries, masquerades. First come the royal banquets,
coronation displays, large and noisy pleasures of Henry VIII. Wolsey
entertains him


"In so gorgeous a sort and costlie maner, that it was an heaven to
behold. There wanted no dames or damosels meet or apt to danse with the
maskers, or to garnish the place for the time: then was there all kind
of musike and harmonie, with fine voices both of men and children. On a
time the king came suddenlie thither in a maske with a dozen maskers all
in garments like sheepheards, made of fine cloth of gold, and crimosin
sattin paned,... having sixteene torch-bearers.... In came a new banket
before the king wherein were served two hundred diverse dishes, of
costlie devises and subtilities. Thus passed they foorth the night with
banketting, dansing, and other triumphs, to the great comfort of the
king, and pleasant regard of the nobilitie there assembled."[279]


Count, if you can, the mythological entertainments, the theatrical
receptions, the open-air operas played before Elizabeth, James, and
their great lords.[280] At Kenilworth the pageants lasted ten days.
There was everything; learned recreations, novelties, popular plays,
sanguinary spectacles, coarse farces, juggling and feats of skill,
allegories, mythologies, chivalric exhibitions, rustic and national
commemorations. At the same time, in this universal outburst and sudden
expanse, men become interested in themselves, find their life desirable,
worthy of being represented and put on the stage complete; they play
with it, delight in looking upon it, love its ups and downs, and make of
it a work of art. The queen is received by a sibyl, then by giants of
the time of Arthur, then by the Lady of the Lake, Sylvanus, Pomona,
Ceres, and Bacchus, every divinity in turn presents her with the
first-fruits of his empire. Next day, a savage, dressed in moss and ivy,
discourses before her with Echo in her praise. Thirteen bears are set
fighting against dogs. An Italian acrobat performs wonderful feats
before the whole assembly. A rustic marriage takes place before the
queen, then a sort of comic fight amongst the peasants of Coventry, who
represent the defeat of the Danes. As she is returning from the chase,
Triton, rising from the lake, prays her, in the name of Neptune, to
deliver the enchanted lady, pursued by a cruel knight, Syr Bruse sauns
Pitee. Presently the lady appears, surrounded by nymphs, followed close
by Proteus, who is borne by an enormous dolphin. Concealed in the
dolphin, a band of musicians with a chorus of ocean-deities, sing the
praise of the powerful, beautiful, chaste queen of England.[281] You
perceive that comedy is not confined to the theatre; the great of the
realm and the queen herself become actors. The cravings of the
imagination are so keen that the court becomes a stage. Under James I,
every year, on Twelfth-day, the queen, the chief ladies and nobles,
played a piece called a Masque, a sort of allegory combined with dances,
heightened in effect by decorations and costumes of great splendor, of
which the mythological paintings of Rubens can alone give an idea:


"The attire of the lords was from the antique Greek statues. On their
heads they wore Persic crowns, that were with scrolls of gold plate
turned outward, and wreathed about with a carnation and silver net-lawn.
Their bodies were of carnation cloth of silver; to express the naked, in
manner of the Greek thorax, girt under the breasts with a broad belt of
cloth of gold, fastened with jewels; the mantles were of coloured silke;
the first, sky-colour; the second, pearl-colour; the third, flame
colour; the fourth, tawny. The ladies attire was of white cloth of
silver, wrought with Juno's birds and fruits; a loose under garment,
full gathered, of carnation, striped with silver, and parted with a
golden zone; beneath that, another flowing garment, of watchet cloth of
silver, laced with gold; their hair carelessly bound under the circle of
a rare and rich coronet, adorned with all variety, and choice of jewels;
from the top of which flowed a transparent veil, down to the ground.
Their shoes were azure and gold, set with rubies and diamonds."[282]


I abridge the description, which is like a fairy tale. Fancy that all
these costumes, this glitter of materials, this sparkling of diamonds,
this splendor of nudities, was displayed daily at the marriage of the
great, to the bold sounds of a pagan epithalamium. Think of the feasts
which the Earl of Carlisle introduced, where was served first of all a
table loaded with sumptuous viands, as high as a man could reach, in
order to remove it presently, and replace it by another similar table.
This prodigality of magnificence, these costly follies, this unbridling
of the imagination, this intoxication of eye and ear, this comedy played
by the lords of the realm, like the pictures of Rubens, Jordaens, and
their Flemish contemporaries, so open an appeal to the senses, so
complete a return to nature, that our chilled and gloomy age is scarcely
able to imagine it.[283]




SECTION III.--Popular Festivals


To vent the feelings, to satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly
on all the roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this
was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was "merry
England," as they called it then. It was not yet stern and constrained.
It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to find itself so expanded. No
longer at court only was the drama found, but in the village. Strolling
companies betook themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any
deficiencies, when necessary. Shakespeare saw, before he depicted them,
stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners, bellows-menders, play Pyramus and
Thisbe, represent the lion roaring as gently as any sucking dove, and
the wall, by stretching out their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in
which townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. They were
actors by nature. When the soul is full and fresh, it does not express
its ideas by reasonings; it plays and figures them; it mimics them; that
is the true and original language, the children's tongue, the speech of
artists, of invention, and of joy. It is in this manner they please
themselves with songs and feasting, on all the symbolic holidays with
which tradition has filled the year.[284] On the Sunday after
Twelfth-night the laborers parade the streets, with their shirts over
their coats, decked with ribbons, dragging a plough to the sound of
music, and dancing a sword-dance; on another day they draw in a cart a
figure made of ears of corn, with songs, flutes, and drums; on another,
Father Christmas and his company; or else they enact the history of
Robin Hood, the bold archer, around the May-pole, or the legend of Saint
George and the Dragon. We might occupy half a volume in describing all
these holidays, such as Harvest Home, All Saints, Martinmas,
Sheepshearing, above all Christmas, which lasted twelve days, and
sometimes six weeks. They eat and drink, junket, tumble about, kiss the
girls, ring the bells, satiate themselves with noise: coarse drunken
revels, in which man is an unbridled animal, and which are the
incarnation of natural life. The Puritans made no mistake about that.
Stubbes says:


"First, all the wilde heades of the parishe, conventying together, chuse
them a ground capitaine of mischeef, whan they innoble with the title of
my Lorde of Misserule, and hym they crown with great solemnitie, and
adopt for their kyng. This kyng anoynted, chuseth for the twentie,
fourtie, three score, or a hundred lustie guttes like to hymself to
waite uppon his lordely maiestie.... Then have they their hobbie horses,
dragons, and other antiques, together with their baudie pipers and
thunderyng drommers, to strike up the devilles daunce withall: then
marche these heathen companie towardes the churche and churche-yarde,
their pipers pipyng, their drommers thonderyng, their stumppes dauncyng,
their belles rynglyng, their handkerchefes swyngyng about their heads
like madmen, their hobbie horses and other monsters skirmishyng amongest
the throng; and in this sorte they goe to the churche (though the
minister be at praier or preachyng), dauncyng, and swingyng their
handkercheefes over their heades, in the churche, like devilles
incarnate, with such a confused noise, that no man can heare his owne
voice. Then the foolishe people they looke, they stare, they laugh, they
fleere, and mount upon formes and pewes, to see these goodly pageauntes,
solemnized in this sort. Then after this, aboute the churche they goe
againe and againe, and so forthe into the churche-yarde, where they have
commonly their sommer haules, their bowers, arbours, and banquettyng
houses set up, wherein they feaste, banquet, and daunce all that daie,
and peradventure all that night too. And thus these terrestriall furies
spend the Sabbaoth daie!... An other sorte of fantasticall fooles bringe
to these helhoundes (the Lorde of Misrule and his complices) some bread,
some good ale, some newe cheese, some olde cheese, some custardes, some
cakes, some flaunes, some tartes, some creame, some meate, some one
thing, some an other."


He continues thus:


"Against Maie, every parishe, towne and village essemble themselves
together, bothe men, women, and children, olde and yong, even all
indifferently; they goe to the woodes where they spende all the night in
pleasant pastymes, and in the mornyng they returne, bringing with them
birch, bowes, and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies with-all.
But their cheefest iewell they bringe from thence is their Maie poole,
whiche they bring home with great veneration, as thus: They have twenty
or fourtie yoke of oxen, every ox havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers
tyed on the tippe of his homes, and these oxen, drawe home this Maie
poole (this stinckyng idoll rather)... and thus beyng reared up, they
strawe the grounde aboute, binde greene boughes about it, sett up sommer
haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it; and then fall they to banquet
and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at
the dedication of their idolles.... Of a hundred maides goyng to the
woode over night, there have scarcely the third parte returned home
againe undefiled."[285]


"On Shrove Tuesday," says another,[286] "at the sound of a bell, the
folk become insane, thousands at a time, and forget all decency and
common-sense.... It is to Satan and the devil that they pay homage and
do sacrifice to in these abominable pleasures." It is in fact to nature,
to the ancient Pan, to Freya, to Hertha, her sisters, to the old
Teutonic deities who survived the Middle Ages. At this period, in the
temporary decay of Christianity, and the sudden advance of corporal
well-being, man adored himself, and there endured no life within him but
that of paganism.




SECTION IV.--Influence of Classic Literature


To sum up, observe the process of ideas at this time. A few sectarians,
chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung gloomily to the Bible. But
the court and the men of the world sought their teachers and their
heroes from pagan Greece and Rome. About 1490[287] they began to read
the classics; one after the other they translated them; it was soon the
fashion to read them in the original. Queen Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the
Duchess of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, and many other ladies, were
conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original, and
appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men were raised to
the level of the great and healthy minds who had freely handled ideas of
all kinds fifteen centuries before. They comprehended not only their
language, but their thought; they did not repeat lessons from, but held
conversations with them; they were their equals, and found in them
intellects as manly as their own. For they were not scholastic
cavillers, miserable compilers, repulsive pedants, like the professors
of jargon whom the Middle Ages had set over them, like gloomy Duns
Scotus, whose leaves Henry VII's visitors scattered to the winds. They
were gentlemen, statesmen, the most polished and best educated men in
the world, who knew how to speak, and draw their ideas, not from books,
but from things, living ideas, and which entered of themselves into
living souls. Across the train of hooded schoolmen and sordid cavillers
the two adult and thinking ages were united, and the moderns, silencing
the infantine or snuffling voices of the Middle Ages, condescended only
to converse with the noble ancients. They accepted their gods, at least
they understand them, and keep them by their side. In poems, festivals,
on hangings, almost in all ceremonies, they appear, not restored by
pedantry merely, but kept alive by sympathy, and endowed by the arts
with a life as flourishing and almost as profound as that of their
earliest birth. After the terrible night of the Middle Ages, and the
dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a delight to see
again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its heroic and beautiful
deities once more ravishing the heart of men; they raised and instructed
this young world by speaking to it the language of passion and genius;
and this age of strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only
to follow its own bent, in order to discover in them its masters and the
eternal promoters of liberty and beauty.

Nearer still was another paganism, that of Italy; the more seductive
because more modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient
stock; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present, with its
worship of force and genius, of pleasure and voluptuousness. The
rigorists knew this well, and were shocked at it. Ascham writes:


"These bee the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie to marre
mens maners in England; much, by example of ill life, but more by
preceptes of fonde bookes, of late translated out of Italian into
English, sold in every shop in London.... There bee moe of these
ungratious bookes set out in Printe wythin these fewe monethes, than
have bene sene in England many score yeares before.... Than they have in
more reverence the triumphes of Petrarche: than the Genesis of Moses:
They make more account of Tullies offices, than S. Paules epistles: of a
tale in Bocace than a storie of the Bible."[288]


In fact, at that time Italy clearly led in everything, and civilization
was to be drawn thence, as from its spring. What is this civilization
which is thus imposed on the whole of Europe, whence every science and
every elegance comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which
Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare sought their models and their
materials? It was pagan in its elements and its birth; in its language,
which is but Latin, hardly changed; in its Latin traditions and
recollections, which no gap has interrupted; in its constitution, whose
old municipal life first led and absorbed the feudal life; in the genius
of its race, in which energy and joy always abounded. More than a
century before other nations--from the time of Petrarch, Rienzi,
Boccaccio--the Italians began to recover the lost antiquity, to set free
the manuscripts buried in the dungeons of France and Germany, to
restore, interpret, comment upon, study the ancients, to make themselves
Latin in heart and mind, to compose in prose and verse with the polish
of Cicero and Vergil, to hold sprightly converse and intellectual
pleasures as the ornament and the fairest flower of life.[289] They
adopt not merely the externals of the life of the ancients, but its very
essence; that is, preoccupation with the present life, forgetfulness of
the future, the appeal to the senses, the renunciation of Christianity.
"We must enjoy," sang their first poet, Lorenzo de Medici, in his
pastorals and triumphal songs: "there is no certainty of tomorrow." In
Pulci the mocking incredulity breaks out, the bold and sensual gayety,
all the audacity of the free-thinkers, who kicked aside in disgust the
worn-out monkish frock of the Middle Ages. It was he who, in a jesting
poem, puts at the beginning of each canto a Hosanna, an _In principio_,
or a sacred text from the mass-book.[290] When he had been inquiring
what the soul was, and how it entered the body, he compared it to jam
covered up in white bread quite hot. What would become of it in the
other world? "Some people think they will there discover becafico's,
plucked ortolans, excellent wine, good beds, and therefore they follow
the monks, walking behind them. As for us, dear friend, we shall go into
the black valley, where we shall hear no more Alleluias." If you wish
for a more serious thinker, listen to the great patriot, the Thucydides
of the age, Machiavelli, who, contrasting Christianity and paganism,
says that the first places "supreme happiness in humility, abjection,
contempt for human things, while the other makes the sovereign good
consist in greatness of soul, force of body, and all the qualities which
make men to be feared." Whereon he boldly concludes that Christianity
teaches man "to support evils, and not to do great deeds"; he discovers
in that inner weakness the cause of all oppressions; declares that "the
wicked saw that they could tyrannize without fear over men, who, in
order to get to paradise, were more disposed to suffer than to avenge
injuries." Through such sayings, in spite of his constrained
genuflexions, we can see which religion he prefers. The ideal to which
all efforts were turning, on which all thoughts depended, and which
completely raised this civilization, was the strong and happy man,
possessing all the powers to accomplish his wishes, and disposed to use
them in pursuit of his happiness.

If you would see this idea in its grandest operation, you must seek it
in the arts, such as Italy made them and carried throughout Europe,
raising or transforming the national schools with such originality and
vigor that all art likely to survive is derived from hence, and the
population of living figures with which they have covered our walls
denotes, like Gothic architecture of French tragedy, a unique epoch of
human intelligence. The attenuated mediæval Christ--a miserable,
distorted, and bleeding earth-worm; the pale and ugly Virgin--a poor old
peasant woman, fainting beside the cross of her Son; ghastly martyrs,
dried up with fasts, with entranced eyes; knotty-fingered saints with
sunken chests--all the touching or lamentable visions of the Middle Ages
have vanished: the train of godheads which are now developed show
nothing but flourishing frames, noble, regular features, and fine, easy
gestures; the names, the names only, are Christian. The new Jesus is a
"crucified Jupiter," as Pulci called him; the Virgins which Raphael
sketched naked, before covering them with garments,[291] are beautiful
girls, quite earthly, related to the Fornarina. The saints which Michel
Angelo arranges and contorts in heaven in his picture of the Last
Judgment are an assembly of athletes, capable of fighting well and
daring much. A martyrdom, like that of Saint Laurence, is a fine
ceremony in which a beautiful young man, without clothing, lies amidst
fifty men dressed and grouped as in an ancient gymnasium. Is there one
of them who had macerated himself? Is there one who had thought with
anguish and tears of the judgment of God, who had worn down and subdued
his flesh, who had filled his heart with the sadness and sweetness of
the gospel? They are too vigorous for that; they are in too robust
health; their clothes fit them too well; they are too ready for prompt
and energetic action. We might make of them strong soldiers or superb
courtesans, admirable in a pageant or at a ball. So, all that the
spectator accords to their halo of glory is a bow or a sign of the
cross; after which his eyes find pleasure in them; they are there simply
for the enjoyment of the eyes. What the spectator feels at the sight of
a Florentine Madonna is the splendid creature, whose powerful body and
fine growth bespeak her race and her vigor; the artist did not paint
moral expression as nowadays, the depth of a soul tortured and refined
by three centuries of culture. They confine themselves to the body, to
the extent even of speaking enthusiastically of the spinal column
itself, "which is magnificent"; of the shoulder-blades, which in the
movements of the arm "produce an admirable effect. You will next draw
the bone which it situated between the hips. It is very fine, and is
called the sacrum."[292] The important point with them is to represent
the nude well. Beauty with them is that of the complete skeleton, sinews
which are linked together and tightened, the thighs which support the
trunk, the strong chest breathing freely, the pliant neck. What a
pleasure to be naked! How good it is in the full light to rejoice in a
strong body, well-formed muscles, a spirited and bold soul! The splendid
goddesses reappear in their primitive nudity, not dreaming that they are
nude; you see from the tranquillity of their look, the simplicity of
their expression, that they have always been thus, and that shame has
not yet reached them. The soul's life is not here contrasted, as amongst
us, with the body's life; the one is not so lowered and degraded that we
dare not show its actions and functions; they do not hide them; man does
not dream of being all spirit. They rise, as of old, from the luminous
sea, with their rearing steeds tossing up their manes, champing the bit,
inhaling the briny savor, whilst their companions wind the
sounding-shell; and the spectators,[293] accustomed to handle the sword,
to combat naked with the dagger or double-handled blade, to ride on
perilous roads, sympathize with the proud shape of the bended back, the
effort of the arm about to strike, the long quiver of the muscles which,
from neck to heel, swell out, to brace a man, or to throw him.




_PART II.--Poetry_




SECTION I.--Renaissance of Saxon Genius


Transplanted into different races and climates, this paganism receives
from each, distinct features and a distinct character. In England it
becomes English; the English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the Saxon
genius. Invention recommences; and to invent is to express one's genius.
A Latin race can only invent by expressing Latin ideas; a Saxon race by
expressing Saxon ideas; and we shall find in the new civilization and
poetry, descendants of Caedmon and Adhelm, of Piers Plowman, and Robin
Hood.




SECTION II.--The Earl of Surrey


Old Puttenham says:


"In the latter end of the same king (Henry the eighth) reigne, sprong up
a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat th' elder and
Henry Earle of Surrey were the two chieftaines, who having travailed
into Italie, and there tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile
of the Italian Poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schooles of
Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly pollished our rude and homely
maner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had bene before, and for that cause
may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English meetre and
stile."[294]


Not that their style was very original, or openly exhibits the new
spirit: the Middle Ages is nearly ended, but not quite. By their side
Andrew Borde, John Bale, John Heywood, Skelton himself, repeat the
platitudes of the old poetry and the coarseness of the old style. Their
manners, hardly refined, were still half feudal; on the field, before
Landrecies, the English commander wrote a friendly letter to the French
governor of Térouanne, to ask him "if he had not some gentlemen
disposed to break a lance in honor of the ladies," and promised to send
six champions to meet them. Parades, combats, wounds, challenges, love,
appeals to the judgment of God, penances--all these are found in the
life of Surrey as in a chivalric romance. A great lord, an earl, a
relative of the king, who had figured in processions and ceremonies, had
made war, commanded fortresses, ravaged countries, mounted to the
assault, fallen in the breach, had been saved by his servant,
magnificent, sumptuous, irritable, ambitious, four times imprisoned,
finally beheaded. At the coronation of Anne Boleyn he wore the fourth
sword; at the marriage of Anne of Cleves he was one of the challengers
at the jousts. Denounced and placed in durance, he offered to fight in
his shirt against an armed adversary. Another time he was put in prison
for having eaten flesh in Lent. No wonder if this prolongation of
chivalric manners brought with it a prolongation of chivalric poetry; if
in an age which had known Petrarch, poets displayed the sentiments of
Petrarch. Lord Berners, Sackville, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Surrey in the
first rank, were like Petrarch, plaintive and platonic lovers. It was
pure love to which Surrey gave expression; for his lady, the beautiful
Geraldine, like Beatrice and Laura, was an ideal personage, and a child
of thirteen years.

And yet, amid this languor of mystical tradition, a personal feeling had
sway. In this spirit which imitated, and that badly at times, which
still groped for an outlet and now and then admitted into its polished
stanzas the old, simple expressions and stale metaphors of heralds of
arms and _trouvères_, there was already visible the Northern
melancholy, the inner and gloomy emotion. This feature, which presently,
at the finest moment of its richest blossom, in the splendid
expansiveness of natural life, spreads a sombre tint over the poetry of
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, already in the first poet separates this
pagan yet Teutonic world from the other, wholly voluptuous, which in
Italy, with lively and refined irony, had no taste, except for art and
pleasure. Surrey translated the Ecclesiastes into verse. Is it not
singular, at this early hour, in this rising dawn, to find such a book
in his hand? A disenchantment, a sad or bitter dreaminess, an innate
consciousness of the vanity of human things, are never lacking in this
country and in this race; the inhabitants support life with difficulty,
and know how to speak of death. Surrey's finest verses bear witness thus
soon to his serious bent, this instinctive and grave philosophy. He
records his griefs, regretting his beloved Wyatt, his friend Clère, his
companion the young Duke of Richmond, all dead in their prime. Alone, a
prisoner at Windsor, he recalls the happy days they have passed
together:


"So cruel prison how could betide, alas,
As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy,
With a Kinges son, my childish years did pass,
In greater feast than Priam's son of Troy.

"Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour,
The large green courts, where we were wont to hove,
With eyes cast up into the Maiden's tower,
And easy sighs, such as folk draw in love.

"The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue,
The dances short, long tales of great delight,
With words and looks, that tigers could but rue;
Where each of us did plead the other's right.

"The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game,
With dazed eyes oft we by gleams of love
Have miss'd the ball, and got sight of our dame,
To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above....

"The secret thoughts, imparted with such trust;
The wanton talk, the divers change of play;
The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,
Wherewith we past the winter night away.

"And with his thought the blood forsakes the face;
The tears berain my cheeks of deadly hue:
The which, as soon as sobbing sighs, alas!
Up-supped have, thus I my plaint renew:

"O place of bliss! renewer of my woes!
Give me account, where is my noble fere?
Whom in thy walls thou dost each night enclose;
To other lief; but unto me most dear.

"Echo, alas! that doth my sorrow rue,
Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint."[295]


So in love, it is the sinking of a weary soul, to which he gives vent:


"For all things having life, sometime hath quiet rest;
The bearing ass, the drawing ox, and every other beast;
The peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays;
The ship-boy, and the galley-slave, have time to take their ease;
Save I, alas! whom care of force doth so constrain,
To wail the day, and wake the night, continually in pain,
From pensiveness to plaint, from plaint to bitter tears,
From tears to painful plaint again; and thus my life it wears."[296]


That which brings joy to others brings him grief:


"The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale.
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs;
The hart has hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete with new repaired scale;
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her honey now she mings;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs!"[297]


For all that, he will love on to his last sigh:


"Yea, rather die a thousand times, than once to false my faith;
And if my feeble corpse, through weight of woful smart
Do fail, or faint, my will it is that still she keep my heart.
And when this carcass here to earth shall be refar'd,
I do bequeath my wearied ghost to serve her afterward."[298]


An infinite love, and pure as Petrarch's; and she is worthy of it. In
the midst of all these studied or imitated verses, an admirable portrait
stands out, the simplest and truest we can imagine, a work of the heart
now, and not of the memory, which behind the Madonna of chivalry shows
the English wife, and beyond feudal gallantry domestic bliss. Surrey
alone, restless, hears within him the firm tones of a good friend, a
sincere counsellor, Hope, who speaks to him thus:


"For I assure thee, even by oath,
And thereon take my hand and troth,
That she is one of the worthiest,
The truest, and the faithfullest;
The gentlest and the meekest of mind
That here on earth a man may find:
And if that love and truth were gone,
In her it might be found alone.
For in her mind no thought there is,
But how she may be true, I wis;
And tenders thee and all thy heale,
And wishes both thy health and weal;
And loves thee even as far forth than
As any woman may a man;
And is thine own, and so she says;
And cares for thee ten thousand ways.
Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks;
With thee she eats, with thee she drinks;
With thee she talks, with thee she moans;
With thee she sighs, with thee she groans;
With thee she says 'Farewell mine own!'
When thou, God knows, full far art gone.
And even, to tell thee all aright,
To thee she says full oft 'Good night!'
And names thee oft her own most dear,
Her comfort, weal, and all her cheer;
And tells her pillow all the tale
How thou hast done her woe and bale;
And how she longs, and plains for thee,
And says, 'Why art thou so from me?'
Am I not she that loves thee best!
Do I not wish thine ease and rest?
Seek I not how I may thee please?
Why art thou then so from thine ease?
If I be she for whom thou carest,
For whom in torments so thou farest,
Alas! thou knowest to find me here,
Where I remain thine own most dear.
Thine own most true, thine own most just,
Thine own that loves thee still, and must;
Thine own that cares alone for thee,
As thou, I think, dost care for me;
And even the woman, she alone,
That is full bent to be thine own."[299]


Certainly it is of his wife[300] that he is thinking here, not of an
imaginary Laura. The poetic dream of Petrarch has become the exact
picture of deep and perfect conjugal affection, such as yet survives in
England; such as all the poets, from the authoress of the "Nutbrown
Maid" to Dickens,[301] have never failed to represent.




SECTION III.--Surrey's Style


An English Petrarch: no juster title could be given to Surrey, for it
expresses his talent as well as his disposition. In fact, like Petrarch,
the oldest of the humanists, and the earliest exact writer of the modern
tongue, Surrey introduces a new style, the manly style, which marks a
great change of the mind; for this new form of writing is the result of
superior reflection, which, governing the primitive impulse, calculates
and selects with an end in view. At last the intellect has grown capable
of self-criticism, and actually criticises itself. It corrects its
unconsidered works, infantine and incoherent, at once incomplete and
superabundant; it strengthens and binds them together; it prunes and
perfects them; it takes from them the master idea, to set it free and to
show it clearly. This is what Surrey does, and his education had
prepared him for it; for he had studied Vergil as well as Petrarch, and
translated two books of the Æneid, almost verse for verse. In such
company a man cannot but select his ideas and connect his phrases. After
their example, Surrey gauges the means of striking the attention,
assisting the intelligence, avoiding fatigue and weariness. He looks
forward to the last line whilst writing the first. He keeps the
strongest word for the last, and shows the symmetry of ideas by the
symmetry of phrases. Sometimes he guides the intelligence by a
continuous series of contrasts to the final image; a kind of sparkling
casket, in which he means to deposit the idea which he carries, and to
which he directs our attention from the first.[302] Sometimes he leads
his reader to the close of a long flowery description, and then suddenly
checks him with a sorrowful phrase.[303] He arranges his process, and
knows how to produce effects; he uses even classical expressions, in
which two substantives, each supported by its adjective, are balanced on
either side of the verb.[304] He collects his phrases in harmonious
periods, and does not neglect the delight of the ears any more than of
the mind. By his inversions he adds force to his ideas, and weight to
his argument. He selects elegant or noble terms, rejects idle words and
redundant phrases. Every epithet contains an idea, every metaphor a
sentiment. There is eloquence in the regular development of his thought;
music in the sustained accent of his verse.

Such is the new-born art. Those who have ideas, now possess an
instrument capable of expressing them. Like the Italian painters, who in
fifty years had introduced or discovered all the technical tricks of the
brush, English writers, in half a century, introduce or discover all the
artifices of language, period, elevated style, heroic verse, soon the
grand stanza, so effectually, that a little later the most perfect
versifiers, Dryden, and Pope himself, says Dr. Nott, will add scarce
anything to the rules, invented or applied, which were employed in the
earliest efforts.[305] Even Surrey is too near to these authors, too
constrained in his models, not sufficiently free; he has not yet felt
the fiery blast of the age; we do not find in him a bold genius, an
impassioned writer capable of wide expansion, but a courtier, a lover of
elegance, who, penetrated by the beauties of two finished literatures,
imitates Horace and the chosen masters of Italy, corrects and polishes
little morsels, aims at speaking perfectly fine language. Amongst
semi-barbarians he wears a full dress becomingly. Yet he does not wear
it completely at his ease: he keeps his eyes too exclusively on his
models, and does not venture on frank and free gestures. He is sometimes
as a school-boy, makes too great use of "hot" and "cold," wounds and
martyrdom. Although a lover, and a genuine one, he thinks too much that
he must be so in Petrarch's manner, that his phrase must be balanced and
his image kept up. I had almost said that, in his sonnets of
disappointed love, he thinks less often of the strength of love than of
the beauty of his writing. He has conceits, ill-chosen words; he uses
trite expressions; he relates how Nature, having formed his lady, broke
the mould, he assigns parts to Cupid and Venus; he employs the old
machinery of the troubadours and the ancients, like a clever man who
wishes to pass for a gallant. At first scarce any mind dares be quite
itself: when a new art arises, the first artist listens not to his
heart, but to his masters, and asks himself at every step whether he be
setting foot on solid ground, or whether he is not stumbling.




SECTION IV.--Development of Artistic Ideas


Insensibly the growth became complete, and at the end of the century all
was changed. A new, strange, overloaded style had been formed, destined
to remain in force until the Restoration, not only in poetry, but also
in prose, even in ceremonial speech and theological discourse,[306] so
suitable to the spirit of the age that we meet with it at the same time
throughout the world of Europe, in Ronsard and d'Aubigné, in Calderon,
Gongora, and Marini. In 1580 appeared "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," by
Lyly, which was its text-book, its masterpiece, its caricature, and was
received with universal admiration.[307] "Our nation," says Edward
Blount, "are in his debt for a new English which hee taught them. All
our ladies were then his scollers; and that beautie in court who could
not parley Euphuesme was as little regarded as shee which now there
speakes not French." The ladies knew the phrases of Euphues by heart:
strange, studied, and refined phrases, enigmatical; whose author seems
of set purpose to seek the least natural expressions and the most
farfetched, full of exaggeration and antithesis, in which mythological
allusions, reminiscences from alchemy, botanical and astronomical
metaphors, all the rubbish and medley of learning, travels, mannerism,
roll in a flood of conceits and comparisons. Do not judge it by the
grotesque picture that Walter Scott drew of it. Sir Piercie Shafton is
but a pedant, a cold and dull copyist; it is its warmth and originality
which give this style a true force and an accent of its own. You must
conceive it, not as dead and inert, such as we have it to-day in old
books, but springing from the lips of ladies and young lords in
pearl-bedecked doublet, quickened by their vibrating voices, their
laughter, the flash of their eyes, the motion of their hands as they
played with the hilt of their swords or with their satin cloaks. They
were full of life, their heads filled to overflowing; and they amused
themselves, as our sensitive and eager artists do, at their ease in the
studio. They did not speak to convince or be understood, but to satisfy
their excited imagination, to expend their overflowing wit.[308] They
played with words, twisted, put them out of shape, enjoyed sudden views,
strong contrasts, which they produced one after another, ever and anon,
and in great quantities. They cast flower on flower, tinsel on tinsel:
everything sparkling delighted them; they gilded and embroidered and
plumed their language like their garments. They cared nothing for
clearness, order, common-sense; it was a festival of madness; absurdity
pleased them. They knew nothing more tempting than a carnival of
splendors and oddities; all was huddled together: a coarse gayety, a
tender and sad word, a pastoral, a sounding flourish of unmeasured
boasting, a gambol of a Jack-pudding. Eyes, ears, all the senses, eager
and excited, are satisfied by this jingle of syllables, the display of
fine high-colored words, the unexpected clash of droll or familiar
images, the majestic roll of well-poised periods. Every one had his own
oaths, his elegances, his style. "One would say," remarks Heylyn, "that
they are ashamed of their mother-tongue, and do not find it sufficiently
varied to express the whims of their mind." We no longer imagine this
inventiveness, this boldness of fancy, this ceaseless fertility of
nervous sensibility: there was no genuine prose at that time; the poetic
flood swallowed it up. A word was not an exact symbol, as with us; a
document which from cabinet to cabinet carried a precise thought. It was
part of a complete action, a little drama; when they read it they did
not take it by itself, but imagined it with the intonation of a hissing
and shrill voice, with the puckering of the lips, the knitting of the
brows, and the succession of pictures which crowd behind it, and which
it calls forth in a flash of lightning. Each one mimics and pronounces
it in his own style, and impresses his own soul upon it. It was a song,
which like the poet's verse, contains a thousand things besides the
literal sense, and manifests the depth, warmth, and sparkling of the
source whence it flowed. For in that time, even when the man was feeble,
his work lived; there is some pulse in the least productions of this
age; force and creative fire signalize it; they penetrate through
bombast and affectation. Lyly himself, so fantastic that he seems to
write purposely in defiance of common-sense, is at times a genuine poet;
a singer, a man capable of rapture, akin to Spenser and Shakespeare; one
of those introspective dreamers who see dancing fairies, the purpled
cheeks of goddesses, drunken, amorous woods, as he says


"Adorned with the presence of my love,
The woods I fear such secret power shall prove,
As they'll shut up each path, hide every way,
Because they still would have her go astray."[309]


The reader must assist me, and assist himself. I cannot otherwise give
him to understand what the men of this age had the felicity to
experience.

Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of this spirit and
this literature--features common to all the literatures of the
Renaissance, but more marked here than elsewhere, because the German
race is not confined, like the Latin, by the taste for harmonious forms,
and prefers strong impression to fine expression. We must select amidst
this crowd of poets; and here is one amongst the first, who exhibits, by
his writings as well as by his life, the greatness and the folly of the
prevailing manners and the public taste: Sir Philip Sidney, nephew of
the Earl of Leicester, a great lord and a man of action, accomplished in
every kind of culture; who, after a good training in classical
literature, travelled in France, Germany, and Italy; read Plato and
Aristotle, studied astronomy and geometry at Venice; pondered over the
Greek tragedies, the Italian sonnets, the pastorals of Montemayor, the
poems of Ronsard; displaying an interest in science, keeping up an
exchange of letters with the learned Hubert Languet; and withal a man of
the world, a favorite of Elizabeth, having had enacted in her honor a
flattering and comic pastoral; a genuine "jewel of the court"; a judge,
like d'Urfé, of lofty gallantry and fine language; above all,
chivalrous in heart and deed, who wished to follow maritime adventure
with Drake, and, to crown all, fated to die an early and heroic death.
He was a cavalry officer, and had saved the English army at Gravelines.
Shortly after, mortally wounded, and dying of thirst, as some water was
brought to him, he saw by his side a soldier still more desperately
hurt, who was looking at the water with anguish in his face: "Give it to
this man," said he; "his necessity is still greater than mine." Do not
forget the vehemence and impetuosity of the Middle Ages; one hand ready
for action, and kept incessantly on the hilt of the sword or poniard.
"Mr. Molineux," wrote he to his father's secretary, "if ever I know you
to do so much as read any letter I write to my father, without his
commandment or my consent, I will thrust my dagger into you. And trust
to it, for I speak it in earnest." It was the same man who said to his
uncle's adversaries that they "lied in their throat"; and to support his
words, promised them a meeting in three months in any place in Europe.
The savage energy of the preceding age remains intact, and it is for
this reason that poetry took so firm a hold on these virgin souls. The
human harvest is never so fine as when cultivation opens up a new soil.
Impassioned, moreover, melancholy and solitary, he naturally turned to
noble and ardent fantasy; and he was so much the poet that he had no
need of verse.

Shall I describe his pastoral epic, the "Arcadia"? It is but a
recreation, a sort of poetical romance, written in the country for the
amusement of his sister; a work of fashion, which, like "Cyrus" and
"Clélie,"[310] is not a monument, but a document. This kind of books
shows only the externals, the current elegance and politeness, the
jargon of the fashionable world--in short, that which should be spoken
before ladies; and yet we perceive from it the bent of the public
opinion. In "Clélie," oratorical development, delicate and collected
analysis, the flowing converse of men seated quietly in elegant
arm-chairs; in the "Arcadia," fantastic imagination, excessive
sentiment, a medley of events which suited men scarcely recovered from
barbarism. Indeed, in London they still used to fire pistols at each
other in the streets; and under Henry VIII and his children, Queens, a
Protector, the highest nobles, knelt under the axe of the executioner.
Armed and perilous existence long resisted in Europe the establishment
of peaceful and quiet life. It was necessary to change society and the
soil, in order to transform men of the sword into citizens. The high
roads of Louis XIV and his regular administration, and more recently the
railroads and the _sergents de ville_, freed the French from habits of
violence and a taste for dangerous adventure. Remember that at this
period men's heads were full of tragical images. Sidney's "Arcadia"
contains enough of them to supply half a dozen epics. "It is a trifle,"
says the author; "my young head must be delivered." In the first
twenty-five pages you meet with a shipwreck, an account of pirates, a
half-drowned prince rescued by shepherds, a journey in Arcadia, various
disguises, the retreat of a king withdrawn into solitude with his wife
and children, the deliverance of a young imprisoned lord, a war against
the Helots, the conclusion of peace, and many other things. Read on, and
you will find princesses shut up by a wicked fairy, who beats them, and
threatens them with death if they refuse to marry her son; a beautiful
queen condemned to perish by fire if certain knights do not come to her
succor; a treacherous prince tortured for his wicked deeds, then cast
from the top of a pyramid; fights, surprises, abductions, travels: in
short, the whole programme of the most romantic tales. That is the
serious element: the agreeable is of a like nature; the fantastic
predominates. Improbable pastoral serves, as in Shakespeare or Lope de
Vega, for an intermezzo to improbable tragedy. You are always coming
upon dancing shepherds. They are very courteous, good poets, and subtle
metaphysicians. Several of them are disguised princes who pay their
court to the princesses. They sing continually, and get up allegorical
dances; two bands approach, servants of Reason and Passion; their hats,
ribbons, and dress are described in full. They quarrel in verse, and
their retorts, which follow close on one another, over-refined, keep up
a tournament of wit. Who cared for what was natural or possible in this
age? There were such festivals at Elizabeth's "progresses"; and you have
only to look at the engravings of Sadeler, Martin de Vos, and Goltzius,
to find this mixture of sensitive beauties and philosophical enigmas.
The Countess of Pembroke and her ladies were delighted to picture this
profusion of costumes and verses, this play beneath the trees. They had
eyes in the sixteenth century, senses which sought satisfaction in
poetry--the same satisfaction as in masquerading and painting. Man was
not yet a pure reasoner; abstract truth was not enough for him. Rich
stuffs, twisted about and folded; the sun to shine upon them, a large
meadow studded with white daisies; ladies in brocaded dresses, with bare
arms, crowns on their heads, instruments of music behind the trees--this
is what the reader expects; he cares nothing for contrasts; he will
readily accept a drawing-room in the midst of the fields.

What are they going to say there? Here comes out that nervous
exaltation, in all its folly, which is characteristic of the spirit of
the age; love rises to the thirty-sixth heaven. Musidorus is the brother
of Céladon; Pamela is closely related to the severe heroines of
"Astrée";[311] all the Spanish exaggerations abound and all the Spanish
falsehoods. For in these works of fashion or of the Court, primitive
sentiment never retains its sincerity: wit, the necessity to please, the
desire for effect, of speaking better than others, alter it, influence
it, heap up embellishments and refinements, so that nothing is left but
twaddle. Musidorus wished to give Pamela a kiss. She repels him. He
would have died on the spot; but luckily remembers that his mistress
commanded him to leave her, and finds himself still able to obey her
command. He complains to the trees, weeps in verse: there are dialogues
where Echo, repeating the last word, replies; duets in rhyme, balanced
stanzas, in which the theory of love is minutely detailed; in short, all
the grand airs of ornamental poetry. If they send a letter to their
mistress, they speak to it, tell the ink: "Therfore mourne boldly, my
inke; for while shee lookes upon you, your blacknesse will shine: cry
out boldly my lamentation; for while shee reades you, your cries will be
musicke."[312]

Again, two young princesses are going to bed: "They impoverished their
clothes to enrich their bed, which for that night might well scorne the
shrine of Venus; and there cherishing one another with deare, though
chaste embracements; with sweete, though cold kisses; it might seeme
that love was come to play him there without dart, or that wearie of his
owne fires, he was there to refresh himselfe betwen their sweete
breathing lippes."[313]

In excuse of these follies, remember that they have their parallels in
Shakespeare. Try rather to comprehend them, to imagine them in their
place, with their surroundings, such as they are; that is, as the excess
of singularity and inventive fire. Even though they mar now and then the
finest ideas, yet a natural freshness pierces through the disguise. Take
another example: "In the time that the morning did strew roses and
violets in the heavenly floore against the coming of the sun, the
nightingales (striving one with the other which could in most dainty
varietie recount their wronge-caused sorrow) made them put off their
sleep."

In Sidney's second work, "The Defence of Poesie," we meet with genuine
imagination, a sincere and serious tone, a grand, commanding style, all
the passion and elevation which he carries in his heart and puts into
his verse. He is a muser, a Platonist, who is penetrated by the
doctrines of the ancients, who takes things from a lofty point of view,
who places the excellence of poetry not in pleasing effect, imitation,
or rhyme, but in that creative and superior conception by which the
artist creates anew and embellishes nature. At the same time, he is an
ardent man, trusting in the nobleness of his aspirations and in the
width of his ideas, who puts down the brawling of the shoppy, narrow,
vulgar Puritanism, and glows with the lofty irony, the proud freedom, of
a poet and a lord.

In his eyes, if there is any art or science capable of augmenting and
cultivating our generosity, it is poetry. He draws comparison after
comparison between it and philosophy or history, whose pretensions he
laughs at and dismisses.[314] He fights for poetry as a knight for his
lady, and in what heroic and splendid style! He says: "I never heard the
old Song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more
than with a trumpet: and yet it is sung but by some blinde Crowder, with
no rougher voyce, than rude stile; which beeing so evill apparelled in
the dust and Cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in
the gorgeous eloquence of Pindare?"[315]

The philosopher repels, the poet attracts: "Nay hee doth as if your
journey should lye through a faire vineyard, at the very first, give you
a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste, you may long to passe
further."[316]

What description of poetry can displease you? Not pastoral so easy and
genial? "Is it the bitter but wholesome Iambicke, who rubbes the galled
minde, making shame the Trumpet of villanie, with bold and open crying
out against naughtinesse?"[317]

At the close he reviews his arguments, and the vibrating martial accent
of his political period is like a trump of victory: "So that since the
excellencies of it (poetry) may bee so easily and so justly confirmed,
and the low-creeping objections so soone trodden downe, it not being an
Art of lyes, but of true doctrine: not of effeminatenesse, but of
notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of
strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us
rather plant more Laurels for to ingarland the Poets heads than suffer
the ill-savoured breath of such wrong speakers, once to blow upon the
cleare springs of Poesie."[318]

From such vehemence and gravity you may anticipate what his verses will
be.

Often, after reading the poets of this age, I have looked for some time
at the contemporary prints, telling myself that man, in mind and body,
was not then such as we see him to-day. We also have our passions, but
we are no longer strong enough to bear them. They unsettle us; we are no
longer poets without suffering for it. Alfred de Musset, Heine, Edgar
Poe, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Cowper, how many shall I instance? Disgust,
mental and bodily degradation, disease, impotence, madness, suicide, at
best a permanent hallucination or feverish raving--these are nowadays
the ordinary issues of the poetic temperament. The passion of the brain
gnaws our vitals, dries up the blood, eats into the marrow, shakes us
like a tempest, and the human frame, such as civilization has made us,
is not substantial enough long to resist it. They, who have been more
roughly trained, who are more inured to the inclemencies of climate,
more hardened by bodily exercise, more firm against danger, endure and
live. Is there a man living who could withstand the storm of passions
and visions which swept over Shakespeare, and end, like him, as a
sensible citizen and landed proprietor in his small county? The muscles
were firmer, despair less prompt. The rage of concentrated attention,
the half hallucinations, the anguish and heaving of the breast, the
quivering of the limbs bracing themselves involuntarily and blindly for
action, all the painful yearnings which accompany grand desires,
exhausted them less; this is why they desired longer, and dared more.
D'Aubigné, wounded with many sword-thrusts, conceiving death at hand,
had himself bound on his horse that he might see his mistress once more,
and rode thus several leagues, losing blood all the way, and arriving in
a swoon. Such feelings we glean still from their portraits, in the
straight looks which pierce like a sword; in that strength of back, bent
or twisted; in the sensuality, energy, enthusiasm, which breathe from
their attitude or look. Such feelings we still discover in their poetry,
in Greene, Lodge, Jonson, Spenser, Shakespeare, in Sidney, as in all the
rest. We quickly forget the faults of taste which accompany them, the
affectation, the uncouth jargon. Is it really so uncouth? Imagine a man
who with closed eyes distinctly sees the adored countenance of his
mistress, who keeps it before him all the day; who is troubled and
shaken as he imagines ever and anon her brow, her lips, her eyes; who
cannot and will not be separated from his vision; who sinks daily deeper
in this passionate contemplation; who is every instant crushed by mortal
anxieties, or transported by the raptures of bliss: he will lose the
exact conception of objects. A fixed idea becomes a false idea. By dint
of regarding an object under all its forms, turning it over, piercing
through it, we at last deform it. When we cannot think of a thing
without being dazed and without tears, we magnify it, and give it a
character which it has not. Hence strange comparisons, over-refined
ideas, excessive images, become natural. However far Sidney goes,
whatever object he touches, he sees throughout the universe only the
name and features of Stella. All ideas bring him back to her. He is
drawn ever and invincibly by the same thought: and comparisons which
seem farfetched, only express the unfailing presence and sovereign power
of the besetting image. Stella is ill; it seems to Sidney that "Joy,
which is inseparate from those eyes, Stella, now learnes (strange case)
to weepe in thee."[319] To us, the expression is absurd. Is it so for
Sidney, who for hours together had dwelt on the expression of those
eyes, seeing in them at last all the beauties of heaven and earth, who,
compared to them, finds all light dull and all happiness stale? Consider
that in every extreme passion ordinary laws are reversed, that our logic
cannot pass judgment on it, that we find in it affectation,
childishness, witticisms, crudity, folly, and that to us violent
conditions of the nervous machine are like an unknown and marvellous
land, where common-sense and good language cannot penetrate. On the
return of spring, when May spreads over the fields her dappled dress of
new flowers, Astrophel and Stella sit in the shade of a retired grove,
in the warm air, full of birds' voices and pleasant exhalations. Heaven
smiles, the wind kisses the trembling leaves, the inclining trees
interlace their sappy branches, amorous earth swallows greedily the
rippling water:


"In a grove most rich of shade,
Where birds wanton musike made,
May, then yong, his py'd weeds showing,
New perfum'd with flowers fresh growing,

"Astrophel with Stella sweet,
Did for mutuall comfort meet,
Both within themselves oppressed,
But each in the other blessed....

"Their eares hungry of each word,
Which the deere tongue would afford,
But their tongues restrain'd from walking,
Till their hearts had ended talking.

"But when their tongues could not speake,
Love it selfe did silence breake;
Love did set his lips asunder,
Thus to speake in love and wonder....

"This small winde which so sweet is,
See how it the leaves doth kisse,
Each tree in his best attyring,
Sense of love to love inspiring."[320]


On his knees, with beating heart, oppressed, it seems to him that his
mistress becomes transformed:


"Stella, soveraigne of my joy,...
Stella, starre of heavenly fire,
Stella, load-starre of desire,
Stella, in whose shining eyes
Are the lights of Cupid's skies....
Stella, whose voice when it speakes
Senses all asunder breakes;
Stella, whose voice when it singeth,
Angels to acquaintance bringeth."[321]


These cries of adoration are like a hymn. Every day he writes thoughts
of love which agitate him, and in this long journal of a hundred pages
we feel the heated breath swell each moment. A smile from his mistress,
a curl lifted by the wind, a gesture--all are events. He paints her in
every attitude; he cannot see her too constantly. He talks to the birds,
plants, winds, all nature. He brings the whole world to Stella's feet.
At the notion of a kiss he swoons:


"Thinke of that most gratefull time,
When thy leaping heart will climbe,
In my lips to have his biding.
There those roses for to kisse,
Which doe breath a sugred blisse,
Opening rubies, pearles dividing."[322]

"O joy, too high for my low stile to show:
O blisse, fit for a nobler state than me:
Envie, put out thine eyes, lest thou do see
What Oceans of delight in me do flow.
My friend, that oft saw through all maskes my wo,
Come, come, and let me powre my selfe on thee;
Gone is the winter of my miserie,
My spring appeares, O see what here doth grow,
For Stella hath with words where faith doth shine,
Of her high heart giv'n me the monarchie:
I, I, O I may say that she is mine."[323]


There are Oriental splendors in the dazzling sonnet in which he asks why
Stella's cheeks have grown pale:


"Where be those Roses gone, which sweetned so our eyes?
Where those red cheekes, with oft with faire encrease doth frame
The height of honour in the kindly badge of shame?
Who hath the crimson weeds stolne from my morning skies?"[324]


As he says, his "life melts with too much thinking." Exhausted by
ecstasy, he pauses; then he flies from thought to thought, seeking
relief for his wound, like the Satyr whom he describes:


"Prometheus, when first from heaven hie
He brought downe fire, ere then on earth not seene,
Fond of delight, a Satyr standing by,
Gave it a kisse, as it like sweet had beene.

"Feeling forthwith the other burning power,
Wood with the smart with showts and shryking shrill,
He sought his ease in river, field, and bower,
But for the time his griefe went with him still."[325]


At last calm returned; and whilst this calm lasts, the lively, glowing
spirit plays like a flickering flame on the surface of the deep brooding
fire. His love-songs and word-portraits, delightful pagan and chivalric
fancies, seem to be inspired by Petrarch or Plato. We feel the charm and
sportiveness under the seeming affectation:


"Faire eyes, sweete lips, deare heart, that foolish I
Could hope by Cupids helpe on you to pray;
Since to himselfe he doth your gifts apply,
As his maine force, choise sport, and easefull stray.

"For when he will see who dare him gainsay,
Then with those eyes he lookes, lo by and by
Each soule doth at Loves feet his weapons lay,
Glad if for her he give them leave to die.

"When he will play, then in her lips he is,
Where blushing red, that Loves selfe them doth love,
With either lip he doth the other kisse:
But when he will for quiets sake remove
From all the world, her heart is then his rome,
Where well he knowes, no man to him can come."[326]


Both heart and sense are captive here. If he finds the eyes of Stella
more beautiful than anything in the world, he finds her soul more lovely
than her body. He is a Platonist when he recounts how Virtue, wishing to
be loved of men, took Stella's form to enchant their eyes, and make them
see the heaven which the inner sense reveals to heroic souls. We
recognize in him that entire submission of heart, love turned into a
religion, perfect passion which asks only to grow, and which, like the
piety of the mystics, finds itself always too insignificant when it
compares itself with the object loved:


"My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes,
My wit doth strive those passions to defend,
Which for reward spoyle it with vaine annoyes,
I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend:
I see and yet no greater sorrow take,
Than that I lose no more for Stella's sake."[327]


At last, like Socrates in the banquet, he turns his eyes to deathless
beauty, heavenly brightness:


"Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou my minde aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings....
O take fast hold, let that light be thy guide,
In this small course which birth drawes out to death."[328]


Divine love continues the earthly love; he was imprisoned in this, and
frees himself. By this nobility, these lofty aspirations, recognize one
of those serious souls of which there are so many in the same climate
and race. Spiritual instincts pierce through the dominant paganism, and
ere they make Christians, make Platonists.




SECTION V.--Wherein Lies the Strength of the Poetry of this Period


Sidney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude about him, a
multitude of poets. In fifty-two years, without counting the drama, two
hundred and thirty-three are enumerated,[329] of whom forty have genius
or talent: Breton, Donne, Drayton, Lodge, Greene, the two Fletchers,
Beaumont, Spenser, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Wither, Warner,
Davison, Carew, Suckling, Herrick; we should grow tired in counting
them. There is a crop of them, and so there is at the same time in
Catholic and heroic Spain; and as in Spain it was a sign of the times,
the mark of a public want, the index to an extraordinary and transient
condition of the mind. What is this condition which gives rise to so
universal a taste for poetry? What is it breathes life into their books?
How happens it that amongst the least, in spite of pedantries,
awkwardnesses, in the rhyming chronicles or descriptive cyclopedias, we
meet with brilliant pictures and genuine love-cries? How happens it that
when this generation was exhausted, true poetry ended in England, as
true painting in Italy and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind
came and passed away--that, namely, of instinctive and creative
conception. These men had new senses, and no theories in their heads.
Thus, when they took a walk, their emotions were not the same as ours.
What is sunrise to an ordinary man? A white smudge on the edge of the
sky, between bosses of clouds, amid pieces of land, and bits of road,
which he does not see because he has seen them a hundred times. But for
them, all things have a soul; I mean that they feel within themselves,
indirectly, the uprising and severance of the outlines, the power and
contrast of tints, the sad or delicious sentiment, which breathes from
this combination and union like a harmony or a cry. How sorrowful is the
sun, as he rises in a mist above the sad sea-furrows; what an air of
resignation in the old trees rustling in the night rain; what a feverish
tumult in the mass of waves, whose dishevelled locks are twisted forever
on the surface of the abyss! But the great torch of heaven, the luminous
god, emerges and shines; the tall, soft, pliant herbs, the evergreen
meadows, the expanding roof of lofty oaks--the whole English landscape,
continually renewed and illumined by the flooding moisture, diffuses an
inexhaustible freshness. These meadows, red and white with flowers, ever
moist and ever young, slip off their veil of golden mist, and appear
suddenly, timidly, like beautiful virgins. Here is the cuckoo-flower,
which springs up before the coming of the swallow; there the hare-bell,
blue as the veins of a woman; the marigold, which sets with the sun,
and, weeping, rises with him. Drayton, in his "Polyolbion," sings


"Then from her burnisht gate the goodly glittring East
Guilds every lofty top, which late the humorous Night
Bespangled had with pearle, to please the Mornings sight;
On which the mirthfull Quires, with their cleere open throats,
Unto the joyfull Morne so straine their warbling notes,
That Hills and Valleys ring, and even the ecchoing Ayre
Seemes all compos'd of sounds, about them everywhere....
Thus sing away the Morne, untill the mounting Sunne,
Through thick exhaled fogs, his golden head hath runne,
And through the twisted tops of our close Covert creeps,
To kiss the gentle Shade, this while that sweetly sleeps."[330]


A step further, and you will find the old gods reappear. They reappear,
these living gods--these living gods mingled with things which you
cannot help meeting as soon as you meet nature again. Shakespeare, in
the "Tempest," sings:


"Ceres, most bounteous lady thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease;
Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep;
Thy banks with peoned and lilied brims,
Which spongy April at thy hest betrims,
To make cold nymphs chaste crowns...
Hail, many-colour'd messenger (Iris)...
Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers
Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers,
And with each end of thy blue bow dost crown
My bosky acres and my unshrubb'd down."[331]


In "Cymbeline" he says:


"They are as gentle as zephyrs, blowing below the violet.
Not wagging his sweet head."[332]


Greene writes:


"When Flora, proud in pomp of all her flowers,
Sat bright and gay,
And gloried in the dew of Iris' showers,
And did display
Her mantle chequered all with gaudy green."[333]


The same author also says:


"How oft have I descending Titan seen,
His burning locks couch in the sea-queen's lap;
And beauteous Thetis his red body wrap
In watery robes, as he her lord had been!"[334]


So Spenser, in his "Faërie Queene," sings:


"The joyous day gan early to appeare;
And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:
Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
About her eares, when Una her did marke
Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;
With mery note her lowd salutes the mounting larke."[335]


All the splendor and sweetness of this moist and well-watered land; all
the specialties, the opulence of its dissolving tints, of its variable
sky, its luxuriant vegetation, assemble thus about the gods, who gave
them their beautiful form.

In the life of every man there are moments when, in presence of objects,
he experiences a shock. This mass of ideas, of mangled recollections, of
mutilated images, which lie hidden in all corners of his mind, are set
in motion, organized, suddenly developed like a flower. He is
enraptured; he cannot help looking at and admiring the charming creature
which has just appeared; he wishes to see it again, and others like it,
and dreams of nothing else. There are such moments in the life of
nations, and this is one of them. They are happy in contemplating
beautiful things, and wish only that they should be the most beautiful
possible. They are not preoccupied, as we are, with theories. They do
not excite themselves to express moral or philosophical ideas. They wish
to enjoy through the imagination, through the eyes, like those Italian
nobles, who, at the same time, were so captivated by fine colors and
forms that they covered with paintings not only their rooms and their
churches, but the lids of their chests and the saddles of their horses.
The rich and green sunny country; young, gayly attired ladies, blooming
with health and love; half-draped gods and goddesses, masterpieces and
models of strength and grace--these are the most lovely objects which
man can contemplate, the most capable of satisfying his senses and his
heart--of giving rise to smiles and joy; and these are the objects which
occur in all the poets in a most wonderful abundance of songs,
pastorals, sonnets, little fugitive pieces, so lively, delicate, easily
unfolded, that we have never since had their equals. What though Venus
and Cupid have lost their altars? Like the contemporary painters of
Italy, they willingly imagine a beautiful naked child, drawn on a
chariot of gold through the limpid air; or a woman, redolent with youth,
standing on the waves, which kiss her snowy feet. Harsh Ben Jonson is
ravished with the scene. The disciplined battalion of his sturdy verses
changes into a band of little graceful strophes, which trip as lightly
as Raphael's children. He sees his lady approach, sitting on the chariot
of Love, drawn by swans and doves. Love leads the car; she passes calm
and smiling, and all hearts, charmed by her divine looks, wish no other
joy than to see and serve her forever.


"See the chariot at hand here of Love,
Wherein my lady rideth!
Each that draws is a swan or a dove,
And well the car Love guideth.
As she goes, all hearts do duty
Unto her beauty;
And, enamoured, do wish, so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side,
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.
Do but look on her eyes, they do light
All that Love's world compriseth!
Do but look on her hair, it is bright
As Love's star when it riseth!...
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall o' the snow,
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver?
Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!"[336]


What can be more lively, more unlike measured and artificial mythology?
Like Theocritus and Moschus, they play with their smiling gods, and
their belief becomes a festival. One day, in an alcove of a wood, Cupid
meets a nymph asleep:


"Her golden hair o'erspread her face,
Her careless arms abroad were cast,
Her quiver had her pillow's place,
Her breast lay bare to every blast."[337]


He approaches softly, steals her arrows, and puts his own in their
place. She hears a noise at last, raises her reclining head, and sees a
shepherd approaching. She flees; he pursues. She bends her bow, and
shoots her arrows at him. He only becomes more ardent, and is on the
point of seizing her. In despair, she takes an arrow, and buries it in
her lovely body. Lo! she is changed, she stops, smiles, loves, draws
near him.


"Though mountains meet not, lovers may.
What other lovers do, did they.
The god of Love sat on a tree,
And laught that pleasant sight to see."[338]


A drop of archness falls into the medley of artlessness and voluptuous
charm; it was so in Longus, and in all that delicious nosegay called the
Anthology. Not the dry mocking of Voltaire, of folks who possessed only
wit, and always lived in a drawing-room; but the raillery of artists,
lovers whose brain is full of color and form, who, when they recount a
bit of roguishness, imagine a stooping neck, lowered eyes, the blushing
of vermilion cheeks. One of these fair ones says the following verses,
simpering, and we can even see now the pouting of her lips:


"Love in my bosom like a bee
Doth suck his sweet.
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet.
Within my eyes he makes his rest,
His bed amid my tender breast,
My kisses are his daily feast.
And yet he robs me of my rest.
Ah! wanton, will ye!"[339]


What relieves these sportive pieces is their splendor of imagination.
There are effects and flashes which we hardly dare quote, dazzling and
maddening, as in the _Song of Songs_:


"Her eyes, fair eyes, like to the purest lights
That animate the sun, or cheer the day;
In whom the shining sunbeams brightly play,
Whiles fancy doth on them divine delights.

"Her cheeks like ripened lilies steeped in wine,
Or fair pomegranate kernels washed in milk,
Or snow-white threads in nets of crimson silk,
Or gorgeous clouds upon the sun's decline.

"Her lips are roses over-washed with dew,
Or like the purple of Narcissus' flower...

"Her crystal chin like to the purest mould,
Enchased with dainty daisies soft and white,
Where fancy's fair pavilion once is pight,
Whereas embraced his beauties he doth hold.

"Her neck like to an ivory shining tower,
Where through with azure veins sweet nectar runs,
Or like the down of swans where Senesse woons,
Or like delight that doth itself devour.

"Her paps are like fair apples in the prime,
As round as orient pearls, as soft as down;
They never vail their fair through winter's frown,
But from their sweets love sucked his summer time."[340]

"What need compare, where sweet exceeds compare?
Who draws his thoughts of love from senseless things,
Their pomp and greatest glories doth impair,
And mounts love's heaven with overladen wings."[341]


I can well believe that things had no more beauty then than now; but I
am sure that men found them more beautiful.

When the power of embellishment is so great, it is natural that they
should paint the sentiment which unites all joys, whither all dreams
converge--ideal love, and in particular, artless and happy love. Of all
sentiments, there is none for which we have more sympathy. It is of all
the most simple and sweet. It is the first motion of the heart, and the
first word of nature. It is made up of innocence and self-abandonment.
It is clear of reflection and effort. It extricates us from complicated
passion, contempt, regret, hate, violent desires. It penetrates us, and
we breathe it as the fresh breath of the morning wind, which has swept
over flowery meads. The knights of this perilous court inhaled it, and
were enraptured, and so rested in the contrast from their actions and
their dangers. The most severe and tragic of their poets turned aside to
meet it, Shakespeare among the evergreen oaks of the forest of
Arden,[342] Ben Jonson in the woods of Sherwood,[343] amid the wide
shady glades, the shining leaves and moist flowers, trembling on the
margin of lonely springs. Marlowe himself, the terrible painter of the
agony of Edward II, the impressive and powerful poet, who wrote
"Faustus, Tamerlane" and the "Jew of Malta," leaves his sanguinary
dramas, his high-sounding verse, his images of fury, and nothing can be
more musical and sweet than his song. A shepherd, to gain his lady-love,
says to her:


"Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.
A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love....
The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my Love."[344]


The unpolished gentlemen of the period, returning from hawking, were
more than once arrested by such rustic pictures; such as they were, that
is to say, imaginative and not very citizen-like, they had dreamed of
figuring in them on their own account. But while entering into, they
reconstructed them; they reconstructed them in their parks, prepared for
Queen Elizabeth's entrance, with a profusion of costumes and devices,
not troubling themselves to copy rough nature exactly. Improbability did
not disturb them; they were not minute imitators, students of manners:
they created; the country for them was but a setting, and the complete
picture came from their fancies and their hearts. Romantic it may have
been, even impossible, but it was on this account the more charming. Is
there a greater charm than putting on one side this actual world which
fetters or oppresses us, to float vaguely and easily in the azure and
the light, on the summit of the cloud-capped land of fairies, to arrange
things according to the pleasure of the moment, no longer feeling the
oppressive laws, the harsh and resisting framework of life, adorning and
varying everything after the caprice and the refinements of fancy? That
is what is done in these little poems. Usually the events are such as
happen nowhere, or happen in the land where kings turn shepherds and
marry shepherdesses. The beautiful Argentile[345] is detained at the
court of her uncle, who wishes to deprive her of her kingdom, and
commands her to marry Curan, a boor in his service; she flees, and Curan
in despair goes and lives two years among the shepherds. One day he
meets a beautiful country-woman, and loves her; gradually, while
speaking to her, he thinks of Argentile, and weeps; he describes her
sweet face, her lithe figure, her blue-veined delicate wrists, and
suddenly sees that the peasant girl is weeping. She falls into his arms,
and says, "I am Argentile." Now Curan was a king's son, who had
disguised himself thus for love of Argentile. He resumes his armor, and
defeats the wicked king. There never was a braver knight; and they both
reigned long in Northumberland. From a hundred such tales, tales of the
spring-time, the reader will perhaps bear with me while I pick out one
more, gay and simple as a May morning. The Princess Dowsabel came down
one morning into her father's garden: she gathers honeysuckles,
primroses, violets, and daisies; then, behind a hedge, she heard a
shepherd singing, and that so finely that she loved him at once. He
promises to be faithful, and asks for a kiss. Her cheeks became as
crimson as a rose:


"With that she bent her snow white knee,
Down by the shepherd kneeled she,
And him she sweetly kiss'd.
With that the shepherd whoop'd for joy;
Quoth he: 'There's never shepherd's boy
That ever was so blest.'"[346]


Nothing more; is it not enough? It is but a moment's fancy; but they had
such fancies every moment. Think what poetry was likely to spring from
them, how superior to common events, how free from literal imitation,
how smitten with ideal beauty, how capable of creating a world beyond
our sad world. In fact, among all these poems there is one truly divine,
so divine that the reasoners of succeeding ages have found it wearisome,
that even now but few understand it--Spenser's "Faërie Queene." One day
M. Jourdain, having turned Mamamouchi[347] and learned orthography, sent
for the most illustrious writers of the age. He settled himself in his
arm-chair, pointed with his finger at several folding-stools for them to
sit down, and said:


"I have read your little productions, gentlemen. They have afforded me
much pleasure. I wish to give you some work to do. I have given some
lately to little Lulli,[348] your fellow-laborer. It was at my command
that he introduced the sea-shell at his concerts--a melodious
instrument, which no one thought of before, and which has such a
pleasing effect. I insist that you will work out my ideas as he has
worked them out, and I give you an order for a poem in prose. What is
not prose, you know, is verse; and what is not verse is prose. When I
say, 'Nicolle, bring me my slippers and give me my nightcap,' I speak
prose. Take this sentence as your model. This style is much more
pleasing than the jargon of unfinished lines which you call verse. As
for the subject, let it be myself. You will describe my flowered
dressing-gown which I have put on to receive you in, and this little
green velvet undress which I wear underneath, to do my morning exercise
in. You will set down that this chintz costs a louis an ell. The
description, if well worked out, will furnish some very pretty
paragraphs, and will enlighten the public as to the cost of things. I
desire also that you should speak of my mirrors, my carpets, my
hangings. My tradesmen will let you have their bills; don't fail to put
them in. I shall be glad to read in your works, all fully and naturally
set forth, about my father's shop, who, like a real gentleman, sold
cloth to oblige his friends; my maid Nicolle's kitchen, the genteel
behavior of Brusquet, the little dog of my neighbor M. Dimanche. You
might also explain my domestic affairs: there is nothing more
interesting to the public than to hear how a million may be scraped
together. Tell them also that my daughter Lucile has not married that
little rascal Cléonte, but M. Samuel Bernard, who made his fortune as a
_fermier-général_, keeps his carriage and is going to be a minister of
state. For this I will pay you liberally, half a louis for a yard of
writing. Come back in a month, and let me see what my ideas have
suggested to you."


We are the descendants of M. Jourdain, and this is how we have been
talking to the men of genius from the beginning of the century, and the
men of genius have listened to us. Hence arise our shoppy and realistic
novels. I pray the reader to forget them, to forget himself, to become
for a while a poet, a gentleman, a man of the sixteenth century. Unless
we bury the M. Jourdain who survives in us, we shall never understand
Spenser.




SECTION VI--Edmund Spenser


Spenser belonged to an ancient family, allied to great houses; was a
friend to Sidney and Raleigh, the two most accomplished knights of the
age--a knight himself, at least in heart; who had found in his
connections, his friendships, his studies, his life, everything
calculated to lead him to ideal poetry. We find him at Cambridge, where
he imbues himself with the noblest ancient philosophies; in a northern
country, where he passes through a deep and unfortunate passion; at
Penshurst, in the castle and in the society where the "Arcadia" was
produced; with Sidney, in whom survived entire the romantic poetry and
heroic generosity of the feudal spirit; at court, where all the
splendors of a disciplined and gorgeous chivalry were gathered about the
throne; finally, at Kilcolman, on the borders of a lake, in a lonely
castle, from which the view embraced an amphitheatre of mountains, and
the half of Ireland. Poor on the other hand,[349] not fit for court, and
though favored by the queen, unable to obtain from his patrons anything
but inferior employment; in the end, wearied of solicitations, and
banished to his dangerous property in Ireland, whence a rebellion
expelled him, after his house and child had been burned; he died three
months later, of misery and a broken heart.[350] Expectations and
rebuffs, many sorrows and many dreams, some few joys, and a sudden and
frightful calamity, a small fortune and a premature end; this indeed was
a poet's life. But the heart within was the true poet--from it all
proceeded; circumstances furnished the subject only; he transformed them
more than they him; he received less than he gave. Philosophy and
landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendors of the country and the
court, on all which he painted or thought, he impressed his inward
nobleness. Above all, his was a soul captivated by sublime and chaste
beauty, eminently platonic; one of these lofty and refined souls most
charming of all, who, born in the lap of nature, draw thence their
sustenance, but soar higher, enter the regions of mysticism, and mount
instinctively in order to expand on the confines of a loftier world.
Spenser leads us to Milton, and thence to Puritanism, as Plato to
Vergil, and thence to Christianity. Sensuous beauty is perfect in both,
but their main worship is for moral beauty. He appeals to the Muses:


"Revele to me the sacred noursery
Of vertue, which with you doth there remaine,
Where it in silver bowre does hidden ly
From view of men and wicked worlds disdaine!"


He encourages his knight when he sees him droop. He is wroth when he
sees him attacked. He rejoices in his justice, temperance, courtesy. He
introduces in the beginning of a song, long stanzas in honor of
friendship and justice. He pauses, after relating a lovely instance of
chastity, to exhort women to modesty. He pours out the wealth of his
respect and tenderness at the feet of his heroines. If any coarse man
insults them, he calls to their aid nature and the gods. Never does he
bring them on his stage without adorning their name with splendid
eulogy. He has an adoration for beauty worthy of Dante and Plotinus. And
this, because he never considers it a mere harmony of color and form,
but an emanation of unique, heavenly, imperishable beauty, which no
mortal eye can see, and which is the masterpiece of the great Author of
the worlds.[351] Bodies only render it visible; it does not live in
them; charm and attraction are not in things, but in the immortal idea
which shines through them:


"For that same goodly hew of white and red,
With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay,
And those sweete rosy leaves, so fairly spred
Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away
To that they were, even to corrupted clay:
That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright,
Shall turne to dust, and lose their goodly light.
But that faire lampe, from whose celestiall ray
That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers fire,
Shall never be extinguisht nor decay;
But, when the vitall spirits doe expyre,
Upon her native planet shall retyre;
For it is heavenly borne, and cannot die,
Being a parcell of the purest skie."[352]


In presence of this ideal of beauty, love is transformed:


"For Love is lord of Truth and Loialtie,
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust,
On golden plumes up to the purest skie,
Above the reach of loathly sinfull lust,
Whose base affect through cowardly distrust
Of his weake wings dare not to heaven fly,
But like a moldwarpe in the earth doth ly."[353]


Love such as this contains all that is good, and fine, and noble. It is
the prime source of life, and the eternal soul of things. It is this
love which, pacifying the primitive discord, has created the harmony of
the spheres, and maintains this glorious universe. It dwells in God, and
is God himself, come down in bodily form to regenerate the tottering
world and save the human race; around and within animated beings, when
our eyes can pierce outward appearances, we behold it as a living light,
penetrating and embracing every creature. We touch here the sublime
sharp summit where the world of mind and the world of sense unite; where
man, gathering with both hands the loveliest flowers of either, feels
himself at the same time a pagan and a Christian.

So much, as a testimony to his heart. But he was also a poet, that is,
pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and that most naturally,
instinctively, unceasingly. We might go on forever describing this
inward condition of all great artists; there would still remain much to
be described. It is a sort of mental growth with them; at every instant
a bud shoots forth, and on this another and still another; each
producing, increasing, blooming of itself, so that after a few moments
we find first a green plant crop up, then a thicket, then a forest. A
character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a
succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing,
arranging themselves by instinctive development, as when in a dream we
behold a train of figures which, without any outward compulsion, display
and group themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing
forms is inexhaustible in Spenser; he is always imaging; it is his
specialty. He has but to close his eyes, and apparitions arise; they
abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he pours them forth; they
continually float up, more copious and more dense. Many times, following
the inexhaustible stream, I have thought of the vapors which rise
incessantly from the sea, ascend, sparkle, commingle their golden and
snowy scrolls, while underneath them new mists arise, and others again
beneath, and the splendid procession never grows dim or ceases.

But what distinguishes him from all others is the mode of his
imagination. Generally with a poet his mind ferments vehemently and by
fits and starts; his ideas gather, jostle each other, suddenly appear in
masses and heaps, and burst forth in sharp, piercing, concentrative
words; it seems that they need these sudden accumulations to imitate the
unity and life-like energy of the objects which they reproduce; at least
almost all the poets of that time, Shakespeare at their head, act thus.
Spenser remains calm in the fervor of invention. The visions which would
be fever to another, leave him at peace. They come and unfold themselves
before him, easily, entire, uninterrupted, without starts. He is epic,
that is, a narrator, not a singer like an ode-writer, nor a mimic like a
play-writer. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer and the great
epic-writers, he only presents consecutive and noble, almost classical
images, so nearly ideas, that the mind seizes them unaided and unawares.
Like Homer, he is always simple and clear: he makes no leaps, he omits
no argument, he robs no word of its primitive and ordinary meaning, he
preserves the natural sequence of ideas. Like Homer, again, he is
redundant, ingenuous, even childish. He says everything, he puts down
reflections which we have made beforehand; he repeats without limit his
grand ornamental epithets. We can see that he beholds objects in a
beautiful uniform light, with infinite detail; that he wishes to show
all this detail, never fearing to see his happy dream change or
disappear; that he traces its outline with a regular movement, never
hurrying or slackening. He is even a little prolix, too unmindful of the
public, too ready to lose himself and dream about the things he beholds.
His thought expands in vast repeated comparisons, like those of the old
Ionic poet. If a wounded giant falls, he finds him


"As an aged tree,
High growing on the top of rocky clift,
Whose hart-strings with keene steele nigh hewen be,
The mightie trunck halfe rent with ragged rift,
Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift.

"Or as a castle, reared high and round,
By subtile engins and malitious slight
Is undermined from the lowest ground,
And her foundation forst, and feebled quight,
At last downe falles; and with her heaped hight
Her hastie ruine does more heavie make,
And yields it selfe unto the victours might:
Such was this Gyaunt's fall, that seemd to shake
The stedfast globe of earth, as it for feare did quake."[354]


He develops all the ideas which he handles. All his phrases become
periods. Instead of compressing, he expands. To bear this ample thought
and its accompanying train, he requires a long stanza, ever renewed,
long alternate verses, reiterated rhymes, whose uniformity and fullness
recall the majestic sounds which undulate eternally through the woods
and the fields. To unfold these epic faculties, and to display them in
the sublime region where his soul is naturally borne, he requires an
ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of reality, with personages who
could hardly exist, and in a world which could never be.

He made many miscellaneous attempts in sonnets, elegies, pastorals,
hymns of love, little sparkling word-pictures;[355] they were but
essays, incapable for the most part of supporting his genius. Yet
already his magnificent imagination appeared in them; gods, men,
landscapes, the world which he sets in motion is a thousand miles from
that in which we live. His "Shepherd's Calendar"[356] is a
thought-inspiring and tender pastoral, full of delicate loves, noble
sorrows, lofty ideas, where no voice is heard but of thinkers and poets.
His "Visions of Petrarch and Du Bellay" are admirable dreams, in which
palaces, temples of gold, splendid landscapes, sparkling rivers,
marvellous birds, appear in close succession as in an Oriental
fairy-tale. If he sings a "Prothalamion," he sees two beautiful swans,
white as snow, who come softly swimming down amidst the songs of nymphs
and vermeil roses, while the transparent water kisses their silken
feathers, and murmurs with joy:


"There, in a meadow, by the river's side,
A flocke of Nymphes I chaunced to espy,
All lovely daughters of the Flood thereby,
With goodly greenish locks, all loose untyde,
As each had bene a bryde;
And each one had a little wicker basket,
Made of fine twigs, entrayled curiously,
In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket,
And with fine fingers cropt full feateously
The tender stalkes on hye.
Of every sort, which in that meadow grew,
They gathered some; the violet, pallid blew,
The little dazie, that at evening closes,
The virgin lillie, and the primrose trew,
With store of vermeil roses,
To deck their bridegroomes posies
Against the brydale-day, which was not long:
Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my song.

"With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe
Come softly swimming downe along the lee;
Two fairer birds I yet did never see;
The snow, which doth the top of Pindus strew,
Did never whiter shew...
So purely white they were,
That even the gentle stream, the which them bare,
Seem'd foule to them, and bad his billowes spare
To wet their silken feathers, least they might
Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre,
And marre their beauties bright,
That shone as heavens light,
Against their brydale day, which was not long:
Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my song!"[357]


If he bewails the death of Sidney, Sidney becomes a shepherd, he is
slain like Adonis; around him gather weeping nymphs:


"The gods, which all things see, this same beheld,
And, pittying this paire of lovers trew,
Transformed them there lying on the field,
Into one flowre that is both red and blew:
It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade,
Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made.

"And in the midst thereof a star appeares,
As fairly formd as any star in skyes:
Resembling Stella in her freshest yeares,
Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes;
And all the day it standeth full of deow,
Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow."[358]


His most genuine sentiments become thus fairy-like. Magic is the mould
of his mind, and impresses its shape on all that he imagines or thinks.
Involuntarily he robs objects of their ordinary form. If he looks at a
landscape, after an instant he sees it quite differently. He carries it,
unconsciously, into an enchanted land; the azure heaven sparkles like a
canopy of diamonds, meadows are clothed with flowers, a biped population
flutters in the balmy air, palaces of jasper shine among the trees,
radiant ladies appear on carved balconies above galleries of emerald.
This unconscious toil of mind is like the slow crystallizations of
nature. A moist twig is cast into the bottom of a mine, and is brought
out again a hoop of diamonds.

At last he finds a subject which suits him, the greatest joy permitted
to an artist. He removes his epic from the common ground which, in the
hands of Homer and Dante, gave expression to a living creed, and
depicted national heroes. He leads us to the summit of fairy-land,
soaring above history, on that extreme verge where objects vanish and
pure idealism begins: "I have undertaken a work," he says, "to represent
all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a knight to be the
patron and defender of the same; in whose actions and feats of armes and
chivalry the operations of that vertue, whereof he is the protector, are
to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose
themselves against the same, to be beaten downe and overcome."[359] In
fact he gives us an allegory as the foundation of his poem, not that he
dreams of becoming a wit, a preacher of moralities, a propounder of
riddles. He does not subordinate image to idea; he is a seer, not a
philosopher. They are living men and actions which he sets in motion;
only from time to time, in his poem, enchanted palaces, a whole train of
splendid visions trembles and divides like a mist, enabling us to catch
a glimpse of the thought which raised and arranged it. When in his
Garden of Adonis we see the countless forms of all living things
arranged in due order, in close compass, awaiting life, we conceive with
him the birth of universal love, the ceaseless fertility of the great
mother, the mysterious swarm of creatures which rise in succession from
her "wide wombe of the world." When we see his Knight of the Cross
combating with a horrible woman-serpent in defence of his beloved lady
Una, we dimly remember that, if we search beyond these two figures, we
shall find behind one, Truth, behind the other, Falsehood. We perceive
that his characters are not flesh and blood, and that all these
brilliant phantoms are phantoms, and nothing more. We take pleasure in
their brilliancy, without believing in their substantiality; we are
interested in their doings, without troubling ourselves about their
misfortunes. We know that their tears and cries are not real. Our
emotion is purified and raised. We do not fall into gross illusion; we
have that gentle feeling of knowing ourselves to be dreaming. We, like
him, are a thousand leagues from actual life, beyond the pangs of
painful pity, unmixed terror, violent and bitter hatred. We entertain
only refined sentiments, partly formed, arrested at the very moment they
were about to affect us with too sharp a stroke. They slightly touch us,
and we find ourselves happy in being extricated from a belief which was
beginning to be oppressive.




SECTION VII.--Spenser in his Relation to the Renaissance


What world could furnish materials to so elevated a fancy? One only,
that of chivalry; for none is so far from the actual. Alone and
independent in his castle, freed from all the ties which society,
family, toil, usually impose on the actions of men, the feudal hero had
attempted every kind of adventure, but yet he had done less than he
imagined; the boldness of his deeds had been exceeded by the madness of
his dreams. For want of useful employment and an accepted rule, his
brain had labored on an unreasoning and impossible track, and the
urgency of his wearisomeness had increased beyond measure his craving
for excitement. Under this stimulus his poetry had become a world of
imagery. Insensibly strange conceptions had grown and multiplied in his
brains, one over the other, like ivy woven round a tree, and the
original trunk had disappeared beneath their rank growth and their
obstruction. The delicate fancies of the old Welsh poetry, the grand
ruins of the German epics, the marvellous splendors of the conquered
East, all the recollections which four centuries of adventure had
scattered among the minds of men, had become gathered into one great
dream; and giants, dwarfs, monsters, the whole medley of imaginary
creatures, of superhuman exploits and splendid follies, were grouped
around a unique conception, exalted and sublime love, like courtiers
prostrated at the feet of their king. It was an ample and buoyant
subject-matter, from which the great artists of the age, Ariosto, Tasso,
Cervantes, Rabelais, had hewn their poems. But they belonged too
completely to their own time, to admit of their belonging to one which
had passed.[360] They created a chivalry afresh, but it was not genuine.
The ingenious Ariosto, an ironical epicurean, delights his gaze with it,
and grows merry over it, like a man of pleasure, a sceptic who rejoices
doubly in his pleasure because it is sweet, and because it is forbidden.
By his side poor Tasso, inspired by a fanatical, revived, factitious
Catholicism, amid the tinsel of an old school of poetry, works on the
same subject, in sickly fashion, with great effort and scant success.
Cervantes, himself a knight, albeit he loves chivalry for its nobleness,
perceives its folly, and crushes it to the ground, with heavy blows, in
the mishaps of the wayside inns. More coarsely, more openly, Rabelais, a
rude commoner, drowns it with a burst of laughter, in his merriment and
nastiness. Spenser alone takes it seriously and naturally. He is on the
level of so much nobleness, dignity, reverie. He is not yet settled and
shut in by that species of exact common-sense which was to found and
cramp the whole modern civilization. In his heart he inhabits the poetic
and shadowy land from which men were daily drawing farther and farther
away. He is enamored of it, even to its very language; he revives the
old words, the expressions of the Middle Ages, the style of Chaucer,
especially in the "Shepherd's Calendar." He enters straightway upon the
strangest dreams of the old story-tellers, without astonishment, like a
man who has still stranger dreams of his own. Enchanted castles,
monsters and giants, duels in the woods, wandering ladies, all spring up
under his hands, the mediæval fancy with the mediaeval generosity; and
it is just because this world is unreal that it so suits his humor.

Is there in chivalry sufficient to furnish him with matter? That is but
one world, and he has another. Beyond the valiant men, the glorified
images of moral virtues, he has the gods, finished models of sensible
beauty; beyond Christian chivalry he has the pagan Olympus; beyond the
idea of heroic will which can only be satisfied by adventures and
danger, there exists calm energy, which, by its own impulse, is in
harmony with actual existence. For such a poet one ideal is not enough;
beside the beauty of effort he places the beauty of happiness; he
couples them, not deliberately as a philosopher, nor with the design of
a scholar like Goethe, but because they are both lovely; and here and
there, amid armor and passages of arms, he distributes satyrs, nymphs,
Diana, Venus, like Greek statues amid the turrets and lofty trees of an
English park. There is nothing forced in the union; the ideal epic, like
a superior heaven, receives and harmonizes the two worlds; a beautiful
pagan dream carries on a beautiful dream of chivalry; the link consists
in the fact that they are both beautiful. At this elevation the poet has
ceased to observe the differences of races and civilizations. He can
introduce into his picture whatever he will; his only reason is, "That
suited"; and there could be no better. Under the glossy-leaved oaks, by
the old trunk so deeply rooted in the ground, he can see two knights
cleaving each other, and the next instant a company of Fauns who came
there to dance. The beams of light which have poured down upon the
velvet moss, the green turf of an English forest, can reveal the
dishevelled locks and white shoulders of nymphs. Do we not see it in
Rubens? And what signify discrepancies in the happy and sublime illusion
of fancy? Are there more discrepancies? Who perceives them, who feels
them? Who does not feel, on the contrary, that to speak the truth, there
is but one world, that of Plato and the poets; that actual phenomena are
but outlines--mutilated, incomplete and blurred outlines--wretched
abortions scattered here and there on Time's track, like fragments of
clay, half moulded, then cast aside, lying in an artist's studio; that,
after all, invisible forces and ideas, which forever renew the actual
existences, attain their fulfilment only in imaginary existences; and
that the poet, in order to express nature in its entirety, is obliged to
embrace in his sympathy all the ideal forms by which nature reveals
itself? This is the greatness of his work; he has succeeded in seizing
beauty in its fulness, because he cared for nothing but beauty.

The reader will feel that it is impossible to give in full the plot of
such a poem. In fact, there are six poems, each of a dozen cantos, in
which the action is ever diverging and converging again, becoming
confused and starting again; and all the imaginings of antiquity and of
the Middle Ages are, I believe, combined in it. The knight "pricks along
the plaine," among the trees, and at a crossing of the paths meets other
knights with whom he engages in combat; suddenly from within a cave
appears a monster, half woman and half serpent, surrounded by a hideous
offspring; further on a giant, with three bodies; then a dragon, great
as a hill, with sharp talons and vast wings. For three days he fights
them, and twice overthrown, he comes to himself only by aid of "a
gracious ointment." After that there are savage tribes to be conquered,
castles surrounded by flames to be taken. Meanwhile ladies are wandering
in the midst of forests, on white palfreys, exposed to the assaults of
miscreants, now guarded by a lion which follows them, now delivered by a
band of satyrs who adore them. Magicians work manifold charms; palaces
display their festivities; tilt-yards provide endless tournaments;
sea-gods, nymphs, fairies, kings, intermingle in these feasts,
surprises, dangers.

You will say it is a phantasmagoria. What matter, if we see it? And we
do see it, for Spenser does. His sincerity communicates itself to us. He
is so much at home in this world that we end by finding ourselves at
home in it too. He shows no appearance of astonishment at astonishing
events; he comes upon them so naturally that he makes them natural; he
defeats the miscreants, as if he had done nothing else all his life.
Venus, Diana, and the old deities, dwell at his gate and enter his
threshold without his taking any heed of them. His serenity becomes
ours. We grow credulous and happy by contagion, and to the same extent
as he. How could it be otherwise? Is it possible to refuse credence to a
man who paints things for us with such accurate details and in such
lively colors? Here with a dash of his pen he describes a forest for
you; and are you not instantly in it with him Beech trees with their
silvery stems, "loftie trees iclad with sommers pride, did spred so
broad, that heavens light did hide"; rays of light tremble on the bark
and shine on the ground, on the reddening ferns and low bushes, which,
suddenly smitten with the luminous track, glisten and glimmer. Footsteps
are scarcely heard on the thick beds of heaped leaves; and at distant
intervals, on the tall herbage, drops of dew are sparkling. Yet the
sound of a horn reaches us through the foliage; how sweetly yet
cheerfully it falls on the ear, amidst this vast silence! It resounds
more loudly; the clatter of a hunt draws near; "eft through the thicke
they heard one rudely rush;" a nymph approaches, the most chaste and
beautiful in the world. Spenser sees her; nay more, he kneels before
her:


"Her face so faire, as flesh it seemed not,
But hevenly pourtraict of bright angels hew,
Cleare as the skye, withouten blame or blot,
Through goodly mixture of complexions dew;
And in her cheekes the vermeill red did shew
Like roses in a bed of lillies shed,
The which ambrosiall odours from them threw,
And gazers sence with double pleasure fed,
Hable to heale the sicke and to revive the ded.

"In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame,
Kindled above at th' Hevenly Makers light,
And darted fyrie beames out of the same;
So passing persant, and so wondrous bright,
That quite bereav'd the rash beholders sight:
In them the blinded god his lustfull fyre
To kindle oft assayd, but had no might;
For, with dredd maiestie and awfull yre,
She broke his wanton darts, and quenched bace desyre.

"Her yvorie forhead, full of bountie brave,
Like a broad table did itselfe dispred,
For Love his loftie triumphes to engrave,
And write the battailes of his great godhed:
All good and honour might therein be red;
For there their dwelling was. And, when she spake
Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed;
And 'twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemd to make.

"Upon her eyelids many Graces sate,
Under the shadow of her even browes,
Working belgardes and amorous retrate;
And everie one her with a grace endowes,
And everie one with meekenesse to her bowes:
So glorious mirrhour of celestiall grace,
And soveraine moniment of mortall vowes,
How shall frayle pen descrive her heavenly face,
For feare, through want of skill, her beauty to disgrace.

"So faire, and thousand thousand times more faire,
She seemd, when she presented was to sight;
And was yclad, for heat of scorching aire,
All in a silken Camus lilly whight,
Purfled upon with many a folded plight,
Which all above besprinckled was throughout
With golden aygulets, that glistred bright,
Like twinckling starres; and all the skirt about
Was hemd with golden fringe.

"Below her ham her weed did somewhat trayne,
And her streight legs most bravely were embayld
In gilden buskins of costly cordwayne,
All bard with golden bendes, which were entayld
With curious antickes, and full fayre aumayld.
Before, they fastned were under her knee
In a rich iewell, and therein entrayld
The ends of all the knots, that none might see
How they within their fouldings close enwrapped bee.

"Like two faire marble pillours they were seene,
Which doe the temple of the gods support,
Whom all the people decke with girlands greene,
And honour in their festivall resort;
Those same with stately grace and princely port
She taught to tread, when she herselfe would grace;
But with the woody nymphes when she did play,
Or when the flying libbard she did chace,
She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace.

"And in her hand a sharpe bore-speare she held,
And at her backe a bow and quiver gay,
Stuft with steel-headed dartes wherewith she queld
The salvage beastes in her victorious play,
Knit with a golden bauldricke which forelay
Athwart her snowy brest, and did divide
Her daintie paps; which, like young fruit in May,
Now little gan to swell, and being tide
Through her thin weed their places only signifide.

"Her yellow lockes, crisped like golden wyre,
About her shoulders weren loosely shed,
And, when the winde emongst them did inspyre,
They waved like a penon wyde dispred
And low behinde her backe were scattered:
And, whether art it were or heedlesse hap,
As through the flouring forrest rash she fled,
In her rude heares sweet flowres themselves did lap,
And flourishing fresh leaves and blossomes did enwrap."[361]

"The daintie rose, the daughter of her morne,
More deare than life she tendered, whose flowre
The girlond of her honour did adorne;
Ne suffered she the middayes scorching powre.
Ne the sharp northerne wind thereon to showre;
But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre,
Whenso the froward skye began to lowre;
But, soone as calmed was the cristall ayre,
She did it fayre dispred, and let to flourish fayre."[362]


He is on his knees before her, I repeat, as a child on Corpus Christi
day, among flowers and perfumes, transported with admiration, so that he
sees a heavenly light in her eyes, and angel's tints on her cheeks, even
impressing into her service Christian angels and pagan graces to adorn
and await upon her; it is love which brings such visions before him:


"Sweet love, that doth his golden wings embay
In blessed nectar and pure pleasures well."


Whence this perfect beauty, this modest and charming dawn, in which he
assembles all the brightness, all the sweetness, all the virgin graces
of the full morning? What mother begat her, what marvellous birth
brought to light such a wonder of grace and purity? One day, in a
sparkling, solitary fountain, where the sunbeams shone, Chrysogone was
bathing with roses and violets.


"It was upon a sommers shinie day,
When Titan faire his beamës did display,
In a fresh fountaine, far from all mens vew,
She bath'd her brest the boyling heat t' allay;
She bath'd with roses red and violets blew,
And all the sweetest flowers that in the forrest grew.
Till faint through yrkesome wearines adowne
Upon the grassy ground herselfe she layd
To sleepe, the whiles a gentle slombring swowne
Upon her fell all naked bare displayd."[363]


The beams played upon her body, and "fructified" her. The months rolled
on. Troubled and ashamed, she went into the "wildernesse," and sat down,
"every sence with sorrow sore opprest." Meanwhile Venus, searching for
her boy Cupid, who had mutinied and fled from her, "wandered in the
world." She had sought him in courts, cities, cottages, promising
"kisses sweet, and sweeter things, unto the man that of him tydings to
her brings."


"Shortly unto the wastefull woods she came,
Whereas she found the goddesse (Diana) with her crew,
After late chace of their embrewed game,
Sitting beside a fountaine in a rew;
Some of them washing with the liquid dew
From off their dainty limbs the dusty sweat
And soyle, which did deforme their lively hew;
Others lay shaded from the scorching heat,
The rest upon her person gave attendance great.
She, having hong upon a bough on high
Her bow and painted quiver, had unlaste
Her silver buskins from her nimble thigh,
And her lanck loynes ungirt, and brests unbraste,
After her heat the breathing cold to taste;
Her golden lockes, that late in tresses bright
Embreaded were for hindring of her haste,
Now loose about her shoulders hong undight,
And were with sweet Ambrosia all besprinckled light."[364]


Diana, surprised thus, repulses Venus, "and gan to smile, in scorne of
her vaine playnt," swearing that if she should catch Cupid, she would
clip his wanton wings. Then she took pity on the afflicted goddess, and
set herself with her to look for the fugitive. They came to the "shady
covert" where Chrysogone, in her sleep, had given birth "unawares" to
two lovely girls, "as faire as springing day." Diana took one, and made
her the purest of all virgins. Venus carried off the other to the Garden
of Adonis, "the first seminary of all things, that are borne to live and
dye"; where Psyche, the bride of Love, disports herself; where Pleasure,
their daughter, wantons with the Graces; where Adonis, "lapped in
flowres and pretious spycery, liveth in eternal bliss," and came back
to life through the breath of immortal Love. She brought her up as her
daughter, selected her to be the most faithful of loves, and after long
trials, gave her hand to the good knight Sir Scudamore.

That is the kind of thing we meet with in the wondrous forest. Are you
ill at ease there, and do you wish to leave it because it is wondrous?
At every bend in the alley, at every change of the light, a stanza, a
word, reveals a landscape or an apparition. It is morning, the white
dawn gleams faintly through the trees; bluish vapors veil the horizon,
and vanish in the smiling air; the springs tremble and murmur faintly
amongst the mosses, and on high the poplar leaves begin to stir and
flutter like the wings of butterflies. A knight alights from his horse,
a valiant knight, who has unhorsed many a Saracen, and experienced many
an adventure. He unlaces his helmet, and on a sudden you perceive the
cheeks of a young girl:


"Which doft, her golden lockes, that were upbound
Still in a knot, unto her heeles downe traced,
And like a silken veile in compasse round
About her backe and all her bodie wound;
Like as the shining skie in summers night,
What time the dayes with scorching heat abound,
Is creasted all with lines of firie light,
That it prodigious seemes in common peoples sight."[365]


It is Britomart, a virgin and a heroine, like Clorinda or Marfisa,[366]
but how much more ideal! The deep sentiment of nature, the sincerity of
reverie, the ever-flowing fertility of inspiration, the German
seriousness, reanimate in this poem classical or chivalrous conceptions,
even when they are the oldest or the most trite. The train of splendors
and of scenery never ends. Desolate promontories, cleft with gaping
chasms; thunder-stricken and blackened masses of rocks, against which
the hoarse breakers dash; palaces sparkling with gold, wherein ladies,
beauteous as angels, reclining carelessly on purple cushions, listen
with sweet smiles to the harmony of music played by unseen hands; lofty
silent walks, where avenues of oaks spread their motionless shadows over
clusters of virgin violets, and turf which never mortal foot has trod;
to all these beauties of art and nature he adds the marvels of
mythology, and describes them with as much of love and sincerity as a
painter of the Renaissance or an ancient poet. Here approach on chariots
of shell, Cymoënt and her nymphs:


"A teme of dolphins raunged in aray
Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoënt;
They were all taught by Triton to obay
To the long raynes at her commaundëment:
As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went,
That their brode flaggy finnes no fome did reare,
Ne bubling rowndell they behinde them sent;
The rest, of other fishes drawen weare;
Which with their finny oars the swelling sea did sheare."[367]


Nothing, again, can be sweeter or calmer than the description of the
palace of Morpheus:


"He, making speedy way through spersed ayre,
And through the world of waters wide and deepe.
To Morpheus house doth hastily repaire.
Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe,
And low, where dawning day doth never peepe
His dwelling is; there Tethys his wet bed
Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steepe
In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed,
Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred.
And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe
And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne,
Might there be heard: but careless Quiet lyes,
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes."


Observe also in a corner of this forest, a band of satyrs dancing under
the green leaves. They come leaping like wanton kids, as gay as birds of
joyous spring. The fair Hellenore, whom they have chosen for "May-lady,"
"daunst lively" also, laughing, and "with girlonds all bespredd." The
wood re-echoes the sound of their "merry pypes. Their horned feet the
greene gras wore. All day they daunced with great lustyhedd," with
sudden motions and alluring looks, while about them their flock feed on
"the brouzes" at their pleasure. In every book we see strange
processions pass by, allegorical and picturesque shows, like those which
were then displayed at the courts of princes; now a masquerade of Cupid,
now of the Rivers, now of the Months, now of the Vices. Imagination was
never more prodigal or inventive. Proud Lucifera advances in a chariot
"adorned all with gold and girlonds gay," beaming like the dawn,
surrounded by a crowd of courtiers whom she dazzles with her glory and
splendor: "six unequall beasts" draw her along, and each of these is
ridden by a Vice. Idleness "upon a slouthfull asse... in habit blacke...
like to an holy monck," sick for very laziness, lets his heavy head
droop, and holds in his hand a breviary which he does not read;
Gluttony, on "a filthie swyne," crawls by in his deformity, "his
belly... upblowne with luxury, and eke with fatnesse swollen were his
eyne; and like a crane his necke was long and fyne," dressed in
vine-leaves, through which one can see his body eaten by ulcers, and
vomiting along the road the wine and flesh with which he is glutted.
Avarice seated between "two iron coffers, upon a camell loaden all
with gold," is handling a heap of coin, with threadbare coat, hollow
cheeks, and feet stiff with gout. Envy "upon a ravenous wolfe still did
chaw between his cankred teeth a venemous tode, that all the poison ran
about his chaw," and his discolored garment "ypainted full of eies,"
conceals a snake wound about his body. Wrath, covered with a torn and
bloody robe, comes riding on a lion, brandishing about his head "a
burning brond," his eyes sparkling, his face pale as ashes, grasping in
his feverish hand the haft of his dagger. The strange and terrible
procession passes on, led by the solemn harmony of the stanzas; and the
grand music of oft-repeated rhymes sustains the imagination in this
fantastic world, which, with its mingled horrors and splendors, has just
been opened to its flight.

Yet all this is little. However much mythology and chivalry can supply,
they do not suffice for the needs of this poetical fancy. Spenser's
characteristic is the vastness and overflow of his picturesque
invention. Like Rubens, whatever he creates is beyond the region of all
traditions, but complete in all parts, and expresses distinct ideas. As
with Rubens, his allegory swells its proportions beyond all rule, and
withdraws fancy from all law, except in so far as it is necessary to
harmonize forms and colors. For, if ordinary minds receive from allegory
a certain weight which oppresses them, lofty imaginations receive from
it wings which carry them aloft. Freed by it from the common conditions
of life, they can dare all things, beyond imitation, apart from
probability, with no other guides but their inborn energy and their
shadowy instincts. For three days Sir Guyon is led by the cursed spirit,
the tempter Mammon, in the subterranean realm, across wonderful gardens,
trees laden with golden fruits, glittering palaces, and a confusion of
all worldly treasures. They have descended into the bowels of the earth,
and pass through caverns, unknown abysses, silent depths. "An ugly
Feend... with monstrous stalke behind him stept," without Guyon's
knowledge, ready to devour him on the least show of covetousness. The
brilliancy of the gold lights up hideous figures, and the beaming metal
shines with a beauty more seductive in the gloom of the infernal prison.


"That Houses forme within was rude and strong,
Lyke an huge cave hewne out of rocky clifte,
From whose rough vaut the ragged breaches hong
Embost with massy gold of glorious guifte,
And with rich metall loaded every rifte,
That heavy ruine they did seeme to threatt;
And over them Arachne high did lifte
Her cunning web, and spred her subtile nett,
Enwrapped in fowle smoke and clouds more black than iett.

"Both roofe, and floore, and walls, were all of gold,
But overgrowne with dust and old decay,
And hid in darknes, that none could behold
The hew thereof; for vew of cheerfull day
Did never in that House itselfe display,
But a faint shadow of uncertein light;
Such as a lamp; whose life does fade away;
Or as the moone, cloathed with dowdy night,
Does show to him that walkes in feare and sad affright.

"In all that rowme was nothing to be seene
But huge great yron chests and coffers strong,
All bard with double bends, that none could weene
Them to enforce by violence or wrong;
On every side they placed were along.
But all the grownd with sculs was scattered
And dead mens bones, which round about were flong;
Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there were shed,
And their vile carcases now left unburied....

"Thence, forward he him ledd and shortly brought
Unto another rowme, whose dore forthright
To him did open as it had beene taught:
Therein an hundred raunges weren pight,
And hundred fournaces all burning bright;
By every fournace many Feends did byde,
Deformed creatures, horrible in sight;
And every Feend his busie paines applyde
To melt the golden metall, ready to be tryde.

"One with great bellowes gathered filling ayre,
And with forst wind the fewell did inflame;
Another did the dying bronds repayre
With yron tongs, and sprinckled ofte the same
With liquid waves, fiers Vulcans rage to tame,
Who, maystring them, renewd his former heat:
Some scumd the drosse that from the metall came;
Some stird the molten owre with ladles great:
And every one did swincke, and every one did sweat...

"He brought him, through a darksom narrow strayt,
To a broad gate all built of beaten gold:
The gate was open; but therein did wayt
A sturdie Villein, stryding stiffe and bold,
As if the Highest God defy he would:
In his right hand an yron club he held,
But he himselfe was all of golden mould,
Yet had both life and sence, and well could weld
That cursed weapon, when his cruell foes he queld....

"He brought him in. The rowme was large and wyde,
As it some gyeld or solemne temple weare;
Many great golden pillours did upbeare
The massy roofe, and riches huge sustayne;
And every pillour decked was full deare
With crownes, and diademes, and titles vaine,
Which mortall princes wore whiles they on earth did rayne.

"A route of people there assembled were,
Of every sort and nation under skye,
Which with great uprore preaced to draw nere
To th' upper part, where was advaunced hye
A stately siege of soveraine maiestye;
And thereon satt a Woman gorgeous gay,
And richly cladd in robes of royaltye,
That never earthly prince in such aray
His glory did enhaunce, and pompous pryde display....

"There, as in glistring glory she did sitt,
She held a great gold chaine ylincked well,
Whose upper end to highest heven was knitt.
And lower part did reach to lowest hell."[368]


No artist's dream matches these visions: the glow of the furnaces
beneath the vaults of the cavern, the lights flickering over the crowded
figures, the throne, and the strange glitter of the gold shining in
every direction through the darkness. The allegory assumes gigantic
proportions. When the object is to show temperance struggling with
temptations, Spenser deems it necessary to mass all the temptations
together. He is treating of a general virtue; and as such a virtue is
capable of every sort of resistance, he requires from it every sort of
resistance alike; after the test of gold, that of pleasure. Thus the
grandest and the most exquisite spectacles follow and are contrasted
with each other, and all are supernatural; the graceful and the terrible
are side by side--the happy gardens close by with the cursed
subterranean cavern.


"No gate, but like one, being goodly dight
With bowes and braunches, which did broad dilate
Their clasping armes in wanton wreathings intricate:

"So fashioned a porch with rare device,
Archt over head with an embracing vine,
Whose bounches hanging downe seemed to entice
All passers-by to taste their lushious wine,
And did themselves into their hands incline,
As freely offering to be gathered;
Some deepe empurpled as the hyacine,
Some as the rubine laughing sweetely red,
Some like faire emeraudes, not yet well ripened....

"And in the midst of all a fountaine stood,
Of richest substance that on earth might bee,
So pure and shiny that the silver flood
Through every channell running one might see;
Most goodly it with curious ymageree
Was over-wrought, and shapes of naked boyes,
Of which some seemed with lively iollitee
To fly about, playing their wanton toyes,
Whylest others did themselves embay in liquid ioyes.

"And over all of purest gold was spred
A trayle of yvie in his native hew;
For the rich metall was so coloured,
That wight, who did not well avis'd it vew,
Would surely deeme it to bee yvie trew;
Low his lascivious armes adown did creepe,
That themselves dipping in the silver dew
Their fleecy flowres they fearfully did steepe,
Which drops of christall seemd for wantones to weep.

"Infinit streames continually did well
Out of this fountaine, sweet and faire to see,
The which into an ample laver fell,
And shortly grew to such great quantitie,
That like a little lake it seemd to bee;
Whose depth exceeded not three cubits hight,
That through the waves one might the bottom see,
All pav'd beneath with jaspar shining bright,
That seemd the fountaine in that sea did sayle upright....

"The ioyes birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet;
Th' angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the waters fall;
The waters fall with difference discreet.
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all....

"Upon a bed of roses she was layd,
As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin;
And was arayd, or rather disarayd,
All in a vele of silke and silver thin,
That hid no whit her alabaster skin,
But rather shewd more white, if more might bee:
More subtile web Arachne cannot spin;
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched deaw, do not in th' ayre more lightly flee.

"Her snowy brest was bare to ready spoyle
Of hungry eies, which n' ote therewith be fild;
And yet, through languour of her late sweet toyle,
Few drops, more cleare then nectar, forth distild,
That like pure orient perles adowne it trild;
And her faire eyes, sweet smyling in delight,
Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild
Fraile harts, yet quenched not, like starry lights
Which sparckling on the silent waves, does seeme more bright."[369]


Do we find here nothing but fairy land? Yes; here are finished pictures
true and complete, composed with a painter's feeling, with choice of
tints and outlines; our eyes are delighted by them. This reclining
Acrasia has the pose of a goddess, or of one of Titian's courtesans. An
Italian artist might copy these gardens, these flowing waters, these
sculptured loves, those wreaths of creeping ivy thick with glossy leaves
and fleecy flowers. Just before, in the infernal depths, the lights,
with their long streaming rays, were fine, half smothered by the
darkness; the lofty throne in the vast hall, between the pillars, in the
midst of a swarming multitude, connected all the forms around it by
drawing all looks towards one centre. The poet, here and throughout, is
a colorist and an architect. However fantastic his world may be, it is
not factitious; if it does not exist, it might have been; indeed, it
should have been; it is the fault of circumstances if they do not so
group themselves as to bring it to pass; taken by itself, it possesses
that internal harmony by which a real thing, even a still higher
harmony, exists, inasmuch as, without any regard to real things, it is
altogether, and in its least detail, constructed with a view to beauty.
Art has made its appearance; this is the great characteristic of the
age, which distinguishes the "Faërie Queene" from all similar tales
heaped up by the Middle Ages. Incoherent, mutilated, they lie like
rubbish, or rough-hewn stones, which the weak hands of the _trouvères_
could not build into a monument. At last the poets and artists appear,
and with them the conception of beauty, to wit, the idea of general
effect. They understand proportions, relations, contrasts; they compose.
In their hands the blurred vague sketch becomes defined, complete,
separate; it assumes color--is made a picture. Every object thus
conceived and imaged acquires a definite existence as soon as it assumes
a true form; centuries after, it will be acknowledged and admired, and
men will be touched by it; and more, they will be touched by its author;
for, besides the object which he paints, the poet paints himself. His
ruling idea is stamped upon the work which it produces and controls.
Spenser is superior to his subject, comprehends it fully, frames it with
a view to its end, in order to impress upon it the proper mark of his
soul and his genius. Each story is modulated with respect to another,
and all with respect to a certain effect which is being worked out. Thus
a beauty issues from this harmony--the beauty in the poet's heart--which
his whole work strives to express; a noble and yet a cheerful beauty,
made up of moral elevation and sensuous seductions, English in
sentiment, Italian in externals, chivalric in subject, modern in its
perfection, representing a unique and wonderful epoch, the appearance of
paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an imagination
of the North.





_PART III.--Prose_




SECTION I.--The Decay of Poetry


Such an epoch can scarcely last, and the poetic vitality wears itself
out by its very efflorescence, so that its expansion leads to its
decline. From the beginning of the seventeenth century the subsidence of
manners and genius grows apparent. Enthusiasm and respect decline. The
minions and court-fops intrigue and pilfer, amid pedantry, puerility,
and show. The court plunders, and the nation murmurs. The Commons begin
to show a stern front, and the king, scolding them like a schoolmaster,
gives way before them like a little boy. This sorry monarch (James I)
suffers himself to be bullied by his favorites, writes to them like a
gossip, calls himself a Solomon, airs his literary vanity, and in
granting an audience to a courtier, recommends him to become a scholar,
and expects to be complimented on his own scholarly attainments. The
dignity of the government is weakened, and the people's loyalty is
cooled. Royalty declines, and revolution is fostered. At the same time,
the noble chivalric paganism degenerates into a base and coarse
sensuality. The king, we are told, on one occasion, had got so drunk
with his royal brother Christian of Denmark, that they both had to be
carried to bed. Sir John Harrington says:


"The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in
intoxication.... The Lady who did play the Queen's part (in the Masque
of the Queen of Sheba) did carry most precious gifts to both their
Majesties; but, forgetting the steppes arising to the canopy, overset
her caskets into his Danish Majesties lap, and fell at his feet, tho I
rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion;
cloths and napkins were at hand, to make all clean. His Majestie then
got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and
humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid
on a bed of state; which was not a little defiled with the presents of
the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream,
jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters. The
entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went
backward, or fell down; wine did so occupy their upper chambers. Now did
appear, in rich dress, Hope, Faith, and Charity: Hope did assay to
speak, but wine rendered her endeavours so feeble that she withdrew, and
hoped the king would excuse her brevity: Faith... left the court in a
staggering condition.... They were both sick and spewing in the lower
hall. Next came Victory, who... by a strange medley of versification...
and after much lamentable utterance was led away like a silly captive,
and laid to sleep in the outer steps of the anti-chamber. As for Peace,
she most rudely made war with her olive branch, and laid on the pates of
those who did oppose her coming. I ne'er did see such lack of good
order, discretion, and sobriety in our Queen's days."[370]


Observe that these tipsy women were great ladies. The reason is, that
the grand ideas which introduce an epoch, end, in their exhaustion, by
preserving nothing but their vices; the proud sentiment of natural life
becomes a vulgar appeal to the senses. An entrance, an arch of triumph
under James I, often represented obscenities; and later, when the
sensual instincts, exasperated by Puritan tyranny, begin to raise their
heads once more, we shall find under the Restoration excess revelling in
its low vices, and triumphing in its shamelessness.

Meanwhile literature undergoes a change; the powerful breeze which had
wafted it on, and which, amidst singularity, refinement, exaggerations,
had made it great, slackened and diminished. With Carew, Suckling, and
Herrick, prettiness takes the place of the beautiful. That which strikes
them is no longer the general features of things; and they no longer try
to express the inner character of what they describe. They no longer
possess that liberal conception, that instinctive penetration, by which
we sympathize with objects, and grow capable of creating them anew. They
no longer boast of that overflow of emotions, that excess of ideas and
images, which compelled a man to relieve himself by words, to act
externally, to represent freely and boldly the interior drama which made
his whole body and heart tremble. They are rather wits of the court,
cavaliers of fashion, who wish to show off their imagination and style.
In their hands love becomes gallantry; they write songs, fugitive
pieces, compliments to the ladies. There are no more upwellings from the
heart. They write eloquent phrases in order to be applauded, and
flattering exaggerations in order to please. The divine faces, the
serious or profound looks, the virgin or impassioned expressions which
burst forth at every step in the early poets, have disappeared; here we
see nothing but agreeable countenances, painted in agreeable verses.
Blackguardism is not far off; we meet with it already in Suckling, and
crudity to boot, and prosaic epicurism; their sentiment is expressed
before long, in such a phrase as: "Let us amuse ourselves, and a fig for
the rest." The only objects they can still paint are little graceful
things, a kiss, a May-day festivity, a dewy primrose, a daffodil, a
marriage morning, a bee.[371] Herrick and Suckling especially produce
little exquisite poems, delicate, ever pleasant or agreeable, like those
attributed to Anacreon, or those which abound in the Anthology. In fact,
here, as at the Grecian period alluded to, we are in the decline of
paganism; energy departs, the reign of the agreeable begins. People do
not relinquish the worship of beauty and pleasure, but dally with them.
They deck and fit them to their taste; they cease to subdue and bend
men, who enjoy them whilst they amuse them. It is the last beam of a
setting sun; the genuine poetic sentiment dies out with Sedley, Waller,
and the rhymesters of the Restoration; they write prose in verse; their
heart is on a level with their style, and with an exact language we find
the commencement of a new age and a new art.

Side by side with prettiness comes affectation; it is the second mark of
their decadence. Instead of writing to express things, they write to say
them well; they outbid their neighbors, and strain every mode of speech;
they push art over on the one side to which it had a leaning; and as in
this age it had a leaning towards vehemence and imagination, they pile
up their emphasis and coloring. A jargon always springs out of a style.
In all arts, the first masters, the inventors, discover the idea, steep
themselves in it, and leave it to effect its outward form. Then come the
second class, the imitators, who sedulously repeat this form, and alter
it by exaggeration. Some nevertheless have talent, as Quarles, Herbert,
Habington, Donne in particular, a pungent satirist, of terrible
crudeness,[372] a powerful poet, of a precise and intense imagination,
who still preserves something of the energy and thrill of the original
inspiration.[373] But he deliberately spoils all these gifts, and
succeeds with great difficulty in concocting a piece of nonsense. For
instance, the impassioned poets had said to their mistress that if they
lost her, they should hate all other women. Donne, in order to eclipse
them, says:


"O do not die, for I shall hate
All women so, when thou art gone,
That thee I shall not celebrate
When I remember thou wast one."[374]


Twenty times while reading him we rub our brow, and ask with
astonishment, how a man could have so tormented and contorted himself,
strained his style, refined on his refinement, hit upon such absurd
comparisons? But this was the spirit of the age; they made an effort to
be ingeniously absurd. A flea had bitten Donne and his mistress, and he
says:


"This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed and mariage temple is.
Though Parents grudge, and you, w' are met,
And cloyster'd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that selfe-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three."[375]


The Marquis de Mascarille[376] never found anything to equal this. Would
you have believed a writer could invent such absurdities? She and he
made but one, for both are but one with the flea, and so one could not
be killed without the other. Observe that the wise Malherbe wrote very
similar enormities, in the "Tears of St. Peter," and that the sonneteers
of Italy and Spain reach simultaneously the same height of folly, and
you will agree that throughout Europe at that time they were at the
close of a poetical epoch.

On this boundary line of a closing and a dawning literature a poet
appeared, one of the most approved and illustrious of his time, Abraham
Cowley,[377] a precocious child, a reader and a versifier like Pope, and
who, like Pope, having known passions less than books, busied himself
less about things than about words. Literary exhaustion has seldom been
more manifest. He possesses all the capacity to say what pleases him,
but he has precisely nothing to say. The substance has vanished, leaving
in its place an empty form. In vain he tries the epic, the Pindaric
strophe, all kinds of stanzas, odes, short lines, long lines; in vain he
calls to his assistance botanical and philosophical similes, all the
erudition of the university, all the recollections of antiquity, all the
ideas of new science: we yawn as we read him. Except in a few
descriptive verses, two or three graceful tendernesses,[378] he feels
nothing, he speaks only; he is a poet of the brain. His collection of
amorous pieces is but a vehicle for a scientific test, and serves to
show that he has read the authors, that he knows geography, that he is
well versed in anatomy, that he has a smattering of medicine and
astronomy, that he has at his service comparisons and allusions enough
to rack the brains of his readers. He will speak in this wise:


"Beauty, thou active--passive ill!
Which dy'st thyself as fast as thou dost kill!"


Or will remark that his mistress is to blame for spending three hours
every morning at her toilet, because


"They make that Beauty Tyranny,
That's else a Civil-government."


After reading two hundred pages, you feel disposed to box his ears. You
have to think, by way of consolation, that every grand age must draw to
a close, that this one could not do so otherwise, that the old glow of
enthusiasm, the sudden flood of rapture, images, whimsical and audacious
fancies, which once rolled through the minds of men, arrested now and
cooled down, could only exhibit dross, a curdling scum, a multitude of
brilliant and offensive points. You say to yourself that, after all,
Cowley had perhaps talent; you find that he had in fact one, a new
talent, unknown to the old masters, the sign of a new culture, which
needs other manners, and announces a new society. Cowley had these
manners, and belongs to this society. He was a well-governed,
reasonable, well-informed, polished, well-educated man, who, after
twelve years of service and writing in France, under Queen Henrietta,
retires at last wisely into the country, where he studies natural
history, and prepares a treatise on religion, philosophizing on men and
life, fertile in general reflections and ideas, a moralist, bidding his
executor "to let nothing stand in his writings which might seem the
least in the world to be an offence against religion or good manners."
Such intentions and such a life produce and indicate less a poet, that
is, a seer, a creator, than a literary man; I mean a man who can think
and speak, and who therefore ought to have read much, learned much,
written much, ought to possess a calm and clear mind, to be accustomed
to polite society, sustained conversation, pleasantry. In fact, Cowley
is an author by profession, the oldest of those who in England deserve
the name. His prose is as easy and sensible as his poetry is contorted
and unreasonable. A polished man, writing for polished men, pretty much
as he would speak to them in a drawing-room--this I take to be the idea
which they had of a good author in the seventeenth century. It is the
idea which Cowley's essays leave of his character; it is the kind of
talent which the writers of the coming age take for their model, and he
is the first of that grave and amiable group which, continued in Temple,
reaches so far as to include Addison.




SECTION II.--The Intellectual Level of the Renaissance


Having reached this point, the Renaissance seemed to have attained its
limit, and, like a drooping and faded flower, to be ready to leave its
place for a new bud which began to spring up amongst its withered
leaves. At all events, a living and unexpected shoot sprang from the old
declining stock. At the moment when art languished, science shot forth;
the whole labor of the age ended in this. The fruits are not unlike; on
the contrary, they come from the same sap, and by the diversity of the
shape only manifest two distinct periods of the inner growth which has
produced them. Every art ends in a science, and all poetry in a
philosophy. For science and philosophy do but translate into precise
formulas the original conceptions which art and poetry render sensible
by imaginary figures: when once the idea of an epoch is manifested in
verse by ideal creations, it naturally comes to be expressed in prose by
positive arguments. That which had struck men on escaping from
ecclesiastical oppression and monkish asceticism was the pagan idea of a
life true to nature, and freely developed. They had found nature buried
behind scholasticism, and they had expressed it in poems and paintings;
in Italy by superb healthy corporeality, in England by vehement and
unconventional spirituality, with such divination of its laws,
instincts, and forms, that we might extract from their theatre and their
pictures a complete theory of soul and body. When enthusiasm is past,
curiosity begins. The sentiment of beauty gives way to the need of
truth. The theory contained in works of imagination frees itself. The
gaze continues fixed on nature, not to admire now, but to understand.
From painting we pass to anatomy, from the drama to moral philosophy,
from grand poetical divinations to great scientific views; the second
continue the first, and the same mind displays itself in both; for what
art had represented, and science proceeds to observe, are living things,
with their complex and complete structure, set in motion by their
internal forces, with no supernatural intervention. Artists and savants
all set out, without knowing it themselves, from the same master
conception, to wit, that nature subsists of herself, that every
existence has in its own womb the source of its action, that the causes
of events are the innate laws of things; an all-powerful idea, from
which was to issue the modern civilization, and which, at the time I
write of, produced in England and Italy, as before in Greece, genuine
sciences, side by side with a complete art: after da Vinci and Michel
Angelo, the school of anatomists, mathematicians, naturalists, ending
with Galileo; after Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare, the school of
thinkers who surround Bacon and lead up to Harvey.

We have not far to look for this school. In the interregnum of
Christianity the dominating bent of mind belongs to it. It was paganism
which reigned in Elizabeth's court, not only in letters, but in
doctrine--a paganism of the North, always serious, generally sombre, but
which was based, like that of the South, on natural forces. In some men
all Christianity had passed away; many proceeded to atheism through
excess of rebellion and debauchery, like Marlowe and Greene. With
others, like Shakespeare, the idea of God scarcely makes its
appearance; they see in our poor short human life only a dream, and
beyond it the long sad sleep: for them, death is the goal of life; at
most, a dark gulf, into which man plunges, uncertain of the issue. If
they carry their gaze beyond, they perceive,[379] not the spiritual soul
welcomed into a purer world, but the corpse abandoned to the damp earth,
or the ghost hovering about the churchyard. They speak like sceptics or
superstitious men, never as true believers. Their heroes have human, not
religious, virtues; against crime they rely on honor and the love of the
beautiful, not on piety and the fear of God. If others, at intervals,
like Sidney and Spenser, catch a glimpse of the Divine, it is as a vague
ideal light, a sublime Platonic phantom, which has no resemblance to a
personal God, a strict inquisitor of the slightest motions of the heart.
He appears at the summit of things, like the splendid crown of the
world, but He does not weigh upon human life; He leaves it intact and
free, only turning it towards the beautiful. Man does not know as yet
the sort of narrow prison in which official cant and respectable creeds
were, later on, to confine activity and intelligence. Even the
believers, sincere Christians like Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne, discard
all oppressive sternness, reduce Christianity to a sort of moral poetry,
and allow naturalism to subsist beneath religion. In such a broad and
open channel, speculation could spread its wings. With Lord Herbert
appeared a systematic deism; with Milton and Algernon Sidney, a
philosophical religion; Clarendon went so far as to compare Lord
Falkland's gardens to the groves of Academe. Against the rigorism of the
Puritans, Chillingworth, Hales, Hooker, the greatest doctors of the
English Church, give a large place to natural reason--so large, that
never, even to this day, has it made such an advance.

An astonishing irruption of facts--the discovery of America, the revival
of antiquity, the restoration of philology, the invention of the arts,
the development of industries, the march of human curiosity over the
whole of the past and the whole of the globe--came to furnish
subject-matter, and prose began its reign. Sidney, Wilson, Ascham, and
Puttenham explored the rules of style; Hakluyt and Purchas compiled the
cyclopædia of travel and the description of every land; Holinshed,
Speed, Raleigh, Stowe, Knolles, Daniel, Thomas May, Lord Herbert,
founded history; Camden, Spelman, Cotton, Usher, and Selden inaugurate
scholarship; a legion of patient workers, of obscure collectors, of
literary pioneers, amassed, arranged, and sifted the documents which Sir
Robert Cotton and Sir Thomas Bodley stored up in their libraries; whilst
Utopians, moralists, painters of manners--Thomas More, Joseph Hall, John
Earle, Owen Feltham, Burton--described and passed judgment on the modes
of life, continued with Fuller, Sir Thomas Browne, and Izaak Walton up
to the middle of the next century, and add to the number of
controversialists and politicians who, with Hooker, Taylor,
Chillingworth, Algernon Sidney, Harrington, study religion, society,
church, and state. A copious and confused fermentation, from which
abundance of thoughts rose, but few notable books. Noble prose, such as
was heard at the court of Louis XIV, in the house of Pollio, in the
schools at Athens, such as rhetorical and sociable nations know how to
produce, was altogether lacking. These men had not the spirit of
analysis, the art of following step by step the natural order of ideas,
nor the spirit of conversation, the talent never to weary or shock
others. Their imagination is too little regulated, and their manners too
little polished. They who had mixed most in the world, even Sidney,
speak roughly what they think, and as they think it. Instead of glossing
they exaggerate. They blurt out all, and withhold nothing. When they do
not employ excessive compliments, they take to coarse jokes. They are
ignorant of measured liveliness, refined raillery, delicate flattery.
They rejoice in gross puns, dirty allusions. They mistake involved
charades and grotesque images for wit. Though they are great lords and
ladies, they talk like ill-bred persons, lovers of buffoonery, of shows,
and bear-fights. With some, as Overbury or Sir Thomas Browne, prose is
so much run over by poetry, that it covers its narrative with images,
and hides ideas under its pictures. They load their style with flowery
comparisons, which produce one another, and mount one above another, so
that sense disappears, and ornament only is visible. In short, they are
generally pedants, still stiff with the rust of the school; they divide
and subdivide, propound theses, definitions; they argue solidly and
heavily, and quote their authors in Latin, and even in Greek; they
square their massive periods, and learnedly knock their adversaries
down, and their readers too, as a natural consequence. They are never on
the prose-level, but always above or below--above by their poetic
genius, below by the weight of their education and the barbarism of
their manners. But they think seriously and for themselves; they are
deliberate; they are convinced and touched by what they say. Even in the
compiler we find a force and loyalty of spirit, which give confidence
and cause pleasure. Their writings are like the powerful and heavy
engravings of their contemporaries, the maps of Hofnagel for instance,
so harsh and so instructive; their conception is sharp and clear; they
have the gift of perceiving every object, not under a general aspect,
like the classical writers, but specially and individually. It is not
man in the abstract, the citizen as he is everywhere, the countryman as
such, that they represent, but James or Thomas, Smith or Brown, of such
a parish, from such an office, with such and such attitude or dress,
distinct from all others; in short, they see, not the idea, but the
individual. Imagine the disturbance that such a disposition produces in
a man's head, how the regular order of ideas becomes deranged by it; how
every object, with the infinite medley of its forms, properties,
appendages, will thenceforth fasten itself by a hundred points of
contact unforeseen to other objects, and bring before the mind a series
and a family; what boldness language will derive from it; what familiar,
picturesque, absurd words, will break forth in succession; how the dash,
the unforeseen, the originality and inequality of invention, will stand
out. Imagine, at the same time, what a hold this form of mind has on
objects, how many facts it condenses in each conception; what a mass of
personal judgments, foreign authorities, suppositions, guesses,
imaginations, it spreads over every subject; with what venturesome and
creative fecundity it engenders both truth and conjecture. It is an
extraordinary chaos of thoughts and forms, often abortive, still more
often barbarous, sometimes grand. But from this superfluity something
lasting and great is produced; namely, science, and we have only to
examine more closely into one or two of these works to see the new
creation emerge from the blocks and the debris.




SECTION III.--Robert Burton


Two writers especially display this state of mind. The first, Robert
Burton, a clergyman and university recluse, who passed his life in
libraries, and dabbled in all the sciences, as learned as Rabelais,
having an inexhaustible and overflowing memory; unequal, moreover,
gifted with enthusiasm, and spasmodically gay, but as a rule sad and
morose, to the extent of confessing in his epitaph that melancholy made
up his life and his death; in the first place original, liking his own
common-sense, and one of the earliest models of that singular English
mood which, withdrawing man within himself, develops in him, at one time
imagination, at another scrupulosity, at another oddity, and makes of
him, according to circumstances, a poet, an eccentric, a humorist, a
madman, or a puritan. He read on for thirty years, put an encyclopædia
into his head, and now, to amuse and relieve himself, takes a folio of
blank paper. Twenty lines of a poet, a dozen lines of a treatise on
agriculture, a folio page of heraldry, a description of rare fishes, a
paragraph of a sermon on patience, the record of the fever fits of
hypochondria, the history of the particle that, a scrap of
metaphysics--that is what passes through his brain in a quarter of an
hour; it is a carnival of ideas and phrases, Greek, Latin, German,
French, Italian, philosophical, geometrical, medical, poetical,
astrological, musical, pedagogic, heaped one on the other; an enormous
medley, a prodigious mass of jumbled quotations, jostling thoughts, with
the vivacity and the transport of a feast of unreason.


"This roving humour (though not with like success) I have ever had, and,
like a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his
game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly
complain, and truly, _qui ubique est, nusquam est_, which Gesner did in
modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of
good method, I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our
libraries with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I
never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have
freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the
study of cosmography. Saturn was lord of my geniture, culminating, etc.,
and Mars principal significator of manners, in partile conjunction with
mine ascendent; both fortunate in their houses, etc. I am not poor, I am
not rich; _nihil est, nihil deest_; I have little; I want nothing: all
my treasure is in Minerva's tower. Greater preferment as I could never
get, so am I not in debt for it. I have a competency (_laus Deo_) from
my noble and munificent patrons. Though I live still a collegiat
student, as Democritus in his garden, and lead a monastique life, _ipse
mihi theatrum_, sequestred from those tumults and troubles of the world,
_et tanquam in speculâ positus_ (as he said), in some high place above
you all, like _Stoïcus sapiens, omnia sœcula prœterita prœsentiaque
videns, uno velut intuitu_, I hear and see what is done abroad, how
others run, ride, turmoil, and macerate themselves in court and
countrey. Far from these wrangling lawsuits, _aulœ vanitatem, fori
ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo_: I laugh at all, only secure, lest my
suit go amiss, my ships perish, corn and cattle miscarry, trade decay; I
have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for; a mere spectator
of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts,
which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre
or scene. I hear new news every day: and those ordinary rumours of war,
plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors,
comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions; of towns taken, cities
besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters
and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford,
battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwracks, piracies,
and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms--a vast
confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas,
laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances--are daily brought to our
ears: new books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms,
heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc. Now come tidings
of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilies, embassies,
tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, playes: then
again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies,
enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, death of princes,
new discoveries, expeditions; now comical, then tragical matters. To-day
we hear of new lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men
deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred: one is let loose,
another imprisoned: one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his
neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one
runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, etc. Thus I daily hear,
and such like, both private and publick news."[380]

"For what a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts, and
sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader? In
arithmetick, geometry, perspective, optick, astronomy, architecture,
_sculptura, pictura_, of which so many and such elaborate treatises are
of late written: in mechanicks and their mysteries, military matters,
navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting,
great tomes of husbandry, cookery, faulconry, hunting, fishing, fowling,
etc., with exquisite pictures of all sports, games, and what not. In
musick, metaphysicks, natural and moral philosophy, philologie, in
policy, heraldry, genealogy, chronology, etc., they afford great tomes,
or those studies of antiquity, etc., _et quid subtilius arithmeticis
inventionibus? quia jucundius musicis rationibus? quid divinius
astronomicis? quid rectius geometricis demonstrationibus?_ What so sure,
what so pleasant? He that shall but see the geometrical tower of
Garezenda at Bologne in Italy, the steeple and clock at Strasborough,
will admire the effects of art, or that engine of Archimedes to remove
the earth itself, if he had but a place to fasten his instrument.
_Archimedis cochlea_, and rare devises to corrivate waters, musick
instruments, and trisyllable echoes again, again, and again repeated,
with miriades of such. What vast tomes are extant in law, physick, and
divinity, for profit, pleasure, practice, speculation, in verse or
prose, etc.! Their names alone are the subject of whole volumes; we have
thousands of authors of all sorts, many great libraries, full well
furnished, like so many dishes of meat, served out for several palates,
and he is a very block that is affected with none of them. Some take an
infinite delight to study the very languages wherein these books are
written--Hebrew, Greek, Syriack, Chalde, Arabick, etc. Methinks it would
well please any man to look upon a geographical map (_suavi animum
delectatione allicere, ob incredibilem rerum varietatem et jucunditatem,
et ad pleniorem sui cognitionem excitare_), chorographical,
topographical delineations; to behold, as it were, all the remote
provinces, towns, cities of the world, and never to go forth of the
limits of his study; to measure, by the scale and compasse, their
extent, distance, examine their site. Charles the Great (as Platina
writes) had three faire silver tables, in one of which superficies was a
large map of Constantinople, in the second Rome neatly engraved, in the
third an exquisite description of the whole world; and much delight he
took in them. What greater pleasure can there now be, than to view those
elaborate maps of Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, etc.? to peruse those
books of cities put out by Braunus and Hogenbergius? to read those
exquisite descriptions of Maginus, Munster, Herrera, Laet, Merula,
Boterus, Leander Albertus, Camden, Leo Afer, Adricomius, Nic. Gerbelius,
etc.? those famous expeditions of Christopher Columbus, Americus
Vespucius, Marcus Polus the Venetian, Lod. Vertomannus, Aloysius
Cadamustus, etc.? those accurate diaries of Portugals, Hollanders, of
Bartison, Oliver a Nort, etc., Hacluit's Voyages, Pet. Martyr's Decades,
Benzo, Lerius, Linschoten's relations, those Hodaeporicons of Jod. a
Meggen, Brocarde the Monke, Bredenbachius, Jo. Dublinius, Sands, etc.,
to Jerusalem, Egypt, and other remote places of the world? those
pleasant itineraries of Paulus Hentzerus, Jodocus Sincerus, Dux Polonus,
etc.? to read Bellonius observations, P. Gillius his survayes; those
parts of America, set out, and curiously cut in pictures, by Fratres a
Bry? To see a well cut herbal, hearbs, trees, flowers, plants, all
vegetals, expressed in their proper colours to the life, as that of
Matthiolus upon Dioscorides, Delacampius, Lobel, Bauhinus, and that last
voluminous and mighty herbal of Besler of Noremberge; wherein almost
every plant is to his own bignesse. To see birds, beasts, and fishes of
the sea, spiders, gnats, serpents, flies, etc., all creatures set out by
the same art, and truly expressed in lively colours, with an exact
description of their natures, vertues, qualities, etc., as hath been
accurately performed by Ælian, Gesner, Ulysses Aldrovandus, Bellonius,
Rondoletius, Hippolytus Salvianus, etc."[381]


He is never-ending; words, phrases, overflow, are heaped up, overlap
each other, and flow on, carrying the reader along, deafened, stunned,
half drowned, unable to touch ground in the deluge. Burton is
inexhaustible. There are no ideas which he does not iterate under fifty
forms: when he has exhausted his own, he pours out upon us other
men's--the classics, the rarest authors, known only by savants—authors
rarer still, known only to the learned; he borrows from all. Underneath
these deep caverns of erudition and science, there is one blacker and
more unknown than all the others, filled with forgotten authors, with
crackjaw names, Besler of Nuremberg, Adricomius, Linschoten, Brocarde,
Bredenbachius. Amidst all these antediluvian monsters, bristling with
Latin terminations, he is at his ease; he sports with them, laughs,
skips from one to the other, drives them all abreast. He is like old
Proteus, the sturdy rover, who in one hour, with his team of
hippopotami, makes the circuit of the ocean.

What subject does he take? Melancholy, his own individual mood; and he
takes it like a schoolman. None of St. Thomas Aquinas's treatises is
more regularly constructed than his. This torrent of erudition flows in
geometrically planned channels, turning off at right angles without
deviating by a line. At the head of every part you will find a
synoptical and analytical table, with hyphens, brackets, each division
begetting its subdivisions, each subdivision its sections, each section
its subsections: of the malady in general, of melancholy in particular,
of its nature, its seat, its varieties, causes, symptoms, prognosis; of
its cure by permissible means, by forbidden means, by dietetic means, by
pharmaceutical means. After the scholastic process, he descends from the
general to the particular, and disposes each emotion and idea in its
labelled case. In this framework, supplied by the Middle Ages, he heaps
up the whole, like a man of the Renaissance--the literary description of
passions and the medical description of madness, details of the hospital
with a satire on human follies, physiological treatises side by side
with personal confidences, the recipes of the apothecary with moral
counsels, remarks on love with the history of evacuations. The
discrimination of ideas has not yet been effected; doctor and poet, man
of letters and savant, he is all at once; for want of dams, ideas pour
like different liquids into the same vat, with strange spluttering and
bubbling, with an unsavory smell and odd effect. But the vat is full,
and from this admixture are produced potent compounds which no preceding
age has known.




SECTION IV.--Sir Thomas Browne


For in this mixture there is an effectual leaven, the poetic sentiment,
which stirs up and animates the vast erudition, which will not be
confined to dry catalogues; which, interpreting every fact, every
object, disentangles or divines a mysterious soul within it, and
agitates the whole mind of man, by representing to him the restless
world within and without him as a grand enigma. Let us conceive a
kindred mind to Shakespeare's, a scholar and an observer instead of an
actor and a poet, who in place of creating is occupied in comprehending,
but who, like Shakespeare, applies himself to living things, penetrates
their internal structure, puts himself in communication with their
actual laws, imprints in himself fervently and scrupulously the smallest
details of their outward appearance; who at the same time extends his
penetrating surmises beyond the region of observation, discerns behind
visible phenomena some world obscure yet sublime, and trembles with a
kind of veneration before the vast, indistinct, but peopled darkness on
whose surface our little universe hangs quivering. Such a one is Sir
Thomas Browne, a naturalist, a philosopher, a scholar, a physician, and
a moralist, almost the last of the generation which produced Jeremy
Taylor and Shakespeare. No thinker bears stronger witness to the
wandering and inventive curiosity of the age. No writer has better
displayed the brilliant and sombre imagination of the North. No one has
spoken with a more eloquent emotion of death, the vast night of
forgetfulness, of the all-devouring pit, of human vanity, which tries to
create an ephemeral immortality out of glory or sculptured stones. No
one has revealed, in more glowing and original expressions, the poetic
sap which flows through all the minds of the age.


"But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who
can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt
the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared
the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we
compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad
have equal duration; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon.
Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more
remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known
account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the
first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life
had been his only chronicle.

"Oblivion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as
though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the
record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story before the
flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century.
The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of
time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every
hour adds unto the current arithmetick which scarce stands one moment.
And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt,
whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right
declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be
long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since
the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, and time, that
grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration;--diuturnity is a
dream, and folly of expectation.

"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with
memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our
felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart
upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or
themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce
callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which
notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to
come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision of nature,
whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days; and our
delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows
are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.... All was vanity, feeding
the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath
spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim
cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.... Man is a noble animal,
splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and
deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the
infancy of his nature.... Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the
irregularities of vain glory, and wild enormities of ancient
magnanimity."[382]


These are almost the words of a poet, and it is just this poet's
imagination which urges him onward into science.[383] Face to face with
the productions of nature he abounds in conjectures, comparisons; he
gropes about, proposing explanations, making trials, extending his
guesses like so many flexible and vibrating feelers into the four
corners of the globe, into the most distant regions, of fancy and truth.
As he looks upon the tree-like and foliaceous crusts which are formed
upon the surface of freezing liquids, he asks himself if this be not a
regeneration of vegetable essences, dissolved in the liquid. At the
sight of curdling blood or milk, he inquires whether there be not
something analogous to the formation of the bird in the egg, or to the
coagulation of chaos which gave birth to our world. In presence of that
impalpable force which makes liquids freeze, he asks if apoplexy and
cataract are not the effects of a like power, and do not indicate also
the presence of a congealing agency. He is in presence of nature as an
artist, a man of letters in presence of a living countenance, marking
every feature, every movement of physiognomy, so as to be able to divine
the passions and the inner disposition, ceaselessly correcting and
undoing his interpretations, kept in agitation by thought of the
invisible forces which operate beneath the visible envelope. The whole
of the Middle Ages and of antiquity, with their theories and
imaginations, Platonism, Cabalism, Christian theology, Aristotle's
substantial forms, the specific forms of the alchemists--all human
speculations, entangled and transformed one with the other, meet
simultaneously in his brain, so as to open up to him vistas of this
unknown world. The accumulation, the pile, the confusion, the
fermentation and the inner swarming, mingled with vapors and flashes,
the tumultuous overloading of his imagination and his mind, oppress and
agitate him. In this expectation and emotion his curiosity takes hold of
everything; in reference to the least fact, the most special, the most
obsolete, the most chimerical, he conceives a chain of complicated
investigations, calculating how the ark could contain all creatures,
with their provision of food; how Perpenna, at a banquet, arranged the
guests so as to strike Sertorius; what trees must have grown on the
banks of Acheron, supposing that there were any; whether quincunx
plantations had not their origin in Eden, and whether the numbers and
geometrical figures contained in the lozenge-form are not met with in
all the productions of nature and art. You may recognize here the
exuberance and the strange caprices of an inner development too ample
and too strong. Archæology, chemistry, history, nature, there is
nothing in which he is not passionately interested, which does not cause
his memory and his inventive powers to overflow, which does not summon
up within him the idea of some force, certainly admirable, possibly
infinite. But what completes his picture, what signalizes the advance of
science, is the fact that his imagination provides a counterbalance
against itself. He is as fertile in doubts as he is in explanations. If
he sees a thousand reasons which tend to one view, he sees also a
thousand which tend to the contrary. At the two extremities of the same
fact, he raises up to the clouds, but in equal piles, the scaffolding of
contradictory arguments. Having made a guess, he knows that it is but a
guess; he pauses, ends with a perhaps, recommends verification. His
writings consist only of opinions, given as such; even his principal
work is a refutation of popular errors. In the main, he proposes
questions, suggests explanations, suspends his judgments, nothing more;
but this is enough; when the search is so eager, when the paths in which
it proceeds are so numerous, when it is so scrupulous in securing its
hold, the issue of the pursuit is sure; we are but a few steps from the
truth.




SECTION V.--Francis Bacon


In this band of scholars, dreamers, and inquirers, appears the most
comprehensive, sensible, originative of the minds of the age, Francis
Bacon, a great and luminous intellect, one of the finest of this poetic
progeny, who, like his predecessors, was naturally disposed to clothe
his ideas in the most splendid dress: in this age, a thought did not
seem complete until it had assumed form and color. But what
distinguishes him from the others is, that with him an image only serves
to concentrate meditation. He reflected long, stamped on his mind all
the parts and relations of his subject; he is master of it, and then,
instead of exposing this complete idea in a graduated chain of
reasoning, he embodies it in a comparison so expressive, exact, lucid,
that behind the figure we perceive all the details of the idea, like
liquor in a fine crystal vase. Judge of his style by a single example:


"For as water, whether it be the dew of Heaven or the springs of the
earth, easily scatters and loses itself in the ground, except it be
collected into some receptacle, where it may by union and consort
comfort and sustain itself (and for that cause, the industry of man hath
devised aqueducts, cisterns, and pools, and likewise beautified them
with various ornaments of magnificence and state, as well as for use and
necessity); so this excellent liquor of knowledge, whether it descend
from divine inspiration or spring from human sense, would soon perish
and vanish into oblivion, if it were not preserved in books, traditions,
conferences, and especially in places appointed for such matters as
universities, colleges, and schools, where it may have both a fixed
habitation, and means and opportunity of increasing and collecting
itself."[384]

"The greatest error of all the rest, is the mistaking or misplacing of
the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a
desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and
inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety
and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to
enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for
lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of
their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were
sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless
spirit; or a terrace, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and
down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to
raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and
contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse,
for the glory of the Creator, and the relief of man's estate."[385]


This is his mode of thought, by symbols, not by analysis; instead of
explaining his idea, he transposes and translates it--translates it
entire, to the smallest details, enclosing all in the majesty of a grand
period, or in the brevity of a striking sentence. Thence springs a style
of admirable richness, gravity, and vigor, now solemn and symmetrical,
now concise and piercing, always elaborate, and full of color.[386]
There is nothing in English prose superior to his diction.

Thence is derived also his manner of conceiving things. He is not a
dialectician, like Hobbes or Descartes, apt in arranging ideas, in
educing one from another, in leading his reader from the simple to the
complex by an unbroken chain. He is a producer of conceptions and of
sentences. The matter being explored, he says to us: "Such it is; touch
it not on that side; it must be approached from the other." Nothing
more; no proof, no effort to convince: he affirms, and does nothing
more; he has thought in the manner of artists and poets, and he speaks
after the manner of prophets and seers. _Cogitata et visa_ this title of
one of his books might be the title of all. The most admirable, the
"Novum Organum," is a string of aphorisms--a collection, as it were, of
scientific decrees, as of an oracle who foresees the future and reveals
the truth. And to make the resemblance complete, he expresses them by
poetical figures, by enigmatic abbreviations, almost in Sibylline
verses: _Idola specûs, Idola tribûs, Idola fori, Idola theatri_,
everyone will recall these strange names, by which he signifies the four
kinds of illusions to which man is subject.[387] Shakespeare and the
seers do not contain more vigorous or expressive condensations of
thought, more resembling inspiration, and in Bacon they are to be found
everywhere. On the whole, his process is that of the creators; it is
intuition, not reasoning. When he has laid up his store of facts, the
greatest possible, on some vast subject, on some entire province of the
mind, on the whole anterior philosophy, on the general condition of the
sciences, on the power and limits of human reason, he casts over all
this a comprehensive view, as it were a great net, brings up a universal
idea, condenses his idea into a maxim, and hands it to us with the
words, "Verify and profit by it."

There is nothing more hazardous, more like fantasy, than this mode of
thought, when it is not checked by natural and good strong sense. This
common-sense, which is a kind of natural divination, the stable
equilibrium of an intellect always gravitating to the true, like the
needle to the pole, Bacon possesses in the highest degree. He has a
pre-eminently practical, even an utilitarian mind, such as we meet with
later in Bentham, and such as their business habits were to impress more
and more upon the English. At the age of sixteen, while at the
university, he was dissatisfied with Aristotle's philosophy,[388] not
that he thought meanly of the author, whom, on the contrary, he calls a
great genius; but because it seemed to him of no practical utility,
incapable of producing works which might promote the well-being of men.
We see that from the outset he struck upon his dominant idea; all else
comes to him from this; a contempt for antecedent philosophy, the
conception of a different system, the entire reformation of the sciences
by the indication of a new goal, the definition of a distinct method,
the opening up of unsuspected anticipations.[389] It is never
speculation which he relishes, but the practical application of it. His
eyes are turned not to heaven, but to earth; not to things abstract and
vain, but to things palpable and solid; not to curious, but to
profitable truths. He seeks to better the condition of men, to labor for
the welfare of mankind, to enrich human life with new discoveries and
new resources, to equip mankind with new powers and new instruments of
action, His philosophy itself is but an instrument, _organum_, a sort of
machine or lever constructed to enable the intellect to raise a weight,
to break through obstacles, to open up vistas, to accomplish tasks,
which had hitherto surpassed its power. In his eyes, every special
science, like science in general, should be an implement. He invites
mathematicians to quit their pure geometry, to study numbers only with a
view to natural philosophy, to seek formulas only to calculate real
quantities and natural motions. He recommends moralists to study the
soul, the passions, habits, temptations, not merely in a speculative
way, but with a view to the cure or diminution of vice, and assigns to
the science of morals as its goal the amelioration of morals. For him,
the object of science is always the establishment of an art; that is,
the production of something of practical utility; when he wished to
describe the efficacious nature of his philosophy by a tale, he
delineated in the "New Atlantis," with a poet's boldness and the
precision of a seer, almost employing the very terms in use now, modern
applications, and the present organization of the sciences, academies,
observatories, air-balloons, submarine vessels, the improvement of land,
the transmutation of species, regenerations, the discovery of remedies,
the preservation of food. The end of our foundation, says his principal
personage, is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and
the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all
things possible. And this "possible" is infinite.

How did this grand and just conception originate? Doubtless common-sense
and genius, too, were necessary to its production; but neither
common-sense nor genius was lacking to men: there had been more than one
who, observing, like Bacon, the progress of particular industries,
could, like him, have conceived of universal industry, and from certain
limited ameliorations have advanced to unlimited amelioration. Here we
see the power of connection; men think they do everything by their
individual thought, and they can do nothing without the assistance of
the thoughts of their neighbors; they fancy that they are following the
small voice within them, but they only hear it because it is swelled by
the thousand buzzing and imperious voices, which, issuing from all
surrounding or distant circumstances, are confounded with it in an
harmonious vibration. Generally they hear it, as Bacon did, from the
first moment of reflection; but it had become inaudible among the
opposing sounds which came from without to smother it. Could this
confidence in the infinite enlargement of human power, this glorious
idea of the universal conquest of nature, this firm hope in the
continual increase of well-being and happiness, have germinated, grown,
occupied an intelligence entirely, and thence have struck its roots,
been propagated and spread over neighboring intelligences, in a time of
discouragement and decay, when men believed the end of the world at
hand, when things were falling into ruin about them, when Christian
mysticism, as in the first centuries, ecclesiastical tyranny, as in the
fourteenth century, were convincing them of their impotence, by
perverting their intellectual efforts and curtailing their liberty. On
the contrary, such hopes must then have seemed to be outbursts of pride,
or suggestions of the carnal mind. They did seem so; and the last
representatives of ancient science, and the first of the new, were
exiled or imprisoned, assassinated or burned. In order to be developed
an idea must be in harmony with surrounding civilization; before man can
expect to attain the dominion over nature, or attempts to improve his
condition, amelioration must have begun on all sides, industries have
increased, knowledge have been accumulated, the arts expanded, a hundred
thousand irrefutable witnesses must have come incessantly to give proof
of his power and assurance of his progress. The "masculine birth of the
time" (_temporis partus masculus_) is the title which Bacon applies to
his work, and it is a true one. In fact, the whole age co-operated in
it; by this creation it was finished. The consciousness of human power
and prosperity gave to the Renaissance its first energy, its ideal, its
poetic materials, its distinguishing features; and now it furnishes it
with its final expression, its scientific doctrine, and its ultimate
object.

We may add also, its method. For, the end of a journey once determined,
the route is laid down, since the end always determines the route; when
the point to be reached is changed, the path of approach is changed, and
science, varying its object, varies also its method. So long as it
limited its effort to the satisfying an idle curiosity, opening out
speculative vistas, establishing a sort of opera in speculative minds,
it could launch out any moment into metaphysical abstractions and
distinctions: it was enough for it to skim over experience; it soon
quitted it, and came all at once upon great words, quiddities, the
principle of individuation, final causes. Half proofs sufficed science;
at bottom it did not care to establish a truth, but to get an opinion;
and its instrument, the syllogism, was serviceable only for refutations,
not for discoveries; it took general laws for a starting-point instead
of a point of arrival; instead of going to find them, it fancied them
found. The syllogism was good in the schools, not in nature; it made
disputants, not discoverers. From the moment that science had art for an
end, and men studied in order to act, all was transformed; for we cannot
act without certain and precise knowledge. Forces, before they can be
employed, must be measured and verified; before we can build a house, we
must know exactly the resistance of the beams, or the house will
collapse; before we can cure a sick man, we must know with certainty the
effect of a remedy, or the patient will die. Practice makes certainty
and exactitude a necessity to science, because practice is impossible
when it has nothing to lean upon but guesses and approximations. How can
we eliminate guesses and approximations? How introduce into science,
solidity and precision? We must imitate the cases in which science,
issuing in practice, has proved to be precise and certain, and these
cases are the industries. We must, as in the industries, observe, essay,
grope about, verify, keep our mind fixed on sensible and particular
things, advance to general rules only step by step; not anticipate
experience, but follow it; not imagine nature, but interpret it. For
every general effect, such as heat, whiteness, hardness, liquidity, we
must seek a general condition, so that in producing the condition we may
produce the effect. And for this it is necessary, by fit rejections and
exclusions, to extract the condition sought from the heap of facts in
which it lies buried, construct the table of cases from which the effect
is absent, the table where it is present, the table where the effect is
shown in various degrees, so as to isolate and bring to light the
condition which produced it.[390] Then we shall have, not useless
universal axioms, but efficacious mediate axioms, true laws from which
we can derive works, and which are the sources of power in the same
degree as the sources of light.[391] Bacon described and predicted in
this modern science and industry, their correspondence, method,
resources, principle; and after more than two centuries it is still to
him that we go even at the present day to look for the theory of what we
are attempting and doing.




[Illustration: CHOICE EXAMPLES OF EARLY PRINTING AND ENGRAVING.

Fac-similes from Rare and Curious Books.

_THE NEW PSALTER OF THE VIRGIN MARY._

The "Novum Beatæ Mariæ Virginis Psalterium" was printed by the
Cistercians monks of the monastery of Sienna, in the duchy of Magdeburg,
near Wittemberg, in 1492. The present illustration shows the page of
dedication, in which mention is made of the Emperor Frederick, whose
arms, the double-headed eagle, appears in the border. The book was
printed in the year before the emperor died. The border is an easy and
flowing design of roses, which are always considered an emblem of the
Virgin. The volume is a remarkable production, rare and much prized by
collectors.]




Beyond this great view, he has discovered nothing. Cowley, one of his
admirers, rightly said that, like Moses on Mount Pisgah, he was the
first to announce the promised land; but he might have added quite as
justly, that, like Moses, he did not enter there. He pointed out the
route, but did not travel it; he taught men how to discover natural
laws, but discovered none. His definition of heat is extremely
imperfect. His "Natural History" is full of fanciful explanations.[392]
Like the poets, he peoples nature with instincts and desires; attributes
to bodies an actual voracity, to the atmosphere a thirst for light,
sounds, odors, vapors which it drinks in; to metals a sort of haste to
be incorporated with acids. He explains the duration of the bubbles of
air which float on the surface of liquids, by supposing that air has a
very small or no appetite for height. He sees in every quality, weight,
ductility, hardness, a distinct essence which has its special cause; so
that when a man knows the cause of every quality of gold, he will be
able to put all these causes together, and make gold. In the main, with
the alchemists, Paracelsus and Gilbert, Kepler himself, with all the men
of his time, men of imagination, nourished on Aristotle, he represents
nature as a compound of secret and living energies, inexplicable and
primordial forces, distinct and indecomposable essences, adapted each by
the will of the Creator to produce a distinct effect. He almost saw
souls endowed with latent repugnances and occult inclinations, which
aspire to or resist certain directions, certain mixtures, and certain
localities. On this account also he confounds everything in his
researches in an undistinguishable mass, vegetative and medicinal
properties, mechanical and curative, physical and moral, without
considering the most complex as depending on the simplest, but each on
the contrary in itself, and taken apart, as an irreducible and
independent existence. Obstinate in this error, the thinkers of the age
mark time without advancing. They see clearly with Bacon the wide field
of discovery, but they cannot enter upon it. They want an idea, and for
want of this idea they do not advance. The disposition of mind which but
now was a lever, is become an obstacle: it must be changed, that the
obstacle may be got rid of. For ideas, I mean great and efficacious
ones, do not come at will nor by chance, by the effort of an individual,
or by a happy accident. Methods and philosophies, as well as literatures
and religions, arise from the spirit of the age; and this spirit of the
age makes them potent or powerless. One state of public intelligence
excludes a certain kind of literature; another, a certain scientific
conception. When it happens thus, writers and thinkers labor in vain,
the literature is abortive, the conception does not make its appearance.
In vain they turn one way and another, trying to remove the weight which
hinders them; something stronger than themselves paralyzes their hands
and frustrates their endeavors. The central pivot of the vast wheel on
which human affairs move must be displaced one notch, that all may move
with its motion. At this moment the pivot was moved, and thus a
revolution of the great wheel begins, bringing round a new conception of
nature, and in consequence that part of the method which was lacking. To
the diviners, the creators, the comprehensive and impassioned minds who
seized objects in a lump and in masses, succeeded the discursive
thinkers, the systematic thinkers, the graduated and clear logicians,
who, disposing ideas in continuous series, lead the hearer gradually
from the simple to the most complex by easy and unbroken paths.
Descartes superseded Bacon; the classical age obliterated the
Renaissance; poetry and lofty imagination gave way before rhetoric,
eloquence, and analysis. In this transformation of mind, ideas were
transformed. Everything was drained dry and simplified. The universe,
like all else, was reduced to two or three notions; and the conception
of nature, which was poetical, became mechanical. Instead of souls,
living forces, repugnances, and attractions, we have pulleys, levers,
impelling forces. The world, which seemed a mass of instinctive powers,
is now like a mere machinery of cog-wheels. Beneath this adventurous
supposition lies a large and certain truth; that there is, namely, a
scale of facts, some at the summit very complex, others at the base very
simple; those above having their origin in those below, so that the
lower ones explain the higher; and that we must seek the primary laws of
things in the laws of motion. The search was made, and Galileo found
them. Thenceforth the work of the Renaissance, outstripping the extreme
point to which Bacon had pushed it, and at which he had left it, was
able to proceed onward by itself, and did so proceed, without limit.




[Footnote 265: See, at Bruges, the pictures of Hemling (fifteenth
century). No paintings enable us to understand so well the ecclesiastical
piety of the Middle Ages, which was altogether like that of the
Buddhists.]

[Footnote 266: The first carriage was in 1564. It caused much
astonishment. Some said that it was "a great sea-shell brought
from China"; others, "that it was a temple in which cannibals
worshipped the devil."]

[Footnote 267: For a picture of this state of things, see Fenn's
"Paston Letters."]

[Footnote 268: Louis XI in France, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain,
Henry VII in England. In Italy the feudal regime ended earlier, by
the establishment of republics and principalities.]

[Footnote 269: 1488, Act of Parliament on Enclosures.]

[Footnote 270: A "Compendious Examination," 1581, by William
Strafford. Act of Parliament, 1541.]

[Footnote 271 Between 1377 and 1588 the increase was from two and a
half to five millions.]

[Footnote 272: In 1585; Ludovic Guicciardini.]

[Footnote 273: Henry VIII at the beginning of his reign had but one
ship of war. Elizabeth sent out one hundred and fifty against the
Armada. In 1553 was founded a company to trade with Russia. In 1578
Drake circumnavigated the globe. In 1600 the East India Company was
founded.]

[Footnote 274: Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," 1817, I. V.
72 et passim.]

[Footnote 275: Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," I. V. 102.]

[Footnote 276: This was called the Tudor style. Under James I, in the
hands of Inigo Jones, it became	entirely Italian, approaching the
antique.]

[Footnote 277: Burton, "Anatomy of Melancholy," 12th ed. 1821.
Stubbes, "Anatomie of Abuses," ed. Turnbull, 1836.]

[Footnote 278: Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," II. 6, 87.]

[Footnote 279: Holinshed (1586), 1808, 6 vols. III. 763 et passim.]

[Footnote 280: Ibid., Reign of Henry VII "Elizabeth and James
Progresses," by Nichols.]

[Footnote 281: Laneham's Entertainment at Killingworth Castle, 1575.
Nichols's "Progresses," vol. I. London, 1788.]

[Footnote 282: Ben Jonson's works, ed. Gifford, 1816, 9 vols. "Masque
of Hymen," vol. VII. 76.]

[Footnote 283: Certain private letters also describe the court of
Elizabeth as a place where there was little piety or practice of
religion, and where all enormities reigned in the highest degree.]

[Footnote 284: Nathan Drake, "Shakespeare and his Times," chap.
V. and VI.]

[Footnote 285: Stubbes, "Anatomie of Abuses," p. 168 et passim.]

[Footnote 286: Hentzner's "Travels in England" (Bentley's
translation). He thought that the figure carried about in the
Harvest Home represented Ceres.]

[Footnote 287: Warton, vol. II. sec. 35. Before 1600 all the great
poets were translated into English, and between 1550 and 1616 all
the great historians of Greece and Rome. Lyly in 1500 first taught
Greek in public.]

[Footnote 288: Ascham, "The Scholemaster" (1570), ed. Arber, 1870,
first book, 78 et passim.]

[Footnote 289: Ma il vero e principal ornemento dell' animo in
ciascuno penso io che siano le lettere, benche i Franchesi solamente
conoscano la nobilita dell'arme... et tutti i litterati tengon per
vilissimi huomini. Castiglione "Il Cortegiano," ed. 1585, p. 112.]

[Footnote 290: See Burchard (the Pope's Steward) account of the
festival at which Lucretia Borgia was present. Letters of Aretinus,
"Life of Cellini," etc.]

[Footnote 291: See his sketches at Oxford, and those of Fra
Bartolomeo at Florence. See also the Martyrdom of St. Laurence,
by Baccio Bandinelli.]

[Footnote 292: Benvenuto Cellini, "Principles of the Art of Design."]

[Footnote 293: "Life of Cellini." Compare also these exercises which
Castiglione prescribes for a well-educated man, in his "Cortegiano,"
ed. 1585, p. 55: "Peró voglio che il nostro cortegiano sia perfetto
cavaliere d'ogni sella.... Et perche degli Italiani è peculiar
laude il cavalcare bene alia brida, il maneggiar con raggione massimamente
cavalli aspri, il corre lance, il giostare, sia in questo de meglior
Italiani.... Nel torneare, teper un passo, combattere una sbarra, sia
buono tra il miglior francesi.... Nel giocare a canne, correr torri,
lanciar haste e dardi, sia tra Spagnuoli eccelente.... Conveniente
è ancor sapere saltare, e correre;... ancor nobile exercitio il gioco
di palla.... Non di minor laude estimo il voltegiar a cavallo."]

[Footnote 294: Puttenham, "The Arte of English Poesie," ed. Arber,
1869, book I. ch. 31, p. 74.]

[Footnote 295: Surrey's "Poems," Pickering, 1831, p. 17.]

[Footnote 296: Ibid. "The faithful lover declareth his pains and his
uncertain joys, and with only hope recomforteth his woful heart," p. 53.]

[Footnote 297: Ibid. "Description of Spring, wherein everything
renews, save only the lover," p. 2.]

[Footnote 298: Ibid. p. 50.]

[Footnote 299: Syrrey's "Poems. A description of the restless state
of the lover when absent from the mistress of his heart," p. 78]

[Footnote 300: In another piece, "Complaint on the Absence of her
Lover being upon the Sea," he speaks in direct terms of his wife,
almost as affectionately.]

[Footnote 301: Greene, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Shakespeare,
Ford, Otway, Richardson, De Foe, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, etc.]

[Footnote 302: "The Frailty and Hurtfulness of Beauty."]

[Footnote 303: "Description of Spring. A Vow to Love Faithfully."]

[Footnote 304: "Complaint of the Lover Disdarned."]

[Footnote 305: Surrey, ed. Nott.]

[Footnote 306: The Speaker's address to Charles II on his restoration.
Compare it with the speech of M. de Fontanes under the Empire. In each
case it was the close of a literary epoch. Read for illustration the
speech before the University of Oxford, "Athenæ Oxonienses," I. 193.]

[Footnote 307: His second work, "Euphues and his England," appeared in
1581.]

[Footnote 308: See Shakespeare's young men, Mercutio especially.]

[Footnote 309: "The Maid her Metamorphosis."]

[Footnote 310: Two French novels of the age of Louis XIV, each in
ten volumes, and written by Mademoiselle de Scudéry.--Tr.]

[Footnote 311: Celadon, a rustic lover in "Astrée," a French novel
in five volumes, named after the heroine, and written by d'Urfé
(d. 1625).--Tr.]

[Footnote 312: "Arcadia," ed. fol. 1629, p. 117.]

[Footnote 313: "Arcadia," ed. fol. 1629, p. 114.]

[Footnote 314: "The Defence of Poesie," ed. fol. 1629, p. 558: "I
dare undertake, that Orlando Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will
never displease a soldier: but the quidditie of Ens and prima materia,
will hardly agree with a Corselet." See also, in the same book, the
very lively and spirited personification of History and Philosophy,
full of genuine talent.]

[Footnote 315: "The Defence of Poesie," ed. fol. 1629, p. 553.]

[Footnote 316: Ibid. p. 550.]

[Footnote 317: Ibid. p. 552.]

[Footnote 318: Ibid. p. 560. Here and there we find also verse as
spirited as this:
"Or Pindar's Apes, flaunt they in
phrases	fine,
Enam'ling with pied flowers their
thoughts of gold."--p. 568.]

[Footnote 319: "Astrophel and Stella," ed. fol. 1629, 101st sonnet,
p. 613.]

[Footnote 320: Ibid. 8th song, p. 603.]

[Footnote 321: "Astrophel and Stella" (1629), 8th song, 604.]

[Footnote 322: Ibid. 10th song, p. 610.]

[Footnote 323: Ibid, sonnet 69, p. 555.]

[Footnote 324: "Astrophel and Stella" (1629), sonnet 102, p. 614.]

[Footnote 325: Ibid. p. 525: this sonnet is headed E. D. Wood, in
his "Athen. Oxon." i., says it was written by Sir Edward Dyer,
Chancellor of the Most noble Order of the Garter.--Tr.]

[Footnote 326: Ibid, sonnet 43, p. 545.]

[Footnote 327: "Astrophel and Stella" (1629), sonnet 18, p. 573.]

[Footnote 328: Ibid, last sonnet, p. 539.]

[Footnote 329: Nathan Drake, "Shakspeare and his Times," I. Part 2,
ch. 2, 3, 4. Among these 233 poets the authors of isolated pieces are
not reckoned, but only those who published or collected their works.]

[Footnote 330: Drayton's "Polyolbion," ed. 1622, 13th song, p. 214.]

[Footnote 331: Shakespeare's "Tempest," act IV. 1.]

[Footnote 332: Ibid, act IV. 2.]

[Footnote 333: Greene's Poems, ed. Bell, "Eurymachus in Laudem
Mirimidæ," p. 73.]

[Footnote 334: Ibid. Melicertus's description of his Mistress, p. 38.]

[Footnote 335: Spenser's Works, ed. Todd, 1863, "The Faërie Queene,"
I. c. II, st. 51.]

[Footnote 336: Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. R. Bell. Celebration of Charis;
her Triumph, p. 125.]

[Footnote 337: "Cupid's Pastime," unknown author, ab. 1621.]

[Footnote 338: Ibid.]

[Footnote 339: "Rosalind's Madrigal."]

[Footnote 340: Greene's Poems, ed. R. Bell, Menaphon's Eclogue, p. 41.]

[Footnote 341: Ibid., Melicertus's Eclogue, p. 43.]

[Footnote 342: "As you Like It."]

[Footnote 343: "The Sad Shepherd." See also Beaumont and Fletcher,
"The Faithful Shepherdess."]

[Footnote 344: This poem was, and still is, frequently attributed
to Shakespeare. It appears as his in Knight's edition, published a
few years ago. Izaak Walton, however, writing about fifty years after
Marlowe's death, attributes it to him. In Palgrave's "Golden Treasury,"
it is also ascribed to the same author. As a confirmation, let us state
that Ithamore, in Marlowe's "Jew of Malta," says to the courtesan
(Act IV. Sc. 4):
"Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me, and be my love."--Tr.]

[Footnote 345: Chalmers's "English Poets"; William Warner, "Fourth Book
of Albion's England," ch. XX. p. 551.]

[Footnote 346: Chalmers's "English Poets," M. Drayton's "Fourth
Eclogue," IV. p. 436.]

[Footnote 347: M. Jourdain is the hero of Molière's comedy, "Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme," the type of a vulgar and successful upstart;
Mamamouchi is a mock title.--Tr.]

[Footnote 348: Lulli, a celebrated Italian composer of the time
of Molière.--Tr.]

[Footnote 349: It is very doubtful whether Spenser was so poor as
he is generally believed to have been.--Tr.]

[Footnote 350: "He died for want of bread, in King Street." Ben
Jonson, quoted by Drummond.]

[Footnote 351: "Hymns of Love and Beauty"; Of Heavenly Love and Beauty.]

[Footnote 352: "A Hymne in Honour of Beautie," lines 92-105.]

[Footnote 353: "A Hymne in Honour of Love," lines 176-182.]

[Footnote 354: "The Faërie Queene," I. c. 8, stanzas 22, 23.]

[Footnote 355: "The Shepherd's Calendar, Amoretti, Sonnets,
Prothalamion, Epithalamion, Muiopotmos, Vergil's Gnat, The Ruines
of Time, The Teares of the Muses," etc.]

[Footnote 356: Published in 1580: dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney.]

[Footnote 357: "Prothalamion," lines 19-54.]

[Footnote 358: "Astrophel and Stella," lines 181-192.]

[Footnote 359: Words attributed to him by Lodowick Bryskett,
"Discourse of Civil Life," ed. 1606, p. 26.]

[Footnote 360: Ariosto, 1474-1533. Tasso, 1544-1595. Cervantes,
1547-1616. Rabelais, 1483-1553.]

[Footnote 361: "The Faërie Queene," II. c. 3, stanzas 22-30.]

[Footnote 362: Ibid. III. c. 5, stanza 51.]

[Footnote 363: "The Faërie Queene," III. c. 6, stanzas 6 and 7.]

[Footnote 364: Ibid, stanzas 17 and 18.]

[Footnote 365: "The Faërie Queene," IV. c. 1, stanza 13.]

[Footnote 366: Clorinda, the heroine of the infidel army in Tasso's
epic poem, "Jerusalem Delivered"; Marfisa, an Indian Queen, who figures
in Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," and also, in Boyardo's "Orlando
Innamorato."--Tr.]

[Footnote 367: "The Faërie Queene," III. c. 4, stanza 33.]

[Footnote 368: "The Faërie Queene," II. c. 7, stanzas 28-46.]

[Footnote 369: "The Faërie Queene," II. c. 12, stanzas 53-78.]

[Footnote 370: "Nugæ Antiquæ," I. 349 et passim.]

[Footnote 371: "Some asked me where the Rubies grew,
And nothing I did say;
But with my finger pointed to
The lips of Julia.
Some ask'd how Pearls did grow, and where;
Then spake I to my girle,
To part her lips, and shew me there
The quarelets of Pearl.
One ask'd me where the roses grew;
I bade him not go seek;
But forthwith bade my Julia show
A bud in either cheek."
--Herrick's "Hesperides," ed. Walford, 1859; The Rock of Rubies, p. 32.

"About the sweet bag of a bee,
Two Cupids fell at odds;
And whose the pretty prize shu'd be,
They vow'd to ask the Gods.
Which Venus hearing, thither came,
And for their boldness stript them;
And taking thence from each his flame,
With rods of mirtle whipt them.
Which done, to still their wanton cries,
When quiet grown sh'ad seen them.
She kist and wip'd their dove-like eyes,
And gave the bag between them."
--Herrick, Ibid. The Bag of the Bee, p. 42.

"Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Pr'ythee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can't move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Pr'ythee, why so pale?
Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
Pr'ythee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can't win her,
Saying nothing do't?
Pr'ythee, why so mute?
Quit, quit for shame; this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her.
The devil take her!"
--Sir John Suckling's Works, ed. A. Suckling, 1836, p. 70.

"As when a lady, walking Flora's bower,
Picks here a pink, and there a gilly-flower,
Now plucks a violet from her purple bed,
And then a primrose, the year's maidenhead,
There nips the brier, here the lover's pansy,
Shifting her dainty pleasures with her fancy,
This on her arms, and that she lists to wear
Upon the borders of her curious hair;
At length a rose-bud (passing all the rest)
She plucks, and bosoms in her lily breast."--Quarles, Stanzas.]

[Footnote 372: See, in particular, his satire against courtiers. The
following is against imitators:
"But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others wit's fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out-spew,
As his owne things; and they 're his owne, 't is true,
For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne
The meat was mine, th' excrement is his owne."
--Donne's "Satires," 1639. Satire II. p. 128.]

[Footnote 373: "When I behold a stream, which from the spring
Doth with doubtful melodious murmuring,
Or in a speechless slumber calmly ride
Her wedded channel's bosom, ana there chide
And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough
Does but stoop down to kiss her utmost brow;
Yet if her often gnawing kisses win
The traiterous banks to gape and let her in,
She rusheth violently and doth divorce
Her from her native and her long-kept course,
And roares, and braves it, and in gallant scorn
In flatt'ring eddies promising return,
She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is dry.
Then say I: That is she, and this am I."--Donne, Elegy VI.]

[Footnote 374: Donne's Poems, 1639, "A Feaver," p. 15.]

[Footnote 375: Ibid. "The Flea," p. 1.]

[Footnote 376: A valet in Molière's "Les Précieuses Ridicules," who
apes and exaggerates his master's manners and style, and pretends to
be a marquess. He also appears in "L'Etourdi" and "Le dépit Amoureux,"
by the same author.--Tr.]

[Footnote 377: 1608-1667. I refer to the eleventh edition, of 1710.]

[Footnote 378: "The Spring" ("The Mistress," I. 72).]

[Footnote 379: See in Shakespeare, "The Tempest, Measure for
Measure, Hamlet"; in Beaumont and Fletcher, "Thierry and Theodoret,"
Act IV; Webster, passim.]

[Footnote 380: "Anatomy of Melancholy," 12th ed. 1821, 2 vols; Democritus
to the Reader, I. 4.]

[Footnote 381: "Anatomy of Melancholy," I. part 2, sec. 2, Mem. 4,
p. 420 et passim.]

[Footnote 382: "The Works of Sir Thomas Browne," ed. Wilkin, 1852, 3
vols. "Hydriotaphia," III. ch. V. 14 et passim.]

[Footnote 383: See Milsand, Étude sur Sir Thomas Browne, in the "Revue
des Deux Mondes," 1858.]

[Footnote 384: Bacon's Works. Translation of the "De Augmentis
Scientiarum," Book II; To the King.]

[Footnote 385: Ibid. Book I. The true end of learning mistaken.]

[Footnote 386: Especially in the Essays.]

[Footnote 387: See also "Novum Organum," Books I and II; the
twenty-seven kinds of examples, with their metaphorical names:
Instantiæ crucis, divortii januæ, Instantiæ innuentes, polychrestæ,
magicæ, etc.]

[Footnote 388: "The Works of Francis Bacon," London, 1824, vol. VII.
p. 2. "Latin Biography," by Rawley.]

[Footnote 389: This point is brought out by the review of Lord Macaulay.
"Critical and Historical Essays," vol. III.]

[Footnote 390: "Novum Organum," II. 15 and 16.]

[Footnote 391: Ibid. I. I. 3.]

[Footnote 392: "Natural History," 800, 24, etc. "De Augmentis," III. 1.]




CHAPTER SECOND


The Theatre


We must look at this world more closely, and beneath the ideas which are
developed seek for the living men; it is the theatre especially which is
the original product of the English Renaissance, and it is the theatre
especially which will exhibit the men of the English Renaissance. Forty
poets, amongst them ten of superior rank, as well as one, the greatest
of all artists who have represented the soul in words; many hundreds of
pieces, and nearly fifty masterpieces; the drama extended over all the
provinces of history, imagination, and fancy--expanded so as to embrace
comedy, tragedy, pastoral and fanciful literature--to represent all
degrees of human condition, and all the caprices of human invention--to
express all the perceptible details of actual truth, and all the
philosophic grandeur of general reflection; the stage disencumbered of
all precept and freed from all imitation, given up and appropriated in
the minutest particulars to the reigning taste and public intelligence;
all this was a vast and manifold work, capable by its flexibility, its
greatness, and its form, of receiving and preserving the exact imprint
of the age and of the nation.[393]




SECTION I.--The Public and the Stage


Let us try, then, to set before our eyes this public, this audience, and
this stage--all connected with one another, as in every natural and
living work; and if ever there was a living and natural work, it is
here. There were already seven theatres in London, in Shakespeare's
time, so brisk and universal was the taste for dramatic representations.
Great and rude contrivances, awkward in their construction, barbarous in
their appointments; but a fervid imagination readily supplied all that
they lacked, and hardy bodies endured all inconveniences without
difficulty. On a dirty site, on the banks of the Thames, rose the
principal theatre, the Globe, a sort of hexagonal tower, surrounded by a
muddy ditch, on which was hoisted a red flag. The common people could
enter as well as the rich: there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny
seats; but they could not see it without money. If it rained, and it
often rains in London, the people in the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers,
sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain upon their heads. I
suppose they did not trouble themselves about it; it was not so long
since they began to pave the streets of London; and when men, like
these, have had experience of sewers and puddles, they are not afraid of
catching cold. While waiting for the piece, they amuse themselves after
their fashion, drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then
resort to their lists; they have been known to fall upon the actors, and
turn the theatre upside down. At other times they were dissatisfied and
went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding, or toss him in a blanket;
they were coarse fellows, and there was no month when the cry of "Clubs"
did not call them out of their shops to exercise their brawny arms. When
the beer took effect, there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a
peculiar receptacle for general use. The smell rises, and then comes the
cry, "Burn the juniper!" They burn some in a plate on the stage, and the
heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled could
scarcely get disgusted at anything, and cannot have had sensitive noses.
In the time of Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of.
Remember that they were hardly out of the Middle Ages and that in the
Middle Ages man lived on a dunghill.

Above them, on the stage, were the spectators able to pay a shilling,
the elegant people, the gentlefolk. These were sheltered from the rain,
and if they chose to pay an extra shilling, could have a stool. To this
were reduced the prerogatives of rank and the devices of comfort: it
often happened that there were not stools enough; then they lie down on
the ground: this was not a time to be dainty. They play cards, smoke,
insult the pit, who gave it them back without stinting, and throw apples
at them into the bargain. They also gesticulate, swear in Italian,
French, English;[394] crack aloud jokes in dainty, composite, high-colored
words: in short, they have the energetic, original, gay manners of
artists, the same humor, the same absence of constraint, and, to
complete the resemblance, the same desire to make themselves singular,
the same imaginative cravings, the same absurd and picturesque devices,
beards cut to a point, into the shape of a fan, a spade, the letter T,
gaudy and expensive dresses, copied from five or six neighboring
nations, embroidered, laced with gold, motley, continually heightened in
effect or changed for others: there was, as it were, a carnival in their
brains as well as on their backs.

With such spectators illusions could be produced without much trouble:
there were no preparations or perspectives; few or no movable scenes:
their imaginations took all this upon them. A scroll in big letters
announced to the public that they were in London or Constantinople; and
that was enough to carry the public to the desired place. There was no
trouble about probability. Sir Philip Sidney writes:


"You shall have Asia of the one side, and Africke of the other, and so
many other under-kingdomes, that the Plaier when hee comes in, must ever
begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived.
Now shall you have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then wee
must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and by wee heare newes of
shipwracke in the same place, then wee are to blame if we accept it not
for a rocke;... while in the meane time two armies flie in, represented
with foure swordes and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not
receive it for a pitched field? Now of time they are much more liberall.
For ordinary it is, that two young Princes fall in love, after many
traverses, shee is got with childe, delivered of a faire boy, hee is
lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is readie to get another
childe; and all this in two hours space."[395]


Doubtless these enormities were somewhat reduced under Shakespeare; with
a few hangings, crude representations of animals, towers, forests, they
assisted somewhat the public imagination. But after all, in
Shakespeare's plays, as in all others, the imagination from within is
chiefly drawn upon for the machinery; it must lend itself to all,
substitute all, accept for a queen a young man who has just been shaved,
endure in one act ten changes of place, leap suddenly over twenty years
or five hundred miles,[396] take half a dozen supernumeraries for forty
thousand men, and to have represented by the rolling of the drums all
the battles of Caesar, Henry V, Coriolanus, Richard III. And
imagination, being so overflowing and so young, accepts all this. Recall
your own youth; for my part, the deepest emotions I have ever felt at a
theatre were given to me by a strolling bevy of four young girls,
playing comedy and tragedy on a stage in a coffee-house; true, I was
eleven years old. So in this theatre, at this moment, their souls were
fresh, as ready to feel everything as the poet was to dare everything.




SECTION II.--Manners of the Sixteenth Century


These are but externals; let us try to advance further, to observe the
passions, the bent of mind, the inner man: it is this inner state which
raised and modelled the drama, as everything else; invisible
inclinations are everywhere the cause of visible works, and the interior
shapes the exterior. What are these townspeople, courtiers, this public,
whose taste fashions the theatre? what is there peculiar in the
structure and condition of their minds? The condition must needs be
peculiar; for the drama flourishes all of a sudden, and for sixty years
together, with marvellous luxuriance, and at the end of this time is
arrested so that no effort could ever revive it. The structure must be
peculiar; for of all theatres, old and new, this is distinct in form,
and displays a style, action, characters, an idea of life, which are not
found in any age or any country beside. This particular feature is the
free and complete expansion of nature.

What we call nature in men is, man such as he was before culture and
civilization had deformed and reformed him. Almost always, when a new
generation arrives at manhood and consciousness, it finds a code of
precepts impose on it with all the weight and authority of antiquity. A
hundred kinds of chains, a hundred thousand kinds of ties, religion,
morality, good breeding, every legislation which regulates sentiments,
morals, manners, fetter and tame the creature of impulse and passion
which breathes and frets within each of us. There is nothing like that
here. It is a regeneration, and the curb of the past is wanting to the
present. Catholicism, reduced to external ceremony and clerical
chicanery, had just ended; Protestantism, arrested in its first gropings
after truth, or straying into sects, had not yet gained the mastery; the
religion of discipline was grown feeble, and the religion of morals was
not yet established; men ceased to listen to the directions of the
clergy, and has not yet spelled out the law of conscience. The church
was turned into an assembly-room, as in Italy; the young fellows came to
St. Paul's to walk, laugh, chatter, display their new cloaks; the thing
had even passed into a custom. They paid for the noise they made with
their spurs, and this tax was a source of income to the canons;[397]
pickpockets, loose girls, came there by crowds; these latter struck
their bargains while service was going on. Imagine, in short, that the
scruples of conscience and the severity of the Puritans were at that
time odious and ridiculed on the stage, and judge of the difference
between this sensual, unbridled England, and the correct, disciplined,
stiff England of our own time. Ecclesiastical or secular, we find no
signs of rule. In the failure of faith, reason had not gained sway, and
opinion is as void of authority as tradition. The imbecile age, which
has just ended, continues buried in scorn, with its ravings, its
verse-makers, and its pedantic text-books; and out of the liberal
opinions derived from antiquity, from Italy, France, and Spain, everyone
could pick and choose as it pleased him, without stooping to restraint
or acknowledging a superiority. There was no model imposed on them, as
nowadays; instead of affecting imitation, they affected
originality.[398] Each strove to be himself, with his own oaths,
peculiar ways, costumes, his specialties of conduct and humor, and to be
unlike everyone else. They said not, "So and so is done," but "I do so
and so." Instead of restraining, they gave free vent to themselves.
There was no etiquette of society; save for an exaggerated jargon of
chivalresque courtesy, they are masters of speech and action on the
impulse of the moment. You will find them free from decorum, as of all
else. In this outbreak and absence of fetters, they resemble fine strong
horses let loose in the meadow. Their inborn instincts have not been
tamed, nor muzzled, nor diminished.

On the contrary, they have been preserved intact by bodily and military
training; and escaping as they were from barbarism, not from
civilization, they had not been acted upon by the innate softening and
hereditary tempering which are new transmitted with the blood, and
civilize a man from the moment of his birth. This is why man, who for
three centuries has been a domestic animal, was still almost a savage
beast, and the force of his muscles and the strength of his nerves
increased the boldness and energy of his passions. Look at these
uncultivated men, men of the people, how suddenly the blood warms and
rises to their face; their fists double, their lips press together, and
those vigorous bodies rush at once into action. The courtiers of that
age were like our men of the people. They had the same taste for the
exercise of their limbs, the same indifference toward the inclemencies
of the weather, the same coarseness of language, the same undisguised
sensuality. They were carmen in body and gentlemen in sentiment, with
the dress of actors and the tastes of artists. "At fourtene," says John
Hardyng, "a lordes sonnes shalle to felde hunte the dere, and catch an
hardynesse. For dere to hunte and slea, and see them blede, ane
hardyment gyffith to his courage.... At sextene yere, to werray and to
wage, to juste and ryde, and castels to assayle... and every day his
armure to assay in fete of armes with some of his meyne."[399] When
ripened to manhood, he is employed with the bow, in wrestling, leaping,
vaulting. Henry VII's court, in its noisy merriment, was like a village
fair. The king, says Holinshed, exercised himself "dailie in shooting,
singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the barre, plaieing at the
recorders, flute, virginals, in setting of songs, and making of
ballads." He leaps the moats with a pole, and was once within an ace of
being killed. He is so fond of wrestling, that publicly, on the field of
the Cloth of Gold, he seized Francis I in his arms to try a throw with
him. This is how a common soldier or a bricklayer nowadays tries a new
comrade. In fact, they regarded gross jests and brutal buffooneries as
amusements, as soldiers and bricklayers do now. In every nobleman's
house there was a fool, whose business it was to utter pointed jests, to
make eccentric gestures, horrible faces, to sing licentious songs, as we
might hear now in a beer-house. They thought insults and obscenity a
joke. They were foul-mouthed, they listened to Rabelais's words
undiluted, and delighted in conversation which would revolt us. They had
no respect for humanity; the rules of proprieties and the habits of good
breeding began only under Louis XIV, and by imitation of the French; at
this time they all blurted out the word that fitted in, and that was
most frequently a coarse word. You will see on the stage, in
Shakespeare's "Pericles," the filth of a haunt of vice.[400] The great
lords, the well-dressed ladies, speak billingsgate. When Henry V pays
his court to Catherine of France, it is with the coarse bearing of a
sailor who may have taken a fancy to a sutler; and like the tars who
tattoo a heart on their arms to prove their love for the girls they left
behind them, there were men who "devoured sulphur and drank urine"[401]
to win their mistress by a proof of affection. Humanity is as much
lacking as decency.[402] Blood, suffering, does not move them. The court
frequents bear and bull baitings, where dogs are ripped up and chained
beasts are sometimes beaten to death, and it was, says an officer of the
palace, "a charming entertainment."[403] No wonder they used their arms
like clodhoppers and gossips. Elizabeth used to beat her maids of honor,
"so that these beautiful girls could often be heard crying and lamenting
in a piteous manner." One day she spat upon Sir Mathew's fringed coat;
at another time, when Essex, whom she was scolding, turned his back, she
gave him a box on the ear. It was then the practice of great ladies to
beat their children and their servants. Poor Jane Grey was sometimes so
wretchedly "boxed, struck, pinched, and ill-treated in other manners
which she dare not relate," that she used to wish herself dead. Their
first idea is to come to words, to blows, to have satisfaction. As in
feudal times, they appeal at once to arms, and retain the habit of
taking the law in their own hands, and without delay. "On Thursday
laste," writes Gilbert Talbot to the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury,
"as my Lorde Rytche was rydynge in the streates, there was one Wyndam
that stode in a dore, and shotte a dagge at him, thynkynge to have
slayne him. ... The same daye, also, as Sr John Conway was goynge in the
streetes, Mr. Lodovyke Grevell came sodenly upon him, and stroke him on
the hedd wth a sworde.... I am forced to trouble yor Honors wth thes
tryflynge matters, for I know no greater."[404] No one, not even the
queen, is safe among these violent dispositions.[405] Again, when one
man struck another in the precincts of the court, his hand was cut off,
and the arteries stopped with a red-hot iron. Only such atrocious
imitations of their own crimes, and the painful image of bleeding and
suffering flesh, could tame their vehemence and restrain the uprising of
their instincts. Judge now what materials they furnish to the theatre,
and what characters they look for at the theatre. To please the public,
the stage cannot deal too much in open lust and the strongest passions;
it must depict man attaining the limit of his desires, unchecked, almost
mad, now trembling and rooted before the white palpitating flesh which
his eyes devour, now haggard and grinding his teeth before the enemy
whom he wishes to tear to pieces, now carried beyond himself and
overwhelmed at the sight of the honors and wealth which he covets,
always raging and enveloped in a tempest of eddying ideas, sometimes
shaken by impetuous joy, more often on the verge of fury and madness,
stronger, more ardent, more daringly let loose to infringe on reason and
law than ever. We hear from the stage as from the history of the time,
these fierce murmurs: the sixteenth century is like a den of lions.

Amid passions so strong as these there is not one lacking. Nature
appears here in all its violence, but also in all its fulness. If
nothing had been weakened, nothing had been mutilated. It is the entire
man who is displayed, heart, mind, body, senses, with his noblest and
finest aspirations, as with his most bestial and savage appetites,
without the preponderance of any dominant circumstance to cast him
altogether in one direction, to exalt or degrade him. He has not become
rigid, as he will be under Puritanism. He is not uncrowned as in the
Restoration. After the hollowness and weariness of the fifteenth
century, he rose up by a second birth, as before in Greece man had risen
by a first birth; and now, as then, the temptations of the outer world
came combined to raise his faculties from their sloth and torpor. A sort
of generous warmth spread over them to ripen and make them flourish.
Peace, prosperity, comfort began; new industries and increasing activity
suddenly multiplied objects of utility and luxury tenfold. America and
India, by their discovery, caused the treasures and prodigies heaped up
afar over distant seas to shine before their eyes; antiquity
rediscovered, sciences mapped out, the Reformation begun, books
multiplied by printing, ideas by books, doubled the means of enjoyment,
imagination, and thought. People wanted to enjoy, to imagine, and to
think; for the desire grows with the attraction, and here all
attractions were combined. There were attractions for the senses, in the
chambers which they began to warm, in the beds newly furnished with
pillows, in the coaches which they began to use for the first time.
There were attractions for the senses, in the chambers which they began
to warm, in the beds newly furnished with pillows, in the coaches which
they began to use for the first time. There were attractions for the
imagination in the new palaces, arranged after the Italian manner; in
the variegated hangings from Flanders; in the rich garments,
gold-embroidered, which, being continually changed, combined the fancies
and the splendors of all Europe. There were attractions for the mind, in
the noble and beautiful writings which, spread abroad, translated,
explained, brought in philosophy, eloquence, and poetry, from restored
antiquity, and from the surrounding renaissances. Under this appeal all
aptitudes and instincts at once started up; the low and the lofty, ideal
and sensual love, gross cupidity and pure generosity. Recall what you
yourself experienced, when from being a child you became a man: what
wishes for happiness, what breadth of anticipation, what intoxication of
heart wafted you towards all joys; with what impulse your hands seized
involuntarily and all at once every branch of the tree, and would not
let a single fruit escape. At sixteen years, like Chérubin,[406] we
wish for a servant girl while we adore a Madonna; we are capable of
every species of covetousness, and also of every species of self-denial;
we find virtue more lovely, our meals more enjoyable; pleasure has more
zest, heroism more worth: there is no allurement which is not keen; the
sweetness and novelty of things are too strong; and in the hive of
passions which buzzes within us, and stings us like the sting of a bee,
we can do nothing but plunge, one after another, in all directions. Such
were the men of this time, Raleigh, Essex, Elizabeth, Henry VIII
himself, excessive and inconstant, ready for devotion and for crime,
violent in good and evil, heroic with strange weaknesses, humble with
sudden changes of mood, never vile with premeditation like the
roisterers of the Restoration, never rigid on principle like the
Puritans of the Revolution, capable of weeping like children,[407] and
of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once true knights,
displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only
the fulness of their characters. Thus prepared, they could take in
everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of
shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all
the characters, prostitutes and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass
quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen
alternately to the quibbles of clowns and the songs of lovers. The drama
even, in order to imitate and satisfy the fertility of their nature,
must talk all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and
side by side with this, vulgar prose: more, it must distort its natural
style and limits; put songs, poetical devices, into the discourse of
courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy
world of the opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and
sea, with their groves and their meadows; compel the gods to descend
upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its world of marvels. No
other theatre is so complicated; for nowhere else do we find men so
complete.




SECTION III.--Some Aspects of the English Mind


In this free and universal expansion, the passions had their special
bent withal, which was an English one, inasmuch as they were English.
After all, in every age, under every civilization, a people is always
itself. Whatever be its dress, goat-skin blouse, gold-laced doublet,
black dress-coat, the five or six great instincts which it possessed in
its forests, follow it in its palaces and offices. To this day, warlike
passions, a gloomy humor, subsist under the regularity and propriety of
modern manners.[408] Their native energy and harshness pierce through
the perfection of culture and the habits of comfort. Rich young men, on
leaving Oxford, go to hunt bears on the Rocky Mountains, the elephant in
South Africa, live under canvas, box, jump hedges on horseback, sail
their yachts on dangerous coasts, delight in solitude and peril. The
ancient Saxon, the old rover of the Scandinavian seas, has not perished.
Even at school the children roughly treat one another, withstand one
another, fight like men; and their character is so indomitable that they
need the birch and blows to reduce them to the discipline of law. Judge
what they were in the sixteenth century; the English race passed then
for the most warlike of Europe, the most redoubtable in battle, the most
impatient of anything like slavery.[409] "English savages" is what
Cellini calls them; and the "great shins of beef" with which they fill
themselves, keep up the force and ferocity of their instincts. To harden
them thoroughly, institutions work in the same groove with nature. The
nation is armed, every man is brought up like a soldier, bound to have
arms according to his condition, to exercise himself on Sundays or
holidays; from the yeoman to the lord, the old military constitution
keeps them enrolled and ready for action.[410] In a state which
resembles an army it is necessary that punishments, as in an army, shall
inspire terror; and to make them worse, the hideous Wars of the Roses,
which on every flaw of the succession to the throne are ready to break
out again, are ever present in their recollection. Such instincts, such
a constitution, such a history, raise before them, with tragic severity,
an idea of life: death is at hand, as well as wounds, the block,
tortures. The fine cloaks of purple which the renaissances of the South
displayed joyfully in the sun, to wear like a holiday garment, are here
stained with blood, and edged with black. Throughout,[411] a stern
discipline, and the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; great men,
bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king's relatives, queens, a
protector, all kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their
blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks;
the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the
Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey
and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, Mary Stuart, the Earl of
Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest
rank of honors, beauty, youth, and genius; of the bright procession
nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of
the executioner. Shall I count the funeral pyres, the hangings, living
men cut down from the gibbet, disembowelled, quartered,[412] their limbs
cast into the fire, their heads exposed on the walls? There is a page in
Holinshed which reads like a death register:


"The five and twentith daie of Maie (1535), was in saint Paules church
at London examined nineteene men and six women born in Holland, whose
opinions were (heretical). Fourteene of them were condemned, a man and a
woman of them were burned in Smithfield, the other twelve were sent to
other townes, there to be burnt. On the nineteenth of June were three
moonkes of the Charterhouse hanged, drawne, and quartered at Tiburne,
and their heads and quarters set up about London, for denieng the king
to be supreme head of the church. Also the one and twentith of the same
moneth, and for the same cause, doctor John Fisher, bishop of Rochester,
was beheaded for denieng of the supremacie, and his head set upon London
bridge, but his bodie buried within Barking churchyard. The pope had
elected him a cardinall, and sent his hat as far as Calais, but his head
was off before his hat was on: so that they met not. On the sixt of
Julie, was Sir Thomas Moore beheaded for the like crime, that is to wit,
for denieng the king to be supreme head."[413]


None of these murders seem extraordinary; the chroniclers mention them
without growing indignant; the condemned go quietly to the block, as if
the thing were perfectly natural. Anne Boleyn said seriously, before
giving up her head to the executioner: "I praie God save the king, and
send him long to reigne over you, for a gentler, nor a more merciful
prince was there never."[414] Society is, as it were, in a state of
siege, so incited that beneath the idea of order everyone entertained
the idea of the scaffold. They saw it, the terrible machine, planted on
all the highways of human life; and the byways as well as the highways
led to it. A sort of martial law, introduced by conquests into civil
affairs, entered thence into ecclesiastical matters,[415] and social
economy ended by being enslaved by it. As in a camp,[416] expenditure,
dress, the food of each class, are fixed and restricted; no one might
stray out of his district, be idle, live after his own devices. Every
stranger was seized, interrogated; if he could not give a good account
of himself, the parish-stocks bruised his limbs; as in time of war he
would have passed for a spy and an enemy, if caught amidst the army. Any
person, says the law,[417] found living idly or loiteringly for the
space of three days, shall be marked with a hot iron on his breast, and
adjudged as a slave to the man who shall inform against him. This one
"shall take the same slave, and give him bread, water, or small drink,
and refuse meat, and cause him to work, by beating, chaining, or
otherwise, in such work and labour as he shall put him to, be it never
so vile." He may sell him, bequeath him, let him out for hire, or trade
upon him "after the like sort as they may do of any other their moveable
goods or chattels," put a ring of iron about his neck or leg; if he runs
away and absents himself for fourteen days, he is branded on the
forehead with a hot iron, and remains a slave for the whole of his life;
if he runs away a second time, he is put to death. Sometimes, says More,
you might see a score of thieves hung on the same gibbet. In one
year[418] forty persons were put to death in the county of Somerset
alone, and in each county there were three or four hundred vagabonds who
would sometimes gather together and rob in armed bands of sixty at a
time. Follow the whole of this history closely, the fires of Mary, the
pillories of Elizabeth, and it is plain that the moral tone of the land,
like its physical condition, is harsh by comparison with other
countries. They have no relish in their enjoyments, as in Italy; what is
called Merry England is England given up to animal spirits, a coarse
animation, produced by abundant feeding, continued prosperity, courage,
and self-reliance; voluptuousness does not exist in this climate and
this race. Mingled with the beautiful popular beliefs, the lugubrious
dreams and the cruel nightmare of witchcraft make their appearance.
Bishop Jewell, preaching before the queen, tells her that witches and
sorcerers within these last few years are marvellously increased. Some
ministers assert


"That they have had in their parish at one instant xvij or xviij
witches; meaning such as could worke miracles supernaturallie; that they
work spells by which men pine away even unto death, their colour fadeth,
their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft;
that instructed by the devil, they make ointments of the bowels and
members of children, whereby they ride in the aire, and accomplish all
their desires. When a child is not baptized, or defended by the sign of
the cross, then the witches catch them from their mothers sides in the
night,... kill them... or after buriall steale them out of their graves,
and seeth them in a caldron, untill their flesh be made potable.... It
is an infallible rule, that everie fortnight, or at the least everie
moneth, each witch must kill one child at the least for hir part."


Here was something to make the teeth chatter with fright. Add to this
revolting and absurd descriptions, wretched tomfooleries, details about
the infernal caldron, all the nastinesses which could haunt the trite
imagination of a hideous and drivelling old woman, and you have the
spectacles, provided by Middleton and Shakespeare, and which suit the
sentiments of the age and the national humor. The fundamental gloom
pierces through the glow and rapture of poetry. Mournful legends have
multiplied; every churchyard has its ghost; wherever a man has been
murdered his spirit appears. Many people dare not leave their village
after sunset. In the evening, before bed-time, men talk of the coach
which is seen drawn by headless horses, with headless postilions and
coachmen, or of unhappy spirits who, compelled to inhabit the plain,
under the sharp northeast wind, pray for the shelter of a hedge or a
valley. They dream terribly of death:


"To die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!"[419]


The greatest speak with a sad resignation of the infinite obscurity
which embraces our poor, short, glimmering life, our life, which is but
a troubled dream;[420] the sad state of humanity, which is but passion,
madness, and sorrow; the human being who is himself, perhaps, but a vain
phantom, a grievous sick man's dream. In their eyes we roll down a fatal
slope, where chance dashes us one against the other, and the inner
destiny which urges us onward, only shatters after it has blinded us.
And at the end of all is "the silent grave, no conversation, no joyful
tread of friends, no voice of lovers, no careful father's counsel;
nothing's heard, nor nothing is, but all oblivion, dust, and endless
darkness."[421] If yet there were nothing. "To die, to sleep; to sleep,
perchance to dream." To dream sadly, to fall into a nightmare like the
nightmare of life, like that in which we are struggling and crying
to-day, gasping with hoarse throat!--this is their idea of man and of
existence, the national idea, which fills the stage with calamities and
despair, which makes a display of tortures and massacres, which abounds
in madness and crime, which holds up death as the issue throughout. A
threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy,
like the sun, only appears in its full force now and then. They are
different from the Latin race, and in the common Renaissance they are
regenerated otherwise than the Latin races. The free and full
development of pure nature which, in Greece and Italy, ends in the
painting of beauty and happy energy, ends here in the painting of
ferocious energy, agony, and death.




SECTION IV.--The Poets of the Period


Thus was this theatre produced; a theatre unique in history, like the
admirable and fleeting epoch from which it sprang, the work and the
picture of this young world, as natural, as unshackled, and as tragic as
itself. When an original and national drama springs up, the poets who
establish it carry in themselves the sentiments which it represents.
They display better than other men the feelings of the public, because
those feelings arc stronger in them than in other men. The passions
which surround them, break forth in their heart with a harsher or a
juster cry, and hence their voices become the voices of all. Chivalric
and Catholic Spain had her interpreters in her enthusiasts and her Don
Quixotes: in Calderon, first a soldier, afterwards a priest; in Lope de
Vega, a volunteer at fifteen, a passionate lover, a wandering duelist, a
soldier of the Armada, finally, a priest and familiar of the Holy
Office; so full of fervor that he fasts till he is exhausted, faints
with emotion while singing mass, and in his flagellations stains the
walls of his cell with blood. Calm and noble Greece had in her principal
tragic poet one of the most accomplished and fortunate of her sons:[422]
Sophocles, first in song and palaestra; who at fifteen sang, unclad, the
pæan before the trophy of Salamis, and who afterwards, as ambassador,
general, ever loving the gods and impassioned for his state, presented,
in his life as in his works, the spectacle of the incomparable harmony
which made the beauty of the ancient world, and which the modern world
will never more attain to. Eloquent and worldly France, in the age which
carried the art of good manners and conversation to its highest pitch,
finds, to write her oratorical tragedies and to paint her drawing-room
passions, the most able craftsman of words, Racine, a courtier, a man of
the world; the most capable, by the delicacy of his tact and the
adaptation of his style, of making men of the world and courtiers speak.
So in England the poets are in harmony with their works. Almost all are
Bohemians; they sprang from the people,[423] were educated, and usually
studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but they were poor, so that their
education contrasts with their condition. Ben Jonson is the step-son of
a bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer; Marlowe is the son of a
shoemaker; Shakespeare of a wool merchant; Massinger of a servant of a
noble family.[424] They live as they can, get into debt, write for their
bread, go on the stage. Peele, Lodge, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare,
Heywood, are actors; most of the details which we have of their lives
are taken from the journal of Henslowe, a retired pawnbroker, later a
money-lender and manager of a theatre, who gives them work, advances
money to them, receives their manuscripts or their wardrobes as
security. For a play he gives seven or eight pounds; after the year 1600
prices rise, and reach as high as twenty or twenty-five pounds. It is
clear that, even after this increase, the trade of author scarcely
brings in bread. In order to earn money, it was necessary, like
Shakespeare, to become a manager, to try to have a share in the property
of a theatre; but such success is rare, and the life which they lead, a
life of actors and artists, improvident, full of excess, lost amid
debauchery and acts of violence, amidst women of evil fame, in contact
with young profligates, among the temptations of misery, imagination and
license, generally leads them to exhaustion, poverty, and death. Men
received enjoyment from them, but neglected and despised them. One
actor, for a political allusion, was sent to prison, and only just
escaped losing his ears; great men, men in office, abused them like
servants. Heywood, who played almost every day, bound himself, in
addition, to write a sheet daily, for several years composes at
haphazard in taverns, labors and sweats like a true literary hack, and
dies leaving two hundred and twenty pieces, of which most are lost. Kyd,
one of the earliest in date, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last,
at the end of his career, was obliged to become once more a
schoolmaster. Massinger dies unknown; and in the parish register we find
only this sad mention of him: "Philip Massinger, a stranger." A few
months after the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask alms
of the City, because he had left nothing. Imagination, as Drummond said
of Ben Jonson, oppressed their reason; it is the common failing of
poets. They wish to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoyment;
their mood, their heart governs them; in their life, as in their works,
impulses are irresistible; desire comes suddenly, like a wave, drowning
reason, resistance--often even giving neither reason nor resistance time
to show themselves.[425] Many are roisterers, sad roisterers of the same
sort, such as Musset and Murger, who give themselves up to every
passion, and "drown their sorrows in the bowl"; capable of the purest
and most poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tenderness,
and who yet can only undermine their health and mar their fame. Such
are Nash, Decker, and Greene; Nash, a fantastic satirist, who abused his
talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune; Decker, who
passed three years in the King's Bench prison; Greene, above all, a
pleasing wit, copious, graceful, who took a delight in destroying
himself, publicly with tears confessing his vices,[426] and the next
moment plunging into them again. These are mere androgynes, true
courtesans, in manners, body, and heart. Quitting Cambridge, "with good
fellows as free-living as himself," Greene had travelled over Spain,
Italy, "in which places he sawe and practizde such villainie as is
abhominable to declare." You see the poor man is candid, not sparing
himself; he is natural; passionate in everything, repentance or
otherwise; above all of ever-varying mood; made for self-contradiction;
not self-correction. On his return he became, in London, a supporter of
taverns, a haunter of evil places. In his "Groatsworth of Wit bought
with a Million of Repentance" he says:


"I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony
with drunkenness was my onely delight.... After I had wholly betaken me
to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise) I was so far
from calling upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such
delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could
thinke otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These
vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine
fantasies was my chiefest stay of living; and for those my vaine
discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my
continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would
continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long....
If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied; let me shift after
death as I may.... 'Hell!' quoth I; 'what talke you of hell to me? I
know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than
myselfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so
long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse.... If I
feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God
I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make
merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last.'"


A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious
verse the regularity and calm of an upright life; then returns to
London, spends his property and his wife's fortune with "a sorry ragged
queane," in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans;
drinking, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and
orgies; writing for bread, sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of
his wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love,
worthy of Rolla;[427] very often disgusted with himself, seized with a
fit of weeping between two merry bouts, and writing little pieces to
accuse himself, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn
young people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. He was
soon worn out by this kind of life; six years were enough to exhaust
him. An indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings
finished him. If it had not been for his landlady, who succored him, he
"would have perished in the streets." He lasted a little longer, and
then his light went out; now and then he begged her "pittifully for a
penny pott of malmesie"; he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt,
and when his own was "awashing," he was obliged to borrow her husband's.
"His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges," and the
poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding
sheet, and six and fourpence for the burial.

In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence,
dramatic genius forced its way, and amongst others, that of the first,
of the most powerful, of the true founder of the dramatic school,
Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and
audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy;
pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal
return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces which
brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas which
hallow them, break forth impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like
Kett,[428] is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity,
declares Moses "a juggler," Christ more worthy of death than Barabas,
says that "yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a
more excellent and more admirable methode," and "almost in every company
he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme."[429] Such were the rages, the
rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of thought gave rise to in these
new minds, who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared to
walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded with children, from the
straps and awls, he found himself studying at Cambridge, probably
through the patronage of a great man, and on his return to London, in
want, amid the license of the green-room, the low houses and taverns,
his head was in a ferment, and his passions became excited. He turned
actor; but having broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained
lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He openly avowed his
infidelity, and a prosecution was begun, which, if time had not failed,
would probably have brought him to the stake. He made love to a drab,
and in trying to stab his rival, his hand was turned, so that his own
blade entered his eye and his brain, and he died, cursing and
blaspheming. He was only thirty years old.

Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and occupied
in such a manner! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder,
atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy bespattered with
blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations of
the English stage, "Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo," even
the "Pericles" of Shakespeare, reach the same height of extravagance,
magniloquence and horror.[430] It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall
Schiller's "Robbers," and how modern democracy has recognized for the
first time its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor.[431]
So here the characters struggle and roar, stamp on the earth, gnash
their teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the
drums beat, coats of mail file past armies clash, men stab each other,
or themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats and lyrical
figures;[432] kings die, straining a bass voice; "now doth ghastly death
with greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my
life." The hero in "Tamburlaine the Great"[433] is seated on a chariot
drawn by chained kings; he burns towns, drowns women and children, puts
men to the sword, and finally, seized with an inscrutable sickness,
raves in monstrous outcries against the gods, whose hands afflict his
soul, and whom he would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of
senseless pride, of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many
devastations, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of
savage and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this
prodigality of carnage, this display of splendors and exaggerated
colors, this railing of demoniacal passions, this audacity of grand
impiety. If in the dramas which succeed it, "The Massacre at Paris,"
"The Jew of Malta," the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas
the Jew maddened with hate, is henceforth no longer human; he has been
treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a beast.
He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words:


"Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words,
And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee:
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.
... I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells....
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian;
There I enrich'd the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells....
I fill'd the jails with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him."[434]


All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like a demon who
rejoices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the
very extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors; and
by forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she
takes the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his daughter and the
whole convent. Two friars wish to denounce him, then to convert him; he
strangles the first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by
profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy, and says:


"Pull amain,
'Tis neatly done, sir; here's no print at all.
So, let him lean upon his staff; excellent! he stands as if he were
begging of bacon."[435]
"O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottlenosed
knave to my master, that ever gentleman had."[436]


The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the murder.


"_Barabas._ Heaven bless me! what, a friar a murderer!
When shall you see a Jew commit the like?
_Ithamore._ Why, a Turk could ha' done no more.
_Bar._ To-morrow is the sessions; you shall do it--
Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence.
_Friar._ Villains, I am a sacred person; touch me not.
_Bar._ The law shall touch you; we'll but lead you, we:
'Las, I could weep at your calamity!"[437]


We have also two other poisonings, an infernal machine to blow up the
Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the Turkish commander into a well.
Barabas falls into it himself, and dies in the hot caldron,[438]
howling, hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he had not
done evil enough. These are the ferocities of the Middle Ages; we might
find them to this day among the companions of Ali Pacha, among the
pirates of the Archipelago; we retain pictures of them in the paintings
of the fifteenth century, which represent a king with his court, seated
calmly round a living man who is being flayed; in the midst the flayer
on his knees is working conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the
skin.[439]

All this is pretty strong, you will say; these people kill too readily,
and too quickly. It is on this very account that the painting is a true
one. For the specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's
characters, is the abrupt commission of a deed; they are children,
robust children. As a horse kicks out instead of speaking, so they pull
out their knives instead of asking an explanation. Nowadays we hardly
know what nature is; instead of observing it we still retain the
benevolent prejudices of the eighteenth century; we only see it
humanized by two centuries of culture, and we take its acquired calm for
an innate moderation. The foundations of the natural man are
irresistible impulses, passions, desires, greeds; all blind. He sees a
woman,[440] thinks her beautiful; suddenly he rushes towards her; people
try to restrain him, he kills these people, gluts his passion, then
thinks no more of it, save when at times a vague picture of a moving
lake of blood crosses his brain and makes him gloomy. Sudden and extreme
resolves are confused in his mind with desire; barely planned, the thing
is done; the wide interval which a Frenchman places between the idea of
an action and the action itself is not to be found here.[441] Barabas
conceived murders, and straightway murders were accomplished; there is
no deliberation, no pricks of conscience; that is how he commits a score
of them; his daughter leaves him, he becomes unnatural, and poisons her;
his confidential servant betrays him, he disguises himself, and poisons
him. Rage seizes these men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill.
Benvenuto Cellini relates how, being offended, he tried to restrain
himself, but was nearly suffocated; and that in order to cure himself,
he rushed with his dagger upon his opponent. So, in "Edward the Second,"
the nobles immediately appeal to arms; all is excessive and unforeseen:
between two replies the heart is turned upside down, transported to the
extremes of hate or tenderness. Edward, seeing his favorite Gaveston
again, pours out before him his treasure, casts his dignities at his
feet, gives him his seal, himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop of
Coventry, suddenly cries:


"Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole,
And in the channel christen him anew."[442]


Then, when the queen supplicates:


"Fawn not on me, French strumpet! get thee gone....
Speak not unto her: let her droop and pine."[443]


Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in battle. The Earl of
Lancaster draws his sword on Gaveston to slay him, before the king;
Mortimer wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl; the noblemen
will not even let a dog approach the prince, and rob them of their rank.
Lancaster says of Gaveston:


"... He comes not back,
Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd body.
_Warwick._ And to behold so sweet a sight as that,
There's none here but would run his horse to death."[444]


They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him "at a bough"; they
refuse to let him speak a single minute with the king. In vain they are
entreated; when they do at last consent, they are sorry for it; it is a
prey they want immediately, and Warwick, seizing him by force, "strake
off his head in a trench." Those are the men of the Middle Ages. They
have the fierceness, the tenacity, the pride of big, well-fed,
thorough-bred bull-dogs. It is this sternness and impetuosity of
primitive passions which produced the Wars of the Roses, and for thirty
years drove the nobles on each other's swords and to the block.

What is there beyond all these frenzies and gluttings of blood? The idea
of crushing necessity and inevitable ruin in which everything sinks and
comes to an end. Mortimer, brought to the block, says with a smile:


"Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel
There is a point, to which, when men aspire,
They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd,
And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why should I grieve at my declining fall?--
Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown."[445]


Weigh well these grand words; they are a cry from the heart, the
profound confession of Marlowe, as also of Byron, and of the old
sea-kings. The northern paganism is fully expressed in this heroic and
mournful sigh: it is thus they imagine the world so long as they remain
on the outside of Christianity, or as soon as they quit it. Thus, when
men see in life, as they did, nothing but a battle of unchecked
passions, and in death but a gloomy sleep, perhaps filled with mournful
dreams, there is no other supreme good but a day of enjoyment and
victory. They glut themselves, shutting their eyes to the issue, except
that they may be swallowed up on the morrow. That is the master-thought
of "Doctor Faustus," the greatest of Marlowe's dramas: to satisfy his
soul, no matter at what price, or with what results:


"A sound magician is a mighty god....
How am I glutted with conceit of this!...
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl....
I'll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;
I'll have them wall all Germany with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg....
Like lions shall they guard us when we please;
Like Almain rutters with their horsemen's staves,
Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides;
Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love."[446]


What brilliant dreams, what desires, what vast or voluptuous wishes,
worthy of a Roman Cæsar or an Eastern poet, eddy in this teeming brain!
To satiate them, to obtain four-and-twenty years of power, Faustus gave
his soul, without fear, without need of temptation, at the first outset,
voluntarily, so sharp is the prick within:


"Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all for Mephistophilis.
By him I'll be great emperor of the world,
And make a bridge thorough the moving air....
Why shouldst thou not? Is not thy soul thine own?"[447]


And with that he gives himself full swing: he wants to know everything,
to have everything; a book in which he can behold all herbs and trees
which grow upon the earth; another in which shall be drawn all the
constellations and planets; another which shall bring him gold when he
wills it, and "the fairest courtezans"; another which summons "men in
armour" ready to execute his commands, and which holds "whirlwinds,
tempests, thunder and lightning" chained at his disposal. He is like a
child, he stretches out his hands for everything shining; then grieves
to think of hell, then lets himself be diverted by shows:


"_Faustus._ O this feeds my soul!
_Lucifer._ Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.
_Faustus._ Oh, might I see hell, and return again,
How happy were I then!..."[448]


He is conducted, being invisible, over the whole world: lastly to Rome,
amongst the ceremonies of the pope's court. Like a schoolboy during a
holiday, he has insatiable eyes, he forgets everything before a pageant,
he amuses himself in playing tricks, in giving the pope a box on the
ear, in beating the monks, in performing magic tricks before princes,
finally in drinking, feasting, filling his belly, deadening his
thoughts. In his transport he becomes an atheist, and says there is no
hell, that those are "old wives' tales." Then suddenly the sad idea
knocks at the gates of his brain.


"I will renounce this magic, and repent...
My heart's so harden'd I cannot repent:
Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,
But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears,
'Faustus, thou are damn'd!' then swords and knives,
Poison, guns, halters, and envenom'd steel
Are laid before me to despatch myself;
And long ere this I should have done the deed,
Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.
Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander's love and Œnon's death?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephistophilis?
Why should I die, then, or basely despair?
I am resolv'd; Faustus shall ne'er repent.--
Come Mephistophilis, let us dispute again,
And argue of divine astrology.
Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon?
Are all celestial bodies but one globe,
As is the substance of this centric earth?..."[449]
"One thing... let me crave of thee
To glut the longing of my heart's desire....
Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!--
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena....
O thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"[450]


"Oh, my God, I would weep! but the devil draws in my tears. Gush forth
blood, instead of tears! yea, life and soul! Oh, he stays my tongue! I
would lift up my hands; but see, they hold them, they hold them; Lucifer
and Mephistophilis...."[451]


"Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come....
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
Oh, I'll leap up to my God!--Who pulls me down?--
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ,
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ,
Yet will I call on him....
Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon....
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd....
It strikes, it strikes....
Oh soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!"[452]


There is the living, struggling, natural, personal man, not the
philosophic type which Goethe has created, but a primitive and genuine
man, hot-headed, fiery, the slave of his passions, the sport of his
dreams, wholly engrossed in the present, moulded by his lusts,
contradictions, and follies, who amidst noise and starts, cries of
pleasure and anguish, rolls, knowing it and willing it, down the slope
and crags of his precipice. The whole English drama is here, as a plant
in its seed, and Marlowe is to Shakespeare what Perugino was to Raphael.




SECTION V.--Formation of the Drama


Gradually art is being formed; and toward the close of the century it is
complete. Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster,
Massinger, Ford, Middleton, Heywood, appear together, or close upon each
other, a new and favored generation, flourishing largely in the soil
fertilized by the efforts of the generation which preceded them.
Henceforth the scenes are developed and assume consistency, the
characters cease to move all of a piece, the drama is no longer like a
piece of statuary. The poet who a little while ago knew only how to
strike or kill, introduces now a sequence of situation and a rationale
in intrigue. He begins to prepare the way for sentiments, to forewarn us
of events, to combine effects, and we find a theatre at last, the most
complete, the most life-like, and also the most strange that ever
existed.

We must follow its formation, and regard the drama when it was formed,
that is, in the minds of its authors. What was going on in these minds?
What sorts of ideas were born there, and how were they born? In the
first place, they see the event, whatever it be, and they see it as it
is; I mean that they have it within themselves, with its persons and
details, beautiful and ugly, even dull and grotesque. If it is a trial,
the judge is there, in their minds, in his place, with his physiognomy
and his warts; the plaintiff in another place, with his spectacles and
brief-bag; the accused is opposite, stooping and remorseful; each with
his friends, cobblers, or lords; then the buzzing crowd behind, all with
their grinning faces, their bewildered or kindling eyes.[453] It is a
genuine trial which they imagine, a trial like those they have seen
before the justice, where they screamed or shouted as witnesses or
interested parties, with their quibbling terms, their pros and cons, the
scribblings, the sharp voices of the counsel, the stamping of feet, the
crowding, the smell of their fellow-men, and so forth. The endless
myriads of circumstances which accompany and influence every event,
crowd round that event in their heads, and not merely the externals,
that is, the visible and picturesque traits, the details of color and
costume, but also, and chiefly, the internals, that is, the motions of
anger and joy, the secret tumult of the soul, the ebb and flow of ideas
and passions which are expressed by the countenance, swell the veins,
make a man to grind his teeth, to clench his fists, which urge him on or
restrain him. They see all the details, the tides that sway a man, one
from without, another from within, one through another, one within
another, both together without faltering and without ceasing. And what
is this insight but sympathy, an imitative sympathy, which puts us in
another's place, which carries over their agitations to our own breasts,
which makes our life a little world, able to reproduce the great one in
abstract? Like the characters they imagine, poets and spectators make
gestures, raise their voices, act. No speech or story can show their
inner mood, but it is the scenic effect which can manifest it. As some
men invent a language for their ideas, so these act and mimic them;
theatrical imitation and figured representation is their genuine speech:
all other expression, the lyrical song of Æschylus, the reflective
symbolism of Goethe, the oratorical development of Racine, would be
impossible for them. Involuntarily, instantaneously, without forecast,
they cut life into scenes, and carry it piecemeal on the boards; this
goes so far that often a mere character becomes an actor,[454] playing a
part within a part; the scenic faculty is the natural form of their
mind. Beneath the effort of this instinct, all the accessory parts of
the drama come before the footlights and expand before your eyes. A
battle has been fought; instead of relating it, they bring it before the
public, trumpets and drums, pushing crowds, slaughtering combatants. A
shipwreck happens; straightway the ship is before the spectator, with
the sailors' oaths, the technical orders of the pilot. Of all the
details of human life,[455] tavern-racket and statesmen's councils,
scullion's talk and court processions, domestic tenderness and
pandering--none is to small or too lofty: these things exist in
life--let them exist on the stage, each in full, in the rough,
atrocious, or absurd, just as they are, no matter how. Neither in
Greece, nor Italy, nor Spain, nor France, has an art been seen which
tried so boldly to express the soul, and its innermost depths—the
truth, and the whole truth.

How did they succeed, and what is this new art which tramples on all
ordinary rules? It is an art for all that, since it is natural; a great
art, since it embraces more things, and that more deeply than others do,
like the art of Rembrandt and Rubens; but like theirs, it is a Teutonic
art, and one whose every step is in contrast with those of classical
art. What the Greeks and Romans, the originators of the latter, sought
in everything, was charm and order. Monuments, statues, and paintings,
the theatre, eloquence and poetry, from Sophocles to Racine, they shaped
all their work in the same mould, and attained beauty by the same
method. In the infinite entanglement and complexity of things, they
grasped a small number of simple ideas, which they embraced in a small
number of simple representations, so that the vast confused vegetation
of life is presented to the mind from that time forth, pruned and
reduced, and perhaps easily embraced at a single glance. A square of
walls with rows of columns all alike; a symmetrical group of draped or
undraped forms; a young man standing up and raising one arm; a wounded
warrior who will not return to the camp, though they beseech him: this,
in their noblest epoch, was their architecture, their painting, their
sculpture, and their theatre. No poetry but a few sentiments not very
intricate, always natural, not toned down, intelligible to all; no
eloquence but a continuous argument, a limited vocabulary, the loftiest
ideas brought down to their sensible origin, so that children can
understand such eloquence and feel such poetry; and in this sense they
are classical.[456] In the hands of Frenchmen, the last inheritors of
the simple art, these great legacies of antiquity undergo no change. If
poetic genius is less, the structure of mind has not altered. Racine
puts on the stage a sole action, whose details he adjusts, and whose
course he regulates; no incident, nothing unforeseen, no appendices or
incongruities; no secondary intrigue. The subordinate parts are effaced;
at the most four or five principal characters, the fewest possible; the
rest, reduced to the condition of confidants, take the tone of their
masters, and merely reply to them. All the scenes are connected, and
flow insensibly one into the other, and every scene, like the entire
piece, has its order and progress. The tragedy stands out symmetrically
and clear in the midst of human life, like a complete and solitary
temple which limns its regular outline on the luminous azure of the sky,
in England all is different. All that the French call proportion and
fitness is wanting; Englishmen do not trouble themselves about them,
they do not need them. There is no unity; they leap suddenly over twenty
years, or five hundred leagues. There are twenty scenes in an act--we
stumble without preparation from one to the other, from tragedy to
buffoonery; usually it appears as though the action gained no ground;
the different personages waste their time in conversation, dreaming,
displaying their character. We were moved, anxious for the issue, and
here they bring us in quarrelling servants, lovers making poetry. Even
the dialogue and speeches, which we would think ought particularly to be
of a regular and continuous flow of engrossing ideas, remain stagnant,
or are scattered in windings and deviations. At first sight we fancy we
are not advancing, we do not feel at every phrase that we have made a
step. There are none of those solid pleadings, none of those conclusive
discussions, which every moment add reason to reason, objection to
objection; people might say that the different personages only knew how
to scold, to repeat themselves, and to mark time. And the disorder is as
great in general as in particular things. They heap a whole reign, a
complete war, an entire novel, into a drama; they cut up into scenes an
English chronicle or an Italian novel: this is all their art; the events
matter little; whatever they are, they accept them. They have no idea of
progressive and individual action. Two or three actions connected
endwise, or entangled one within another, two or three incomplete
endings badly contrived, and opened up again; no machinery but death,
scattered right and left and unforeseen: such is the logic of their
method. The fact is, that our logic, the Latin, fails them. Their mind
does not march by the smooth and straightforward paths of rhetoric and
eloquence. It reaches the same end, but by other approaches. It is at
once more comprehensive and less regular than ours. It demands a
conception more complete, but less consecutive. It proceeds, not as with
us, by a line of uniform steps, but by sudden leaps and long pauses. It
does not rest satisfied with a simple idea drawn from a complex fact,
but demands the complex fact entire, with its numberless
particularities, its interminable ramifications. It sees in man not a
general passion--ambition, anger, or love; not a pure
quality--happiness, avarice, folly; but a character, that is, the
imprint, wonderfully complicated, which inheritance, temperament,
education, calling, age, society, conversation, habits, have stamped on
every man; an incommunicable and individual imprint, which, once stamped
in a man, is not found again in any other. It sees in the hero not only
the hero, but the individual, with his manner of walking, drinking,
swearing, blowing his nose; with the tone of his voice, whether he is
thin or fat;[457] and thus plunges to the bottom of things, with every
look, as by a miner's deep shaft. This sunk, it little cares whether the
second shaft be two paces or a hundred from the first; enough that it
reaches the same depth, and serves equally well to display the inner and
visible layer. Logic is here from beneath, not from above. It is the
unity of a character which binds the two actions of the personage, as
the unity of an impression connects the two scenes of a drama. To speak
exactly, the spectator is like a man whom we should lead along a wall
pierced at separate intervals with little windows; at every window he
catches for an instant a glimpse of a new landscape, with its million
details: the walk over, if he is of Latin race and training, he finds a
medley of images jostling in his head, and asks for a map that he may
recollect himself; if he is of German race and training, he perceives as
a whole, by natural concentration, the wide country which he has only
seen piecemeal. Such a conception, by the multitude of details which it
combines, and by the depth of the vistas which it embraces, is a
half-vision which shakes the whole soul. What its works are about to
show us is, with what energy, what disdain of contrivance, what
vehemence of truth, it dares to coin and hammer the human medal; with
what liberty it is able to reproduce in full prominence worn-out
characters, and the extreme flights of virgin nature.




SECTION VI.--Furious Passions--Exaggerated Characters


Let us consider the different personages which this art, so suited to
depict real manners, and so apt to paint the living soul, goes in search
of amidst the real manners and the living souls of its time and country.
They are of two kinds, as befits the nature of the drama: one which
produces terror, the other which moves to pity; these graceful and
feminine, those manly and violent. All the differences of sex, all the
extremes of life, all the resources of the stage, are embraced in this
contrast; and if ever there was a complete contrast, it is here.

The reader must study for himself some of these pieces, or he will have
no idea of the fury into which the stage is hurled: force and transport
are driven every instant to the point of atrocity, and further still, if
there be any further. Assassinations, poisonings, tortures, outcries of
madness and rage; no passion and no suffering are too extreme for their
energy or their effort. Anger is with them a madness, ambition a frenzy,
love a delirium. Hippolyto, who has lost his mistress, says, "Were thine
eyes clear as mine, thou mightst behold her, watching upon yon
battlements of stars, how I observe them."[458] Aretus, to be avenged on
Valentinian, poisons him after poisoning himself, and with the
death-rattle in his throat, is brought to his enemy's side, to give him
a foretaste of agony. Queen Brunhalt has panders with her on the stage,
and causes her two sons to slay each other. Death everywhere; at the
close of every play, all the great people wade in blood: with slaughter
and butcheries, the stage becomes a field of battle or a
churchyard.[459] Shall I describe a few of these tragedies? In the "Duke
of Milan," Francesco, to avenge his sister, who has been seduced, wishes
to seduce in his turn the Duchess Marcelia, wife of Sforza, the seducer;
he desires her, he will have her; he says to her, with cries of love and
rage:


"For with this arm I'll swim through seas of blood,
Or make a bridge, arch'd with the bones of men,
But I will grasp my aims in you, my dearest,
Dearest, and best of women!"[460]


For he wishes to strike the duke through her, whether she lives or dies,
if not by dishonor, at least by murder; the first is as good as the
second, nay, better, for so he will do a greater injury. He calumniates
her, and the duke, who adores her, kills her; then, being undeceived,
loses his senses, will not believe she is dead, has the body brought in,
kneels before it, rages and weeps. He knows now the name of the traitor,
and at the thought of him he swoons or raves:


"I'll follow him to hell, but I will find him,
And there live a fourth Fury to torment him.
Then, for this cursed hand and arm that guided
The wicked steel, I'll have them, joint by joint,
With burning irons sear'd off, which I will eat,
I being a vulture fit to taste such carrion."[461]


Suddenly he gasps for breath, and falls; Francesco has poisoned him. The
duke dies, and the murderer is led to torture. There are worse scenes
than this; to find sentiments strong enough, they go to those which
change the very nature of man. Massinger puts on the stage a father who
judges and condemns his daughter, stabbed by her husband; Webster and
Ford, a son who assassinates his mother; Ford, the incestuous loves of a
brother and sister.[462] Irresistible love overtakes them; the ancient
love of Pasiphaë and Myrrha, a kind of madness-like enchantment, and
beneath which the will entirely gives way. Giovanni says:


"Lost! I am lost! My fates have doom'd my death!
The more I strive, I love; the more I love,
The less I hope: I see my ruin certain....
I have even wearied heaven with pray'rs, dried up
The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd
My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art
Could counsel, I have practis'd; but, alas!
I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales,
To fright unsteady youth: I am still the same;
Or I must speak, or burst."[463]


What transports follow! what fierce and bitter joys, and how short too,
how grievous and mingled with anguish, especially for her! She is
married to another. Read for yourself the admirable and horrible scene
which represents the wedding night. She is pregnant, and Soranzo, the
husband, drags her along the ground, with curses, demanding the name of
her lover:


"Come strumpet, famous whore?...
Harlot, rare, notable harlot,
That with thy brazen face maintain'st thy sin,
Was there no man in Parma to be bawd
To your loose cunning whoredom else but I?
Must your hot itch and plurisy of lust,
The heyday of your luxury, be fed
Up to a surfeit, and could none but I
Be pick'd out to be cloak to your close tricks,
Your belly-sports?--Now I must be the dad
To all that gallimaufry that is stuff'd
In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb?
Say, must I?
_Annabella._ Beastly man? why, 'tis thy fate.
I su'd not to thee....
_S._ Tell me by whom."[464]


She gets excited, feels and cares for nothing more, refuses to tell the
name of her lover, and praises him in the following words. This praise
in the midst of danger is like a rose she has plucked, and of which the
odor intoxicates her:


"_A._ Soft! 'twas not in my bargain.
Yet somewhat, sir, to stay your longing stomach
I am content t' acquaint you with _the_ man,
The more than man, that got this sprightly boy--
(For 'tis a boy, and therefore glory, sir,
Your heir shall be a son.)
_S._ Damnable monster?
_A._ Nay, and you will not hear, I'll speak no more.
_S._ Yes, speak, and speak thy last.
_A._ A match, a match?...
You, why you are not worthy once to name
His name without true worship, or, indeed,
Unless you kneel'd to hear another name him.
_S._ What was he call'd?
_A._ We are not come to that;
Let it suffice that you shall have the glory
To father what so brave a father got....
_S._ Dost thou laugh?
Come, whore, tell me your lover, or, by truth,
I'll hew thy flesh to shreds; who is't?"[465]


She laughs; the excess of shame and terror has given her courage; she
insults him, she sings; so like a woman!


"_A._ (Sings) _Che morte piu dolce che morire per amore._
_S._ Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag
Thy lust be-leper'd body through the dust....
(_Hales her up and down_)
_A._ Be a gallant hangman....
I leave revenge behind, and thou shalt feel't....
(_To Vasquez._) Pish, do not beg for me, I prize my life
As nothing; if the man will needs be mad,
Why, let him take it."[466]


In the end all is discovered, and the two lovers know they must die. For
the last time, they see each other in Annabella's chamber, listening to
the noise of the feast below which shall serve for their funeral feast.
Giovanni, who has made his resolve like a madman, sees Annabella richly
dressed, dazzling. He regards her in silence, and remembers the past. He
weeps and says:


"These are the funeral tears,
Shed on your grave; these furrow'd-up my cheeks
When first I lov'd and knew not how to woo....
Give me your hand: how sweetly life doth run
In these well-colour'd veins! How constantly
These palms do promise health!...
Kiss me again, forgive me.... Farewell."[467]


He then stabs her, enters the banqueting room, with her heart upon his
dagger:


"Soranzo see this heart, which was thy wife's.
Thus I exchange it royally for thine."[468]


He kills him, and casting himself on the swords of banditti, dies. It
would seem that tragedy could go no further.

But it did go further; for if these are melodramas, they are sincere,
composed, not like those of to-day, by Grub Street writers for peaceful
citizens, but by impassioned men, experienced in tragical arts, for a
violent, over-fed, melancholy race. From Shakespeare to Milton, Swift,
Hogarth, no race has been more glutted with coarse expressions and
horrors, and its poets supply them plentifully; Ford less so than
Webster; the latter a sombre man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be
haunting tombs and charnel-houses. "Places in court," he says, "are but
like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's
foot, and so lower and lower."[469] Such are his images. No one has
equalled Webster in creating desperate characters, utter wretches,
bitter misanthropes,[470] in blackening and blaspheming human life,
above all, in depicting the shameless depravity and refined ferocity of
Italian manners.[471] The Duchess of Malfi has secretly married her
steward Antonio, and her brother learns that she has children; almost
mad[472] with rage and wounded pride, he remains silent, waiting until
he knows the name of the father; then he arrives all of a sudden, means
to kill her, but so that she shall taste the lees of death. She must
suffer much, but above all, she must not die too quickly! She must
suffer in mind; these griefs are worse than the body's. He sends
assassins to kill Antonio, and meanwhile comes to her in the dark, with
affectionate words; he pretends to be reconciled, and suddenly shows her
waxen figures, covered with wounds, whom she takes for her slaughtered
husband and children. She staggers under the blow, and remains in gloom
without crying out. Then she says:


"Good comfortable fellow,
Persuade a wretch that's broke upon the wheel
To have all his bones new set; entreat him live
To be executed again. Who must despatch me?...
_Bosola._ Come, be of comfort, I will save your life.
_Duchess._ Indeed, I have not leisure to tend
So small a business.
_B._ Now, by my life, I pity you.
_D._ Thou art a fool, then,
To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched
As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers."[473]


Slow words, spoken in a whisper, as in a dream, or as if she were
speaking of a third person. Her brother sends to her a company of
madmen, who leap and howl and rave around her in mournful wise; a
pitiful sight, calculated to unseat the reason; a kind of foretaste of
hell. She says nothing, looking upon them; her heart is dead, her eyes
fixed, with vacant stare:


"_Cariola._ What think you of, madam?
_Duchess._ Of nothing:
When I muse thus, I sleep.
_C._ Like a madman, with your eyes open?
_D._ Dost thou think we shall know one another
In the other world?
_C._ Yes, out of question.
_D._ O that it were possible we might
But hold some two days' conference with the dead!
From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure,
I never shall know here. I'll teach thee a miracle;
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow:
The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass,
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad.
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar...."[474]


In this state, the limbs, like those of one who has been newly executed,
still quiver, but the sensibility is worn out; the miserable body only
stirs mechanically; it has suffered too much. At last the gravedigger
comes with executioners, a coffin, and they sing before her a funeral
dirge:


"_Duchess._ Farewell, Cariola...
I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.--Now, what you please:
What death?
_Bosola._ Strangling; here are your executioners.
_D._ I forgive them:
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do.... My body
Bestow upon my women, will you?...
Go, tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet."[475]


After the mistress the maid; the latter cries and struggles:


"_Cariola._ I will not die; I must not; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.
_1st Executioner._ Here's your wedding-ring.
_C._ If you kill me now,
I am damn'd. I have not been at confession
This two years.
_B._ When?[476]
_C._ I am quick with child."[477]


They strangle her also, and the two children of the duchess. Antonio is
assassinated; the cardinal and his mistress, the duke and his confidant,
are poisoned or butchered; and the solemn words of the dying, in the
midst of this butchery, utter, as from funereal trumpets, a general
curse upon existence:


"We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruin'd yield no echo. Fare you well....
O this gloomy world!
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!"[478]

"In all our quest of greatness,
Like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care,
We follow after bubbles blown in the air.
Pleasure of life, what is't? only the good hours
Of an ague; merely a preparative to rest,
To endure vexation....
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."[479]


You will find nothing sadder or greater from the Edda to Lord Byron.

We can well imagine what powerful characters are necessary to sustain
these terrible dramas. All these personages are ready for extreme acts;
their resolves break forth like blows of a sword; we follow, meet at
every change of scene their glowing eyes, wan lips, the starting of
their muscles, the tension of their whole frame. Their powerful will
contracts their violent hands, and their accumulated passion breaks out
in thunderbolts, which tear and ravage all around them, and in their own
hearts. We know them, the heroes of this tragic population, Iago,
Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hotspur, full of genius,
courage, desire, generally mad or criminal, always self-driven to the
tomb. There are as many around Shakespeare as in his own works. Let me
exhibit one character more, written by the same dramatist, Webster. No
one, except Shakespeare, has seen further into the depths of diabolical
and unchained nature. The "White Devil" is the name which he gives to
his heroine. His Vittoria Corombona receives as her lover the Duke of
Brachiano, and at the first interview dreams of the issue:


"To pass away the time, I'll tell your grace
A dream I had last night."


It is certainly well related, and still better chosen, of deep meaning
and very clear import. Her brother Flaminio says, aside:


"Excellent devil! she hath taught him in a dream
To make away his duchess and her husband."[480]


So, her husband, Camillo, is strangled, the Duchess poisoned, and
Vittoria, accused of the two crimes, is brought before the tribunal.
Step by step, like a soldier brought to bay with his back against a
wall, she defends herself, refuting and defying advocates and judges,
incapable of blenching or quailing, clear in mind, ready in word, amid
insults and proofs, even menaced with death on the scaffold. The
advocate begins to speak in Latin.


"_Vittoria._ Pray my lord, let him speak his usual tongue;
I'll make no answer else.
_Francisco de Medicis._ Why, you understand Latin.
_V._ I do, sir; but amongst this auditory
Which come to hear my cause, the half or more
May be ignorant in't."


She wants a duel, bare-breasted, in open day, and challenges the
advocate:


"I am at the mark, sir: I'll give aim to you,
And tell you how near you shoot."


She mocks his legal phraseology, insults him, with biting irony:


"Surely, my lords, this lawyer here hath swallow'd
Some pothecaries' bills, or proclamations;
And now the hard and undigestible words
Come up, like stones we use give hawks for physic:
Why, this is Welsh to Latin."


Then, to the strongest adjuration of the judges:


"To the point,
Find me but guilty, sever head from body,
We'll part good friends; I scorn to hold my life
At yours, or any man's entreaty, sir....
These are but feigned shadows of my evils:
Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils;
I am past such needless palsy. For your names
Of whore and murderess, they proceed from you,
As if a man should spit against the wind;
The filth returns in's face."[481]


Argument for argument: she has a parry for every blow: a parry and a
thrust:


"But take you your course: it seems you have beggar'd me first,
And now would fain undo me. I have houses.
Jewels, and a poor remnant of crusadoes:
Would those would make you charitable!"


Then, in a harsher voice:


"In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies;
The sport would be more noble."


They condemn her to be shut up in a house of convertites:


"_V._ A house of convertites! What's that?
_Monticelso._ A house of penitent whores.
_V._ Do the noblemen in Rome
Erect it for their wives, that I am sent
To lodge there?"[482]


The sarcasm comes home like a sword-thrust; then another behind it; then
cries and curses. She will not bend, she will not weep. She goes off
erect, bitter and more haughty than ever:


"I will not weep;
No, I do scorn to call up one poor tear
To fawn on your injustice: bear me hence
Unto this house of what's your mitigating title?
_Mont._ Of convertites.
_V._ It shall not be a house of convertites;
My mind shall make it honester to me
Than the Pope's palace, and more peaceable
Than thy soul, though thou art a cardinal."[483]


Against her furious lover, who accuses her of unfaithfulness, she is as
strong as against her judges; she copes with him, casts in his teeth the
death of his duchess, forces him to beg pardon, to marry her; she will
play the comedy to the end, at the pistol's mouth, with the
shamelessness and courage of a courtesan and an empress;[484] snared at
last, she will be just as brave and more insulting when the dagger's
point threatens her:


"Yes, I shall welcome death
As princes do some great ambassadors;
I'll meet thy weapon half way.... 'Twas a manly blow;
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant;
And then thou wilt be famous."[485]


When a woman unsexes herself, her actions transcend man's, and there is
nothing which she will not suffer or dare.




SECTION VII.--Female Characters


Opposed to this band of tragic characters, with their distorted
features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop of sweet and
timid figures, pre-eminently tender-hearted, the most graceful and
loveworthy whom it has been given to man to depict. In Shakespeare you
will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virgilia, Ophelia,
Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in the others; and it is a
characteristic of the race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama
to have represented them. By a singular coincidence, the women are more
of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go
each to its extreme: in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise
and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the
other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable
affection[486]--a thing unknown in distant lands, in France especially
so: a woman in England gives herself without drawing back, and places
her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing and
professing only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him
whom she has freely and forever chosen.[487] It is this, an old German
instinct, which these great painters of instinct diffuse here, one and
all: Penthea, Dorothea, in Ford and Greene; Isabella and the Duchess of
Malfi, in Webster; Bianca, Ordella, Arethusa, Juliana, Euphrasia,
Amoret, and others, in Beaumont and Fletcher: there are a score of them
who, under the severest tests and the strongest temptations, display
this wonderful power of self-abandonment and devotion.[488] The soul, in
this race, is at once primitive and serious. Women keep their purity
longer than elsewhere. They lose respect less quickly; weigh worth and
characters less suddenly: they are less apt to think evil, and to take
the measure of their husbands. To this day, a great lady, accustomed to
company, blushes in the presence of an unknown man, and feels bashful
like a little girl: the blue eyes are dropped, and a child-like shame
flies to her rosy cheeks. Englishwomen have not the smartness, the
boldness of ideas, the assurance of bearing, the precocity, which with
the French make of a young girl, in six months, a woman of intrigue and
the queen of a drawing-room.[489] Domestic life and obedience are more
easy to them. More pliant and more sedentary, they are at the same time
more concentrated and introspective, more disposed to follow the noble
dream called duty, which is hardly generated in mankind but by silence
of the senses. They are not tempted by the voluptuous sweetness which in
southern countries is breathed out in the climate, in the sky, in the
general spectacle of things; which dissolves every obstacle, which
causes privation to be looked upon as a snare and virtue as a theory.
They can rest content with dull sensations, dispense with excitement,
endure weariness; and in this monotony of a regulated existence, fall
back upon themselves, obey a pure idea, employ all the strength of their
hearts in maintaining their moral dignity. Thus supported by innocence
and conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright
sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation: they do not lie nor
simper. When they love, they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are
binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes
almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be spiteful or to
jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the
loved ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion. Euphrasia,
relating her history to Philaster, says:


"My father oft would speak
Your worth and virtue; and, as I did grow
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst
To see the man so prais'd; but yet all this
Was but a maiden longing, to be lost
As soon as found; till sitting in my window,
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates.
My blood flew out, and back again as fast,
As I had puff'd it forth and suck'd it in
Like breath: Then was I call'd away in haste
To entertain you. Never was a man,
Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd
So high in thoughts as I: You left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you forever. I did hear you talk,
Far above singing! After you were gone,
I grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd
What stirr'd it so: Alas! I found it love;
Yet far from lust; for could I but have liv'd
In presence of you, I had had my end."[490]


She had disguised herself as a page,[491] followed him, was his servant;
what greater happiness for a woman than to serve on her knees the man
she loves? She let him scold her, threaten her with death, wound her.


"Blest be that hand!
It meant me well. Again, for pity's sake!"[492]


Do what he will, nothing but words of tenderness and adoration can
proceed from this heart, these wan lips. Moreover, she takes upon
herself a crime of which he is accused, contradicts him when he asserts
his guilt, is ready to die in his place. Still more, she is of use to
him with the Princess Arethusa, whom he loves; she justifies her rival,
brings about their marriage, and asks no other thanks but that she may
serve them both. And strange to say, the princess is not jealous.


"_Euphrasia._ Never, Sir, will I
Marry; it is a thing within my vow:
But if I may have leave to serve the princess,
To see the virtues of her lord and her,
I shall have hope to live.
_Arethusa._... Come, live with me;
Live free as I do. She that loves my lord,
Curst be the wife that hates her!"[493]


What notion of love have they in this country? Whence happens it that
all selfishness, all vanity, all rancor, every little feeling, either
personal or base, flees at its approach? How comes it that the soul is
given up wholly, without hesitation, without reserve, and only dreams
thenceforth of prostrating and annihilating itself, as in the presence
of a god? Biancha, thinking Cesario ruined, offers herself to him as his
wife; and learning that he is not so, gives him up straightway, without
a murmur:


"_Biancha._ So dearly I respected both your fame
And quality, that I would first have perish'd
In my sick thoughts, than e'er have given consent
To have undone your fortunes, by inviting
A marriage with so mean a one as I am:
I should have died sure, and no creature known
The sickness that had kill'd me... Now since I know
There is no difference 'twixt your birth and mine,
Not much 'twixt our estates (if any be,
The advantage is on my side) I come willingly
To tender you the first-fruits of my heart,
And am content t' accept you for my husband.
Now when you are at the lowest....
_Cesario._ Why, Biancha,
Report has cozen'd thee; I am not fallen
From my expected honors or possessions,
Tho' from the hope of birth-right.
_B._ Are you not?
Then I am lost again! I have a suit too;
You'll grant it, if you be a good man....
Pray do not talk of aught what I have said t'ye....
... Pity me;
But never love me more!... I'll pray for you,
That you may have a virtuous wife, a fair one;
And when I'm dead...
_C._ Fy, fy!
_B._ Think on me sometimes,
With mercy for this trespass!
_C._ Let us kiss
At parting, as at coming!
_B._ This I have
As a free dower to a virgin's grave,
All goodness dwell with you!"[494]


Isabella, Brachiano's duchess, is defrayed, insulted by her faithless
husband; to shield him from the vengeance of her family, she takes upon
herself the blame of the rupture, purposely plays the shrew, and leaving
him at peace with his courtesan, dies embracing his picture. Arethusa
allows herself to be wounded by Philaster, stays the people who would
hold back the murderer's arm, declares that he has done nothing, that it
is not he, prays for him, loves him in spite of all, even to the end, as
though all his acts were sacred, as if he had power of life and death
over her. Ordella devotes herself, that the king, her husband, may have
children;[495] she offers herself for a sacrifice, simply, without grand
words, with her whole heart:


"_Ordella._ Let it be what it may then, what it dare,
I have a mind will hazard it.
_Thierry._ But, hark you;
What may that woman merit, makes this blessing?
_O._ Only her duty, sir.
_T._ 'Tis terrible!
_O._ 'Tis so much the more noble.
_T._ 'Tis full of fearful shadows!
_O._ So is sleep, sir,
Or anything that's merely ours, and mortal;
We were begotten gods else: but those fears,
Feeling but once the fires of noble thoughts,
Fly, like the shapes of clouds we form, to nothing.
_T._ Suppose it death!
_O._ I do.
_T._ And endless parting
With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness,
With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason!
For in the silent grave, no conversation,
No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers,
No careful father's counsel, nothing's heard,
Nor nothing is, but all oblivion,
Dust and endless darkness: and dare you, woman,
Desire this place?
_O._ 'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest:
Children begin it to us, strong men seek it,
And kings from height of all their painted glories
Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre....
_T._ Then you can suffer?
_O._ As willingly as say it.
_T._ Martell, a wonder!
Here is a woman that dares die.--Yet, tell me,
Are you a wife?
_O._ I am, sir.
_T._ And have children?--
She sighs and weeps!
_O._ Oh, none, sir.
_T._ Dare you venture
For a poor barren praise you ne'er shall hear,
To part with these sweet hopes?
_O._ With all but Heaven."[496]


Is not this prodigious? Can you understand how one human being can thus
be separated from herself, forget and lose herself in another? They do
so lose themselves, as in an abyss. When they love in vain and without
hope, neither reason nor life resist; they languish, grow mad, die like
Ophelia. Aspasia, forlorn,


"Walks discontented, with her watry eyes
Bent on the earth. The unfrequented woods
Are her delight; and when she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she with a sigh will tell
Her servants what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in; and make her maids
Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse.
She carries with her an infectious grief,
That strikes all her beholders; she will sing
The mournful'st things that ever ear hath heard,
And sigh and sing again; and when the rest
Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood,
Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room
With laughter, she will with so sad a look
Bring forth a story of the silent death
Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief
Will put in such a phrase, that, ere she end,
She'll send them weeping one by one away."[497]


Like a spectre about a tomb, she wanders forever about the remains of
her destroyed love, languishes, grows pale, swoons, ends by causing
herself to be killed. Sadder still are those who, from duty or
submission, allow themselves to be married while their heart belongs to
another. They are not resigned, do not recover, like Pauline in
"Polyeucte." They are crushed to death. Penthea, in Ford's "Broken
Heart," is as upright, but not so strong, as Pauline; she is the English
wife, not the Roman, stoical and calm.[498] She despairs sweetly,
silently, and pines to death. In her innermost heart she holds herself
married to him to whom she has pledged her soul: it is the marriage of
the heart which in her eyes is alone genuine; the other is only
disguised adultery. In marrying Bassanes she has sinned against Orgilus;
moral infidelity is worse than legal infidelity, and thenceforth she is
fallen in her own eyes. She says to her brother:


"Pray, kill me....
Kill me, pray; nay, will ye
_Ithocles._ How does thy lord esteem thee?
_P._ Such an one
As only you have made me; a faith-breaker,
A spotted whore; forgive me, I am one--
In act, not in desires, the gods must witness....
For she's that wife to Orgilus, and lives
In known adultery with Bassanes,
Is, at the best, a whore. Wilt kill me now?...
The handmaid to the wages
Of country toil, drinks the untroubled streams
With leaping kids, and with the bleating lambs,
And so allays her thirst secure; whiles I
Quench my hot sighs with fleetings of my tears."[499]


With tragic greatness, from the height of her incurable grief, she
throws her gaze on life:


"My glass of life, sweet princess, hath few minutes
Remaining to run down; the sands are spent;
For by an inward messenger I feel
The summons of departure short and certain.... Glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams,
And shadows soon decaying; on the stage
Of my mortality, my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length
By varied pleasures, sweeten'd in the mixture,
But tragical in issue... That remedy
Must be a winding-sheet, a fold of lead,
And some untrod-on corner in the earth."[500]


There is no revolt, no bitterness; she affectionately assists her
brother who has caused her unhappiness; she tries to enable him to win
the woman he loves; feminine kindness and sweetness overflow in her in
the depths of her despair. Love here is not despotic, passionate, as in
southern climes. It is only deep and sad; the source of life is dried
up, that is all; she lives no longer, because she cannot; all go by
degrees--health, reason, soul; in the end she becomes mad, and behold
her dishevelled, with wide staring eyes, with words that can hardly find
utterance. For ten days she has not slept, and will not eat any more;
and the same fatal thought continually afflicts her heart, amidst vague
dreams of maternal tenderness and happiness brought to nought, which
come and go in her mind like phantoms:


"Sure, if we were all sirens, we would sing pitifully,
And 'twere a comely music, when in parts
One sung another's knell; the turtle sighs
When he hath lost his mate; and yet some say
He must be dead first: 'tis a fine deceit
To pass away in a dream! indeed, I've slept
With mine eyes open, a great while. No falsehood
Equals a broken faith; there's not a hair
Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet,
It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither;
The journey is not long....
Since I was first a wife, I might have been
Mother to many pretty prattling babes;
They would have smiled when I smiled; and, for certain,
I should have cried when they cried:--truly, brother,
My father would have pick'd me out a husband,
And then my little ones had been no bastards;
But 'tis too late for me to marry now,
I'm past child-bearing; Tis not my fault....
Spare your hand;
Believe me, I'll not hurt it....
Complain not though I wring it hard: I'll kiss it,
Oh, 'tis a fine soft palm!--hark, in thine ear;
Like whom do I look, prithee?--nay, no whispering,
Goodness! we had been happy; too much happiness
Will make folk proud, they say....
There is no peace left for a ravish'd wife,
Widow'd by lawless marriage; to all memory
Penthea's, poor Penthea's name is strumpeted....
Forgive me; Oh! I faint."[501]


She dies, imploring that some gentle voice may sing her a plaintive air,
a farewell ditty, a sweet funeral song. I know nothing in the drama more
pure and touching.

When we find a constitution of soul so new, and capable of such great
effects, it behooves us to look at the bodies. Man's extreme actions
come not from his will, but his nature.[502] In order to understand the
great tensions of the whole machine, we must look upon the whole--I mean
man's temperament, the manner in which his blood flows, his nerves
quiver, his muscles act, the moral interprets the physical, and human
qualities have their root in the animal species. Consider then the
species in this case--namely, the race; for the sisters of Shakespeare's
Ophelia and Virgilia, Goethe's Clara and Margaret, Otway's Belvidera,
Richardson's Pamela, constitute a race by themselves, soft and fair,
with blue eyes, lily whiteness, blushing, of timid delicacy, serious
sweetness, framed to yield, bend, cling. Their poets feel it clearly
when they bring them on the stage; they surround them with the poetry
which becomes them, the murmur of streams, the pendant willow-tresses,
the frail and humid flowers of the country, so like themselves:


"The flower, that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azure harebell, like thy veins; no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath."[503]


They make them sweet, like the south wind, which with its gentle breath
causes the violets to bend their heads, abashed at the slightest
reproach, already half bowed down by a tender and dreamy
melancholy.[504] Philaster, speaking of Euphrasia, whom he takes to be a
page, and who has disguised herself in order to be near him, says:


"Hunting the buck,
I found him sitting by a fountain-side,
Of which he borrow'd some to quench his thirst,
And paid the nymph again as much in tears.
A garland lay him by, made by himself,
Of many several flowers, bred in the bay,
Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness
Delighted me: But ever when he turn'd
His tender eyes upon 'em, he would weep,
As if he meant to make 'em grow again.
Seeing such pretty helpless innocence
Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story.
He told me, that his parents gentle dy'd,
Leaving him to the mercy of the fields,
Which gave him roots; and of the crystal springs,
Which did not stop their courses; and the sun,
Which still, he thank'd him, yielded him his light.
Then he took up his garland, and did shew
What every flower, as country people hold,
Did signify; and how all, order'd thus,
Express'd his grief: And, to my thoughts, did read
The prettiest lecture of his country art
That could be wish'd.... I gladly entertain'd him,
Who was as glad to follow; and have got
The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy
That ever master kept."[505]


The idyl is self-produced among these human flowers: the dramatic action
is stopped before the angelic sweetness of their tenderness and modesty.
Sometimes even the idyl is born com plete and pure, and the whole
theatre is occupied by a sentimental and poetical kind of opera. There
are two or three such plays in Shakespeare; in rude Jonson, "The Sad
Shepherd"; in Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess." Ridiculous titles
nowadays, for they remind us of the interminable platitudes of d'Urfé,
or the affected conceits of Florian; charming titles, if we note the
sincere and overflowing poetry which they contain. Amoret, the faithful
shepherdess, lives in an imaginary country, full of old gods, yet
English, like the dewy verdant landscapes in which Rubens sets his
nymphs dancing:


"Thro' yon same bending plain
That flings his arms down to the main,
And thro' these thick woods, have I run,
Whose bottom never kiss'd the sun
Since the lusty spring began."...

"For to that holy wood is consecrate
A virtuous well, about whose flow'ry banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds,
By the pale moon-shine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying flesh, and dull mortality...[506]

"See the dew-drops, how they kiss
Ev'ry little flower that is;
Hanging on their velvet heads,
Like a rope of christal beads.
See the heavy clouds low falling,
And bright Hesperus down calling
The dead Night from underground."[507]


These are the plants and the aspects of the ever fresh English country,
now enveloped in a pale diaphanous mist, now glistening under the
absorbing sun, teeming with grasses so full of sap, so delicate, that in
the midst of their most brilliant splendor and their most luxuriant
life, we feel that to-morrow will wither them. There, on a summer night,
the young men and girls, after their custom,[508] go to gather flowers
and plight their troth. Amoret and Perigot are together; Amoret,


"Fairer far
Than the chaste blushing morn, or that fair star
That guides the wand'ring seaman thro' the deep,"


modest like a virgin, and tender as a wife, says to Perigot:


"I do believe thee: 'Tis as hard for me
To think thee false, and harder, than for thee
To hold me foul."[509]


Strongly as she is tried, her heart, once given, never draws back.
Perigot, deceived, driven to despair, persuaded that she is unchaste,
strikes her with his sword, and casts her bleeding to the ground. The
"sullen shepherd" throws her into a well; but the god lets fall "a drop
from his watery locks" into the wound; the chaste flesh closes at the
touch of the divine water, and the maiden, recovering, goes once more in
search of him she loves:


"Speak, if thou be here,
My Perigot! Thy Amoret, thy dear,
Calls on thy loved name.... 'Tis thy friend,
Thy Amoret; come hither, to give end
To these consumings. Look up, gentle boy,
I have forgot those pains and dear annoy
I suffer'd for thy sake, and am content
To be thy love again. Why hast thou rent
Those curled locks, where I have often hung
Ribbons, and damask-roses, and have flung
Waters distill'd to make thee fresh and gay,
Sweeter than nosegays on a bridal day?
Why dost thou cross thine arms, and hang thy face
Down to thy bosom, letting fall apace,
From those two little Heav'ns, upon the ground,
Show'rs of more price, more orient, and more round,
Than those that hang upon the moon's pale brow?
Cease these complainings, shepherd! I am now
The same I ever was, as kind and free,
And can forgive before you ask of me:
Indeed, I can and will."[510]


Who could resist her sweet and sad smile? Still deceived, Perigot wounds
her again; she falls, but without anger.


"So this work hath end!
Farewell, and live! be constant to thy friend
That loves thee next."[511]


A nymph cures her, and at last Perigot, disabused, comes and throws
himself on his knees before her. She stretches out her arms; in spite of
all that he had done, she was not changed:


"I am thy love,
Thy Amoret, for evermore thy love!
Strike once more on my naked breast, I'll prove
As constant still. Oh, could'st thou love me yet,
How soon could I my former griefs forget!"[512]


Such are the touching and poetical figures which these poets introduce
in their dramas, or in connection with their dramas, amidst murders,
assassinations, the clash of swords, the howl of slaughter, striving
against the raging men who adore or torment them, like them carried to
excess, transported by their tenderness as the others by their violence;
it is a complete exposition, as well as a perfect opposition of the
feminine instinct ending in excessive self-abandonment, and of masculine
harshness ending in murderous inflexibility. Thus built up and thus
provided, the drama of the age was enabled to bring out the inner depths
of man, and to set in motion the most powerful human emotions; to bring
upon the stage Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia, the death of
Desdemona and the butcheries of Macbeth.




[Footnote 393: "The very age and body of the time, his form and
pressure."--Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 394: Ben Jonson, "Every Man in his Humour"; "Cynthia's Revels."]

[Footnote 395: "The Defence of Poesie," ed. 1629, p. 562.]

[Footnote 396: "Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Julius Cæsar."]

[Footnote 397: Strype, in his "Annals of the Reformation" (1571),
says: "Many now were wholly departed from the communion of the church,
and came no more to hear divine service in their parish churches, nor
received the holy sacrament, according to the laws of the realm."
Richard Baxter, in his "Life," published in 1696, says: "We lived in
a country that had but little preaching at all.... In the village
where I lived the Reader read the Common Prayer briefly; and the rest
of the day, even till dark night almost, except Eating time, was spent
in Dancing under a Maypole ana a great tree, not far from my father's
door, where all the Town did meet together. And though one of my father's
own Tenants was the piper, he could not restrain him nor break the
sport. So that we could not read the Scripture in our family without
the great disturbance of the Taber and Pipe and noise in the street."]

[Footnote 398: Ben Jonson, "Every Man in his Humour."]

[Footnote 399: "The Chronicle" of John Hardyng (1436), ed. H. Ellis,
1812, Preface.]

[Footnote 400: Act IV. sc. 2 and 4. See also the character of Calypso
in Massinger; Putana in Ford; Protalyce in Beaumont and Fletcher.]

[Footnote 401: Middleton, "Dutch Courtezan."]

[Footnote 402: Commission given by Henry VIII to the Earl of Hertford,
1544: "You are there to put all to fire and sword; to burn Edinburgh
town, and to raze and deface it, when you have sacked it, and gotten
what you can out of it.... Do what you can out of hand, and without
long tarrying, to beat down and overthrow the castle, sack Holyrood-House,
and as many towns and villages about Edinburgh as ye conveniently can;
sack Leith, and burn and subvert it, and all the rest, putting man,
woman, and child to fire and sword, without exception, when any resistance
shall be made against you; and this done, pass over to the Fife land,
and extend like extremities and destructions in all towns and villages
whereunto ye may reach conveniently, not forgetting amongst all the rest,
so to spoil and turn upside down the cardinal's town of St. Andrew's,
as the upper stone may be the nether, and not one stick stand by another,
sparing no creature alive within the same, specially such as either in
friendship or blood be allied to the cardinal. This journey shall
succeed most to his majesty's honour."]

[Footnote 403: Laneham, "A Goodly Relief."]

[Footnote 404: February 13, 1587. Nathan Drake, "Shakspeare and his
Times," II. p. 165. See also the same work for all these details.]

[Footnote 405: Essex, when struck by the queen, put his hand on the
hilt of his sword.]

[Footnote 406: A page in the "Mariage de Figaro," a comedy by
Beaumarchais.--Tr.]

[Footnote 407: The great Chancellor Burleigh often wept, so harshly
was he used by Elizabeth.]

[Footnote 408: Compare, to understand this character, the parts assigned
to James Harlowe by Richardson, old Osborne by Thackeray, Sir Giles
Overreach by Massinger, and Manly by Wycherley.]

[Footnote 409: Hentzner's "Travels"; Benvenuto Cellini. See passim,
the costumes printed in Venice and Germany: "Belicosissimi." Froude,
I. pp. 19, 52.]

[Footnote 410: This is not so true of the English now, if it was in
the sixteenth century, as it is of Continental nations. The French
lycées are far more military in character than English schools.--Tr.]

[Footnote 411: Froude's "History of England," vols. I. II. III.]

[Footnote 412: "When his heart was torn out he uttered a deep
groan."--"Execution of Parry;" Strype, III. 251.]

[Footnote 413: Holinshed, "Chronicles of England," III. p. 793.]

[Footnote 414: Holinshed, "Chronicles of England," III, p. 797.]

[Footnote 415: Under Henry IV and Henry V.]

[Footnote 416: Froude, I. 15.]

[Footnote 417: In 1547.]

[Footnote 418: In 1596.]

[Footnote 419: Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure," Act III. I. See
also "The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth."]

[Footnote 420: "We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."--"Tempest," IV. I.]

[Footnote 421: Beaumont and Fletcher, "Thierry and Theodoret," Act IV. I.]

[Footnote 422: Αιεηονήθη δ’ ὲν παισὶ καὶ περὶ παλαΐστραν καὶ μουσικὴν,
ὲξ ὼν ὰμφοτέοων ὲστέφανώθη... Φιλαθηναιότατος καὶ θεοφιλής.--Scholiast.]

[Footnote 423: Except Beaumont and Fletcher.]

[Footnote 424: Hartley Coleridge, in his "Introduction to the
Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford," says of Massinger's father:
"We are not certified of the situation which he held in the noble
house-hold (Earl of Pembroke), but we may be sure that it was neither
menial nor mean. Service in those days was not derogatory to gentle
birth."--Tr.]

[Footnote 425: See, amongst others, "The Woman Killed with Kindness," by
Heywood. Mrs. Frankfort, so upright of heart, accepts Wendoll at his
first offer. Sir Francis Acton, at the sight of her whom he wishes to
dishonor, and whom he hates, falls "into an ecstasy," and dreams of
nothing save marriage. Compare the sudden transport of Juliet, Romeo,
Macbeth, Miranda, etc.; the counsel of Prospero to Fernando, when he
leaves him alone for a moment with Miranda.]

[Footnote 426: Compare "La Vie de Bohême" and "Les Nuits d'Hiver," by
Murger; "Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle," by A. de Musset.]

[Footnote 427: The hero of one of Alfred de Musset's poems.--Tr.]

[Footnote 428: Burnt in 1589.]

[Footnote 429: I have used Marlowe's Works, ed. Dyce, 3 vols. 1850.
Append, I. vol. 3.--Tr.]

[Footnote 430: See especially "Titus Andronicus," attributed to
Shakespeare: there are parricides, mothers whom they cause to
eat their children, a young girl who appears on the stage violated,
with her tongue and hands cut off.]

[Footnote 431: The chief character in Schiller's "Robbers," a
virtuous brigand and redresser of wrongs.--Tr.]

[Footnote 432: For in a field, whose superficies
Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil,
And sprinkled with the brains of slaughter'd men.
My royal chair of state shall be advanc'd;
And he that means to place himself therein,
Must armed wade up to the chin in blood....
And I would strive to swim through pools of blood,
Or make a bridge of murder'd carcasses,
Whose arches should be fram'd with bones of Turks
Ere I would lose the title of a king.--"Tamburlaine," part II. I. 3.]

[Footnote 433: The editor of Marlowe's Works, Pickering, 1826, says in
his Introduction: "Both the matter and style of 'Tamburlaine,' however,
differ materially from Marlowe's other compositions, and doubts have
more than once been suggested as to whether the play was properly
assigned to him. We think that Marlowe did not write it." Dyce is of
a contrary opinion.--Tr.]

[Footnote 434: Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta," II. p. 275 et passim.]

[Footnote 435: Ibid. IV. p. 311.]

[Footnote 436: Ibid. III. p. 291.]

[Footnote 437: Ibid. IV. p. 313.]

[Footnote 438: Up to this time, in England, poisoners were cast into
a boiling caldron.]

[Footnote 439: In the Museum of Ghent.]

[Footnote 440: See in the "Jew of Malta" the seduction of Ithamore,
by Bellamira, a rough, but truly admirable picture.]

[Footnote 441: Nothing could be falser than the hesitation and arguments
of Schiller's "William Tell"; for a contrast, see Goethe's "Goetz von
Berlichingen." In 1377, Wycliff pleaded in St. Paul's before the bishop
of London, and that raised a quarrel. The Duke of Lancaster, Wycliff's
protector, "threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair";
and next day the furious crowd sacked the duke's palace.]

[Footnote 442: Marlowe, "Edward the Second," I. p. 173.]

[Footnote 443: Ibid. p. 186.]

[Footnote 444: Ibid. p. 188.]

[Footnote 445: Marlowe, "Edward the Second," last scene, p. 288.]

[Footnote 446: Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus," I. p. 9 et passim.]

[Footnote 447: Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus," I. pp. 22, 29.]

[Footnote 448: Ibid. p. 43.]

[Footnote 449: Marlowe, "Doctor Faustus," I. p. 37.]

[Footnote 450: Ibid. p. 75.]

[Footnote 451: Ibid. p. 78.]

[Footnote 452: Marlowe "Doctor Faustus," I. p. 80.]

[Footnote 453: See the trial of Vittoria Corombona, of Virginia in
Webster, of Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar in Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 454: Falstaff in Shakespeare; the queen in "London," by
Greene and Decker; Rosalind in Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 455: In Webster's "Duchess of Malfi" there is an admirable
accouchement scene.]

[Footnote 456: This is, in fact, the English view of the French mind,
which is doubtless a refinement, many times refined, of the classical
spirit. But M. Taine has seemingly not taken into account such
products as the Medea on the one hand, and the works of Aristophanes
and the Latin sensualists on the other.--Tr.]

[Footnote 457: See Hamlet, Coriolanus, Hotspur. The queen in
"Hamlet" (v. 2) says: "He (Hamlet) is fat, and scant of breath."]

[Footnote 458: Middleton, "The Honest Whore," part I. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 459: Beaumont and Fletcher, "Valentinian, Thierry and
Theodoret." See Massinger's "Picture," which resembles Musset's
"Barberine." Its crudity, the extraordinary repulsive energy, will
show the difference of the two ages.]

[Footnote 460: Massinger's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, "Duke of
Milan," II. 1.]

[Footnote 461: Ibid. V. 2.]

[Footnote 462: Massinger, "The Fatal Dowry"; Webster and Ford, "A
late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother" (a play not extant); "'Tis
pity she's a Whore." See also Ford's "Broken Heart," with its sublime
scenes of agony and madness.]

[Footnote 463: Ford's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859.]

[Footnote 464: Ibid. IV. 3.]

[Footnote 465: Ford's Works, ed. H. Coleridge, 1859, IV. 3.]

[Footnote 466: Ibid. IV. 3.]

[Footnote 467: Ibid. V. 5.]

[Footnote 468: Ibid. V. 6.]

[Footnote 469: Webster's Works, ed. Dyce, 1857, "Duchess of Malfi," I. 1.]

[Footnote 470: The characters of Bosola, Flaminio.]

[Footnote 471: See Stendhal, "Chronicles of Italy, The Cenci, The
Duchess of Palliano," and all the biographies of the time; of the Borgias,
of Bianca Capello, of Vittoria Corombona.]

[Footnote 472: Ferdinand, one of the brothers, says (II. 5):
"I would have their bodies
Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp'd,
That their curs'd smoke might not ascend to heaven;
Or dip the sheets they lie in in pitch or sulphur,
Wrap them in't, and then light them as a match;
Or else to boil their bastard to a cullis,
And give't his lecherous father to renew
The sin of his back."]

[Footnote 473: "Duchess of Malfi," IV. 1.]

[Footnote 474: Ibid. IV. 2.]

[Footnote 475: "Duchess of Malfi," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 476: "When," an exclamation of impatience, equivalent to
"make haste," very common among the old English dramatists.--Tr.]

[Footnote 477: "Duchess of Malfi," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 478: Ibid. V. 5.]

[Footnote 479: Ibid. V. 4 and 5.]

[Footnote 480: "Vittoria Corombona," I. 2.]

[Footnote 481: Webster Dyce, 1857, "Vittoria Corombona," p. 20, 21.]

[Footnote 482: Ibid. III. 2, p. 23.]

[Footnote 483: "Vittoria Corombona," III. 2, p. 24.]

[Footnote 484: Compare Mme. Marneffe in Balzac's "La Cousine Bette."]

[Footnote 485: "Vittoria Corombona," V. last scene, pp. 49, 50.]

[Footnote 486: Hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie. In
France it is but an association of two comrades, tolerably alike and
tolerably equal, which gives rise to endless disturbance and bickering.]

[Footnote 487: See the representation of this character throughout English
and German literature. Stendhal, an acute observer, saturated with
Italian and French morals and ideas, is astonished at this phenomenon.
He understands nothing of this kind of devotion, "this slavery which
English husbands have had the wit to impose on their wives under the
name of duty." These are "the manners of a seraglio." See also "Corinne,"
by Mme de Staël.]

[Footnote 488: A perfect woman already: meek and patient.--Heywood.]

[Footnote 489: See, by way of contrast, all Molière's women, so French;
even Agnes and little Louison.]

[Footnote 490: Beaumont and Fletcher, Works, ed. G. Colman, 3 vols. 1811,
"Philaster", V.]

[Footnote 491: Like Kaled in Byron's "Lara."]

[Footnote 492: "Philaster," IV.]

[Footnote 493: Ibid. V.]

[Footnote 494: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Fair Maid of the Inn," IV.]

[Footnote 495: Beaumont and Fletcher, "Thierry and Theodoret, The Maid's
Tragedy, Philaster." See also the part of Lucina in "Valentinian."]

[Footnote 496: "Thierry and Theodoret," IV, 1.]

[Footnote 497: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Maid's Tragedy," I.]

[Footnote 498: Pauline says, in Corneille's "Polyeucte" (III. 2):
"Avant qu'abandonner mon âme à mes douleurs,
Il me faut essayer la force de mes pleurs;
En qualité de femme ou de fille, j'espère
Qu'ils vaincront un époux, ou fléchiront un père.
Que si sur l'un et l'autre ils manquent de pouvoir,
Je ne prendrai conseil que de mon désespoir.
Apprends-moi cependant ce qu'ils ont fait au temple."

We could not find a more reasonably and reasoning woman. So with Éliante,
and Henrietta in Molière.]

[Footnote 499: Ford's "Broken Heart," III. 2.]

[Footnote 500: Ibid. 5.]

[Footnote 501: Ford's "Broken Heart," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 502: Schopenhauer, "Metaphysics of Love and Death." Swift
also said that death and love are the two things in which man is
fundamentally irrational. In fact, it is the species and the instinct
which are displayed in them, not the will and the individual.]

[Footnote 503: "Cymbeline," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 504: The death of Ophelia, the obsequies of Imogen.]

[Footnote 505: "Philaster," I.]

[Footnote 506: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess," I.]

[Footnote 507: Ibid, II.]

[Footnote 508: See the description in Nathan Drake, "Shakspeare and his
Times."]

[Footnote 509: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess," I.]

[Footnote 510: Ibid. IV.]

[Footnote 511: Ibid.]

[Footnote 512: Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess," V.
Compare, as an illustration of the contrast of races, the Italian
pastorals, Tasso's "Aminta," Guarini's "Il Pastor fido," etc.]




CHAPTER THIRD


Ben Jonson


SECTION I.--The Man--His Life


When a new civilization brings a new art to light, there are about a
dozen men of talent who partly express the general idea, surrounding one
or two men of genius who express it thoroughly. Guillen de Castro, Perez
de Montalvan, Tirzo de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcon, Agustin Moreto,
surrounding Calderon and Lope de Vega; Crayer, Van Oost, Rombouts, Van
Thulden, Vandyke, Honthorst, surrounding Rubens; Ford, Marlowe,
Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, surrounding Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson. The first constitute the chorus, the others are the leading men.
They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorist is equal to
the solo artist; but only at times. Thus, in the dramas which I have
just referred to, the poet occasionally reaches the summit of his art,
hits upon a complete character, a burst of sublime passion; then he
falls back, gropes amid qualified successes, rough sketches, feeble
imitations, and at last takes refuge in the tricks of his trade. It is
not in him, but in great men like Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, that we
must look for the attainment of his idea and the fulness of his art.
"Numerous were the wit-combats," says Fuller, "betwixt him (Shakespeare)
and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an
English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher
in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the
English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn
with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the
quickness of his wit and invention."[513] Such was Ben Jonson physically
and morally, and his portraits do but confirm this just and animated
outline: a vigorous, heavy, and uncouth person; a broad and long face,
early disfigured by scurvy, a square jaw, large cheeks; his animal
organs as much developed as those of his intellect: the sour aspect of a
man in a passion or on the verge of a passion; to which add the body of
an athlete, about forty years of age, "mountain belly, ungracious gait."
Such was the outside, and the inside is like it. He was a genuine
Englishman, big and coarsely framed, energetic, combative, proud, often
morose, and prone to strange splenetic imaginations. He told Drummond
that for a whole night he imagined "that he saw the Carthaginians and
Romans fighting on his great toe."[514] Not that he is melancholic by
nature; on the contrary, he loves to escape from himself by free and
noisy, unbridled merriment, by copious and varied converse, assisted by
good Canary wine, which he imbibes, and which ends by becoming a
necessity to him. These great phlegmatic butchers' frames require a
generous liquor to give them a tone, and to supply the place of the sun
which they lack. Expansive moreover, hospitable, even lavish, with a
frank imprudent spirit,[515] making him forget himself wholly before
Drummond, his Scotch host, an over-rigid and malicious pedant, who has
marred his ideas and vilified his character.[516] What we know of his
life is in harmony with his person; he suffered much, fought much, dared
much. He was studying at Cambridge, when his stepfather, a bricklayer,
recalled him, and taught him to use the trowel. He ran away, enlisted as
a common soldier, and served in the English army, at that time engaged
against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, killed and despoiled a man
in single combat, "in the view of both armies." He was a man of bodily
action, and he exercised his limbs in early life.[517] On his return to
England, at the age of nineteen, he went on the stage for his
livelihood, and occupied himself also in touching up dramas. Having been
challenged, he fought a duel, was seriously wounded, but killed his
adversary; for this he was cast into prison, and found himself "nigh the
gallows." A Catholic priest visited and converted him; quitting his
prison penniless, at twenty years of age, he married. At last, four
years later, his first successful play was acted. Children came, he must
earn bread for them; and he was not inclined to follow the beaten track
to the end, being persuaded that a fine philosophy--a special nobleness
and dignity—ought to be introduced into comedy--that it was necessary
to follow the example of the ancients, to imitate their severity and
their accuracy, to be above the theatrical racket and the common
improbabilities in which the vulgar delighted. He openly proclaimed his
intention in his prefaces, sharply railed at his rivals, proudly set
forth on the stage[518] his doctrines, his morality, his character. He
thus made bitter enemies, who defamed him outrageously and before their
audiences, whom he exasperated by the violence of his satires, and
against whom he struggled without intermission to the end. He did more,
he constituted himself a judge of the public corruption, sharply
attacked the reigning vices, "fearing no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's
stab."[519] He treated his hearers like schoolboys, and spoke to them
always like a censor and a master. If necessary, he ventured further.
His companions, Marston and Chapman, had been committed to prison for
some reflections on the Scotch in one of their pieces called
"Eastward-Hoe"; and the report spreading that they were in danger of
losing their noses and ears, Jonson, who had written part of the piece,
voluntarily surrendered himself a prisoner, and obtained their pardon.
On his return, amid the feasting and rejoicing, his mother showed him a
violent poison which she intended to put into his drink, to save him
from the execution of the sentence; and "to show that she was not a
coward," adds Jonson, "she had resolved to drink first." We see that in
vigorous actions he found examples in his own family. Toward the end of
his life, money was scarce with him; he was liberal, improvident; his
pockets always had holes in them, and his hand was always ready to give;
though he had written a vast quantity, he was still obliged to write in
order to live. Paralysis came on, his scurvy became worse, dropsy set
in. He could not leave his room, nor walk without assistance. His last
plays did not succeed. In the epilogue to the "New Inn" he says:


"If you expect more than you had to-night,
The maker is sick and sad....
All that his faint and fait'ring tongue doth crave,
Is, that you not impute it to his brain,
That's yet unhurt, altho, set round with pain,
It cannot long hold out."


His enemies brutally insulted him:


"Thy Pegasus...
He had bequeathed his belly unto thee,
To hold that little learning which is fled
Into thy guts from out thy emptye head."


Inigo Jones, his colleague, deprived him of the patronage of the court.
He was obliged to beg a supply of money from the Lord Treasurer, then
from the Earl of Newcastle:


"Disease, the enemy, and his engineers,
Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers,
Have cast a trench about me, now five years....
The muse not peeps out, one of hundred days;
But lies blocked up and straitened, narrowed in,
Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win
Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been."[520]


His wife and children were dead; he lived alone, forsaken, waited on by
an old woman. Thus almost always sadly and miserably is dragged out and
ends the last act of the human comedy. After so many years, after so
many sustained efforts, amid so much glory and genius, we find a poor
shattered body, drivelling and suffering, between a servant and a
priest.




SECTION II.--His Freedom and Precision of Style


This is the life of a combatant, bravely endured, worthy of the
seventeenth century by its crosses and its energy; courage and force
abounded throughout. Few writers have labored more, and more
conscientiously; his knowledge was vast, and in this age of eminent
scholars he was one of the best classics of his time, as deep as he was
accurate and thorough, having studied the most minute details and
understood the true spirit of ancient life. It was not enough for him to
have stored his mind from the best writers, to have their whole works
continually in his mind, to scatter his pages whether he would or no,
with recollections of them. He dug into the orators, critics,
scholiasts, grammarians, and compilers of inferior rank; he picked up
stray fragments; he took characters, jokes, refinements, from Athenæus,
Libanius, Philostratus. He had so well entered into and digested the
Greek and Latin ideas, that they were incorporated with his own. They
enter into his speech without incongruity; they spring forth in him as
vigorous as at their first birth; he originates even when he remembers.
On every subject he had this thirst for knowledge, and this gift of
mastering knowledge. He knew alchemy when he wrote the "Alchemist." He
is familiar with alembics, retorts, receivers, as if he had passed his
life seeking after the philosopher's stone. He explains incineration,
calcination, imbibition, rectification, reverberation, as well as
Agrippa and Paracelsus. If he speaks of cosmetics,[521] he brings out a
shopful of them; we might make out of his plays a dictionary of the
oaths and costumes of courtiers; he seems to have a specialty in all
branches. A still greater proof of his force is, that his learning in no
wise mars his vigor; heavy as is the mass with which he loads himself,
he carries it without stooping. This wonderful mass of reading and
observation suddenly begins to move, and falls like a mountain on the
overwhelmed reader. We must hear Sir Epicure Mammon unfold the vision of
splendors and debauchery, in which he means to plunge, when he has
learned to make gold. The refined and unchecked impurities of the Roman
decadence, the splendid obscenities of Heliogabalus, the gigantic
fancies of luxury and lewdness, tables of gold spread with foreign
dainties, draughts of dissolved pearls, nature devastated to provide a
single dish, the many crimes committed by sensuality against nature,
reason, and justice, the delight in defying and outraging law--all
these images pass before the eyes with the dash of a torrent and the
force of a great river. Phrase follows phrase without intermission,
ideas and facts crowd into the dialogue to paint a situation, to give
clearness to a character, produced from this deep memory, directed by
this solid logic, launched by this powerful reflection. It is a pleasure
to see him advance weighted with so many observations and recollections,
loaded with technical details and learned reminiscences, without
deviation or pause, a genuine literary Leviathan, like the war elephants
which used to bear towers, men, weapons, machines, on their backs, and
ran as swiftly with their freight as a nimble steed.

In the great dash of this heavy attempt, he finds a path which suits
him. He has his style. Classical erudition and education made him a
classic, and he writes like his Greek models and his Roman masters. The
more we study the Latin races and literatures in contrast with the
Teutonic, the more fully we become convinced that the proper and
distinctive gift of the first is the art of development; that is, of
drawing up ideas in continuous rows, according to the rules of rhetoric
and eloquence, by studied transitions, with regular progress, without
shock or bounds. Jonson received from his acquaintance with the ancients
the habit of decomposing ideas, unfolding them bit by bit in natural
order, making himself understood and believed. From the first thought to
the final conclusion, he conducts the reader by a continuous and uniform
ascent. The track never fails with him as with Shakespeare. He does not
advance like the rest by abrupt intuitions, but by consecutive
deductions; we can walk with him without need of bounding, and we are
continually kept upon the straight path: antithesis of words unfolds
antithesis of thoughts; symmetrical phrases guide the mind through
difficult ideas; they are like barriers set on either side of the road
to prevent our falling into the ditch. We do not meet on our way
extraordinary, sudden, gorgeous images, which might dazzle or delay us;
we travel on, enlightened by moderate and sustained metaphors. Jonson
has all the methods of Latin art; even, when he wishes it, especially on
Latin subjects, he has the last and most erudite, the brilliant
conciseness of Seneca and Lucan, the squared, equipoised, filed-off
antithesis, the most happy and studied artifices of oratorical
architecture.[522] Other poets are nearly visionaries; Jonson is almost
a logician.

Hence his talent, his successes, and his faults: if he has a better
style and better plots than the others, he is not, like them, a creator
of souls. He is too much of a theorist, too preoccupied by rules. His
argumentative habits spoil him when he seeks to shape and motion
complete and living men. No one is capable of fashioning these unless he
possesses, like Shakespeare, the imagination of a seer. The human being
is so complex that the logician who perceives his different elements in
succession can hardly study them all, much less gather them all in one
flash, so as to produce the dramatic response or action in which they
are concentrated and which should manifest them. To discover such
actions and responses, we need a kind of inspiration and fever. Then the
mind works as in a dream. The characters move within the poet, almost
involuntarily: he waits for them to speak, he remains motionless,
hearing their voices, wholly wrapt in contemplation, in order that he
may not disturb the inner drama which they are about to act in his soul.
That is his artifice: to let them alone. He is quite astonished at their
discourse; as he observes them he forgets that it is he who invents
them. Their mood, character, education, disposition of mind, situation,
attitude, and actions, form within him so well-connected a whole, and so
readily unite into palpable and solid beings, that he dares not
attribute to his reflection or reasoning a creation so vast and speedy.
Beings are organized in him as in nature; that is, of themselves, and by
a force which the combinations of his art could not replace.[523] Jonson
has nothing wherewith to replace it but these combinations of art. He
chooses a general idea--cunning, folly, severity--and makes a person out
of it. This person is called Crites, Asper, Sordido, Deliro, Pecunia,
Subtil, and the transparent name indicates the logical process which
produced it. The poet took an abstract quality, and putting together all
the actions to which it may give rise, trots it out on the stage in a
man's dress. His characters, like those of La Bruyère and Theophrastus,
were hammered out of solid deductions. Now it is a vice selected from
the catalogue of moral philosophy, sensuality thirsting for gold: this
perverse double inclination becomes a personage, Sir Epicure Mammon;
before the alchemist, before the famulus, before his friend, before his
mistress, in public or alone, all his words denote a greed of pleasure
and of gold, and they express nothing more.[524] Now it is a mania
gathered from the old sophists, a babbling with horror of noise; this
form of mental pathology becomes a personage, Morose; the poet has the
air of a doctor who has undertaken to record exactly all the desires of
speech, all the necessities of silence, and to record nothing else. Now
he picks out a ridicule, an affectation, a species of folly, from the
manners of the dandies and the courtiers; a mode of swearing, an
extravagant style, a habit of gesticulating, or any other oddity
contracted by vanity or fashion. The hero whom he covers with these
eccentricities is overloaded by them. He disappears beneath his enormous
trappings; he drags them about with him everywhere; he cannot get rid of
them for an instant. We no longer see the man under the dress; he is
like a manikin, oppressed under a cloak, too heavy for him. Sometimes,
doubtless, his habits of geometrical construction produce personages
almost life-like. Bobadil, the grave boaster; Captain Tucca, the begging
bully, inventive buffoon, ridiculous talker; Amorphus the traveller, a
pedantic doctor of good manners, laden with eccentric phrases, create as
much illusion as we can wish; but it is because they are flitting
comicalities and low characters. It is not necessary for a poet to study
such creatures; it is enough that he discovers in them three or four
leading features; it is of little consequence if they always present
themselves with the same attitudes; they produce laughter, like the
Countess d'Escarbagans or any of the Fâcheux in Molière; we want
nothing else of them. On the contrary, the others weary and repel us.
They are stage-masks, not living figures. Having acquired a fixed
expression, they persist to the end of the piece in their unvarying
grimace or their eternal frown. A man is not an abstract passion. He
stamps the vices and virtues which he possesses with his individual
mark. These vices and virtues receive, on entering into him, a bent and
form which they have not in others. No one is unmixed sensuality. Take a
thousand sensualists, and you will find a thousand different modes of
sensuality; for there are a thousand paths, a thousand circumstances and
degrees, in sensuality. If Jonson wanted to make Sir Epicure Mammon a
real being, he should have given him the kind of disposition, the
species of education, the manner of imagination, which produce
sensuality. When we wish to construct a man, we must dig down to the
foundations of mankind; that is, we must define to ourselves the
structure of his bodily machine, and the primitive gait of his mind.
Jonson has not dug sufficiently deep, and his constructions are
incomplete; he has built on the surface, and he has built but a single
story. He was not acquainted with the whole man and he ignored man's
basis; he put on the stage and gave a representation of moral treatises,
fragments of history, scraps of satire; he did not stamp new beings on
the imagination of mankind.

He possesses all other gifts, and in particular the classical; first of
all, the talent for composition. For the first time we see a connected,
well-contrived plot, a complete intrigue, with its beginning, middle,
and end; subordinate actions well arranged, well combined; an interest
which grows and never flags; a leading truth which all the events tend
to demonstrate; a ruling idea which all the characters unite to
illustrate; in short, an art like that which Molière and Racine were
about to apply and teach. He does not, like Shakespeare, take a novel
from Greene, a chronicle from Holinshed, a life from Plutarch, such as
they are, to cut them into scenes, irrespective of likelihood,
indifferent as to order and unity, caring only to set up men, at times
wandering into poetic reveries, at need finishing up the piece abruptly
with a recognition or a butchery. He governs himself and his characters;
he wills and he knows all that they do, and all that he does. But beyond
his habits of Latin regularity, he possesses the great faculty of his
age and race--the sentiment of nature and existence, the exact knowledge
of precise detail, the power in frankly and boldly handling frank
passions. This gift is not wanting in any writer of the time; they do
not fear words that are true, shocking, and striking details of the
bedchamber or medical study; the prudery of modern England and the
refinement of monarchical France veil not the nudity of their figures,
or dim the coloring of their pictures. They live freely, amply, amidst
living things; they see the ins and outs of lust raging without any
feeling of shame, hypocrisy, or palliation; and they exhibit it as they
see it, Jonson as boldly as the rest, occasionally more boldly than the
rest, strengthened as he is by the vigor and ruggedness of his athletic
temperament, by the extraordinary exactness and abundance of his
observations and his knowledge. Add also his moral loftiness, his
asperity, his powerful chiding wrath, exasperated and bitter against
vice, his will strengthened by pride and by conscience:


"With an armed and resolved hand,
I'll strip the ragged follies of the time
Naked as at their birth... and with a whip of steel,
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs.
I fear no mood stampt in a private brow,
When I am pleas'd t' unmask a public vice.
I fear no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab,
Should I detect their hateful luxuries;"[525]


above all, a scorn of base compliance, an open disdain for


"Those jaded wits
That run a broken pace for common hire,"[526]


an enthusiasm, or deep love of


"A happy muse,
Borne on the wings of her immortal thought,
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,
And beats at heaven gates with her bright hoofs."[527]


Such are the energies which he brought to the drama and to comedy; they
were great enough to insure him a high and separate position.




SECTION III.--The Dramas Catiline and Sejanus


For whatever Jonson undertakes, whatever be his faults, haughtiness,
rough-handling, predilection for morality and the past, antiquarian and
censorious instincts, he is never little or dull. It signifies nothing
that in his latinized tragedies, "Sejanus, Catiline," he is fettered
by the worship of the old worn models of the Roman decadence; nothing
that he plays the scholar, manufactures Ciceronian harangues, hauls in
choruses imitated from Seneca, holds forth in the style of Lucan and the
rhetors of the empire; he more than once attains a genuine accent;
through his pedantry, heaviness, literary adoration of the ancients,
nature forces its way; he lights, at his first attempt, on the
crudities, horrors, gigantic lewdness, shameless depravity of imperial
Rome; he takes in hand and sets in motion the lusts and ferocities, the
passions of courtesans and princesses, the daring of assassins and of
great men, which produced Messalina, Agrippina, Catiline, Tiberius.[528]
In the Rome which he places before us we go boldly and straight to the
end; justice and pity oppose no barriers. Amid these customs of victors
and slaves, human nature is upset, corruption and villainy are held as
proofs of insight and energy. Observe how, in "Sejanus," assassination
is plotted and carried out with marvellous coolness. Livia discusses
with Sejanus the methods of poisoning her husband, in a clear style,
without circumlocution, as if the subject were how to gain a lawsuit or
to serve up a dinner. There are no equivocations, no hesitation, no
remorse in the Rome of Tiberius. Glory and virtue consist in power;
scruples are for base minds; the mark of a lofty heart is to desire all
and to dare all. Macro says rightly:


"Men's fortune there is virtue; reason their will;
Their license, law; and their observance, skill.
Occasion is their foil; conscience, their stain;
Profit, their lustre; and what else is, vain."[529]


Sejanus addresses Livia thus:


"Royal lady,...
Yet, now I see your wisdom, judgment, strength,
Quickness, and will, to apprehend the means
To your own good and greatness, I protest
Myself through rarified, and turn'd all aflame
In your affection."[530]


These are the loves of the wolf and his mate; he praises her for being
so ready to kill. And observe in one moment the morals of a prostitute
appear behind the manners of the poisoner. Sejanus goes out, and
immediately, like a courtesan, Livia turns to her physician, saying:


"How do I look to-day?
_Eudemus._ Excellent clear, believe it. This same fucus
Was well laid on.
_Livia._ Methinks 'tis here not white.
_E._ Lend me your scarlet, lady. 'Tis the sun
Hath giv'n some little taint unto the ceruse,
You should have us'd of the white oil I gave you.
Sejanus, for your love! His very name
Commandeth above Cupid or his shafts....
[_Paints her cheeks._]
"'Tis now well, lady, you should
Use of the dentrifice I prescrib'd you too,
To clear your teeth, and the prepar'd pomatum,
To smooth the skin. A lady cannot be
Too curious of her form, that still would hold
The heart of such a person, made her captive,
As you have his: who, to endear him more
In your clear eye, hath put away his wife...'"
Fair Apicata, and made spacious room
To your new pleasures.
_L._ Have not we return'd
That with our hate to Drusus, and discovery
Of all his counsels?...
_E._ When will you take some physic, lady?
_L._ When
I shall, Eudemus: but let Drusus' drug
Be first prepar'd.
_E._ Were Lygdus made, that's done....
I'll send you a perfume, first to resolve
And procure sweat, and then prepare a bath
To cleanse and clear the cutis; against when
I'll have an excellent new fucus made
Resistive 'gainst the sun, the rain or wind,
Which you shall lay on with a breath or oil,
As you best like, and last some fourteen hours.
This change came timely, lady, for your health."[531]


He ends by congratulating her on her approaching change of husbands;
Drusus was injuring her complexion; Sejanus is far preferable; a
physiological and practical conclusion. The Roman apothecary kept on the
same shelf his medicine-chest, his chest of cosmetics, and his box of
poisons.[532]

After this we find one after another all the scenes of Roman life
unfolded, the bargain of murder, the comedy of justice, the
shamelessness of flattery, the anguish and vacillation of the Senate.
When Sejanus wishes to buy a conscience, he questions, jokes, plays
round the offer he is about to make, throws it out as if in pleasantry,
so as to be able to withdraw it, if need be; tempt, on the crudities,
horrors, gigantic lewdness, shameless depravity of imperial Rome; he
takes in hand and sets in motion the lusts and ferocities, the passions
of courtesans and princesses, the daring of assassins and of great men,
which produced Messalina, Agrippina, Catiline, Tiberius.[533] In the
Rome which he places before us we go boldly and straight to the end;
justice and pity oppose no barriers. Amid these customs of victors and
slaves, human nature is upset, corruption and villainy are held as
proofs of insight and energy. Observe how, in "Sejanus," assassination
is plotted and carried out with marvellous coolness. Livia discusses
with Sejanus the methods of poisoning her husband, in a clear style,
without circumlocution, as if the subject were how to gain a lawsuit or
to serve up a dinner. There are no equivocations, no hesitation, no
remorse in the Rome of Tiberius. Glory and virtue consist in power;
scruples are for base minds; the mark of a lofty heart is to desire all
and to dare all. Macro says rightly:


"Men's fortune there is virtue; reason their will;
Their license, law; and their observance, skill.
Occasion is their foil; conscience, their stain;
Profit, their lustre; and what else is, vain."[534]


Sejanus addresses Livia thus:


"Royal lady,...
Yet, now I see your wisdom, judgment, strength,
Quickness, and will, to apprehend the means
To your own good and greatness, I protest
Myself through rarified, and turn'd all aflame
In your affection."[535]


These are the loves of the wolf and his mate; he praises her for being
so ready to kill. And observe in one moment the morals of a prostitute
appear behind the manners of the poisoner. Sejanus goes out, and
immediately, like a courtesan, Livia turns to her physician, saying:


"How do I look to-day?
_Eudemus._ Excellent clear, believe it. This same fucus
Was well laid on.
_Livia._ Methinks 'tis here not white.
_E._ Lend me your scarlet, lady. 'Tis the sun
Hath giv'n some little taint unto the ceruse,
You should have us'd of the white oil I gave you.
Sejanus, for your love! His very name
Commandeth above Cupid or his shafts...."
[_Paints her cheeks._]
"'Tis now well, lady, you should
Use of the dentrifice I prescrib'd you too,
To clear your teeth, and the prepar'd pomatum,
To smooth the skin. A lady cannot be
Too curious of her form, that still would hold
The heart of such a person, made her captive,
As you have his: who, to endear him more
In your clear eye, hath put away his wife...
Fair Apicata, and made spacious room
To your new pleasures.
_L._ Have not we return'd
That with our hate to Drusus, and discovery
Of all his counsels?...
_E._ When will you take some physic, lady?
_L._ When
I shall, Eudemus: but let Drusus' drug
Be first prepar'd.
_E._ Were Lygdus made, that's done....
I'll send you a perfume, first to resolve
And procure sweat, and then prepare a bath
To cleanse and clear the cutis; against when
I'll have an excellent new fucus made
Resistive 'gainst the sun, the rain or wind,
Which you shall lay on with a breath or oil,
As you best like, and last some fourteen hours.
This change came timely, lady, for your health."[536]


He ends by congratulating her on her approaching change of husbands;
Drusus was injuring her complexion; Sejanus is far preferable; a
physiological and practical conclusion. The Roman apothecary kept on the
same shelf his medicine-chest, his chest of cosmetics, and his box of
poisons.[537]

After this we find one after another all the scenes of Roman life
unfolded, the bargain of murder, the comedy of justice, the
shamelessness of flattery, the anguish and vacillation of the Senate.
When Sejanus wishes to buy a conscience, he questions, jokes, plays
round the offer he is about to make, throws it out as if in pleasantry,
so as to be able to withdraw it, if need be; then, when the intelligent
look of the rascal, whom he is trafficking with, shows that he is
understood:


"Protest not,
Thy looks are vows to me....
Thou art a man, made to make consuls. Go."[538]


Elsewhere, the senator Latiaris in his own house storms before his
friend Sabinus against tyranny, openly expresses a desire for liberty,
provoking him to speak. Then two spies who were hid "between the roof
and ceiling," cast themselves on Sabinus, crying, "Treason to Cæsar!"
and drag him, with his face covered, before the tribunal, thence to "be
thrown upon the Gemonies."[539] So, when the Senate is assembled,
Tiberius has chosen beforehand the accusers of Silius, and their parts
distributed to them. They mumble in a corner, whilst aloud is heard, in
the emperor's presence:


"Cæsar,
Live long and happy, great and royal Cæsar;
The gods preserve thee and thy modesty,
Thy wisdom and thy innocence....
Guard
His meekness, Jove, his piety, his care,
His bounty."[540]


Then the herald cites the accused; Varro, the consul, pronounces the
indictment; After hurls upon them his bloodthirsty eloquence: the
senators get excited; we see laid bare, as in Tacitus and Juvenal, the
depths of Roman servility, hypocrisy, insensibility, the venomous craft
of Tiberius. At last, after so many others, the turn of Sejanus comes.
The fathers anxiously assemble in the temple of Apollo; for some days
past Tiberius has seemed to be trying to contradict himself; one day he
appoints the friends of his favorite to high places, and the next day
sets his enemies in eminent positions. The senators mark the face of
Sejanus, and know not what to anticipate; Sejanus is troubled, then
after a moment's cringing is more arrogant than ever. The plots are
confused, the rumors contradictory. Macro alone is in the confidence of
Tiberius, and soldiers are seen, drawn up at the porch of the temple,
ready to enter at the slightest commotion. The formula of convocation is
read, and the council marks the names of those who do not respond to the
summons; then Regulus addresses them, and announces that Cæsar


Propounds to this grave Senate, the bestowing
Upon the man he loves, honor'd Sejanus,
The tribunitial dignity and power:
Here are his letters, signed with his signet.
What pleaseth now the Fathers to be done?
"_Senators._ Read, read them, open, publicly read them.
_Cotta._ Cæsar hath honor'd his own greatness much
In thinking of this act.
_Trio._	It was a thought
Happy, and worthy Cæsar.
_Latiaris._ And	the lord
As worthy it, on whom it is directed!
_Haterius._ Most worthy!
_Sanquinius._ Rome did never boast the virtue
That could give envy bounds, but his: Sejanus--
_1st Sen._ Honor'd and noble!
_2d Sen._ Good and great Sejanus!
_Prœcones._ Silence!"[541]


Tiberius's letter is read. First, long, obscure, and vague phrases,
mingled with indirect protestations and accusations, foreboding
something and revealing nothing. Suddenly comes an insinuation against
Sejanus. The fathers are alarmed, but the next line reassures them. A
word or two further on the same insinuation is repeated with greater
exactness. "Some there be that would interpret this his public severity
to be particular ambition; and that, under a pretext of service to us,
he doth but remove his own lets: alleging the strengths he hath made to
himself, by the praetorian soldiers, by his faction in court and Senate,
by the offices he holds himself, and confers on others, his popularity
and dependents, his urging (and almost driving) us to this our unwilling
retirement, and lastly, his aspiring to be our son-in-law." The fathers
rise: "This is strange!" Their eager eyes are fixed on the letter, on
Sejanus, who perspires and grows pale; their thoughts are busy with
conjectures, and the words of the letter fall one by one, amidst a
sepulchral silence, caught up as they fall with all devouring and
attentive eagerness. The senators anxiously weigh the value of these
shifty expressions, fearing to compromise themselves with the favorite
or with the prince, all feeling that they must understand, if they value
their lives.


"'_Your wisdoms, conscript fathers, are able to examine, and censure
these suggestions. But, were they left to our absolving voice, we durst
pronounce them, as we think them, most malicious._'
_Senator._ O, he has restor'd all; list.
_Prœco. 'Yet are they offered to be averr'd, and on the lives of the
informers._'"[542]


At this word the letter becomes menacing. Those next Sejanus forsake
him. "Sit farther.... Let's remove!" The heavy Sanquinius leaps panting
over the benches. The soldiers come in; then Macro. And now, at last,
the letter orders the arrest of Sejanus.


"_Regulus._ Take him hence;
And all the gods guard Cæsar!
_Trio._ Take him hence.
_Haterius._ Hence.
_Cotta._ To the dungeon with him.
_Sanquinius._ He deserves it.
_Senator._ Crown all our doors with bays.
_San._ And let an ox,
With gilded horns and garlands, straight be led
Unto the Capitol.
_Hat._ And sacrific'd
To Jove, for Cæsar's safety.
_Tri._ All our gods
Be present still to Cæsar!...
_Cot._ Let all the traitor's titles be defac'd.
_Tri._ His images and statues be pull'd down....
_Sen._ Liberty, liberty, liberty! Lead on,
And praise to Macro that hath saved Rome!"[543]


It is the baying of a furious pack of hounds, let loose at last on him,
under whose hand they had crouched, and who had for a long time beaten
and bruised them. Jonson discovered in his own energetic soul the energy
of these Roman passions; and the clearness of his mind, added to his
profound knowledge, powerless to construct characters, furnished him
with general ideas and striking incidents, which suffice to depict
manners.




SECTION IV.--Comedies


Moreover, it was to this that he turned his talent. Nearly all his work
consists of comedies, not sentimental and fanciful as Shakespeare's, but
imitative and satirical, written to represent and correct follies and
vices. He introduced a new model; he had a doctrine; his masters were
Terence and Plautus. He observes the unity of time and place, almost
exactly. He ridicules the authors who, in the same play,


"Make a child now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars....
He rather prays you will be pleas'd to see."[544]


He wishes to represent on the stage


"One such to-day, as other plays shou'd be;
Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please:
Nor nimble squib is seen to' make afeard
The gentlewomen....
But deeds, and language, such as men do use....
You, that have so grac'd monsters, may like men."[545]


Men, as we see them in the streets, with their whims and humors--


"When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers
In their conductions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humor."[546]


It is these humors which he exposes to the light, not with the artist's
curiosity, but with the moralist's hate:


"I will scourge those apes,
And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror,
As large as is the stage whereon we act;
Where they shall see the time's deformity
Anatomized in every nerve, and sinew,
With constant courage, and contempt of fear....
My strict hand
Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe
Squeeze out the humour of such spongy souls,
As lick up every idle vanity."[547]


Doubtless a determination so strong and decided does violence to the
dramatic spirit. Jonson's comedies are not rarely harsh; his characters
are too grotesque, laboriously constructed, mere automatons; the poet
thought less of producing living beings than of scotching a vice; the
scenes get arranged, or are confused together in a mechanical manner; we
see the process, we feel the satirical intention throughout; delicate
and easy-flowing imitation is absent, as well as the graceful fancy
which abounds in Shakespeare. But if Jonson comes across harsh passions,
visibly evil and vile, he will derive from his energy and wrath the
talent to render them odious and visible, and will produce a "Volpone,"
a sublime work, the sharpest picture of the manners of the age, in which
is displayed the full brightness of evil lusts, in which lewdness,
cruelty, love of gold, shamelessness of vice, display a sinister yet
splendid poetry, worthy of one of Titian's bacchanals.[548] All this
makes itself apparent in the first scene, when Volpone says:


"Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!----
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint."


This saint is his piles of gold, jewels, precious plate:


"Hail the world's soul, and mine!... O thou son of Sol,
But brighter than thy father, let me kiss,
With adoration, thee, and every relick
Of sacred treasure in this blessed room."[549]


Presently after, the dwarf, the eunuch, and the hermaphrodite of the
house sing a sort of pagan and fantastic interlude; they chant in
strange verses the metamorphoses of the hermaphrodite, who was first the
soul of Pythagoras. We are at Venice, in the palace of the magnifico
Volpone. These deformed creatures, the splendor of gold, this strange
and poetical buffoonery, carry the thought immediately to the sensual
city, queen of vices and of arts.

The rich Volpone lives like an ancient Greek or Roman. Childless and
without relatives, playing the invalid, he makes all his flatterers hope
to be his heir, receives their gifts,


"Letting the cherry knock against their lips,
And draw it by their mouths, and back again."[550]


Glad to have their gold, but still more glad to deceive them, artistic
in wickedness as in avarice, and just as pleased to look at a contortion
of suffering as at the sparkle of a ruby.

The advocate Voltore arrives, bearing a "huge piece of plate." Volpone
throws himself on his bed, wraps himself in furs, heaps up his pillows,
and coughs as if at the point of death:


"_Volpone._ I thank you, signior Voltore,
Where is the plate? mine eyes are bad.... Your love
Hath taste in this, and shall not be unanswer'd....
I cannot now last long.... I fell me going--
Uh, uh, uh, uh!"[551]


He closes his eyes, as though exhausted:


"_Voltore._ Am I inscrib'd his heir for certain?
_Mosca_ (_Volpone's Parasite_).	Are you!
I do beseech you, sir, you will vouchsafe
To write me in your family. All my hopes
Depend upon your worship: I am lost,
Except the rising sun do shine on me.
_Volt._ It shall both shine and warm thee, Mosca.
_M._ Sir,
I am man, that hath not done your love
All the worst offices: here I wear your keys,
See all your coffers and your caskets lock'd,
Keep the poor inventory of your jewels,
Your plate and monies; am your steward, sir,
Husband your goods here.
_Volt._ But am I sole heir?
_M._ Without a partner, sir; confirm'd this morning
The wax is warm yet, and the ink scarce dry
Upon the parchment.
_Volt._ Happy, happy me!
By what good chance, sweet Mosca?
_M._ Your desert, sir;
I know no second cause."[552]


And he details the abundance of the wealth in which Voltore is about to
revel, the gold which is to pour upon him, the opulence which is to flow
in his house as a river:


"When will you have your inventory brought, sir?
Or see a copy of the will?"


The imagination is fed with precise words, precise details. Thus, one
after another, the would-be heirs come like beasts of prey. The second
who arrives is an old miser, Corbaccio, deaf, "impotent," almost dying,
who, nevertheless, hopes to survive Volpone. To make more sure of it, he
would fain have Mosca give his master a narcotic. He has it about him,
this excellent opiate: he has had it prepared under his own eyes, he
suggests it. His joy on finding Volpone more ill than himself is
bitterly humorous:


"_Corbaccio._ How does your patron?...
_Mosca._ His mouth
Is ever gaping, and his eyelids hang.
_C._ Good.
_M._ A freezing numbness stiffens all his joints,
And makes the color of his flesh like lead.
_C._ 'Tis good.
_M._ His pulse beats slow, and dull.
_C._ Good symptoms still.
_M._ And from his brain--
_C._ I conceive you; good.
_M._ Flows a cold sweat, with a continual rheum,
Forth the resolved corners of his eyes.
_C._ Is't possible? Yet I am better, ha!
How does he, with the swimming of his head?
_M._ O, sir, 'tis past the scotomy; he now
Hath lost his feeling, and hath left to snort:
You hardly can perceive him, that he breathes.
_C._ Excellent, excellent! sure I shall outlast him:
This makes me young again, a score of years."[553]


If you would be his heir, says Mosca, the moment is favorable, but you
must not let yourself be forestalled. Voltore has been here, and
presented him with this piece of plate:


"_C._ See, Mosca, look,
Here, I have brought a bag of bright chequines.
Will quite weigh down his plate....
_M._ Now, would I counsel you, make home with speed;
There, frame a will; whereto you shall inscribe
My master your sole heir....
_C._ This plot
Did I think on before....
_M._ And you so certain to survive him--
_C._ Ay.
_M._ Being so lusty a man--
_C._ 'Tis true."[554]


And the old man hobbles away, not hearing the insults and ridicule
thrown at him, he is so deaf.

When he is gone the merchant Corvino arrives, bringing an orient pearl
and a splendid diamond:


"_Corvino._ Am I his heir?
_Mosca._ Sir, I am sworn, I may not show the will
Till he be dead; but here has been Corbaccio,
Here has been Voltore, here were others too,
I cannot number 'em, they were so many;
All gaping here for legacies: but I,
Taking the vantage of his naming you,
_Signior Corvino, Signior Corvino_, took
Paper, and pen, and ink, and there I asked him,
Whom he would have his heir? Corvino. Who
Should be executor? Corvino. And,
To any question he was silent to,
I still interpreted the nods he made,
Through weakness, for consent: and sent home th' others,
Nothing bequeath'd them, but to cry and curse.
_Cor._ O my dear Mosca!... Has he children?
_M._ Bastards,
Some dozen, or more, that he begot on beggars,
Gypsies, and Jews, and black-moors, when he was drunk....
Speak out:
You may be louder yet....
Faith, I could stifle him rarely with a pillow,
As well as any woman that should keep him.
_C._ Do as you will; but I'll begone."[555]


Corvino presently departs; for the passions of the time have all the
beauty of frankness. And Volpone, casting aside his sick man's garb,
cries:


"My divine Mosca!
Thou hast to-day out gone thyself.... Prepare
Me music, dances, banquets, all delights;
The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasures,
Than will Volpone."[556]


On this invitation, Mosca draws a most voluptuous portrait of Corvino's
wife, Celia. Smitten with a sudden desire, Volpone dresses himself as a
mountebank, and goes singing under her windows with all the
sprightliness of a quack; for he is naturally a comedian, like a true
Italian, of the same family as Scaramouch, as good an actor in the
public square as in his house. Having once seen Celia, he resolves to
obtain her at any price:


"Mosca, take my keys,
Gold, plate, and jewels, all's at thy devotion;
Employ them how thou wilt; nay, coin me too:
So thou, in this, but crown my longings, Mosca."[557]


Mosca then tells Corvino that some quack's oil has cured his master, and
that they are looking for a "young woman, lusty and full of juice," to
complete the cure:


"Have you no kinswoman?
Odso--Think, think, think, think, think, think, think, sir.
One o' the doctors offer'd there his daughter.
_Corvino._ How!
_Mosca._ Yes, signior Lupo, the physician.
_C._ His daughter!
_M._ And a virgin, sir....
_C._ Wretch!
Covetous wretch."[558]


Though unreasonably jealous, Corvino is gradually induced to offer his
wife. He has given too much already, and would not lose his advantage.
He is like a half-ruined gamester, who with a shaking hand throws on the
green cloth the remainder of his fortune. He brings the poor sweet
woman, weeping and resisting. Excited by his own hidden pangs, he
becomes furious:


"Be damn'd!
Heart, I will drag thee hence, home, by the hair;
Cry thee a strumpet through the streets; rip up
Thy mouth unto thine ears; and slit thy nose;
Like a raw rochet!--Do not tempt me; come,
Yield, I am loth--Death! I will buy some slave
Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive;
And at my window hang you forth, devising
Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters,
Will eat into thy flesh with aquafortis,
And burning corsives, on this stubborn breast.
Now, by the blood thou hast incensed, I'll do it!
_Celia._ Sir, what you please, you may, I am your martyr.
_Corvino._ Be not thus obstinate, I have not deserv'd it:
Think who it is intreats you. Prithee, sweet;--
Good faith thou shalt have jewels, gowns, attires,
What thou wilt think, and ask. Do but go kiss him,
Or touch him, but. For my sake.--At my suit.--
This once.--No! not! I shall remember this.
Will you disgrace me thus? Do you thirst my undoing?"[559]


Mosca turned a moment before, to Volpone:


"Sir,
Signior Corvino... hearing of the consultation had
So lately, for your health, is come to offer,
Or rather, sir, to prostitute.--
_Corvino._ Thanks, sweet Mosca.
_Mosca._ Freely, unask'd, or unintreated.
_C._ Well.
_Mosca._ As the true fervent instance of his love,
His own most fair and proper wife; the beauty
Only of price in Venice.--
_C._ 'Tis well urg'd."[560]


Where can we see such blows launched and driven hard, full in the face,
by the violent hand of satire? Celia is alone with Volpone, who,
throwing off his feigned sickness, comes upon her "as fresh, as hot, as
high, and in as jovial plight," as on the gala days of the Republic,
when he acted the part of the lovely Antinous. In his transport he sings
a love-song; his voluptuousness culminates in poetry; for poetry was
then in Italy the blossom of vice. He spreads before her pearls,
diamonds, carbuncles. He is in raptures at the sight of the treasures,
which he displays and sparkles before her eyes:


"Take these,
And wear, and lose them: yet remains an ear-ring
To purchase them again, and this whole state.
A gem but worth a private patrimony,
Is nothing: we will eat such at a meal,
The heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales,
The brains of peacocks, and of estriches,
Shall be our food....
Conscience? 'Tis the beggar's virtue....
Thy baths shall be of the juice of July flowers,
Spirit of roses, and of violets,
The milk of unicorns, and panthers' breath
Gather'd in bags, and mixt with Cretan wines.
Our drink shall be prepared gold and amber;
Which we will take, until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo: and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic,
Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid's tales,
Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine;
So, of the rest, till we have quite run through,
And wearied all the fables of the gods."[561]


We recognize Venice in this splendor of debauchery--Venice, the throne
of Aretinus, the country of Tintoretto and Giorgione. Volpone seizes
Celia: "Yield, or I'll force thee!" But suddenly Bonario, disinherited
son of Corbaccio, whom Mosca had concealed there with another design,
enters violently, delivers her, wounds Mosca, and accuses Volpone before
the tribunal, of imposture and rape.

The three rascals who aim at being his heirs, work together to save
Volpone. Corbaccio disavows his son, and accuses him of parricide.
Corvino declares his wife an adulteress, the shameless mistress of
Bonario. Never on the stage was seen such energy of lying, such open
villany. The husband, who knows his wife to be innocent, is the most
eager:


"This woman (please your fatherhoods) is a whore,
Of most hot exercise, more than a partrich,
Upon record.
_1st Advocate._ No more.
_Corvino._ Neighs like a jennet.
_Notary._ Preserve the honor of the court.
_C._ I shall,
And modesty of your most reverend ears.
And yet I hope that I may say, these eyes
Have seen her glued unto that piece of cedar,
That fine well-timber'd gallant; and that here
The letters may be read, thorough the horn,
That make the story perfect....
_3d Adv._ His grief hath made him frantic. (_Celia swoons._)
_C._ Rare! Prettily feign'd! again!"[562]


They have Volpone brought in, like a dying man; manufacture false
"testimony," to which Voltore gives weight with his advocate's tongue,
with words worth a sequin apiece. They throw Celia and Bonario into
prison, and Volpone is saved. This public imposture is for him only
another comedy, a pleasant pastime, and a masterpiece.


"_Mosca._ To gull the court.
_Volpone._ And quite divert the torrent
Upon the innocent....
_M._ You are not taken with it enough, methinks.
_V._ O, more than if I had enjoy'd the wench?"[563]


To conclude, he writes a will in Mosca's favor, has his death reported,
hides behind a curtain, and enjoys the looks of the would-be heirs. They
had just saved him from being thrown into prison, which makes the fun
all the better; the wickedness will be all the greater and more
exquisite. "Torture 'em rarely," Volpone says to Mosca. The latter
spreads the will on the table, and reads the inventory aloud. "Turkey
carpets nine. Two cabinets, one of ebony, the other mother-of-pearl. A
perfum'd box, made of an onyx." The heirs are stupefied with
disappointment, and Mosca drives them off with insults. He says to
Corvino:


"Why should you stay here? with what thought, what promise?
Hear you; do you not know, I know you an ass,
And that you would most fain have been a wittol,
If fortune would have let you? That you are
A declar'd cuckold, on good terms? This pearl,
You'll say, was yours? Right: this diamond?
I'll not deny't, but thank you. Much here else?
It may be so. Why, think that these good works
May help to hide your bad. [_Exit Corvino._]...
_Corbaccio._ I am cozen'd, cheated, by a parasite slave;
Harlot, thou hast gull'd me.
_Mosca._ Yes, sir. Stop your mouth,
Or I shall draw the only tooth is left.
Are not you he, that filthy covetous wretch,
With the three legs, that here, in hope of prey,
Have, any time this three years, snufft about,
With your most grov'ling nose, and would have hir'd
Me to the pois'ning of my patron, sir?
Are not you he that have to-day in court
Profess'd the disinheriting of your son?
Perjur'd yourself? Go home, and die, and stink."[564]


Volpone goes out disguised, comes to each of them in turn, and succeeds
in wringing their hearts. But Mosca, who has the will, acts with a high
hand, and demands of Volpone half his fortune. The dispute between the
two rascals discovers their impostures, and the master, the servant,
with the three would-be heirs, are sent to the galleys, to prison, to
the pillory--as Corvino says, to


"Have mine eyes beat out with stinking fish,
Bruis'd fruit, and rotten eggs.--'Tis well. I'm glad,
I shall not see my shame yet."[565]


No more vengeful comedy has been written, none more persistently athirst
to make vice suffer, to unmask, triumph over, and to punish it.

Where can be the gayety of such a theatre? In caricature and farce.
There is a rough gayety, a sort of physical, external laughter which
suits this combative, drinking, blustering mood. It is thus that this
mood relaxes from war-waging and murderous satire; the pastime is
appropriate to the manners of the time, excellent to attract men who
look upon hanging as a good joke, and laugh to see the Puritan's ears
cut. Put yourself for an instant in their place, and you will think like
them, that "The Silent Woman" is a masterpiece. Morose is an old
monomaniac, who has a horror of noise, but loves to speak. He inhabits a
street so narrow that a carriage cannot enter it. He drives off with his
stick the bear-leaders and sword-players, who venture to pass under his
windows. He has sent away his servant whose shoes creaked; and Mute, the
new one, wears slippers "soled with wool," and only speaks in a whisper
through a tube. Morose ends by forbidding the whisper, and makes him
reply by signs. He is also rich, an uncle, and he ill-treats his nephew
Sir Dauphine Eugenie, a man of wit, but who lacks money. We anticipate
all the tortures which poor Morose is to suffer. Sir Dauphine finds him
a supposed silent woman, the beautiful Epicœne. Morose, enchanted by
her brief replies and her voice, which he can hardly hear, marries her,
to play his nephew a trick. It is his nephew who has played him a trick.
As soon as she is married, Epicœne speaks, scolds, argues as loud and
as long as a dozen women: "Why, did you think you had married a statue?
or a motion only? one of the French puppets, with the eyes turned with a
wire? or some innocent out of the hospital, that would stand with her
hands thus, and a plaise mouth, and look upon you?"[566]

She orders the servants to speak louder; she opens the doors wide to her
friends. They arrive in shoals, offering their noisy congratulations to
Morose. Five or six women's tongues overwhelm him all at once with
compliments, questions, advice, remonstrances. A friend of Sir Dauphine
comes with a band of music, who play all together, suddenly, with their
whole force. Morose says, "O, a plot, a plot, a plot, a plot, upon me!
This day I shall be their anvil to work on; they will grate me asunder.
'Tis worse than the noise of a saw."[567] A procession of servants is
seen coming, with dishes in their hands; it is the racket of a tavern
which Sir Dauphine is bringing to his uncle. The guests clash the
glasses, shout, drink healths; they have with them a drum and trumpets
which make great noise. Morose flees to the top of the house, puts "a
whole nest of night-caps" on his head and stuffs up his ears. Captain
Otter cries, "Sound, Tritons o' the Thames! _Nunc est bibendum, nunc
pede libero._ Villains, murderers, sons of the earth and traitors,"
cries Morose from above, "what do you there?" The racket increases. Then
the captain, somewhat "jovial," maligns his wife, who falls upon him and
gives him a good beating. Blows, cries, music, laughter, resound like
thunder. It is the poetry of uproar. Here is a subject to shake coarse
nerves, and to make the mighty chests of the companions of Drake and
Essex shake with uncontrollable laughter. "Rogues, hell-hounds,
Stentors! ... They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder,
with their brazen throats!" Morose casts himself on his tormentors with
his long sword, breaks the instruments, drives away the musicians,
disperses the guests amidst an inexpressible uproar, gnashing his teeth,
looking haggard. Afterwards they pronounce him mad and discuss his
madness before him.[568] The disease in Greek is called _μανία_, in
Latin _insania, furor, vel ecstasis melancholica_; that is, _egressio_,
when a man _ex melancholico evadit fanaticus._... But he may be but
phreneticus yet, mistress; and phrenetis is only delirium, or so. They
talk of the books which he must read aloud to cure him. They add, by way
of consolation, that his wife talks in her sleep, "and snores like a
porpoise. O redeem me, fate; redeem me, fate!" cries the poor
man.[569] "For how many causes may a man be divorced, nephew?" Sir
Dauphine chooses two knaves, and disguises them, one as a priest, the
other as a lawyer, who launch at his head Latin terms of civil and canon
law, explain to Morose the twelve cases of nullity, jingle in his ears
one after another the most barbarous words in their obscure vocabulary,
wrangle, and make between them as much noise as a couple of bells in a
belfry. Following their advice, he declares himself impotent. The
wedding-guests propose to toss him in a blanket; others demand an
immediate inspection. Fall after fall, shame after shame; nothing serves
him: his wife declares that she consents to "take him with all his
faults." The lawyer proposes another legal method; Morose shall obtain a
divorce by proving that his wife is faithless. Two boasting knights, who
are present, declare that they have been her lovers. Morose, in
raptures, throws himself at their knees, and embraces them. Epicœne
weeps, and Morose seems to be delivered. Suddenly the lawyer decides
that the plan is of no avail, the infidelity having been committed
before the marriage. "O, this is worst of all worst worsts that hell
could have devis'd! marry a whore, and so much noise!" There is Morose
then, declared impotent and a deceived husband, at his own request, in
the eyes of the whole world, and moreover married forever. Sir Dauphine
comes in like a clever rascal, and as a succoring deity. "Allow me but
five hundred during life, uncle, and I free you." Morose signs the deed
of gift with alacrity; and his nephew shows him that Epicœne is a boy
in disguise.[570] Add to this enchanting farce the funny parts of the
two accomplished and gallant knights, who, after having boasted of their
bravery, receive gratefully, and before the ladies, flips and
kicks.[571] Never was coarse physical laughter more adroitly produced.
In this broad coarse gayety, this excess of noisy transport, you
recognize the stout roisterer, the stalwart drinker who swallowed
hogsheads of Canary, and made the windows of the Mermaid shake with his
bursts of humor.




SECTION V.--Limits of Jonson's Talent--His Smaller Poems--His Masques


Jonson did not go beyond this; he was not a philosopher like Molière,
able to grasp and dramatize the crisis of human life, education,
marriage, sickness, the chief characters of his country and century, the
courtier, the tradesman, the hypocrite, the man of the world.[572] He
remained on a lower level, in the comedy of plot,[573] the painting of
the grotesque,[574] the representation of too transient subjects of
ridicule,[575] too general vices.[576] If at times, as in the
"Alchemist," he has succeeded by the perfection of plot and the vigor of
satire, he has miscarried more frequently by the ponderousness of his
work and the lack of comic lightness. The critic in him mars the artist;
his literary calculations strip him of spontaneous invention; he is too
much of a writer and moralist, not enough of a mimic and an actor. But
he is loftier from another side, for he is a poet; almost all writers,
prose-authors, preachers even, were so at the time we speak of. Fancy
abounded, as well as the perception of colors and forms, the need and
wont of enjoying through the imagination and the eyes. Many of Jonson's
pieces, the "Staple of News, Cynthia's Revels," are fanciful and
allegorical comedies like those of Aristophanes. He there dallies with
the real, and beyond the real, with characters who are but theatrical
masks, abstractions personified, buffooneries, decorations, dances,
music, pretty laughing whims of a picturesque and sentimental
imagination. Thus, in "Cynthia's Revels," three children come on
"pleading possession of the cloke" of black velvet, which an actor
usually wore when he spoke the prologue. They draw lots for it; one of
the losers, in revenge, tells the audience beforehand the incidents of
the piece. The others interrupt him at every sentence, put their hands
on his mouth, and taking the cloak one after the other, begin to
criticise the spectators and authors. This child's play, these gestures
and loud voices, this little amusing dispute, divert the public from
their serious thoughts, and prepare them for the oddities which they are
to look upon.

We are in Greece, in the valley of Gargaphie, where Diana[577] has
proclaimed "a solemn revels." Mercury and Cupid have come down, and
begin by quarrelling; the latter says: "My light feather-heel'd coz,
what are you any more than my uncle Jove's pander? a lacquey that runs
on errands for him, and can whisper a light message to a loose wench
with some round volubility?... One that sweeps the gods' drinking-room
every morning, and sets the cushions in order again, which they threw
one at another's head over night?"[578]

They are good-tempered gods. Echo, awoke by Mercury, weeps for the "too
beauteous boy Narcissus":


"That trophy of self-love, and spoil of nature,
Who, now transformed into this drooping flower,
Hangs the repentant head, back from the stream....
Witness thy youth's dear sweets, here spent untasted,
Like a fair taper, with his own flame wasted!...
And with thy water let this curse remain,
As an inseparate plague, that who but taste
A drop thereof, may, with the instant touch,
Grow doatingly enamour'd on themselves."[579]


The courtiers and ladies drink thereof, and behold, a sort of a review
of the follies of the time, arranged, as in Aristophanes, in an
improbable farce, a brilliant show. A silly spendthrift, Asotus, wishes
to become a man of the court and of fashionable manners; he takes for
his master Amorphus, a learned traveller, expert in gallantry, who, to
believe himself, is


"An essence so sublimated and refined by travel... able... to speak the
mere extraction of language; one that... was your first that ever
enrich'd his country with the true laws of the duello; whose optics have
drunk the spirit of beauty in some eight-score and eighteen princes'
courts, where I have resided, and been there fortunate in the amours of
three hundred forty and five ladies, all nobly if not princely
descended,... in all so happy, as even admiration herself doth seem to
fasten her kisses upon me."[580]


Asotus learns at this good school the language of the court, fortifies
himself like other people with quibbles, learned oaths, and metaphors;
he fires off in succession supersubtle tirades, and duly imitates the
grimaces and tortuous style of his masters. Then, when he has drunk the
water of the fountain, becoming suddenly pert and rash, he proposes to
all comers a tournament of "court compliment." This odd tournament is
held before the ladies; it comprises four jousts, and at each the
trumpets sound. The combatants perform in succession "the _bare
accost_; the _better regard_; the _solemn address_;" and "the perfect
close."[581] In this grave buffoonery the courtiers are beaten. The
severe Crites, the moralist of the play, copies their language, and
pierces them with their own weapons. Already, with grand declamation, he
had rebuked them thus:


"O vanity,
How are thy painted beauties doated on,
By light, and empty idiots! how pursu'd
With open and extended appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
Rais'd on their toes, to catch thy airy forms,
Still turning giddy, till they reel like drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomeness of following time!"[582]


To complete the overthrow of the vices, appear two symbolical masques,
representing the contrary virtues. They pass gravely before the
spectators, in splendid array, and the noble verses exchanged by the
goddess and her companions raise the mind to the lofty regions of serene
morality, whither the poet desires to carry us:


"Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep....
Lay thy bow of pearl apart,
And thy crystal shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever."[583]


In the end, bidding the dancers to unmask, Cynthia shows that the vices
have disguised themselves as virtues. She condemns them to make fit
reparation, and to bathe themselves in Helicon. Two by two they go off
singing a palinode, whilst the chorus sings the supplication "Good
Mercury defend us."[584] Is it an opera or a comedy? It is a lyrical
comedy; and if we do not discover in it the airy lightness of
Aristophanes, at least we encounter, as in the "Birds" and the "Frogs,"
the contrasts and medleys of poetic invention, which, through caricature
and ode, the real and the impossible, the present and the past, sent
forth to the four quarters of the globe, simultaneously unites all kinds
of incompatibilities, and culls all flowers.

Jonson went further than this, and entered the domain of pure poetry. He
wrote delicate, voluptuous, charming love poems, worthy of the ancient
idyllic muse.[585] Above all, he was the great, the inexhaustible
inventor of Masques, a kind of masquerades, ballets, poetic choruses, in
which all the magnificence and the imagination of the English
Renaissance is displayed. The Greek gods, and all the ancient Olympus,
the allegorical personages whom the artists of the time delineate in
their pictures; the antique heroes of popular legends; all worlds, the
actual, the abstract, the divine, the human, the ancient, the modern,
are searched by his hands, brought on the stage to furnish costumes,
harmonious groups, emblems, songs, whatever can excite, intoxicate the
artistic sense. The _élite_, moreover, of the kingdom is there on the
stage. They are not mountebanks moving about in borrowed clothes,
clumsily worn, for which they are still in debt to the tailor; they are
ladies of the court, great lords, the queen, in all the splendor of
their rank and pride, with real diamonds, bent on displaying their
riches, so that the whole splendor of the national life is concentrated
in the opera which they enact, like jewels in a casket. What dresses!
what profusion of splendors! what medley of strange characters, gipsies,
witches, gods, heroes, pontiffs, gnomes, fantastic beings! How many
metamorphoses, jousts, dances, marriage songs! What variety of scenery,
architecture, floating isles, triumphal arches, symbolic spheres! Gold
glitters; jewels flash; purple absorbs the lustre-lights in its costly
folds; streams of light shine upon the crumpled silks; diamond
necklaces, darting flame, clasp the bare bosoms of the ladies; strings
of pearls are displayed, loop after loop, upon the silver-sown brocaded
dresses; gold embroidery, weaving whimsical arabesques, depicts upon
their dresses flowers, fruits, and figures, setting picture within
picture. The steps of the throne bear groups of Cupids, each with a
torch in his hand.[586] On either side the fountains cast up plumes of
pearls; musicians, in purple and scarlet, laurel-crowned, make harmony
in the bowers. The trains of masques cross, commingling their groups;
"the one half in orange-tawny and silver, the other in sea-green and
silver. The bodies and short skirts (were of) white and gold to both."

Such pageants Jonson wrote year after year, almost to the end of his
life, true feasts for the eyes, like the processions of Titian. Even
when he grew to be old, his imagination, like that of Titian, remained
abundant and fresh. Though forsaken, lying gasping on his bed, feeling
the approach of death, in his supreme bitterness he did not lose his
faculties, but wrote "The Sad Shepherd," the most graceful and pastoral
of his pieces. Consider that this beautiful dream arose in a
sick-chamber, amidst medicine bottles, physic, doctors, with a nurse at
his side, amidst the anxieties of poverty and the choking-fits of a
dropsy! He is transported to a green forest, in the days of Robin Hood,
amidst the gay chase and the great barking greyhounds. There are the
malicious fairies, who, like Oberon and Titania, lead men to flounder in
mishaps. There are open-souled lovers, who, like Daphne and Chloe, taste
with awe the painful sweetness of the first kiss. There lived Earine,
whom the stream has "suck'd in," whom her lover, in his madness, will
not cease to lament:


"Earine,
Who had her very being, and her name
With the first knots or buddings of the spring,
Born with the primrose or the violet,
Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smil'd,
And Venus led the graces out to dance,
And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap
Leap'd out, and made their solemn conjuration
To last but while she liv'd!"...[587]
"But she, as chaste as was her name, Earine,
Died undeflower'd: and now her sweet soul hovers
Here in the air above us."[588]


Above the poor old paralytic artist, poetry still hovers like a haze of
light. Yes, he had cumbered himself with science, clogged himself with
theories, constituted himself theatrical critic and social censor,
filled his soul with unrelenting indignation, fostered a combative and
morose disposition; but divine dreams never left him. He is the brother
of Shakespeare.




SECTION VI.--General Idea of Shakespeare


So now at last we are in the presence of one, whom we perceived before
us through all the vistas of the Renaissance, like some vast oak to
which all the forest ways converge. I will treat of Shapespeare by
himself. In order to take him in completely, we must have a wide and
open space. And yet how shall we comprehend him? how lay bare his inner
constitution? Lofty words, eulogies, are all used in vain; he needs no
praise, but comprehension merely; and he can only be comprehended by the
aid of science. As the complicated revolutions of the heavenly bodies
become intelligible only by use of a superior calculus, as the delicate
transformations of vegetation and life need for their explanation the
intervention of the most difficult chemical formulas, so the great works
of art can be interpreted only by the most advanced psychological
systems; and we need the loftiest of all these to attain to
Shakespeare's level--to the level of his age and his work, of his genius
and of his art.

After all practical experience and accumulated observations of the soul,
we find as the result that wisdom and knowledge are in man only effects
and fortuities. Man has no permanent and distinct force to secure truth
to his intelligence, and common-sense to his conduct. On the contrary,
he is naturally unreasonable and deceived. The parts of his inner
mechanism are like the wheels of clock-work, which go of themselves,
blindly, carried away by impulse and weight, and which yet sometimes, by
virtue of a certain unison, end by indicating the hour. This final
intelligent motion is not natural, but fortuitous; not spontaneous, but
forced; not innate, but acquired. The clock did not always go regularly;
on the contrary, it had to be regulated little by little, with much
difficulty. Its regularity is not insured; it may go wrong at any time.
Its regularity is not complete; it only approximately marks the time.
The mechanical force of each piece is always ready to drag all the rest
from their proper action, and to disarrange the whole agreement. So
ideas, once in the mind, pull each their own way blindly and separately,
and their imperfect agreement threatens confusion every moment. Strictly
speaking, man is mad, as the body is ill, by nature; reason and health
come to us as a momentary success, a lucky accident.[589] If we forget
this, it is because we are now regulated, dulled, deadened, and because
our internal motion has become gradually, by friction and reparation,
half harmonized with the motion of things. But this is only a semblance;
and the dangerous primitive forces remain untamed and independent under
the order which seems to restrain them. Let a great danger arise, a
revolution take place, they will break out and explode, almost as
terribly as in earlier times. For an idea is not a mere inner mark,
employed to designate one aspect of things, inert, always ready to fall
into order with other similar ones, so as to make an exact whole.
However it may be reduced and disciplined, it still retains a sensible
tinge which shows its likeness to an hallucination; a degree of
individual persistence which shows its likeness to a monomania; a
network of singular affinities which shows its likeness to the ravings
of delirium. Being such, it is beyond question the rudiment of a
nightmare, a habit, an absurdity. Let it become once developed in its
entirety, as its tendency leads it,[590] and you will find that it is
essentially an active and complete image, a vision drawing along with it
a train of dreams and sensations, which increases of itself, suddenly,
by a sort of rank and absorbing growth, and which ends by possessing,
shaking, exhausting the whole man. After this, another, perhaps entirely
opposite, and so on successively: there is nothing else in man, no free
and distinct power: he is in himself but the process of these headlong
impulses and swarming imaginations: civilization has mutilated,
attenuated, but not destroyed them; shocks, collisions, transports,
sometimes at long intervals a sort of transient partial equilibrium:
this is his real life, the life of a lunatic, who now and then simulates
reason, but who is in reality "such stuff as dreams are made on";[591]
and this is man, as Shakespeare has conceived him. No writer, not even
Molière, has penetrated so far beneath the semblance of common-sense
and logic in which the human machine is enclosed, in order to
disentangle the brute powers which constitute its substance and its
mainspring.

How did Shakespeare succeed? and by what extraordinary instinct did he
divine the remote conclusions, the deepest insights of physiology and
psychology? He had a complete imagination; his whole genius lies in that
complete imagination. These words seem commonplace and void of meaning.
Let us examine them closer, to understand what they contain. When we
think a thing, we, ordinary men, we only think a part of it; we see one
side, some isolated mark, sometimes two or three marks together; for
what is beyond, our sight fails us; the infinite network of its
infinitely complicated and multiplied properties escapes us; we feel
vaguely that there is something beyond our shallow ken, and this vague
suspicion is the only part of our idea which at all reveals to us the
great beyond. We are like tyro naturalists, quiet people of limited
understanding, who, wishing to represent an animal, recall its name and
ticket in the museum, with some indistinct image of its hide and figure;
but their mind stops there. If it so happens that they wish to complete
their knowledge, they lead their memory, by regular classifications,
over the principal characters of the animal, and slowly, discursively,
piecemeal, bring at last the bare anatomy before their eyes. To this
their idea is reduced, even when perfected; to this also most frequently
is our conception reduced, even when elaborated. What a distance there
is between this conception and the object, how imperfectly and meanly
the one represents the other, to what extent this mutilates that; how
the consecutive idea, disjoined in little, regularly arranged and inert
fragments, resembles but slightly the organized, living thing, created
simultaneously, ever in action, and ever transformed, words cannot
explain. Picture to yourself, instead of this poor dry idea, propped up
by a miserable mechanical linkwork of thought, the complete idea, that
is, an inner representation, so abundant and full that it exhausts all
the properties and relations of the object, all its inward and outward
aspects; that it exhausts them instantaneously; that it conceives of the
entire animal, its color, the play of the light upon its skin, its form,
the quivering of its outstretched limbs, the flash of its eyes, and at
the same time its passion of the moment, its excitement, its dash; and
beyond this its instincts, their composition, their causes, their
history; so that the hundred thousand characteristics which make up its
condition and its nature find their analogues in the imagination which
concentrates and reflects them: there you have the artist's conception,
the poet's--Shakespeare's; so superior to that of the logician, of the
mere savant or man of the world, the only one capable of penetrating to
the very essence of existences, of extricating the inner from beneath
the outer man, of feeling through sympathy, and imitating without
effort, the irregular oscillation of human imaginations and impressions,
of reproducing life with its infinite fluctuations, its apparent
contradictions, its concealed logic; in short, to create as nature
creates. This is what is done by the other artists of this age; they
have the same kind of mind, and the same idea of life: you will find in
Shakespeare only the same faculties, with a still stronger impulse; the
same idea, with a still more prominent relief.




[Footnote 513: Fuller's "Worthies," ed. Nuttall, 1840, 3 vols. III. 284.]

[Footnote 514: There is a similar hallucination to be met with in the
life of Lord Castlereagh, who afterwards committed suicide.]

[Footnote 515: His character lies between those of Fielding and Dr.
Johnson.]

[Footnote 516: Mr. David Laing remarks, however, in Drummond's defence,
that as "Jonson died August 6, 1637, Drummond survived till December 4,
1649, and no portion of these Notes (Conversations) were made public till
1711, or sixty-two years after Drummond's death, and seventy-four after
Jonson's, which renders quite nugatory all Gifford's accusations of
Drummond's having published them 'without shame.' As to Drummond decoying
Jonson under his roof with any premeditated design on his reputation, as
Mr. Campbell has remarked, no one can seriously believe it."--"Archæologica
Scotica," vol. IV. page 243.—-Tr.]

[Footnote 517: At the age of forty-four he went to Scotland on foot.]

[Footnote 518: Parts of "Crites" and "Asper."]

[Footnote 519: "Every Man out of his Humour," I; Gifford's "Jonson,"
p. 30.]

[Footnote 520: Ben Jonson's Poems, ed. Bell, An Epistle Mendicant,
to Richard, Lord Weston, Lord High Treasurer (1631), p. 244.]

[Footnote 521: "The Devil is an Ass."]

[Footnote 522: Sejanus, Catiline, passim.]

[Footnote 523: Alfred de Musset, preface to "La Coupe et les Lèvres."
Plato: "Ion."]

[Footnote 524: Compare Sir Epicure Mammon with Baron Hulot from Balzac's
"Cousine Bette." Balzac, who is learned like Jonson, creates real beings
like Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 525: "Every Man out of his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 526: "Poetaster," I. 1.]

[Footnote 527: Ibid.]

[Footnote 528: See the second act of "Catiline."]

[Footnote 529: "The Fall of Sejanus," III. last scene.]

[Footnote 530: Ibid. II.]

[Footnote 531: "The Fall of Sejanus." II.]

[Footnote 532: See "Catiline," Act II; a very fine scene, no less plain
spoken and animated, on the dissipation	of the higher ranks in Rome.]

[Footnote 533: "The Fall of Sejanus," I.]

[Footnote 534: Ibid. IV.]

[Footnote 535: Ibid. III.]

[Footnote 536: "The Fall of Sejanus," V.]

[Footnote 537: "The Fall of Sejanus," V.]

[Footnote 538: Ibid.]

[Footnote 539: "Every Man in his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 540: Ibid.]

[Footnote 541: Ibid.]

[Footnote 542: "Every Man in his Humour," Prologue.]

[Footnote 543: Compare "Volpone" with Regnard's "Légataire"; the end of
the sixteenth with the beginning of the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 544: "Volpone," I. 1.]

[Footnote 545: "Volpone," I. 1.]

[Footnote 546: Ibid. I. 3.]

[Footnote 547: Ibid.]

[Footnote 548: "Volpone," I. 4.]

[Footnote 549: "Volpone," I. 4.]

[Footnote 550: Ibid. I. 5.]

[Footnote 551: "Volpone," I. 5.]

[Footnote 552: Ibid. II. 2.]

[Footnote 553: Ibid.]

[Footnote 554:  "Volpone," III. 5. We pray reader to pardon us for Ben
Jonson's broadness. If I omit it, I cannot depict the sixteenth century.
Grant the same the indulgence to the historian as to the anatomist.]

[Footnote 555: Ibid.]

[Footnote 556: "Volpone," III. 5.]

[Footnote 557: "Volpone" IV. 1.]

[Footnote 558: Ibid. V. 1.]

[Footnote 559: "Volpone," V. 1.]

[Footnote 560: Ibid. V. 8.]

[Footnote 561: "Epicœne," III. 2.]

[Footnote 562: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 563: Compare M. de Pourceaugnac in Molière.]

[Footnote 564: "Epicœne," IV. I, 2.]

[Footnote 565: Ibid. V.]

[Footnote 566: Compare Polichinelle in "Le Malade imaginaire"; Géronte
in "Les Fourberies de Scapin."]

[Footnote 567: Compare "L'École des Femmes, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope,
Le Bourgeois-gentilhomme, Le Malade imaginaire, Georges Dandin."]

[Footnote 568: Compare "Les Fourberies de Scapin."]

[Footnote 569: Compare "Les Fâcheux."]

[Footnote 570: Compare "Les Précieuses Ridicules."]

[Footnote 571: Compare the plays of Destouches.]

[Footnote 572: By Diana, Queen Elizabeth is meant.]

[Footnote 573: "Cynthia's Revels," I. 1.]

[Footnote 574: Ibid.]

[Footnote 575: "Cynthia's Revels," I. 1.]

[Footnote 576: Ibid. V. 2.]

[Footnote 577: Ibid. I. 1.]

[Footnote 578: Ibid. V. 3.]

[Footnote 579: "Cynthia's Revels," last scene.]

[Footnote 580: Celebration of Charis; "Miscellaneous Poems."]

[Footnote 581: "Masque of Beauty."]

[Footnote 582: "The Sad Shepherd," I. 2.]

[Footnote 583: "The Sad Shepherd," III. 2.]

[Footnote 584: This idea may be expanded psychologically: external
perception, memory, are real hallucinations, etc. This is the
analytical aspect: under another aspect reason and health are the
natural goals.]

[Footnote 585: See Spinoza and Dugald Stewart: Conception in its natural
state is belief.]

[Footnote 586: "Tempest," IV. 1.]




CHAPTER FOURTH


Shakespeare


I am about to describe an extraordinary species of mind, perplexing to
all the French modes of analysis and reasoning, all-powerful, excessive,
master of the sublime as well as of the base; the most creative mind
that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual existence,
in the dazzling caprice of fancy, in the profound complications of
superhuman passions; a nature poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to
reason by the sudden revelations of its seer's madness; so extreme in
joy and grief, so abrupt of gait, so agitated and impetuous, in its
transports, that this great age alone could have cradled such a child.




SECTION I.--Life and Character of Shakespeare


Of Shakespeare all came from within--I mean from his soul and his
genius; circumstances and the externals contributed but slightly to his
development.[592] He was intimately bound up with his age; that is, he
knew by experience the manners of country, court, and town; he had
visited the heights, depths, the middle ranks of mankind; nothing more.
In all other respects his life was commonplace; its irregularities,
troubles, passions, successes, were, on the whole, such as we meet with
everywhere else.[593] His father, a glover and wool-stapler, in very
easy circumstances, having married a sort of country heiress, had become
high-bailiff and chief alderman in his little town; but when Shakespeare
was nearly fourteen he was on the verge of ruin, mortgaging his wife's
property, obliged to resign his municipal offices, and to remove his son
from school to assist him in his business. The young fellow applied
himself to it as well as he could, not without some scrapes and frolics:
if we are to believe tradition, he was one of the thirsty souls of the
place, with a mind to support the reputation of his little town in its
drinking powers. Once, they say, having been beaten at Bideford in one
of these ale-bouts, he returned staggering from the fight, or rather
could not return, and passed the night with his comrades under an
apple-tree by the roadside. Without doubt he had already begun to write
verses, to rove about like a genuine poet, taking part in the noisy
rustic feasts, the gay allegorical pastorals, the rich and bold outbreak
of pagan and poetical life, as it was then to be found in an English
village. At all events, he was not a pattern of propriety, and his
passions were as precocious as they were imprudent. While not yet
nineteen years old, he married the daughter of a substantial yeoman,
about eight years older than himself--and not too soon, as she was about
to become a mother.[594] Other of his outbreaks were no more fortunate.
It seems that he was fond of poaching, after the manner of the time,
being "much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits,"
says the Rev. Richard Davies;[595] "particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy,
who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly
the country;... but his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice
Clodpate." Moreover, about this time Shakespeare's father was in prison,
his affairs were not prosperous, and he himself had three children,
following one close upon the other; he must live, and life was hardly
possible for him in his native town. He went to London, and took to the
stage: took the lowest parts, was a "servant" in the theatre, that is,
an apprentice, or perhaps a supernumerary. They even said that he had
begun still lower, and that to earn his bread he had held gentlemen's
horses at the door of the theatre.[596] At all events he tasted misery,
and felt, not in imagination, but in fact, the sharp thorn of care,
humiliation, disgust, forced labor, public discredit, the power of the
people. He was a comedian, one of "His Majesty's poor players"[597]--a
sad trade, degraded in all ages by the contrasts and the falsehoods
which it allows: still more degraded then by the brutalities of the
crowd, who not seldom would stone the actors, and by the severities of
the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn them to lose their ears. He
felt it, and spoke of it with bitterness:


"Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear."[598]


And again:


"When in disgrace with fortune[599] and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed....
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in those thoughts myself almost despising."[600]


We shall find further on the traces of this long-enduring disgust, in
his melancholy characters, as where he says:


"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
The patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?"[601]


But the worst of this undervalued position is, that it eats into the
soul. In the company of actors we become actors: it is vain to wish to
keep clean, if you live in a dirty place; it cannot be. No matter if a
man braces himself; necessity drives him into a corner and sullies him.
The machinery of the decorations, the tawdriness and medley of the
costumes, the smell of the tallow and the candles, in contrast with the
parade of refinement and loftiness, all the cheats and sordidness of the
representation, the bitter alternative of hissing or applause, the
keeping of the highest and lowest company, the habit of sporting with
human passions, easily unhinge the soul, drive it down the slope of
excess, tempt it to loose manners, green-room adventures, the loves of
strolling actresses. Shakespeare escaped them no more than Molière, and
grieved for it, like Molière:


"O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds."[602]


They used to relate in London how his comrade Burbadge, who played
Richard III, having a rendezvous with the wife of a citizen, Shakespeare
went before, was well received, and was pleasantly occupied, when
Burbage arrived, to whom he sent the message that William the Conqueror
came before Richard III.[603] We may take this as an example of the
tricks and somewhat coarse intrigues which are planned, and follow in
quick succession, on this stage. Outside the theatre he lived with
fashionable young nobles, Pembroke, Montgomery, Southampton,[604] and
others, whose hot and licentious youth gratified his imagination and
senses by the example of Italian pleasures and elegancies. Add to this
the rapture and transport of poetical nature, and this kind of afflux,
this boiling over of all the powers and desires which takes place in
brains of this kind, when the world for the first time opens before
them, and you will understand the "Venus and Adonis, the first heir of
his invention." In fact, it is a first cry, a cry in which the whole man
is displayed. Never was seen a heart so quivering to the touch of
beauty, of beauty of every kind, so delighted with the freshness and
splendor of things, so eager and so excited in adoration and enjoyment,
so violently and entirely carried to the very essence of voluptuousness.
His Venus is unique; no painting of Titian's has a more brilliant and
delicious coloring;[605] no strumpet-goddess of Tintoretto or Giorgione
is more soft and beautiful:


"With blindfold fury she begins to forage,
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil....
And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth;
Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey,
Paying what ransom the insulter willeth;
Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high,
That she will draw his lips' rich treasure dry."[606]

"Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuff'd or prey be gone;
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin."[607]


All is taken by storm, the senses first, the eyes dazzled by carnal
beauty, but the heart also from whence the poetry overflows: the fulness
of youth inundates even inanimate things; the country looks charming
amidst the rays of the rising sun, the air, saturated with brightness,
makes a gala-day:


"Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun riseth in his majesty;
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."[608]


An admirable debauch of imagination and rapture, yet disquieting; for
such a mood will carry one a long way.[609] No fair and frail dame in
London was without "Adonis" on her table.[610] Perhaps Shakespeare
perceived that he had transcended the bounds, for the tone of his next
poem, the "Rape of Lucrece," is quite different; but as he had already a
mind liberal enough to embrace at the same time, as he did afterwards in
his dramas, the two extremes of things, he continued none the less to
follow his bent. The "sweet abandonment of love" was the great
occupation of his life; he was tender-hearted, and he was a poet:
nothing more is required to be smitten, deceived, to suffer, to traverse
without pause the circle of illusions and troubles, which whirls and
whirls round, and never ends.

He had many loves of this kind, amongst others one for a sort of Marion
Delorme,[611] a miserable deluding despotic passion, of which he felt
the burden and the shame, but from which nevertheless he could not and
would not free himself. Nothing can be sadder than his confessions, or
mark better the madness of love, and the sentiment of human weakness:


"When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies."[612]


So spoke Alceste of Célimène;[613] but what a soiled Célimène is the
creature before whom Shakespeare kneels, with as much of scorn as of
desire!


"Those lips of thine,
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov'st those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee."[614]


This is plain-speaking and deep shamelessness of soul, such as we find
only in the stews; and these are the intoxications, the excesses, the
delirium into which the most refined artists fall, when they resign
their own noble hand to these soft, voluptuous, and clinging ones. They
are higher than princes, and they descend to the lowest depths of
sensual passion. Good and evil then lose their names; all things are
inverted:


"How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!
That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;
Naming thy name blesses an ill report."[615]


What are proofs, the will, reason, honor itself, when the passion is so
absorbing? What can be said further to a man who answers, "I know all
that you are going to say, and what does it all amount to?" Great loves
are inundations, which drown all repugnance and all delicacy of soul,
all preconceived opinions and all received principles. Thenceforth the
heart is dead to all ordinary pleasures: it can only feel and breathe on
one side. Shakespeare envies the keys of the instrument over which his
mistress's fingers run. If he looks at flowers, it is she whom he
pictures beyond them; and the extravagant splendors of dazzling poetry
spring up in him repeatedly, as soon as he thinks of those glowing black
eyes:


"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him."[616]


He saw none of it:


"Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose."[617]


All this sweetness of spring was but her perfume and her shade:


"The forward violet thus I did chide:
'Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride,
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.'
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair:
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;...
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or color it had stol'n from thee."[618]


Passionate archness, delicious affectations, worthy of Heine and the
contemporaries of Dante, which tell us of long rapturous dreams
concentrated on one subject. Under a sway so imperious and sustained,
what sentiment could maintain its ground? That of family? He was married
and had children--a family which he went to see "once a year"; and it
was probably on his return from one of these journeys that he used the
words above quoted. Conscience? "Love is too young to know what
conscience is." Jealousy and anger?


"For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body's treason."[619]


Repulses?


"He is contented thy poor drudge to be
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side."[620]


He is no longer young; she loves another, a handsome, young,
light-haired fellow, his own dearest friend, whom he has presented to
her, and whom she wishes to seduce:


"Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman color'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side."[621]


And when she has succeeded in this,[622] he dares not confess it to
himself, but suffers all, like Molière. What wretchedness is there in
these trifles of every-day life! How man's thoughts instinctively place
by Shakespeare's side the great unhappy French poet (Molière), also a
philosopher by nature, but more of a professional laugher, a mocker of
old men in love, a bitter railer at deceived husbands, who, after having
played in one of his most approved comedies, said aloud to a friend, "My
dear fellow, I am in despair; my wife does not love me!" Neither glory,
nor work, nor invention satisfies these vehement souls: love alone can
gratify them, because, with their senses and heart, it contents also
their brain; and all the powers of man, imagination like the rest, find
in it their concentration and their employment. "Love is my sin," he
said, as did Musset and Heine; and in the Sonnets we find traces of yet
other passions, equally abandoned; one in particular, seemingly for a
great lady. The first half of his dramas, "Midsummer Night's Dream,"
"Romeo and Juliet," the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," preserve the warm
imprint more completely; and we have only to consider his latest women's
character,[623] to see with what exquisite tenderness, what full
adoration, he loved them to the end.

In this is all his genius; his was one of those delicate souls which,
like a perfect instrument of music, vibrate of themselves at the
slightest touch. This fine sensibility was the first thing observed in
him. "My darling Shakespeare, Sweet Swan of Avon": these words of Ben
Jonson only confirm what his contemporaries reiterate. He was
affectionate and kind, "civil in demeanor, and excellent in the qualitie
he professes";[624] if he had the impulse, he had also the effusion of
true artists; he was loved, men were delighted in his company; nothing
is more sweet or winning than this charm, this half-feminine abandonment
in a man. His wit in conversation was ready, ingenious, nimble; his
gayety brilliant; his imagination fluent, and so copious, that, as his,
friends tell us, he never erased what he had written; at least when he
wrote out a scene for the second time, it was the idea which he would
change, not the words, by an after-glow of poetic thought, not with a
painful tinkering of the verse. All these characteristics are combined
into a single one: he had a sympathetic genius; I mean that naturally he
knew how to forget himself and become transfused into all the objects
which he conceived. Look around you at the great artists of your time,
try to approach them, to become acquainted with them, to see them as
they think, and you will observe the full force of this word. By an
extraordinary instinct, they put themselves at once in a position of
existences; men, animals, flowers, plants, landscapes, whatever the
objects are, living or not, they feel by intuition the forces and
tendencies which produce the visible external; and their soul,
infinitely complex, becomes by its ceaseless metamorphoses a sort of
abstract of the universe. This is why they seem to live more than other
men; they have no need to be taught, they divine. I have seen such a
man, a propos of a piece of armor, a costume, a collection of furniture,
enter into the Middle Ages more fully than three savants together. They
reconstruct, as they build, naturally, surely, by an inspiration which
is a winged chain of reasoning. Shakespeare had only an imperfect
education, "small Latin and less Greek," barely French and Italian,[625]
nothing else; he had not travelled, he had only read the current
literature of his day, he had picked up a few law words in the court of
his little town: reckon up, if you can, all that he knew of man and of
history. These men see more objects at a time; they grasp them more
closely than other men, more quickly and thoroughly; their mind is full,
and runs over. They do not rest in simple reasoning; at every idea their
whole being, reflections, images, emotions, are set a-quiver. See them
at it; they gesticulate, mimic their thought, brim over with
comparisons; even in their talk they are imaginative and original, with
familiarity and boldness of speech, sometimes happily, always
irregularly, according to the whims and starts of the adventurous
improvisation. The animation, the brilliancy of their language is
marvellous; so are their fits, the wide leaps which they couple widely
removed ideas, annihilating distance, passing from pathos to humor, from
vehemence to gentleness. This extraordinary rapture is the last thing to
quit them. If perchance ideas fail, or if their melancholy is too
violent, they still speak and produce, even if it be nonsense: they
become clowns, though at their own expense, and to their own hurt. I
know one of these men who will talk nonsense when he thinks he is dying,
or has a mind to kill himself; the inner wheel continues to turn, even
upon nothing, that wheel which man must needs see ever turning, even
though it tear him as it turns; his buffoonery is an outlet: you will
find him, this inextinguishable urchin, this ironical puppet, at
Ophelia's tomb, at Cleopatra's death-bed, at Juliet's funeral. High or
low, these men must always be at some extreme. They feel their good and
their ill too deeply; they expatiate too abundantly on each condition of
their soul, by a sort of involuntary novel. After their traducings and
the disgusts by which they debase themselves beyond measure they rise
and become exalted in a marvellous fashion, even trembling with pride
and joy. "Haply," says Shakespeare, after one of these dull moods:


"Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."[626]


Then all fades away, as in a furnace where a stronger flare than usual
has left no substance fuel behind it.


"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest...."[627]

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so.
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe."[628]


These sudden alternatives of joy and sadness, divine transports and
grand melancholies, exquisite tenderness and womanly depressions, depict
the poet, extreme in emotions, ceaselessly troubled with grief or
merriment, feeling the slightest shock, more strong, more dainty in
enjoyment and suffering than other men, capable of more intense and
sweeter dreams, within whom is stirred an imaginary world of graceful or
terrible beings, all impassioned like their author.

Such as I have described him, however, he found his resting-place.
Early, at least what regards outward appearances, he settled down to an
orderly, sensible, almost humdrum existence, engaged in business,
provident of the future. He remained on the stage for at least seventeen
years, though taking secondary parts;[629] he sets his wits at the same
time to the touching up of plays with so much activity, that Greene
called him "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers;... an absolute
Johannes factotum, in his owne conceyte the onely shake-scene in a
countrey."[630] At the age of thirty-three he had amassed money enough
to buy at Stratford a house with two barns and two gardens, and he went
on steadier and steadier in the same course. A man attains only to easy
circumstances by his own labor; if he gains wealth, it is by making
others labor for him. This is why, to the trades of actor and author,
Shakespeare added those of manager and director of a theatre. He
acquired a share in the Blackfriars and Globe theatres, farmed tithes,
bought large pieces of land, more houses, gave a dowry to his daughter
Susanna, and finally retired to his native town on his property, in his
own house, like a good landlord, an honest citizen, who manages his
fortune fitly, and takes his share of municipal work. He had an income
of two or three hundred pounds, which would be equivalent to about eight
or twelve hundred at the present time, and according to tradition, lived
cheerfully and on good terms with his neighbors; at all events, it does
not seem that he thought much about his literary glory, for he did not
even take the trouble to collect and publish his works. One of his
daughters married a physician, the other a wine merchant; the last did
not even know how to sign her name. He lent money, and cut a good figure
in this little world. Strange close; one which at first sight resembles
more that of a shopkeeper than of a poet. Must we attribute it to that
English instinct which places happiness in the life of a country
gentleman and a landlord with a good rent-roll, well connected,
surrounded by comforts, who quietly enjoys his undoubted
respectability,[631] his domestic authority, and his county standing? Or
rather, was Shakespeare, like Voltaire, a common-sense man, though of an
imaginative brain, keeping a sound judgment under the sparkling of his
genius, prudent from scepticism, saving through a desire for
independence, and capable, after going the round of human ideas, of
deciding with Candide,[632] that the best thing one can do in this world
is "to cultivate one's garden"? I had rather think, as his full and
solid head suggests,[633] that by the mere force of his overflowing
imagination he escaped, like Goethe, the perils of an overflowing
imagination; that in depicting passion, he succeeded, like Goethe, in
deadening passion; that the fire did not break out in his conduct,
because it found issue in his poetry; that his theatre kept pure his
life; and that, having passed, by sympathy, through every kind of folly
and wretchedness that is incident to human existence, he was able to
settle down amidst them with a calm and melancholic smile, listening,
for the sake of relaxation, to the aerial music of the fancies in which
he revelled.[634] I am willing to believe, lastly, that in frame as in
other things, he belonged to his great generation and his great age;
that with him, as with Rabelais, Titian, Michel Angelo, and Rubens, the
solidity of the muscles was a counterpoise to the sensibility of the
nerves; that in those days the human machine, more severely tried and
more firmly constructed, could withstand the storms of passion and the
fire of inspiration; that soul and body were still at equilibrium; that
genius was then a blossom, and not, as now, a disease. We can but make
conjectures about all this: if we would become acquainted more closely
with the man, we must seek him in his works.




SECTION II.--Shakespeare's Style--Copiousness--Excesses


Let us then look for the man, and in his style. The style explains the
work; whilst showing the principal features of the genius, it infers the
rest. When we have once grasped the dominant faculty, we see the whole
artist developed like a flower.

Shakespeare imagines with copiousness and excess; he scatters metaphors
profusely over all he writes; every instant abstract ideas are changed
into images; it is a series of paintings which is unfolded in his mind.
He does not seek them, they come of themselves; they crowd within him,
covering his arguments; they dim with their brightness the pure light of
logic. He does not labor to explain or prove; picture on picture, image
on image, he is forever copying the strange and splendid visions which
are engendered one after another, and are heaped up within him. Compare
to our dull writers this passage, which I take at hazard from a tranquil
dialogue:


"The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armor of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan."[635]


Here we have three successive images to express the same thought. It is
a whole blossoming; a bough grows from the trunk, from that another,
which is multiplied into numerous fresh branches. Instead of a smooth
road, traced by a regular line of dry and cunningly fixed landmarks, you
enter a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which
conceal and prevent your progress, which delight and dazzle your eyes by
the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom. You are
astonished at first, modern mind that you are, business man, used to the
clear dissertations of classical poetry; you become cross; you think the
author is amusing himself, and that through conceit and bad taste he is
misleading you and himself in his garden thickets. By no means; if he
speaks thus, it is not from choice, but of necessity; metaphor is not
his whim, but the form of his thought. In the height of passion, he
imagines still. When Hamlet, in despair, remembers his father's noble
form, he sees the mythological pictures with which the taste of the age
filled the very streets:


"A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."[636]


This charming vision, in the midst of a bloody invective, proves that
there lurks a painter underneath the poet. Involuntarily and out of
season, he tears off the tragic mask which covered his face; and the
reader discovers, behind the contracted features of this terrible mask,
a graceful and inspired smile which he did not expect to see.

Such an imagination must needs be vehement. Every metaphor is a
convulsion. Whosoever involuntarily and naturally transforms a dry idea
into an image, has his brain on fire; true metaphors are flaming
apparitions, which are like a picture in a flash of lightning. Never, I
think, in any nation of Europe, or in any age of history, has so grand a
passion been seen. Shakespeare's style is a compound of frenzied
expressions. No man has submitted words to such a contortion. Mingled
contrasts, tremendous exaggerations, apostrophes, exclamations; the
whole fury of the ode, confusion of ideas, accumulation of images, the
horrible and the divine, jumbled into the same line; it seems to my
fancy as though he never writes a word without shouting it. "What have I
done?" the queen asks Hamlet. He answers:


"Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows
As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: Heaven's face doth glow;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act."[637]


It is the style of frenzy. Yet I have not given all. The metaphors are
all exaggerated, the ideas all verge on the absurd. All is transformed
and disfigured by the whirlwind of passion. The contagion of the crime,
which he denounces, has marred all nature. He no longer sees anything in
the world but corruption and lying. To vilify the virtuous were little;
he vilifies virtue herself. Inanimate things are sucked into this
whirlpool of grief. The sky's red tint at sunset, the pallid darkness
spread by night over the landscape, become the blush and the pallor of
shame, and the wretched man who speaks and weeps sees the whole world
totter with him in the dimness of despair.

Hamlet, it will be said, is half-mad; this explains the vehemence of his
expressions. The truth is that Hamlet, here, is Shakespeare. Be the
situation terrible or peaceful, whether he is engaged on an invective or
a conversation, the style is excessive throughout. Shakespeare never
sees things tranquilly. All the powers of his mind are concentrated in
the present image or idea. He is buried and absorbed in it. With such a
genius, we are on the brink of an abyss; the eddying water dashes in
headlong, swallowing up whatever objects it meets, and only bringing
them to light transformed and mutilated. We pause stupefied before these
convulsive metaphors, which might have been written by a fevered hand in
a night's delirium, which gather a pageful of ideas and pictures in half
a sentence, which scorch the eyes they would enlighten. Words lose their
meaning; constructions are put out of joint; paradoxes of style,
apparently false expressions, which a man might occasionally venture
upon with diffidence in the transport of his rapture, become the
ordinary language. Shakespeare dazzles, repels, terrifies, disgusts,
oppresses; his verses are a piercing and sublime song, pitched in too
high a key, above the reach of our organs, which offends our ears, of
which our mind alone can divine the justice and beauty.

Yet this is little; for that singular force of concentration is
redoubled by the suddenness of the dash which calls it into existence.
In Shakespeare there is no preparation, no adaptation, no development,
no care to make himself understood. Like a too fiery and powerful horse,
he bounds, but cannot run. He bridges in a couple of words an enormous
interval; is at the two poles in a single instant. The reader vainly
looks for the intermediate track; dazed by these prodigious leaps, he
wonders by what miracle the poet has entered upon a new idea the very
moment when he quitted the last, seeing perhaps between the two images a
long scale of transitions, which we mount with difficulty step by step,
but which he has spanned in a stride. Shakespeare flies, we creep. Hence
comes a style made up of conceits, bold images, shattered in an instant
by others still bolder, barely indicated ideas completed by others far
removed, no visible connection, but a visible incoherence; at every step
we halt, the track failing; and there, far above us, lo, stands the
poet, and we find that we have ventured in his footsteps, through a
craggy land, full of precipices, which he threads as if it were a
straightforward road, but on which our greatest efforts barely carry us
along.

What will you think, further, if we observe that these vehement
expressions, so natural in their up-welling, instead of following one
after the other, slowly and with effort, are hurled out by hundreds,
with an impetuous ease and abundance, like the bubbling waves from a
welling spring, which are heaped together, rise one above another, and
find nowhere room enough to spread and exhaust themselves? You may find
in "Romeo and Juliet" a score of examples of this inexhaustible
inspiration. The two lovers pile up an infinite mass of metaphors,
impassioned exaggerations, clenches, contorted phrases, amorous
extravagances. Their language is like the trill of nightingales.
Shakespeare's wits, Mercutio, Beatrice, Rosalind, his clowns, buffoons,
sparkle with far-fetched jokes, which rattle out like a volley of
musketry. There is none of them but provides enough play on words to
stock a whole theatre. Lear's curses, or Queen Margaret's, would suffice
for all the madmen in an asylum, or all the oppressed of the earth. The
sonnets are a delirium of ideas and images, labored at with an obstinacy
enough to make a man giddy. His first poem, "Venus and Adonis," is the
sensual ecstasy of a Correggio, insatiable and excited. This exuberant
fecundity intensifies qualities already in excess, and multiplies a
hundred-fold the luxuriance of metaphor, the incoherence of style, and
the unbridled vehemence of expression.[638]

All that I have said may be compressed into a few words. Objects were
taken into his mind organized and complete; they pass into ours
disjointed, decomposed, fragmentarily. He thought in the lump, we think
piecemeal; hence his style and our style--two languages not to be
reconciled. We, for our part, writers and reasoners, can note precisely
by a word each isolated fraction of an idea, and represent the due order
of its parts by the due order of our expressions. We advance gradually;
we follow the filiations, refer continually to the roots, try and treat
our words as numbers, our sentences as equations; we employ but general
terms, which every mind can understand, and regular constructions, into
which any mind can enter; we attain justness and clearness, not life.
Shakespeare lets justness and clearness look out for themselves, and
attains life. From amidst his' complex conception and his colored
semi-vision, he grasps a fragment, a quivering fibre, and shows it; it
is for you, from this fragment, to divine the rest. He, behind the word,
has a whole picture, an attitude, a long argument abridged, a mass of
swarming ideas; you know them, these abbreviative, condensive words:
these are they which we launch out amidst the fire of invention, in a
fit of passion--words of slang or of fashion, which appeal to local
memory or individual experience;[639] little desultory and incorrect
phrases, which, by their irregularity, express the suddenness and the
breaks of the inner sensation; trivial words, exaggerated figures.[640]
There is a gesture beneath each, a quick contraction of the brows, a
curl of laughing lips, a clown's trick, an unhinging of the whole
machine. None of them mark ideas, all suggest images; each is the
extremity and issue of a complete mimic action; none is the expression
and definition of a partial and limited idea. This is why Shakespeare is
strange and powerful, obscure and creative, beyond all the poets of his
or any other age; the most immoderate of all violators of language, the
most marvellous of all creators of souls, the farthest removed from
regular logic and classical reason, the one most capable of exciting in
us a world of forms and of placing living beings before us.




SECTION III.--Shakespeare's Language And Manners


Let us reconstruct this world, so as to find in it the imprint of its
creator. A poet does not copy at random the manners which surround him;
he selects from this vast material, and involuntarily brings upon the
stage the habits of the heart and conduct which best suit his talent. If
he is a logician, a moralist, an orator, as, for instance, one of the
French great tragic poets (Racine) of the seventeenth century, he will
only represent noble manners; he will avoid low characters; he will have
a horror of menials and the plebs; he will observe the greatest decorum
amidst the strongest outbreaks of passion; he will reject as scandalous
every low or indecent word; he will give us reason, loftiness, good
taste throughout; he will suppress the familiarity, childishness,
artlessness, gay banter of domestic life; he will blot out precise
details, special traits, and will carry tragedy into a serene and
sublime region, where his abstract personages, unencumbered by time and
space, after an exchange of eloquent harangues and able dissertations,
will kill each other becomingly, and as though they were merely
concluding a ceremony. Shakespeare does just the contrary, because his
genius is the exact opposite. His master faculty is an impassioned
imagination, freed from the shackles of reason and morality. He abandons
himself to it, and finds in man nothing that he would care to lop off.
He accepts nature and finds it beautiful in its entirety. He paints it
in its littlenesses, it deformities, its weaknesses, its excesses, its
irregularities, and its rages; he exhibits man at his meals, in bed, at
play, drunk, mad, sick; he adds that which ought not to be seen to that
which passes on the stage. He does not dream of ennobling, but of
copying human life, and aspires only to make his copy more energetic and
more striking than the original.

Hence the morals of this drama; and first, the want of dignity. Dignity
arises from self-command. A man selects the most noble of his acts and
attitudes, and allows himself no other. Shakespeare's characters select
none, but allow themselves all. His kings are men, and fathers of
families. The terrible Leontes, who is about to order the death of his
wife and his friend, plays like a child with his son: caresses him,
gives him all the pretty pet names which mothers are wont to employ; he
dares be trivial; he gabbles like a nurse; he has her language and
fulfils her duties:


"_Leontes._ What, hast smutch'd thy nose?
They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, captain,
We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain:...
Come, sir page,
Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain!
Most dear'st! my collop... Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd,
In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master....
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,
This squash, this gentleman!... My brother,
Are you so fond of your young prince as we
Do seem to be of ours?
_Polixenes._ If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter,
Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy,
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all:
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood."[641]


There are a score of such passages in Shakespeare. The great passions,
with him as in nature, are preceded or followed by trivial actions,
small-talk, commonplace sentiments. Strong emotions are accidents in our
life: to drink, to eat, to talk of indifferent things, to carry out
mechanically a habitual duty, to dream of some stale pleasure or some
ordinary annoyance, that is in which we employ all our time. Shakespeare
paints us as we are; his heroes bow, ask people for news, speak of rain
and fine weather, as often and as casually as ourselves, on the very eve
of falling into the extremity of misery, or of plunging into fatal
resolutions. Hamlet asks what's o'clock, finds the wind biting, talks of
feasts and music heard without; and this quiet talk, so unconnected with
the action, so full of slight, insignificant facts, which chance alone
has raised up and guided, lasts until the moment when his father's
ghost, rising in the darkness, reveals the assassination which it is his
duty to avenge.

Reason tells us that our manners should be measured; this is why the
manners which Shakespeare paints are not so. Pure nature is violent,
passionate: it admits no excuses, suffers no middle course, takes no
count of circumstances, wills blindly, breaks out into railing, has the
irrationality, ardor, anger of children. Shakespeare's characters have
hot blood and a ready hand. They cannot restrain themselves, they
abandon themselves at once to their grief, indignation, love, and plunge
desperately down the steep slope, where their passion urges them. How
many need I quote? Timon, Posthumus, Cressida, all the young girls, all
the chief characters in the great dramas; everywhere Shakespeare paints
the unreflecting impetuosity of the impulse of the moment. Capulet tells
his daughter Juliet that in three days she is to marry Earl Paris, and
bids her be proud of it; she answers that she is not proud of it, and
yet she thanks the earl for this proof of love. Compare Capulet's fury
with the anger of Orgon,[642] and you may measure the difference of the
two poets and the two civilizations:


"_Capulet._ How now, how now, chop-logic! What is this?
'Proud,' and 'I thank you,' and 'I thank you not;'
And yet 'not proud,' mistress minion, you,
Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds,
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next,
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's church,
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.
Out, you green-sickness carrion! out, you baggage!
You tallow-face!
_Juliet._ Good father, I beseech you on my knees,
Hear me with patience but to speak a word.
_C._ Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch
I tell thee what: get thee to church o' Thursday,
Or never after look me in the face:
Speak not, reply not, do not answer me;
My fingers itch....
_Lady C._ You are too hot.
_C._ God's bread! it makes me mad:
Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play,
Alone, in company, still my care hath been
To have her match'd: and having now provided
A gentleman of noble parentage,
Of fair demesnes, youthful, and nobly train'd,
Stuff'd, as they say, with honorable parts,
Proportion'd as one's thoughts would wish a man;
And then to have a wretched puling fool,
A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender,
To answer, '_I'll not wed; I cannot love,
I am too young; I pray you, pardon me_,'--
But, an you will not wed, I'll pardon you:
Graze where you will, you shall not house with me:
Look to't, think on't, I do not use to jest.
Thursday is near; lay hand on heart, advise:
An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend;
An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee."[643]


This method of exhorting one's child to marry is peculiar to Shakespeare
and the sixteenth century. Contradiction to these men was like a red rag
to a bull; it drove them mad.

We might be sure that in this age, and on this stage, decency was a
thing unknown. It is wearisome, being a check; men got rid of it,
because it was wearisome. It is a gift of reason and morality; as
indecency is produced by nature and passion. Shakespeare's words are too
indecent to be translated. His characters call things by their dirty
names, and compel the thoughts to particular images of physical love.
The talk of gentlemen and ladies is full of coarse allusions; we should
have to find out an alehouse of the lowest description to hear like
words nowadays.[644]

It would be in an alehouse too that we should have to look for the rude
jests and brutal kind of wit which form the staple of these
conversations. Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced
reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small
acts and everyday discourse; it bids man soften towards others, and
forget himself for the sake of others; it constrains genuine nature,
which is selfish and gross. This is why it is absent from the manners of
the drama we are considering. You will see carmen, out of sportiveness
and good humor, deal one another hard blows; so it is pretty well with
the conversation of the lords and ladies of Shakespeare who are in a
sportive mood; for instance, Beatrice and Benedick, very well bred folk
as things go,[645] with a great reputation for wit and politeness, whose
smart retorts create amusement for the bystanders. These "skirmishes of
wit" consist in telling one another plainly: You are a coward, a
glutton, an idiot, a buffoon, a rake, a brute! You are a parrot's
tongue, a fool, a... (the word is there). Benedick says:


"I will go... to the Antipodes... rather than hold three
words' conference with this harpy.... I cannot endure my
Lady Tongue....
_Don Pedro._ You have put him down, lady, you have put him down.
_Beatrice._ So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should
prove the mother of fools."[646]


We can infer the tone they use when in anger. Emilia, in "Othello,"
says:


"He call'd her whore; a beggar in his drink
Could not have laid such terms upon his callat."[647]


They have a vocabulary of foul words as complete as that of Rabelais,
and they exhaust it. They catch up handfuls of mud and hurl it at their
enemy, not conceiving themselves to be smirched.

Their actions correspond. They go without shame or pity to the limits of
their passion. They kill, poison, violate, burn; the stage is full of
abominations. Shakespeare lugs upon the stage all the atrocious deeds of
the Civil Wars. These are the ways of wolves and hyenas. We must read of
Jack Cade's sedition[648] to gain an idea of this madness and fury. We
might imagine we were seeing infuriated beasts, the murderous
recklessness of a wolf in a sheepfold, the brutality of a hog fouling
and rolling himself in filth and blood. They destroy, kill, butcher each
other; with their feet in the blood of their victims, they call for food
and drink; they stick heads on pikes and make them kiss one another, and
they laugh.


"_Jack Cade._ There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for
a penny.... There shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my
score, and I will apparel them all in one livery.... And here sitting
upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the city's cost, the
pissing-conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our
reign.... Away, burn all the records of the realm; my mouth shall be the
parliament of England.... And henceforth all things shall be in
common.... What canst thou answer to my majesty for giving up of
Normandy unto Mounsieur Basimecu, the dauphin of France?... The proudest
peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay
me tribute; there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me
her maidenhead ere they have it. (_Re-enter rebels with the heads of
Lord Say and his son-in-law._) But is not this braver? Let them kiss one
another, for they loved well when they were alive."[649]


Man must not be let loose; we know not what lusts and rage may brood
under a sober guise. Nature was never so hideous, and this hideousness
is the truth.

Are these cannibal manners only met with among the scum? Why, the
princes are worse. The Duke of Cornwall orders the old Earl of
Gloucester to be tied to a chair, because, owing to him, King Lear has
escaped:


"Fellows, hold the chair.
Upon these eyes of thine I'll set my foot.
(_Gloucester is held down in the chair, while Cornwall plucks
out one of his eyes, and sets his foot on it._)
_Glou._ He that will think to live till he be old,
Give me some help! O cruel: O you gods!
_Regan._ One side will mock another; the other too.
_Cornwall._ If you see vengeance--
_Servant._ Hold	your hand, my lord:
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you,
Than now to bid you hold.
_Regan._ How now, you dog!
_Serv._ If you did wear a beard upon your chin,
I'd shake it on this quarrel. What do you mean?
_Corn._ My villain! (_Draws and runs at him._)
_Serv._ Nay, then, come on, and take the chance of anger.
(_Draws; they fight; Cornwall is wounded._)
_Regan._ Give me thy sword. A peasant stands up thus.
(_Snatches a sword, comes behind, and stabs him._)
_Serv._ O, I am slain! My lord, you have one eye left
To see some mischief on him. O!	(_Dies._)
_Corn._ Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly!
Where is thy lustre now?
_Glou._ All dark and comfortless. Where's my son?...
_Regan._ Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell
His way to Dover."[650]


Such are the manners of that stage. They are unbridled, like those of
the age, and like the poet's imagination. To copy the common actions of
every-day life, the puerilities and feeblenesses to which the greatest
continually sink, the outbursts of passion which degrade them, the
indecent, harsh, or foul words, the atrocious deeds in which license
revels, the brutality and ferocity of primitive nature, is the work of a
free and unencumbered imagination. To copy this hideousness and these
excesses with a selection of such familiar, significant, precise
details, that they reveal under every word of every personage a complete
civilization, is the work of a concentrated and all-powerful
imagination. This species of manners and this energy of description
indicate the same faculty, unique and excessive, which the style had
already indicated.




SECTION IV.--Dramatis Personæ


On this common background stands out in striking relief a population of
distinct living figures, illuminated by an intense light. This creative
power is Shakespeare's great gift, and it communicates an extraordinary
significance to his words. Every phrase pronounced by one of its
characters enables us to see, besides the idea which it contains and the
emotion which prompted it, the aggregate of the qualities and the entire
character which produced it--the mood, physical attitude, bearing, look
of the man, all instantaneously, with a clearness and force approached
by no one. The words which strike our ears are not the thousandth part
of those we hear within; they are like sparks thrown off here and there;
the eyes catch rare flashes of flame; the mind alone perceives the vast
conflagration of which they are the signs and the effect. He gives us
two dramas in one: the first strange, convulsive, curtailed, visible;
the other consistent, immense, invisible; the one covers the other so
well, that as a rule we do not realize that we are perusing words: we
hear the roll of those terrible voices, we see contracted features,
glowing eyes, pallid faces; we see the agitation, the furious
resolutions which mount to the brain with the feverish blood, and
descend to the sharp-strung nerves. This property possessed by every
phrase to exhibit a world of sentiments and forms, comes from the fact
that the phrase is actually caused by a world of emotions and images.
Shakespeare, when he wrote, felt all that we feel, and much besides. He
had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of the eye a
complete character, body, mind, past and present, in every detail and
every depth of his being, with the exact attitude and the expression of
face, which the situation demanded. A word here and there of Hamlet or
Othello would need for its explanation three pages of commentaries; each
of the half-understood thoughts, which the commentator may have
discovered, has left its trace in the turn of the phrase, in the nature
of the metaphor, in the order of the words; nowadays, in pursuing these
traces, we divine the thoughts. These innumerable traces have been
impressed in a second, within the compass of a line. In the next line
there are as many, impressed just as quickly, and in the same compass.
You can gauge the concentration and the velocity of the imagination
which creates thus.

These characters are all of the same family. Good or bad, gross or
delicate, witty or stupid, Shakespeare gives them all the same kind of
spirit which is his own. He has made of them imaginative people, void of
will and reason, impassioned machines, vehemently jostled one against
another, who were outwardly whatever is most natural and most abandoned
in human nature. Let us act the play to ourselves, and see in all its
stages this clanship of figures, this prominence of portraits.

Lowest of all are the stupid folk, babbling or brutish. Imagination
already exists there, where reason is not yet born; it exists also there
where reason is dead. The idiot and the brute blindly follow the
phantoms which exist in their benumbed or mechanical brains. No poet has
understood this mechanism like Shakespeare. His Caliban, for instance, a
deformed savage, fed on roots, growls like a beast under the hand of
Prospero, who has subdued him. He howls continually against his master,
though he knows that every curse will be paid back with "cramps and
aches." He is a chained wolf, trembling and fierce, who tries to bite
when approached, and who crouches when he see's the lash raised. He has
a foul sensuality, a loud base laugh, the gluttony of degraded humanity.
He wishes to violate Miranda in her sleep. He cries for his food, and
gorges himself when he gets it. A sailor who had landed in the island,
Stephano, gives him wine; he kisses his feet, and takes him for a god;
he asks if he has not dropped from heaven, and adores him. We find in
him rebellious and baffled passions, which are eager to rise again and
to be satiated. Stephano had beaten his comrade. Caliban cries, "Beat
Him enough: after a little time I'll beat him too." He prays Stephano to
come with him and murder Prospero in his sleep; he thirsts to lead him
there, dances through joy and sees his master already with his "weasand"
cut, and his brains scattered on the earth:


"Prithee, my king, be quiet. See'st thou here,
This is the mouth o' the cell: no noise, and enter.
Do that good mischief which may make this island
Thine own forever, and I, thy Caliban,
For aye thy foot-licker."[651]


Others, like Ajax and Cloten, are more like men, and yet it is pure mood
that Shakespeare depicts in them, as in Caliban. The clogging corporeal
machine, the mass of muscles, the thick blood sluggishly moving along in
the veins of these fighting men, oppress the intelligence, and leave no
life but for animal passions. Ajax uses his fists, and devours meat;
that is his existence; if he is jealous of Achilles, it is pretty much
as a bull is jealous of his fellow. He permits himself to be restrained
and led by Ulysses, without looking before him: the grossest flattery
decoys him. The Greeks have urged him to accept Hector's challenge.
Behold him puffed up with pride, scorning to answer anyone, not knowing
what he says or does. Thersites cries, "Good-morrow, Ajax"; and he
replies, "Thanks, Agamemnon." He has no further thought than to
contemplate his enormous frame, and roll majestically his big stupid
eyes. When the day of the fight has come, he strikes at Hector as on an
anvil. After a good while they are separated. "I am not warm yet," says
Ajax, "let us fight again."[652] Cloten is less massive than this
phlegmatic ox; but he is just as idiotic, just as vainglorious, just as
coarse. The beautiful Imogen, urged by his insults and his scullion
manners, tells him that his whole body is not worth as much a
Posthumus's meanest garment. He is stung to the quick, repeats the words
several times; he cannot shake off the idea, and runs at it again and
again with his head down, like an angry ram:


"_Cloten._ 'His garment?' Now, the devil--
_Imogen._ To Dorothy my woman hie thee presently--
_C._ 'His garment?'... You have abused me: 'His meanest
garment!'... I'll be revenged: 'His meanest garment!' Well."[653]


He gets some of Posthumus's garments, and goes to Milford Haven,
expecting to meet Imogen there. On his way he mutters thus:


"With that suit upon my back, will I ravish her: first kill him, and in
her eyes; there shall she see my valor, which will then be a torment to
her contempt. He on the ground, my speech of insultment ended on his
dead body, and when my lust has dined--which, as I say, to vex her I
will execute in the clothes that she so praised--to the court I'll knock
her back, foot her home again."[654]


Others again, are but babblers: for example, Polonius, the grave
brainless counsellor; a great baby, not yet out of his "swathing
clouts"; a solemn booby, who rains on men a shower of counsels,
compliments, and maxims; a sort of court speaking-trumpet, useful in
grand ceremonies, with the air of a thinker, but fit only to spout
words. But the most complete of all these characters is that of the
nurse in "Romeo and Juliet," a gossip, loose in her talk, a regular
kitchen oracle, smelling of the stewpan and old boots, foolish,
impudent, immoral, but otherwise a good creature, and affectionate to
her nurse-child. Mark this disjointed and never-ending gossip's babble:


"_Nurse._ 'Faith I can tell her age unto an hour.
_Lady Capulet._ She's not fourteen....
_Nurse._ Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she--God rest all Christian souls!--
Were of an age: well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me: but, as I said,
On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen;
That shall she, marry; I remember it well.
'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was wean'd--I never shall forget it--
Of all the days of the year, upon that day:
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall;
My lord and you were then at Mantua:--
Nay, I do bear a brain:--but, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!
Shake, quoth the dove-house: 'twas no need, I trow,
To bid me trudge:
And since that time it is eleven years;
For then she could stand alone; nay, by the rood,
She could have run and waddled all about;
For even the day before, she broke her brow."[655]


Then she tells an indecent anecdote, which she begins over again four
times. She is silenced: what then? She has her anecdote in her head, and
cannot cease repeating it and laughing to herself. Endless repetitions
are the mind's first step. The vulgar do not pursue the straight line of
reasoning and of the story; they repeat their steps, as it were merely
marking time: struck with an image, they keep it for an hour before
their eyes, and are never tired of it. If they do advance, they turn
aside to a hundred subordinate ideas before they get at the phrase
required. They allow themselves to be diverted by all the thoughts which
come across them. This is what the nurse does; and when she brings
Juliet news of her lover, she torments and wearies her, less from a wish
to tease than from a habit of wandering from the point:


"_Nurse._ Jesu, what haste? can you not stay awhile?
Do you not see that I am out of breath?
_Juliet._ How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?
Is thy news good, or bad? answer to that;
Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance:
Let me be satisfied: is't good or bad?
_N._ Well, you have made a simple choice; you know not how to choose
a man: Romeo! no, not he: though his face be better than any man's,
yet his legs excels all men's; and for a hand and a foot, and a body,
though they be not to be talked on, yet they are past compare: he is
not the flower of courtesy, but, I'll warrant him, as gentle as a lamb.
Go thy ways, wench; serve God. What, have you dined at home?
_J._ No, no: but all this did I know before.
What says he of our marriage? what of that?
_N._ Lord, how my head aches! what a head have I!
It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces.
My back o' t'other side--O, my back, my back!
Beshrew your heart for sending me about,
To catch my death with jaunting up and down!
_J._ I' faith, I am sorry that thou art not well.
Sweet, sweet, sweet nurse, tell me, what says my love?
_N._ Your love says, like an honest gentleman, and a courteous, and
a kind, and a handsome, and, I warrant, a virtuous--Where is your
mother?"[656]


It is never-ending. Her gabble is worse when she comes to announce to
Juliet the death of her cousin and the banishment of Romeo. It is the
shrill cry and chatter of an overgrown asthmatic magpie. She laments,
confuses the names, spins roundabout sentences, ends by asking for
_aqua-vitœ._ She curses Romeo, then brings him to Juliet's chamber.
Next day Juliet is ordered to marry Earl Paris; Juliet throws herself
into her nurse's arms, praying for comfort, advice, assistance. The
other finds the true remedy: Marry Paris,


"O, he's a lovely gentleman!
Romeo's a dishclout to him: an eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,
I think you are happy in this second match.
For it excels your first."[657]


This cool immorality, these weather-cock arguments, this fashion of
estimating love like a fishwoman, completes the portrait.




SECTION V.--Men of Wit


The mechanical imagination produces Shakespeare's fool-characters: a
quick, venturesome, dazzling, unquiet imagination, produces his men of
wit. Of wit there are many kinds. One, altogether French, which is but
reason, a foe to paradox, scorner of folly, a sort of incisive
common-sense, having no occupation but to render truth amusing and
evident, the most effective weapon with an intelligent and vain people:
such was the wit of Voltaire and the drawing-rooms. The other, that of
improvisators and artists, is a mere inventive rapture, paradoxical,
unshackled, exuberant, a sort of self-entertainment, a phantasmagoria of
images, flashes of wit, strange ideas, dazing and intoxicating, like the
movement and illumination in a ball-room. Such is the wit of Mercutio,
of the clowns, of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Benedick. They laugh, not from
a sense of the ridiculous, but from the desire to laugh. You must look
elsewhere for the campaigns with aggressive reason makes against human
folly. Here folly is in its full bloom. Our folk think of amusement, and
nothing more. They are good-humored; they let their wit prance gayly
over the possible and the impossible. They play upon words, contort
their sense, draw absurd and laughable inferences, send them back to one
another, and without intermission, as if with shuttlecocks, and vie with
each other in singularity and invention. They dress all their ideas in
strange or sparkling metaphors. The taste of the time was for
masquerades; their conversation is a masquerade of ideas. They say
nothing in a simple style; they only seek to heap together subtle
things, far-fetched, difficult to invent and to understand; all their
expressions are over-refined, unexpected, extraordinary; they strain
their thought, and change it into a caricature. "Alas, poor Romeo!" says
Mercutio, "he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench's black eye;
shot through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft
with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft."[658] Benedick relates a
conversation he has just held with his mistress: "O, she misused me past
the endurance of a block! an oak, but with one green leaf on it would
have answered her; my very visor began to assume life, and scold with
her."[659] These gay and perpetual extravagances show the bearing of the
speakers. They do not remain quietly seated in their chairs, like the
Marquesses in the "Misanthrope"; they whirl round, leap, paint their
faces, gesticulate boldly their ideas; their wit-rockets end with a
song. Young folk, soldiers and artists, they let off their fireworks of
phrases, and gambol round about. "There was a star danced, and under
that was I born."[660] This expression of Beatrice's aptly describes the
kind of poetical, sparkling, unreasoning, charming wit, more akin to
music than to literature, a sort of dream, which is spoken out aloud,
and whilst wide awake, not unlike that described by Mercutio:


"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife; and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small gray-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream....
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a person's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep: and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes...
This is she."[661]




[Illustration: CHOICE EXAMPLES OF BOOK ILLUMINATION.
Fac-similes from Illuminated Manuscripts and Illustrated Books
of Early Date.

_TITLE-PAGE OF THE HYPNEROTOMACHIA._

The present frontispiece belongs to a French translation of the work of
Poliphilo, the only book with decorated borders and insertions ever
published by the Venetian Aldi. They printed the Hypnerotomachia in
1499, and it was reproduced in a French translation, with the present
title-page by the Parisian printer, Jacques Kerver, in 1546. All the
profuse embellishments of the Aldine edition were retained, but the
title-page here reproduced is from a design of the famous French
sculptor, Jean Goujon.]



Romeo interrupts him, or he would never end. Let the reader compare with
the dialogue of the French theatre this little poem


"Child of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,"[662]


introduced without incongruity in the midst of a conversation of the
sixteenth century, and he will understand the difference between the wit
which devotes itself to reasoning, or to record a subject for laughter,
and that imagination which is self-amused with its own act.

Falstaff has the passions of an animal, and the imagination of a man of
wit. There is no character which better exemplifies the fire and
immorality of Shakespeare. Falstaff is a great supporter of disreputable
places, swearer, gamester, idler, wine-bibber, as low as he well can be.
He has a big belly, bloodshot eyes, bloated face, shaking legs; he
spends his life with his elbows among the tavern-jugs, or asleep on the
ground behind the arras; he only wakes to curse, lie, brag, and steal.
He is as big a swindler as Panurge, who had sixty-three ways of making
money, "of which the honestest was by sly theft." And what is worse, he
is an old man, a knight, a courtier, and well educated. Must he not be
odious and repulsive? By no means; we cannot help liking him. At bottom,
like his brother Panurge, he is "the best fellow in the world." He has
no malice in his composition; no other wish than to laugh and be amused.
When insulted, he bawls out louder than his attackers, and pays them
back with interest in coarse words and insults; but he owes them no
grudge for it. The next minute he is sitting down with them in a low
tavern, drinking their health like a brother and comrade. If he has
vices, he exposes them so frankly that we are obliged to forgive him
them. He seems to say to us, "Well, so I am, what then? I like drinking:
isn't the wine good? I take to my heels when hard hitting begins; don't
blows hurt? I get into debt, and do fools out their money; isn't it nice
to have money in your pocket? I brag; isn't it natural to want to be
well thought of?"--"Dost thou hear, Hal? thou knowest, in the state of
innocency, Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days
of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and
therefore more frailty."[663] Falstaff is so frankly immoral, that he
ceases to be so. Conscience ends at a certain point; nature assumes its
place, and man rushes upon what he desires, without more thought of
being just or unjust than an animal in the neighboring wood. Falstaff,
engaged in recruiting, has sold exemptions to all the rich people, and
only enrolled starved and half-naked wretches. There's but a shirt and a
half in all his company: that does not trouble him. Bah: "they'll find
linen enough on every hedge." The prince, who has seen them, says, "I
did never see such pitiful rascals. Tut, tut," answers Falstaff, "good
enough to toss; food for powder; they'll fill a pit as well as better;
tush, man, mortal men, mortal men."[664] His second excuse is his
unfailing spirit. If ever there was a man who could jabber, it is he.
Insults and oaths, curses, jobations, protests, flow from him as from an
open barrel. He is never at a loss; he devises a shift for every
difficulty. Lies sprout out of him, fructify, increase, beget one
another, like mushrooms on a rich and rotten bed of earth. He lies still
more from his imagination and nature than from interest and necessity.
It is evident from the manner in which he strains his fictions. He says
he has fought alone against two men. The next moment it is four.
Presently we have seven, then eleven, then fourteen. He is stopped in
time, or he would soon be talking of a whole army. When unmasked, he
does not lose his temper, and is the first to laugh at his boastings.
"Gallants, lads, boys, hearts of gold.... What, shall we be merry? shall
we have a play extempore?"[665] He does the scolding part of King Henry
with so much truth that we might take him for a king, or an actor. This
big potbellied fellow, a coward, a cynic, a brawler, a drunkard, a lewd
rascal, a pothouse poet, is one of Shakespeare's favorites. The reason
is, that his morals are those of pure nature, and Shakespeare's mind is
congenial with his own.




SECTION VI.--Shakespeare's Women


Nature is shameless and gross amidst this mass of flesh, heavy with wine
and fatness. It is delicate in the delicate body of women, but as
unreasoning and impassioned in Desdemona as in Falstaff. Shakespeare's
women are charming children, who feel in excess and love passionately.
They have unconstrained manners, little rages, nice words of friendship,
a coquettish rebelliousness, a graceful volubility, which recall the
warbling and the prettiness of birds. The heroines of the French stage
are almost men; these are women, and in every sense of the word. More
imprudent than Desdemona a woman could not be. She is moved with pity
for Cassio, and asks a favor for him passionately, recklessly, be the
thing just or no, dangerous or no. She knows nothing of man's laws, and
does not think of them. All that she sees is, that Cassio is unhappy:


"Be thou assured, good Cassio... My lord shall never rest;
I'll watch him, tame and talk him out of patience;
His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift;
I'll intermingle everything he does
With Cassio's suit."[666]


She asks her favor:


"_Othello._ Not now, sweet Desdemona; some other time.
_Desdemona._ But shall't be shortly?
_O._ The sooner, sweet, for you.
_Des._ Shall't be to-night at supper?
_O._ No, not to-night.
_Des._ To-morrow dinner, then?
_O._ I shall not dine at home;
I meet the captains at the citadel.
_Des._ Why, then, to-morrow night; or Tuesday morn;
On Tuesday noon, or night; on Wednesday morn;
I prithee, name the time, but let it not
Exceed three days: in faith, he's penitent."[667]


She is somewhat astonished to see herself refused: she scolds Othello.
He yields: who would not yield seeing a reproach in those lovely sulking
eyes? O, says she, with a pretty pout:


"This is not a boon;
'Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves,
Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,
Or sue to you to do peculiar profit
To your own person."[668]


A moment after, when he prays her to leave him alone for a while, mark
the innocent gayety, the ready observance, the playful child's tone:


"Shall I deny you? no: farewell, my lord....
Emilia, come: Be as your fancies teach you;
Whate'er you be, I am obedient."[669]


This vivacity, this petulance, does not prevent shrinking modesty and
silent timidity: on the contrary, they spring from a common cause,
extreme sensibility. She who feels much and quickly has more reserve and
more passion than others; she breaks out or is silent; she says nothing
or everything. Such is this Imogen.


"So tender of rebukes that words are strokes,
And strokes death to her."[670]


Such is Virgilia, the sweet wife of Coriolanus; her heart is not a Roman
one; she is terrified at her husband's victories: when Volumnia
describes him stamping on the field of battle, and wiping his bloody
brow with his hand, she grows pale:


"His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood!...
Heavens bless my lord from fell Aufidius!"[671]


She wishes to forget all that she knows of these dangers; she dare not
think of them. When asked if Coriolanus does not generally return
wounded, she cries, "O, no, no, no." She avoids this cruel picture, and
yet nurses a secret pang at the bottom of her heart. She will not leave
the house: "I'll not over the threshold till my lord return."[672] She
does not smile, will hardly admit a visitor; she would blame herself, as
for a lack of tenderness, for a moment's forgetfulness or gayety. When
he does return, she can only blush and weep. This exalted sensibility
must needs end in love. All Shakespeare's women love without measure,
and nearly all at first sight. At the first look Juliet cast on Romeo,
she says to the nurse:


"Go, ask his name: if he be married,
My grave is like to be my wedding bed."[673]


It is the revelation of their destiny. As Shakespeare has made them,
they cannot but love, and they must love till death. But this first look
is an ecstasy: and this sudden approach of love is a transport. Miranda
seeing Fernando, fancies that she sees "a thing divine." She halts
motionless, in the amazement of this sudden vision, at the sound of
these heavenly harmonies which rise from the depths of her heart. She
weeps, on seeing him drag the heavy logs; with her slender white hands
she would do the work whilst he reposed. Her compassion and tenderness
carry her away; she is no longer mistress of her words, she says what
she would not, what her father has forbidden her to disclose, what an
instant before she would never have confessed. The too full heart
overflows unwittingly, happy, and ashamed at the current of joy and new
sensations with which an unknown feeling has flooded her:


"_Miranda._ I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of....
_Fernando._ Wherefore weep you?
_M._ At mine unworthiness that dare not offer
What I desire to give, and much less take
What I shall die to want....
I am your wife, if you will marry me;
If not, I'll die your maid."[674]


This irresistible invasion of love transforms the whole character. The
shrinking and tender Desdemona, suddenly, in full Senate, before her
father, renounces her father; dreams not for an instant of asking his
pardon, or consoling him. She will leave for Cyprus with Othello,
through the enemy's fleet and the tempest. Everything vanishes before
the one and adored image which has taken entire and absolute possession
of her whole heart. So, extreme evils, bloody resolves, are only the
natural sequence of such love. Ophelia becomes mad, Juliet commits
suicide; no one but looks upon such madness and death as necessary. You
will not then discover virtue in these souls, for by virtue is implied a
determinate desire to do good, and a rational observance of duty. They
are only pure through delicacy or love. They recoil from vice as a gross
thing, not as an immoral thing. What they feel is not respect for the
marriage vow, but adoration of their husband. "O sweetest, fairest
lily!" So Cymbeline speaks of one of these frail and lovely flowers
which cannot be torn from the tree to which they have grown, whose least
impurity would tarnish their whiteness. When Imogen learns that her
husband means to kill her as being faithless, she does not revolt at the
outrage; she has no pride, but only love. "False to his bed!" She faints
at the thought that she is no longer loved. When Cordelia hears her
father, an irritable old man, already almost insane, ask her how she
loves him, she cannot make up her mind to say aloud the flattering
protestations which her sisters have been lavishing. She is ashamed to
display her tenderness before the world, and to buy a dowry by it. He
disinherits her, and drives her away; she holds her tongue. And when she
afterwards finds him abandoned and mad, she goes on her knees before
him, with such a touching emotion, she weeps over that dear insulted
head with so gentle a pity, that you might fancy it was the tender voice
of a desolate but delighted mother, kissing the pale lips of her child:


"O yon kind gods,
Cure this great breach in his abused nature!
The untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up
Of this child-changed father!...
O my dear father! Restoration hang
Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss
Repair those violent harms that my two sisters
Have in thy reverence made!... Was this a face
To be opposed against the warring winds?
... Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire....
How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?"[675]


If, in short, Shakespeare comes across a heroic character, worthy of
Corneille, a Roman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain by
passion what Corneille would have explained by heroism. He will depict
it violent and thirsting for the violent feelings of glory. She will not
be able to refrain herself. She will break out into accents of triumph
when she sees her son crowned; into imprecations of vengeance when she
sees him banished. She will descend to the vulgarities of pride and
anger; she will abandon herself to mad effusions of joy, to dreams of an
ambitious fancy,[676] and will prove once more that the impassioned
imagination of Shakespeare has left its trace in all the creatures whom
it has called forth.




SECTION VII.--Types of Villains


Nothing is easier to such a poet than to create perfect villains.
Throughout he is handling the unruly passions which make their
character, and he never hits upon the moral law which restrains them;
but at the same time, and by the same faculty, he changes the inanimate
masks, which the conventions of the stage mould on an identical pattern,
into living and illusory figures. How shall a demon be made to look as
real as a man? Iago is a soldier of fortune who has roved the world from
Syria to England, who, nursed in the lowest ranks, having had close
acquaintance with the horrors of the wars of the sixteenth century, had
drawn thence the maxims of a Turk and the philosophy of a butcher;
principles he has none left. "O my reputation, my reputation!" cries the
dishonored Cassio. "As I am an honest man," says Iago, "I thought you
had received some bodily wound; there is more sense in that than in
reputation."[677] As for woman's virtue, he looks upon it like a man who
has kept company with slave-dealers. He estimates Desdemona's love as he
would estimate a mare's: that sort of thing lasts so long--then... And
then he airs an experimental theory with precise details and nasty
expressions like a stud doctor. "It cannot be that Desdemona should long
continue her love to the Moor, nor he his to her.... These Moors are
changeable in their wills;... the food that to him now is as luscious as
locusts, shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must
change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the
error of her choice."[678] Desdemona, on the shore, trying! to forget
her cares, begs him to sing the praises of her sex. For every portrait
he finds the most insulting insinuations. She insists, and bids him take
the case of a deserving woman. "Indeed," he replies, "she was a wight,
if ever such wight were,... to suckle fools and chronicle small
beer."[679] He also says, when Desdemona asks him what he would write in
praise of her: "O gentle lady do not put me to't, for I am nothing, if
not critical."[680] This is the key to his character. He despises man;
to him Desdemona is a little wanton wench, Cassio an elegant
word-shaper, Othello a mad bull, Roderigo an ass to be basted, thumped,
made to go. He diverts himself by setting these passions at issue; he
laughs at it as at a play. When Othello, swooning, shakes in his
convulsions, he rejoices at this capital result: "Work on, my medicine,
work! Thus credulous fools are caught."[681] You would take him for one
of the poisoners of the time, studying the effect of a new potion on a
dying dog. He only speaks in sarcasms; he has them ready for everyone,
even for those whom he does not know. When he wakes Brabantio to inform
him of the elopement of his daughter, he tells him the matter in coarse
terms, sharpening the sting of the bitter pleasantry, like a
conscientious executioner, rubbing his hands when he hears the culprit
groan under the knife. "Thou art a villain!" cries Brabantio. "You
are--a senator!" answers Iago. But the feature which really completes
him, and makes him take rank with Mephistopheles, is the atrocious truth
and the cogent reasoning by which he likens his crime to virtue.[682]
Cassio, under his advice, goes to see Desdemona, to obtain her
intercession for him; this visit is to be the ruin of Desdemona and
Cassio. Iago, left alone, hums for an instant quietly, then cries:


"And what's he then that says I play the villain?
When this advice is free I give and honest,
Probal to thinking and indeed the course
To win the Moor again."[683]


To all these features must be added a diabolical energy,[684] an
inexhaustible inventiveness in images, caricatures, obscenity, the
manners of a guard-room, the brutal bearing and tastes of a trooper,
habits of dissimulation, coolness, hatred, and patience, contracted amid
the perils and devices of a military life, and the continuous miseries
of long degradation and frustrated hope; you will understand how
Shakespeare could transform abstract treachery into a concrete form, and
how Iago's atrocious vengeance is only the natural consequence of his
character, life, and training.




SECTION VIII.--Principal Characters


How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius of
Shakespeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of
the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the
manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and
crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting
through will and reason: such are the forces and ravings which engender
them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the
whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who
scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the
fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous,
irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose
thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning
flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical
adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack; who, his
nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows mad and
swoons for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is distracted
and disorganized in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear,
violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over
under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents the frightful
spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses,
bowlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first
access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chattering
imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvellous
creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason,
which reason could never have conceived?[685] Amid so many portraitures
let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them all.
The critic is lost in Shakespeare, as in an immense town; he will
describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the
city.

Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general
of the army. In Shakespeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man
of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a
voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush
of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the
body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic
action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the
sack of Corioli. Shakespeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same
disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him
the name of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns
out:


"By Jupiter! forgot.
I am weary; yea, my memory is tired.
Have we no wine here?"[686]


He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian
in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with
shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are heard above
the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has
scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with
slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red
with blood, "as he were flay'd. Come I too late?" Cominius begins to
compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet
finished: he embraces Cominius:


"O! let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done."[687]


For the battle is a real holiday to him. Such senses, such a strong
frame, need the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and
wounds. This haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and
destruction. Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his
soldier's bearing, when he is offered the tenth of the spoils:


"I thank you, general;
But cannot make my heart consent to take
A bribe to pay my sword."[688]


The soldiers cry, Marcius! Marcius! and the trumpets sound. He gets into
a passion: rates the brawlers:


"No more, I say! For that I have not wash'd
My nose that bled, or foil'd some debile wretch--
... You shout me forth
In acclamations hyperbolical;
As if I loved my little should be dieted
In praises sauced with lies."[689]


They are reduced to loading him with honors: Cominius gives him a
war-horse; decrees him the cognomen of Coriolanus; the people shout
Caius Marcius Coriolanus! He replies:


"I will go wash;
And when my face is fair, you shall perceive
Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you.
I mean to stride your steed."[690]


This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment, of a man who can
act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will
treat the plebeians. He loads them with insults; he cannot find abuse
enough for the cobblers, tailors, envious cowards, down on their knees
for a coin. "To beg of Hob and Dick! Bid them wash their faces and
keep their teeth clean." But he must beg, if he would be consul; his
friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable of
self-restraint, such as Shakespeare knew how to paint, breaks forth
without hinderance. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his
teeth, and getting up his lesson in this style:


"What must I say?
'I pray, sir'--Plague upon't! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace:--'Look, sir, my wounds!
I got them in my country's service, when
Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran
From the noise of our own drums.'"[691]


The tribunes have no difficulty in stopping the election of a candidate
who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full Senate, reproach him
with his speech about the corn. He repeats it, with aggravations. Once
roused, neither danger nor prayer restrains him:


"His heart's his mouth:
And, being angry, does forget that ever
He heard the name of death."[692]


He rails against the people, the tribunes, ediles, flatterers of the
plebs. "Come, enough," says his friend Menenius. "Enough, with
over-measure," says Brutus the tribune. He retorts:


"No, take more:
What may be sworn by, both divine and human,
Seal what I end withal!... At once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison."[693]


The tribune cries, Treason! and bids seize him. He cries:


"Hence, old goat!...
Hence, rotten thing! or I shall shake thy bones
Out of thy garments!"[694]


He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst
Volscians. "On fair ground I could beat forty of them!" And when his
friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and


"Speak(s) o' the people
As if you (he) were a god to punish, not
A man of their infirmity."[695]


Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognized in her a soul as
lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from his
infancy to the ascendancy of this pride which he admires. Volumnia
reminds him: "My praises made thee first a soldier." Without power over
himself, continually tossed on the fire of his too hot blood, he has
always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary respect,
like a soldier before his general, but with what effort!


"_Coriolanus._ The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up
The glances of my sight! a beggar's tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees
Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his
That hath received an alms!--I will not do't....
_Volumnia._ ... Do as thou list.
Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me,
But owe thy pride thyself.
_Cor._ Pray, be content:
Mother, I am going to the market-place;
Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves,
Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved
Of all the trades in Rome."[696]


He goes, and his friends speak for him. Except a few bitter asides, he
appears to be submissive. Then the tribunes pronounce the accusation,
and summon him to answer as a traitor:


"_Cor._ How! traitor!
_Men._ Nay, temperately: your promise.
_Cor._ The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people!
Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune!
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say,
'Thou liest,' unto thee with a voice as free
As I do pray the gods."[697]


His friends surround him, entreat him: he will not listen; he foams at
the mouth, he is like a wounded lion:


"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,
Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger
But with a grain a day, I would not buy
Their mercy at the price of one fair word."[698]


The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the
tribune:


"_Cor._ You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.... Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere."[699]


Judge of his hatred by these raging words. It goes on increasing whilst
waiting for vengeance. We find him next with the Volscian army before
Rome. His friends kneel before him, he lets them kneel. Old Menenius,
who had loved him as a son, only comes now to be driven away. "Wife,
mother, child, I know not."[700] He knows not himself. For this strength
of hating in a noble heart is the same as the force of loving. He has
transports of tenderness as of rage, and can contain himself no more in
joy than in grief. He runs, spite of his resolution, to his wife's arms;
he bends his knee before his mother. He had summoned the Volscian chiefs
to make them witnesses of his refusals; and before them, he grants all,
and weeps. On his return to Corioli, an insulting word from Aufidius
maddens him, and drives him upon the daggers of the Volscians. Vices and
virtues, glory and misery, greatness and feebleness, the unbridled
passion which composes his nature, endowed him with all.

If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is
the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy has sunk into his mind
at once, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts the rest, and
transforms the whole man. He is haunted by it; he forgets the thanes who
surround him and "who stay upon his leisure"; he already sees in the
future an indistinct chaos of images of blood:


"... Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs?...
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not."[701]


This is the language of hallucination. Macbeth's hallucination becomes
complete when his wife has persuaded him to assassinate the king. He
sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, "in form as palpable, as this
which now I draw." His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible
phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer could never have
conceived: the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to
an idea of fate, and capable of remorse:


"... Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.... (_A bell rings._)
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell."[702]


He has done the deed, and returns tottering, haggard, like a drunken
man. He is horrified at his bloody hands, "these hangman's hands."
Nothing now can cleanse them. The whole ocean might sweep over them, but
they would keep the hue of murder. "What hands are here? ha, they pluck
out mine eyes!" He is disturbed by a word which the sleeping
chamberlains uttered:


"One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other;
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'
When they did say, 'God bless us!'...
But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen!'
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat."[703]


Then comes a strange dream; a frightful vision of the punishment that
awaits him descends upon him.

Above the beating of his heart, the tingling of the blood which seethes
in his brain, he had heard them cry:


"'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast."[704]


And the voice, like an angel's trumpet, calls him by all his titles:


"'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more!'"[705]


This idea, incessantly repeated, beats in his brain, with monotonous and
quick strokes, like the tongue of a bell. Insanity begins; all the force
of his mind is occupied by keeping before him, in spite of himself, the
image of the man whom he has murdered in his sleep:


"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. (_Knock._)
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!"[706]


Thenceforth, in the rare intervals in which the fever of his mind is
assuaged, he is like a man worn out by a long malady. It is the sad
prostration of maniacs worn out by their fits of rage:


"Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of."[707]


When rest has restored force to the human machine, the fixed idea shakes
him again, and drives him onward, like a pitiless horseman, who has left
his panting horse only for a moment, to leap again into the saddle, and
spur him over precipices. The more he has done, the more he must do:


"I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."[708]


He kills in order to preserve the fruit of his murders. The fatal
circlet of gold attracts him like a magic jewel; and he beats down, from
a sort of blind instinct, the heads, which he sees between the crown and
him:


"But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
Whom we to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further."[709]


Macbeth has ordered Banquo to be murdered, and in the midst of a great
feast he is informed of the success of his plan. He smiles, and proposes
Banquo's health. Suddenly, conscience-smitten, he sees the ghost of the
murdered man; for this phantom, which Shakespeare summons, is not a mere
stage-trick: we feel that here the supernatural is unnecessary, and that
Macbeth would create it even if hell would not send it. With muscles
twitching, dilated eyes, his mouth half open with deadly terror, he sees
it shake its bloody head, and cries with that hoarse voice, which is
only to be heard in maniacs' cells:


"Prithee, see there? Behold! look! lo! how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites....
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,...
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools:...
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!"[710]


His body trembling like that of an epileptic, his teeth clenched,
foaming at the mouth, he sinks on the ground, his limbs writhe, shaken
with convulsive quiverings, whilst a dull sob swells his panting breast,
and dies in his swollen throat. What joy can remain for a man beset by
such visions? The wide dark country, which he surveys from his towering
castle, is but a field of death, haunted by ominous apparitions;
Scotland, which he is depopulating, a cemetery,


"Where... the dead man's knell
Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps.
Dying or ere they sicken."[711]


His soul is "full of scorpions." He has "supp'd full with horrors," and
the loathsome odor of blood has disgusted him with all else. He goes
stumbling over the corpses which he has heaped up, with the mechanical
and desperate smile of a maniac-murderer. Thenceforth death, life, all
is one to him; the habit of murder has placed him out of the pale of
humanity. They tell him that his wife is dead:


"_Macbeth._ She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."[712]


There remains for him the hardening of the heart in crime, the fixed
belief in destiny. Hunted down by his enemies, "bearlike, tied to a
stake," he fights, troubled only by the prediction of the witches, sure
of being invulnerable so long as the man whom they have described does
not appear. Henceforth his thoughts dwell on a supernatural world, and
to the last he walks with his eyes fixed on the dream, which has
possessed him, from the first.

The history of Hamlet, like that of Macbeth, is a story of moral
poisoning. Hamlet has a delicate soul, an impassioned imagination, like
that of Shakespeare. He has lived hitherto, occupied in noble studies,
skilful in mental and bodily exercises, with a taste for art, loved by
the noblest father, enamored of the purest and most charming girl,
confiding, generous, not yet having perceived, from the height of the
throne to which he was born, aught but the beauty, happiness, grandeur
of nature and humanity.[713] On this soul, which character and training
make more sensitive than others, misfortune suddenly falls, extreme,
overwhelming of the very kind to destroy all faith and every motive for
action: with one glance he has seen all the vileness of humanity; and
this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact; but
judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details,
the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not
already one foot on the verge of madness:


"O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king,... so loving to my mother
That he might not let e'en the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
... And yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,...
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good!
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue!"[714]


Here already are contortions of thought, a beginning of hallucination,
the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of conversation the
image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees him. How
then will it be when the "canonised bones have burst their cerements,"
"the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws," and when the
ghost comes in the night, upon a high "platform" of land, to tell him of
the tortures of his prison of fire, and of the fratricide, who has
driven him thither? Hamlet grows faint, but grief strengthens him, and
he has a desire for living:


"Hold, hold, my heart;
And you my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.--Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,...
And thy commandment all alone shall live,...
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:
So, uncle, there you are."[715]	(_Writing._)


This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this frenzy of
intentness, prelude the approach of a kind of monomania. When his
friends come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an
idiot. He is no longer master of his words; hollow phrases whirl in his
brain, and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him; he answers
by imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon: "Hillo, ho,
ho, boy! come, bird, come." Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to
secrecy, the ghost below repeats "Swear." Hamlet cries, with a nervous
excitement and a fitful gayety:


"Ah ha, boy! say'st thou so? art thou there, truepenny?
Come on--you hear this fellow in the cellarage--
Consent to swear....
_Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear.
_Hamlet. Hic et ubique?_ then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen.... Swear by my sword.
_Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear.
_Ham._ Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer!"[716]


Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter, "pale as his shirt,
his knees knocking each other." Intense anguish ends with a kind of
laughter, which is nothing else than a spasm. Thenceforth Hamlet speaks
as though he had a continuous nervous attack. His madness is feigned, I
admit; but his mind, as a door whose hinges are twisted, swings and
bangs with every wind with a mad haste and with a discordant noise. He
has no need to search for the strange ideas, apparent incoherencies,
exaggerations, the deluge of sarcasms which he accumulates. He finds
them within him; he does himself no violence, he simply gives himself up
to himself. When he has the piece played which is to unmask his uncle,
he raises himself, lounges on the floor, lays his head in Ophelia's lap;
he addresses the actors, and comments on the piece to the spectators;
his nerves are strung, his excited thought is like a surging and
crackling flame, and cannot find fuel enough in the multitude of objects
surrounding it, upon all of which it seizes. When the king rises
unmasked and troubled, Hamlet sings, and says, "Would not this, sir, and
a forest of feathers--if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me--with
two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of
players, sir!"[717] And he laughs terribly, for he is resolved on
murder. It is clear that this state is a disease, and that the man will
not survive it.

In a soul so ardent of thought, and so mighty of feeling, what is left
but disgust and despair? We tinge all nature with the color of our
thoughts; we shape the world according to our own ideas; when our soul
is sick, we see nothing but sickness in the universe:


"This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this
most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it
appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of
vapors. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite
in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how
like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of
dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither."[718]


Henceforth his thought sullies whatever it touches. He rails bitterly
before Ophelia against marriage and love. Beauty! Innocence! Beauty is
but a means of prostituting innocence: "Get thee to a nunnery: why
wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?... What should such fellows as I
do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe
none of us."[719]

When he has killed Polonius by accident, he hardly repents it; it is one
fool less. He jeers lugubriously:


"_King._ Now Hamlet, where's Polonius?
_Hamlet._ At supper.
_K._ At supper! where?
_H._ Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation
of politic worms are e'en at him."[720]


And he repeats in five or six fashions these gravedigger jests. His
thoughts already inhabit a churchyard; to this hopeless philosophy a
genuine man is a corpse. Public functions, honors, passions, pleasures,
projects, science, all this is but a borrowed mask, which death removes,
so that people may see what we are, an evil-smelling and grinning skull.
It is this sight he goes to see by Ophelia's grave. He counts the skulls
which the gravedigger turns up; this was a lawyer's, that a countier's.
What bows, intrigues, pretensions, arrogance! And here now is a clown
knocking it about with his spade, and playing "at loggats with 'em."
Cæsar and Alexander have turned to clay and make the earth fat; the
masters of the world have served to "patch a wall. Now get you to my
lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor
she must come; make her laugh at that."[721] When a man has come to
this, there is nothing left but to die.

This heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his
moral poisoning, explains also his conduct. If he hesitates to kill his
uncle, it is not from horror of blood or from our modern scruples. He
belongs to the sixteenth century. On board ship he wrote the order to
behead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to do so without giving them
"shriving-time." He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's death, and has
no great remorse for it. If for once he spared his uncle, it was because
he found him praying, and was afraid of sending him to heaven. He
thought he was killing him when he killed Polonius. What his imagination
robs him of, is the coolness and strength to go quietly and with
premeditation to plunge a sword into a breast. He can only do the thing
on a sudden suggestion; he must have a moment of enthusiasm; he must
think the king is behind the arras, or else, seeing that he himself is
poisoned, he must find his victim under his foil's point. He is not
master of his acts; opportunity dictates them; he cannot plan a murder,
but must improvise it. A too lively imagination exhausts the will, by
the strength of images which it heaps up, and by the fury of intentness
which absorbs it. You recognize in him a poet's soul, made not to act,
but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms of its
creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a part in
the real world; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince, whom worse
chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined by nature for
genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappiness. Hamlet is
Shakespeare, and, at the close of this gallery of portraits which have
all some features of his own, Shakespeare has painted himself in the
most striking of all.

If Racine or Corneille had framed a psychology, they would have said,
with Descartes: Man is an incorporeal soul, served by organs, endowed
with reason and will, dwelling in palaces or porticos, made for
conversation and society, whose harmonious and ideal action is developed
by discourse and replies, in a world constructed by logic beyond the
realms of time and place.

If Shakespeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with
Esquirol:[722] Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to
hallucinations, carried away by unbridled passions, essentially
unreasoning, a mixture of animal and poet, having instead of mind
rapture, instead of virtue sensibility, imagination for prompter and
guide, and led at random, by the most determinate and complex
circumstances, to sorrow, crime, madness, and death.




SECTION IX.--Characteristics of Shakespeare's Genius


Could such a poet always confine himself to the imitation of nature?
Will this poetical world which is going on in his brain never break
loose from the laws of the world of reality? Is he not powerful enough
to follow his own laws? He is; and the poetry of Shakespeare naturally
finds an outlet in the fantastical. This is the highest grade of
unreasoning and creative imagination. Despising ordinary logic, it
creates another; it unites facts and ideas in a new order, apparently
absurd, in reality regular; it lays open the land of dreams, and its
dreams seem to us the truth.

When we enter upon Shakespeare's comedies, and even his
half-dramas,[723] it is as though we met him on the threshold, like an
actor to whom the prologue is committed, to prevent misunderstanding on
the part of the public, and to tell them: "Do not take too seriously
what you are about to hear: I am amusing myself. My brain, being full of
fancies, desired to array them, and here they are. Palaces, distant
landscapes, transparent clouds which blot in the morning the horizon
with their gray mists, the red and glorious flames into which the
evening sun descends, white cloisters in endless vista through the
ambient air, grottos, cottages, the fantastic pageant of all human
passions, the irregular sport of unlooked-for adventures--this is the
medley of forms, colors, sentiments, which I let become entangled and
confused in my presence, a many-tinted skein of glistening silks, a
slender arabesque, whose sinuous curves, crossing and mingled, bewilder
the mind by the whimsical variety of their infinite complications. Don't
regard it as a picture. Don't look for a precise composition, a sole and
increasing interest, the skilful management of a well-ordered and
congruous plot. I have tales and novels before me which I am cutting up
into scenes. Never mind the _finis_, I am amusing myself on the road. It
is not the end of the journey which pleases me, but the journey itself.
Is there any need in going so straight and quick? Do you only care to
know whether the poor merchant of Venice will escape Shylock's knife?
Here are two happy lovers, seated under the palace walls on a calm
night; wouldn't you like to listen to the peaceful reverie which arises
like a perfume from the bottom of their hearts?"


"'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st,
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
(_Enter musicians._)
Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn:
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear.
And draw her home with music.
_Jessica._ I am never merry when I hear sweet music.'"[724]


"Have I not the right, when I see the big laughing face of a clownish
servant, to stop near him, see him gesticulate, frolic, gossip, go
through his hundred pranks and his hundred grimaces, and treat myself to
the comedy of his spirit and gayety? Two fine gentlemen pass by. I hear
the rolling fire of their metaphors, and I follow their skirmish of wit.
Here in a corner is the artless arch face of a young wench. Do you
forbid me to linger by her, to watch her smiles, her sudden blushes, the
childish pout of her rosy lips, the coquetry of her pretty motions? You
are in a great hurry if the prattle of this fresh and musical voice
can't stop you. Is it no pleasure to view this succession of sentiments
and faces? Is your fancy so dull that you must have the mighty mechanism
of a geometrical plot to shake it? My sixteenth century playgoers were
easier to move. A sunbeam that had lost its way on an old wall, a
foolish song thrown into the middle of a drama, occupied their mind as
well as the blackest of catastrophes. After the horrible scene in which
Shylock brandished his butcher's knife before Antonio's bare breast,
they saw just as willingly the petty household wrangle, and the amusing
bit of raillery which ends the piece. Like soft moving water, their soul
rose and sank in an instant to the level of the poet's emotion, and
their sentiments readily flowed in the bed he had prepared for them.
They let him stray here and there on his journey, and did not forbid him
to make two voyages at once. They allowed several plots in one. If but
the slightest thread united them it was sufficient. Lorenzo eloped with
Jessica, Shylock was frustrated in his revenge, Portia's suitors failed
in the test imposed upon them; Portia, disguised as a doctor of laws,
took from her husband the ring which he had promised never to part with;
these three or four comedies, disunited, mingled, were shuffled and
unfolded together, like an unknotted skein in which threads of a hundred
colors are entwined. Together with diversity, my spectators allowed
improbability. Comedy is a slight winged creature, which flutters from
dream to dream, whose wings you would break if you held it captive in
the narrow prison of common-sense. Do not press its fictions too hard;
do not probe their contents. Let them float before your eyes like a
charming swift dream. Let the fleeting apparition plunge back into the
bright misty land from whence it came. For an instant it deluded you;
let it suffice. It is sweet to leave the world of realities behind you;
the mind rests amidst impossibilities. We are happy when delivered from
the rough chains of logic, to wander amongst strange adventures, to live
in sheer romance, and know that we are living there. I do not try to
deceive you, and make you believe in the world where I take you. A man
must disbelieve it in order to enjoy it. We must give ourselves up to
illusion, and feel that we are giving ourselves up to it. We must smile
as we listen. We smile in "The Winter's Tale" when Hermione descends
from her pedestal, and when, Leontes discovers his wife in the statue,
having believed her to be dead. We smile in "Cymbeline" when we see the
lone cavern in which the young princes have lived like savage hunters.
Improbability deprives emotions of their sting. The events interest or
touch us without making us suffer. At the very moment when sympathy is
too intense, we remind ourselves that it is all a fancy. They become
like distant objects, whose distance softens their outline, and wraps
them in a luminous veil of blue air. Your true comedy is an opera. We
listen to sentiments without thinking too much of plot. We follow the
tender or gay melodies without reflecting that they interrupt the
action. We dream elsewhere on hearing music; here I bid you dream on
hearing verse."

Then the speaker of the prologue retires, and the actors come on.

"As You Like It" is a caprice.[725] Action there is none; interest
barely; likelihood still less. And the whole is charming. Two cousins,
princes' daughters, come to a forest with a court clown, Celia disguised
as a shepherdess, Rosalind as a boy. They find here the old duke,
Rosalind's father, who, driven out of his duchy, lives with his friends
like a philosopher and a hunter. They find amorous shepherds, who with
songs and prayers pursue intractable shepherdesses. They discover or
they meet with lovers who become their husbands. Suddenly it is
announced that the wicked Duke Frederick, who had usurped the crown, has
just retired to a cloister, and restored the throne to the old exiled
duke. Everyone gets married, everyone dances, everything ends with a
"rustic revelry." Where is the pleasantness of these puerilities? First,
the fact of its being puerile; the absence of the serious is refreshing;
There are no events, and there is no plot. We gently follow the easy
current of graceful or melancholy emotions, which takes us away and
moves us about without wearying. The place adds to the illusion and
charm. It is an autumn forest, in which the sultry rays permeate the
blushing oak leaves, or the half-stripped, ashes tremble and smile to
the feeble breath of evening. The lovers wander by brooks that "brawl"
under antique roots. As you listen to them you see the slim birches,
whose cloak of lace grows glossy under the slant rays of the sun that
gilds them, and the thoughts wander down the mossy vistas in which their
footsteps are not heard. What better place could be chosen for the
comedy of sentiment and the play of heart-fancies? Is not this a fit
spot in which to listen to love-talk? Someone has seen Orlando,
Rosalind's lover, in this glade; she hears it and blushes. "Alas the
day!... What did he, when thou sawest him? What said he? How looked he?
Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains
he? How parted he with thee? and when shalt thou see him again?" Then,
with a lower voice, somewhat hesitating: "Looks he as freshly as he did
the day he wrestled?" She is not yet exhausted: "Do you not know I am a
woman? When I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on."[726] One question
follows another, she closes the mouth of her friend, who is ready to
answer. At every word she jests, but agitated, blushing, with a forced
gayety; her bosom heaves, and her heart beats. Nevertheless she is
calmer when Orlando comes; bandies words with him; sheltered under her
disguise, she makes him confess that he loves Rosalind. Then she plagues
him, like the frolic, the wag, the coquette she is. "Why, how now,
Orlando, where have you been all this while? You a lover?" Orlando
repeats that he loves Rosalind, and she pleases herself by making him
repeat it more than once. She sparkles with wit, jests, mischievous
pranks; pretty fits of anger, feigned sulks, bursts of laughter,
deafening babble, engaging caprices. "Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am
in a holiday humor, and like enough to consent. What would you say to me
now, an I were your very, very Rosalind?" And every now and then she
repeats with an arch smile, "And I am your Rosalind; am I not your
Rosalind?"[727] Orlando protests that he would die. Die! Who ever
thought of dying for love? Leander? He took one bath too many in the
Hellespont; so poets have said he died for love. Troilus? A Greek broke
his head with a club; so poets have said he died for love. Come, come,
Rosalind will be softer. And then she plays at marriage with him, and
makes Celia pronounce the solemn words. She irritates and torments her
pretended husband; tells him all the whims she means to indulge in, all
the pranks she will play, all the teasing he will have to endure. The
retorts come one after another like fireworks. At every phrase we follow
the looks of these sparkling eyes, the curves of this laughing mouth,
the quick movements of this supple figure. It is a bird's petulance and
volubility. "O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know
how many fathom deep I am in love." Then she provokes her cousin Celia,
sports with her hair, calls her by every woman's name. Antitheses
without end, words all a-jumble, quibbles, pretty exaggerations,
word-racket; as you listen, you fancy it is the warbling of a
nightingale. The trill of repeated metaphors, the melodious roll of the
poetical gamut, the summer-warbling rustling under the foliage, change
the piece into a veritable opera. The three lovers end by chanting a
sort of trio. The first throws out a fancy, the others take it up. Four
times this strophe is renewed; and the symmetry of ideas, added to the
jingle of the rhymes, makes of a dialogue a concerto of love:


"_Phebe._ Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love.
_Silvius._ It is to be all made of sighs and tears;
And so am I for Phebe.
_P._ And I for Ganymede.
_Orlando._ And I for Rosalind.
_Rosalind._ And I for no woman....
_S._ It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all observance;
And so I am for Phebe.
_P._ And so am I for Ganymede.
_O._ And so am I for Rosalind.
_R._ And so am I for no woman."[728]


The necessity of singing is so urgent that a minute later songs break
out of themselves. The prose and the conversation end in lyric poetry.
We pass straight on into these odes. We do not find ourselves in a new
country. We feel the emotion and foolish gayety as if it were a holiday.
We see the graceful couple whom the song of the two pages brings before
us, passing in the misty light "o'er the green corn-field," amid the hum
of sportive insects, on the finest day of the flowering spring-time.
Unlikelihood grows natural, and we are not astonished when we see Hymen
leading the two brides by the hand to give them to their husbands.

Whilst the young folk sing, the old folk talk. Their life also is a
novel, but a sad one. Shakespeare's delicate soul, bruised by the shocks
of social life, took refuge in contemplations of solitary life. To
forget the strife and annoyances of the world, he must bury himself in a
wide silent forest, and


"Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
Loose and neglect the creeping hours of time."[729]


We look at the bright images which the sun carves on the white
beech-boles, the shade of trembling leaves flickering on the thick moss,
the long waves of the summit of the trees; then the sharp sting of care
is blunted; we suffer no more, simply remembering that we suffered once;
we feel nothing but a gentle misanthropy, and being renewed, we are the
better for it. The old duke is happy in his exile. Solitude has given
him rest, delivered him from flattery, reconciled him to nature. He
pities the stags which he is obliged to hunt for food:


"Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forked heads
Have their round haunches gored."[730]


Nothing sweeter than this mixture of tender compassion, dreamy
philosophy, delicate sadness, poetical complaints, and rustic songs. One
of the lords sings:


"Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly."[731]


Amongst these lords is found a soul that suffers more, Jacques the
melancholy, one of Shakespeare's best-loved characters, a transparent
mask behind which we perceive the face of the poet. He is sad because he
is tender; he feels the contact of things too keenly, and what leaves
others indifferent, makes him weep.[732] He does not scold, he is sad;
he does not reason, he is moved; he has not the combative spirit of a
reforming moralist; his soul is sick and weary of life. Impassioned
imagination leads quickly to disgust. Like opium, it excites and
shatters. It leads man to the loftiest philosophy, then lets him down to
the whims of a child. Jacques leaves other men abruptly, and goes to the
quiet nooks to be alone. He loves his sadness, and would not exchange it
for joy. Meeting Orlando, he says:


"Rosalind is your love's name?
_Orlando._ Yes, just.
_Jacques._ I do not like her name."[733]


He has the fancies of a nervous woman. He is scandalized because Orlando
writes sonnets on the forest trees. He is eccentric, and finds subjects
of grief and gayety where others would see nothing of the sort:


"A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool;
Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun,
And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms and yet a motley fool...."


Jacques hearing him moralize in such a manner begins to laugh "sans
intermission" that a fool could be so meditative:


"O noble fool; a worthy fool! Motley's the only wear....
O that I were a fool!
I am ambitious for a motley coat."[734]


The next minute he returns to his melancholy dissertations, bright
pictures whose vivacity explains his character, and betrays Shakespeare,
hiding under his name:


"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
In second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."[735]


"As you Like it" is a half dream. "Midsummer Night's Dream" is a
complete one.

The scene, buried in the far-off mist of fabulous antiquity, carries us
back to Theseus, Duke of Athens, who is preparing his palace for his
marriage with the beautiful queen of the Amazons. The style, loaded with
contorted images, fills the mind with strange and splendid visions, and
the airy elf-world divert the comedy into the fairy-land from whence it
sprung.

Love is still the theme: of all sentiments, is it not the greatest
fancy-weaver? But love is not heard here in the charming, prattle of
Rosalind; it is glaring, like the season of the year. It does not brim
over in slight conversations, in supple and skipping prose; it breaks
forth into big rhyming odes, dressed in magnificent metaphors, sustained
by impassioned accents, such as a warm night, odorous and star-spangled,
inspires in a poet and a lover. Lysander and Hermia agree to meet.


"_Lysander._ To-morrow night when Phoebe doth behold
Her silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass,
A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal,
Through Athens' gates have we devised to steal.
_Hermia._ And in the wood, where often you and I
Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie....
There my Lysander and myself shall meet."[736]


They get lost, and fall asleep, wearied, under the trees. Puck squeezes
in the youth's eyes the juice of a magic flower, and changes his heart.
Presently, when he awakes, he will become enamored of the first woman he
sees. Meanwhile Demetrius, Hermia's rejected lover, wanders with Helena,
whom he rejects, in the solitary wood. The magic flower changes him in
turn, he now loves Helena. The lovers flee and pursue one another,
beneath the lofty trees, in the calm night. We smile at their
transports, their complaints, their ecstasies, and yet we join in them.
This passion is a dream, and yet it moves us: It is like those airy webs
which we find at morning on the crest of the hedgerows where the dew has
spread them, and whose weft sparkles like a jewel-casket. Nothing can be
more fragile, and nothing more graceful. The poet sports with emotions;
he mingles, confuses, redoubles, interweaves them; he twines and
untwines these loves like the mazes of a dance, and we see the noble and
tender figures pass by the verdant bushes, beneath the radiant eyes of
the stars, now wet with tears, now bright with rapture. They have the
abandonment of true love, not the grossness of sensual love. Nothing
causes us to fall from the ideal world in which Shakespeare conducts us.
Dazzled by beauty, they adore it, and the spectacle of their happiness,
their emotion, and their tenderness, is a kind of enchantment.

Above these two couples flutters and hums the swarm of elves and
fairies. They also love. Titania, their queen, has a young boy for her
favorite, son of an Indian king, of whom Oberon, her husband, wishes to
deprive her. They quarrel, so that the elves creep for fear into the
acorn cups, in the golden primroses. Oberon, by way of vengeance,
touches Titania's sleeping eyes with the magic flower, and thus on
waking the nimblest and most charming of the fairies finds herself
enamored of a stupid blockhead with an ass's head. She kneels before
him; she sets on his "hairy temples a coronet of fresh and fragrant
flowers":


"And that same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty floweret's eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail."[737]


She calls round her all her fairy attendants;


"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes....
Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower.
The moon, methinks, looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently."[738]


It was necessary, for her love brayed horribly, and to all the offers of
Titania, replied with a petition for hay. What can be sadder and sweeter
than this irony of Shakespeare? What raillery against love, and what
tenderness for love! The sentiment is divine; its object unworthy. The
heart is ravished, the eyes blind. It is a golden butterfly, fluttering
in the mud; and Shakespeare, whilst painting its misery, preserves all
its beauty:


"Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy....
Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms....
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!"[739]


At the return of morning, when


"The eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams,"[740]


the enchantment ceases, Titania awakes on her couch of wild thyme and
drooping violets. She drives the monster away; her recollections of the
night are effaced in a vague twilight:


"These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds."[741]


And the fairies


"Go seek some dew drops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear."[742]


Such is Shakespeare's fantasy, a slight tissue of bold inventions, of
ardent passions, melancholy mockery, dazzling poetry, such as one of
Titania's elves would have made. Nothing could be more like the poet's
mind than these nimble genii, children of air and flame, whose flights
"compass the globe" in a second, who glide over the foam of the waves
and skip between the atoms of the winds. Ariel flies, an invisible
songster, around shipwrecked men to console them, discovers the thoughts
of traitors, pursues the savage beast Caliban, spreads gorgeous visions
before lovers, and does all in a lightning-flash:


"Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie....
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough....
I drink the air before me, and return
Or ere your pulse twice beat."[743]


Shakespeare glides over things on as swift a wing, by leaps as sudden,
with a touch as delicate.

What a soul! what extent of action, and what sovereignty of an unique
faculty! what diverse creations, and what persistence of the same
impress! There they all are united, and all marked by the same sign,
void of will and reason, governed by mood, imagination, or pure passion,
destitute of the faculties contrary to those of the poet, dominated by
the corporeal type which his painter's eyes have conceived, endowed by
the habits of mind and by the vehement sensibility which he finds in
himself.[744] Go through the groups, and you will only discover in them
divers forms and divers states of the same power. Here, a herd of
brutes, dotards, and gossips, made up of a mechanical imagination;
further on, a company of men of wit, animated by a gay and foolish
imagination; then, a charming swarm of women whom their delicate
imagination raises so high, and their self-forgetting love carries so
far; elsewhere a band of villains, hardened by unbridled passions,
inspired by artistic rapture; in the centre a mournful train of grand
characters, whose excited brain is filled with sad or criminal visions,
and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness, or death. Ascend one
stage, and contemplate the whole scene: the aggregate bears the same
mark as the details. The drama reproduces promiscuously uglinesses,
basenesses, horrors, unclean details, profligate and ferocious manners,
the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is unrestrained by
decorum, common-sense, reason, and duty. Comedy, led through a
phantasmagoria of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the unlikely,
with no other connection but the caprice of an amused imagination,
wantonly disjointed and romantic, an opera without music, a concerto of
melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the
supernatural world, and brings before our eyes on its fairy-wings the
genius which has created it. Look now. Do you not see the poet behind
the crowd of his creations? They have heralded his approach. They have
all shown somewhat of him. Ready, impetuous, impassioned, delicate, his
genius is pure imagination, touched more vividly and by slighter things
than ours. Hence his style, blooming with exuberant images, loaded with
exaggerated metaphors, whose strangeness is like incoherence, whose
wealth is superabundant, the work of a mind, which, at the least
incitement, produces too much and takes too wide leaps. Hence this
involuntary psychology, and this terrible penetration, which
instantaneously perceiving all the effects of a situation, and all the
details of a character, concentrates them in every response, and gives
to a figure a relief and a coloring which create illusion. Hence our
emotion and tenderness. We say to him, as Desdemona to Othello: "I love
thee for the battles, sieges, fortunes thou hast passed, and for the
distressful stroke that thy youth suffered."




[Footnote 587: Halliwell's "Life of Shakespeare."]

[Footnote 588: Born 1564, died 1616. He adapted plays as early as 1591.
The first play entirely from his pen appeared in 1593.--Payne Collier.]

[Footnote 589: Mr. Halliwell and other commentators try to prove that at
this time the preliminary trothplight was regarded as the real marriage;
that this trothplight had taken place, and that there was therefore no
irregularity in Shakespeare's conduct.]

[Footnote 590: Halliwell, 123.]

[Footnote 591: All these anecdotes are traditions, and consequently more
or less doubtful; but the other facts are authentic.]

[Footnote 592: Terms of an extant document. He is named along with Burbage
and Greene.]

[Footnote 593: Sonnet 110.]

[Footnote 594: See Sonnets 91 and 111; also "Hamlet," III. 2. Many of
Hamlet's words would come better from the mouth of an actor than a
prince. See also the 66th Sonnet, "Tired with all these."]

[Footnote 595: Sonnet 29.]

[Footnote 596: "Hamlet," III. 1.]

[Footnote 597: Sonnet 111.]

[Footnote 598: Anecdote written in 1602 on the authority of Tooley the
actor.]

[Footnote 599: The Earl of Southampton was nineteen years old when
Shakespeare dedicated his "Adonis" to him.]

[Footnote 600: See Titian's picture. Loves of the Gods, at Blenheim.]

[Footnote 601: "Venus and Adonis," lines 548-553.]

[Footnote 602: Ibid. lines 55-60.]

[Footnote 603: Ibid, lines 853-858.]

[Footnote 604: Compare the first pieces of Alfred de Musset, "Contes
d'Italie et d'Espagne."]

[Footnote 605: Crawley, quoted by Ph. Chasles, "Études sur Shakspeare."]

[Footnote 606: A famed French courtesan (1613-1650), the heroine of a
drama of that name, by Victor Hugo, having for its subject-matter:
"Love purifies everything."--Tr.]

[Footnote 607: Sonnet 138.]

[Footnote 608: Two characters in Molière's "Misanthrope." The scene
referred to is Act V. Scene 7.--Tr.]

[Footnote 609: Sonnet 142.]

[Footnote 610: Sonnet 95.]

[Footnote 611: Sonnet 98.]

[Footnote 612: Ibid.]

[Footnote 613: Sonnet 99.]

[Footnote 614: Sonnet 151.]

[Footnote 615: Sonnet 151.]

[Footnote 616: Sonnet 144; also the "Passionate Pilgrim," 2.]

[Footnote 617: This new interpretation of the Sonnets is due to the
ingenious and learned conjectures of M. Ph. Chasles.--For a short history
of these Sonnets, see Dyce's "Shakspeare," I. pp. 96-102. This learned
editor says: "I contend that allusions scattered through the whole series
are not to be hastily referred to the personal circumstances of
Shakspeare."--Tr.]

[Footnote 618: Miranda, Desdemona, Viola. The following are the first
words of the Duke in "Twelfth Night":
"If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet
south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor! Enough;
no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh
art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters
there.
Of what validity and pitch soever,
But falls into abatement and low price.
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is
fancy
That it alone is high-fantastical."]

[Footnote 619: H. Chettle, in repudiating Greene's sarcasm, attributed
it to him.]

[Footnote 620: Dyce, "Shakespeare," I. 27: "Of French and Italian, I
apprehend, he knew but little."--Tr.]

[Footnote 621: Sonnet 29.]

[Footnote 622: Sonnet 73.]

[Footnote 623: Sonnet 71.]

[Footnote 624: The part in which he excelled was that of the ghost in
"Hamlet."]

[Footnote 625: Greene's "A Groatsworth of Wit," etc.]

[Footnote 626: "He was a respectable man. A good word; what does it
mean? He kept a gig."--From Thurtell's trial for the murder of Weare.]

[Footnote 627: The model of an optimist, the hero of one of Voltaire's
tales.--Tr.]

[Footnote 628: See his portraits, and in particular his bust.]

[Footnote 629: Especially in his later plays: "Tempest, Twelfth Night."]

[Footnote 630: "Hamlet," III. 3.]

[Footnote 631: Act III. Scene 4.]

[Footnote 632: Act III. Scene 4.]

[Footnote 633: This is why, in the eyes of a writer of the seventeenth
century, Shakespeare's style is the most obscure, pretentious, painful,
barbarous, and absurd, that could be imagined.]

[Footnote 634: Shakespeare's vocabulary is the most copious of all. It
comprises about 15,000 words; Milton's only 8,000.]

[Footnote 635: See the conversation of Laertes and his sister, and of
Laertes and Polonius, in "Hamlet." The style is foreign to the situation;
and we see here plainly the natural and necessary process of
Shakespeare's thought.]

[Footnote 636: "Winter's Tale," I. 2.]

[Footnote 637: One of Molière's characters in "Tartuffe."--Tr.]

[Footnote 638: "Romeo and Juliet," III. 5.]

[Footnote 639: "Henry VIII," II. 3, and many other scenes.]

[Footnote 640: "Much Ado about Nothing." See also the manner in which
Henry V in Shakespeare's "King Henry V" pays court to Katharine of
France (V. 2).]

[Footnote 641: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 642: Act IV. 2.]

[Footnote 643: Second part of "Henry VI," IV. 6.]

[Footnote 644: "Henry VI," 2d part, IV. 2, 6, 7.]

[Footnote 645: "King Lear," III. 7.]

[Footnote 646: "The Tempest," IV. 1.]

[Footnote 647: See "Troilus and Cressida," II. 3, the jesting manner in
which the generals drive on this fierce brute.]

[Footnote 648: "Cymbeline," II. 3.]

[Footnote 649: Ibid. III. 5.]

[Footnote 650: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 3.]

[Footnote 651: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 5.]

[Footnote 652: Ibid. III. 5.]

[Footnote 653: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 4.]

[Footnote 654: "Much Ado about Nothing," II. 1.]

[Footnote 655: "Romeo and Juliet," II. 1.]

[Footnote 656: Ibid. I. 4.]

[Footnote 657: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 4.]

[Footnote 658: First part of "King Henry IV," III. 3.]

[Footnote 659: First Part of "King Henry IV," IV. 2.]

[Footnote 660: Ibid. II. 4.]

[Footnote 661: "Othello," III. 3.]

[Footnote 662: Ibid.]

[Footnote 663: Ibid.]

[Footnote 664: "Othello," III. 3.]

[Footnote 665: "Cymbeline," III. 5.]

[Footnote 666: "Coriolanus," I. 3.]

[Footnote 667: Ibid.]

[Footnote 668: "Romeo and Juliet," I. 5.]

[Footnote 669: "The Tempest," III. 1.]

[Footnote 670: "King Lear," IV. 7.]

[Footnote 671: "O ye're well met: the hoarded plague o' the gods
Requite your love!
If that I could for weeping, you should hear--
Nay, and you shall hear some....
I'll tell thee what; yet go:
Nay but thou shalt stay too: I would my son
Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him,
His good sword in his hand."--Coriolanus, IV. 2.

See again, "Coriolanus," I. 3, the frank and abandoned triumph of a woman
of the people, "I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a
man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man."]

[Footnote 672: Ibid. I. 3.]

[Footnote 673: "Othello," II. 3.]

[Footnote 674: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 675: "Othello," II. 1.]

[Footnote 676: Ibid. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 677: See the like cynicism and scepticism in Richard III. Both
begin by slandering human nature, and both are misanthropical of malice
prepense.]

[Footnote 678: "Othello," II. 3.]

[Footnote 679: See his conversation with Brabantio, then with Roderigo,
Act I.]

[Footnote 680: See again, in Timon, and Hotspur more particularly,
perfect examples of vehement and unreasoning imagination.]

[Footnote 681: "Coriolanus," I. 9.]

[Footnote 682: Ibid. I. 6.]

[Footnote 683: Ibid. I. 9.]

[Footnote 684: "Coriolanus," I. 9.]

[Footnote 685: Ibid.]

[Footnote 686: Ibid. II. 3.]

[Footnote 687: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 688: "Coriolanus," III. 1.]

[Footnote 689: Ibid.]

[Footnote 690: Ibid.]

[Footnote 691: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 692: "Coriolanus," III. 3.]

[Footnote 693: Ibid.]

[Footnote 694: Ibid.]

[Footnote 695: Ibid. V. 2.]

[Footnote 696: "Macbeth," I. 3.]

[Footnote 697: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 698: "Macbeth," II. 2.]

[Footnote 699: Ibid.]

[Footnote 700: Ibid.]

[Footnote 701: Ibid. II. 3.]

[Footnote 702: "Macbeth," II. 3.]

[Footnote 703: Ibid. III. 4.]

[Footnote 704: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 705: "Macbeth," III. 4.]

[Footnote 706: Ibid. IV. 3.]

[Footnote 707: "Macbeth," V. 5.]

[Footnote 708: Goethe, "Wilhelm Meister."]

[Footnote 709: "Hamlet," I. 2.]

[Footnote 710: Ibid. I. 5.]

[Footnote 711: "Hamlet," I. 5.]

[Footnote 712: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 713: "Hamlet," II, 2.]

[Footnote 714: Ibid. III, 1.]

[Footnote 715: Ibid. IV. 3.]

[Footnote 716: "Hamlet," V. 1.]

[Footnote 717: A French physician (1772-1844), celebrated for his
endeavors to improve the treatment of the insane.--Tr.]

[Footnote 718: "Twelfth Night, As You Like it, Tempest, Winter's
Tale," etc., "Cymbeline, Merchant of Venice," etc.]

[Footnote 719: "Merchant of Venice," V. 1.]

[Footnote 720: In English, a word is wanting to express the French
"fantaisie" used by M. Taine, in describing this scene: what in music
is called a capriccio. Tennyson calls the "Princess" a medley, but it
is ambiguous.--Tr.]

[Footnote 721: "As You Like It," III. 2.]

[Footnote 722: Ibid. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 723: "As You Like It," V, 2.]

[Footnote 724: "As You Like It," II. 7.]

[Footnote 725: Ibid. II. 1.]

[Footnote 726: Ibid. II. 7.]

[Footnote 727: Compare Jacques with the Alceste  of Molière. It is
the contrast between a misanthrope through reasoning and one through
imagination.]

[Footnote 728: "As You Like It," III. 2.]

[Footnote 729: Ibid. II. 7.]

[Footnote 730: "As You Like It," II. 7.]

[Footnote 731: "Midsummer Night's Dream," I. 1.]

[Footnote 732: "Midsummer Night's Dream," IV. 1.]

[Footnote 733: "Midsummer Night's Dream," III. 1.]

[Footnote 734: Ibid. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 735: Ibid. III. 2.]

[Footnote 736: Ibid. IV. 1.]

[Footnote 737: "Midsummer Night's Dream," II. 1.]

[Footnote 738: "Tempest," V. 1.]

[Footnote 739: There is the same law in the organic and in the moral
world. It is what Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire calls unity of composition.]





INDEX


_The Roman Numerals Refer to the Volumes.--The Arabic Figures to the Pages
of Each Volume._


Abelard, I. 158, 160
Addison, Joseph, II. 265, 292, 300, 311;
his life and writings, 327-359; III. 83,
95, 259, 272, 280, 306
Adhelm, I. 58, see footnote 89, 69, 70, 185
Agriculture, improvement in, in sixteenth
century, I. 172; in the nineteenth,
III. 43, 168
Akenside, Mark, III. 36
Alcuin, I. 64, 70
Alexander VI, Pope, II. 5
Alexandrian philosophy, I. 21, see footnote 5
Alfred the Great, I. 64, 69
Alison, Sir Archibald, III. 44
Amory, Thomas, II. 438
Angelo, Michel, I. 183, 366; III. 27
Anglo-Saxon poetry, I. 53
Ann of Cleaves, I. 186
Anselm, I. 76
Anthology the, I. 209, 240
Arbuthnot, Dr. John, II. 381
Architecture, Norman, I. 75, 127; the
Tudor style, 174
Ariosto, I. 185, 222, see footnote 360, see footnote 366; II. 236
Aristocracy British, in the nineteenth
century, III. 169 seq.
Arkwright, Sir Richard, II. 320
Armada, the I. 173, 279
Arnold, Dr. Thomas, III. 100, 178
Arthur and Merlin, romance of, I. 77
Ascham, Roger, I. 181, 246, see footnote 288; II. 3
Athelstan, I. 36, 54
Augier, Emile, III. 208
Austen, Jane, III. 85

Bacon, Francis, Lord, I. 245, 255, see footnote 384; II.
34, 39; III. 268 seq. 284
Bacon, Roger, I. 161
Bain, Alexander, III. 185
Bakewell, Robert, II. 320
Bale, John, I. 186
Balzac, Honoré de, I. 3; III. 215, 254
Barclay, Alexander, I. 165
Barclay, John, II. 292
Barclay, Robert, I. 58
Barrow, Isaac, II. 292, 295 seq.
Baxter, Richard, I. 268; II. 56, 292
Bayly's (Lewis) Practice of Piety, II. 62
Beattie, Tames, II. 440; III. 36
Beauclerk, Henry, I. 76
Beaumont, Francis, I. 291, see footnote 421, see footnote 423,
see footnote 459, see footnote 490, see footnote 494,
see footnote 495, see footnote 497, see footnote 506,
see footnote 509, see footnote 512;
II. 41, 45, 100
Becket, Thomas à, I. 97
Beckford, W., III. 77
Bede, the Venerable, I. 64, see footnote 18, see footnote 69
see footnote 73, see footnote 88, see footnote 89
Bedford, Duke of (John Russell), II. 310
Beethovan, Lewis van, III. 87
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, II. 157, 254
Bell, Currer. See Brontë, Charlotte
Bénoit de Sainte-Maure, I. 76
Bentham, Jeremy, II. 320
Bently, Richard, II. 303
Beowolf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem, I.
49
Béranger, II. 11; III. 287
Berkeley, Bishop, II. 303
Berkley, Sir Charles, II. 141
Berners, Lord, I. 186
Best, Paul, II. 50
Bible, English. See Wiclif, Tyndale
Blackmore, Sir Richard, II. 224
Blount, Edward, I. 192
Boccaccio, I. 126, 132; II. 266
Bodley, Sir Thomas, I. 246
Boethius, I. 64, see footnote 90
Boileau, II. 144, 184, 224, 262, 284; III. 7,
4, 345
Boleyn, Ann, I. 276
Bolingbroke, Lord (Henry St. John), II.
275, 303; III. 8
Bonner, Edmund, II. 33
Borde, Andrew, I. 186
Borgia, Cæsar, II. 5, 6
Borgia, Lucretia, I. 182; II. 5
Bossu (or Lebossu), II. 224
Bossuet, I. 18; II. 233; III. 25, 306
Boswell, James, II. 444 seq.
Bourchier. See Berners
Boyle, the Hon. Robert, II. 303
Bridaine, Father, II. 298
Britons, ancient, I. 38
Brontë, Charlotte (Currer Bell), III. 85,
100, 185
Browne, Sir Thomas, I. 245, 246, 252,
see footnote 382, see footnote 383; II. 34, 39
Browning, Mrs., III. 100, 185
Brunanburh, Athelstan's victory at, celebrated
in Saxon song, I. 54
Buckingham, Duke of (John Sheffield),
II. 153, 180, 184
Buckle, Henry Thomas, III. 154 seq., 176
Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton, III. 85, 185
Bunyan, John, II. 58-70, 133
Burke, Edmund, II. 303, 317-326, 444; III.
286, 306
Burleigh, Lord (William Cecil), I. see footnote 407;
III. 286
Burnet, Bishop, II. 202
Burney, Francisca (Madame D'Arblay),
II. 283, 320, 444; III. 275
Burns, Robert, II. 251; Sketch of his life
and works, III. 48-65
Burton, Robert, I. see footnote 277, 248; II. 34, 100
Busby, Dr. Richard, II. 256
Bute, Lord, II. 273 seq., 310
Butler, Bishop, II. 320
Butler, Samuel, II. 137-140, 303
Byng, Admiral, II. 310
Byron, Lord, III. 11; his life and works,
102-151

Cædmon, hymns of, I. 57, 61; his metrical
paraphrase of parts of the Bible,
see footnote 83, 61, 185
Calamy, Edmund, II. 58
Calderon, I. 161, 279; II. 155
Calvin, John, II. 11, 45, 301
Camden, William, I. 246
Campbell, Thomas, III. 76, 112
Carew, Thomas, I. 238
Carlyle, Thomas, I. 6; III. 100, 176; style
and mind, 308 seq.; vocation, 327 seq.;
philosophy, morality, and criticism,
336 seq.; conception of history, 348
Carteret, John (Earl Granville), II. 311
Castlereagh, Lord, I. see footnote 514
Catherine, St., play of, I. 76
Cellini, Benvenuto, I. 26, see footnote 169, see footnote 290
see footnote 292, see footnote 293, see footnote 409
Cervantes, I. 100, see footnote 360, 222; II. 410
Chalmers, George, I. see footnote 95, see footnote 345, see footnote 346
Chandos, Duke of (John Brydges), III. 8
Chapman, George, I. 330
Charles of Orleans, I. 84, 158
Charles I of England, III. 276
Charles II and his court, II. 140 seq.
Chateaubriand, I. 4; II. 346
Chatham. See Pitt
Chaucer, I. 106, 126, 155, see footnote 153; II. 265
Chesterfield, Lord, II. 278 seq., 444; III. 15
Chevy Chase, ballad of, I. 125
Chillingworth, William, I. 245; II. 35, 38,
300
Christianity, introduction of, into Britain,
I. 56, 63 seq.
Chroniclers, French, I. 83
Chroniclers, Saxon, I. 68
Cibber, Colley, III. 8, 17
Cimbrians, the, I. 41
Clarendon, Lord Chancellor (Edward
Hyde), I. 245; II. 140
Clarke, Dr. John, II. 289, 301
Classic spirit in Europe, its origin and
nature, II. 170-173
Classical authors translated, I. 180, 190
Clive, Lord, III. 272
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, III. 73
Collier, Jeremy, II. 225, 256
Collins, William, III. 37
Colman, George, II. 220
Comedy-writers, English, II. 188 seq.
Comines, Philippe de, I. 124
Commerce in sixteenth century, I. 172;
III. 165 seq.
Comte, Auguste, III. 362
Condillac, Stephen-Bonnot de, III. 333,
363
Congreve, William, II. 188-210, 283
Conybeare, J. J., I. see footnote 64, see footnote 66, see footnote 74
Corbet, Bishop, II. 35
Corneille, II. 224, 236
Cotton, Sir Robert, I. 246
Court pageantries in the sixteenth century,
I. 176, 177
Coventry, Sir John, II. 142
Coverdale, Miles, II. 20
Cowley, Abraham, I. 242; II. 34, 71
Cowper, William, III. 67-73
Crabbe, George, III. 71, 112
Cranmer, Archbishop, II. 15, 23
Crashaw, Richard, II. 34
Criticism and History, III. 267 seq.
Cromwell, Oliver, I. 6; II. 35, 50; III.
276, 319, 351
Crowne, John, II. 157
Curll, Edmund, III. 18

Daniel, Samuel, I. 246
Dante, I. 135, 158, 161; II. 110; III. 335
Darwin, Charles, I. see footnote 1
Davie, Adam, I. 93
Davies, Sir John, II. 34
Daye, John, II. 47
Decker, Thomas, I. 281, see footnote 454
De Foe, II. 307, 402-410; III. 169
Delille, James, III. 21
Denham, Sir John, II. 185-188
Denmark, I. 34, 35
Dennis, John, II. 331
Descartes, II. 149, 233; III. 333
Dickens, Charles, III. 85, 100; his novels,
187-221
Domesday Book, I. 104, see footnote 149, see footnote 150,
see footnote 175
Donne, John, I. see footnote 372, see footnote 373, see footnote 374, 241;
II. 35
Dorat, C. J., III. 16, 140
Dorset, Earl of (Charles Sackville), II.
179, 180
Drake, Admiral, I. see footnote 273
Drake, Dr. Nathan, I. see footnote 274, see footnote 275, see footnote 278
see footnote 284, see footnote 329, see footnote 404, see footnote 508
Drama, formation of the, I. 291 seq.
Drayton, Michael, I. 204, see footnote 330, see footnote 346; II. 34
Drummond, William, II. 100
Dryden, John, I. 18; II. 100; his comedies,
153-157, 184; his life and writings,
II. 222-272, 332; III. 5, 329
Dudevant, Madame (George Sand), III.
207
Dunstan, St., I. 36
Durer, Albert, II. 9, 10
Dyer, Sir Edward, I. see footnote 325

Earle, John, I. 246
Eddas, the Scandinavian, I. 42; III.
123, 124
Edgeworth, Maria, III. 253
Edward VI, II. 28
Edwy and Elgiva, story of, I. 38, see footnote 32
Eliot, George. See Evans, Mary A.
England, climate of, I. 33
English Constitution, formation of the,
I. 105
Elizabeth, Queen, I. 175, 245, 270
Elwin, Whitwell, III. 5 seq.
Erigena, John Scotus, I. 64, see footnote 89, 69
Esménard, Joseph Alphonse, I. see footnote 256
Essex, Robert, Earl of, I. 270, 273
Etheredge, Sir George, II. 137, 158
Evans, Mary A. (George Eliot), III. 85,
179, 185
Eyck, Van, I. 151

Falkland, Lord, I. 245
Farnese, Pietro Luigi, II. 6
Farquhar, George, II. 188, 209
Faust, III. 47
Feltham, Owen, I. 246
Fenn, Sir John, I. see footnote 267
Ferguson, Dr. Adam, II. 304; III. 271
Fermor, Mrs. Arabella, III. 15, 16
Feudalism, the protection and character
of, I. 73
Fichte, III. 335
Fielding, Henry, I. 319; II. 135, 434-433,
450
Fitmore, Sir Robert, II. 305
Finsborough, Battle of, an Anglo-Saxon
poem, I. 54
Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, I.
275; II. 26
Flemish artists, I. 170, 178
Fletcher, Giles, II. 34
Fletcher, John, I. 291, 307; II. 45, 100
Ford, John, I. 291, 297, 312; II. 248
Fortescue, Sir John, I. 113, see footnote 171
Fox, Charles James, II. 276, 311, 315 seq.
Fox, George, II. 52, 58, 133
Fox, John, II. 13 seq.
Francis of Assisi, I. 161
Freeman, Edward A., I. see footnote 98
Frisians, the, I. 32, 33
Froissart, I. 83, 102, 126, 127
132, see footnote 195, see footnote 255
Froude, J. A., I. see footnote 149, see footnote 411; II. 15 seq.
Fuller, Thomas, I. 318, see footnote 513

Gaimar, Geoffroy, I. 76, 92
Gainsborough, Thomas, landscape painter,
II. 220
Garrick, David, II. 444, 448
Gaskell, Mrs. Elisabeth C., III. 85, 185
Gay, John, II. 211, 279; III. 4. 29-32
Geoffrey of Monmouth, I. see footnote 130
German ideas, introduction of, in Europe
and England, III; 328 seq.
Germany, drinking habits in, II. 7
Gibbon, Edward, II. 444
Gladstone, William Ewart, III. 274
Glencoe, Massacre of, III. 302 seq.
Glover, Richard, III. 37
Godwin, William, II. 95
Goethe, I. 6, 18, see footnote 441, see footnote 708;
II. 111, 118, 430; III. 48, 74, 125-131, 327 seq.
Goldsmith, Oliver, II. 211, 307, 440-443
Goltzius, I. 196
Gower, John, I. 90, 163, see footnote 127
Grammont, Count de, II. 135, 169, 170
Gray, Thomas, III. 36
Greene, Robert, I. 206, see footnote 301, see footnote 333, 281,
see footnote 340, 306
Grenville, George, II. 310
Gresset, J. B. Lewis, III. 16
Grey, Lady Jane, I. 180, 270
Grostete, Robert, I. 90, 93
Grote, George, III. 185
Guicciardini, Ludovic, I. 173
Guido, I. 16
Guizot, I. see footnote 155; III. 276, 282, 305
Guy of Warwick, I. 77, see footnote 143

Habington, William, I. 240
Hakluyt, Richard, I. 246
Hale, Sir Matthew, II. 16
Hales, John, I. 245; II. 35, 37, 301
Halifax, Charles, Montague, Earl of, II.
329, 334. 361, 366
Hall, Bishop, Joseph, I. 246; II. 35
Hallam, Henry, I. 118; III. 276
Hamilton, Anthony, II. 136 seq.
Hamilton, Sir William, III. 185
Hampden, John, III. 276
Hampole, I. 93
Hardyng, John, I. 269
Harrington, Sir John, I. 237
Harrison, William, I. 173
Hastings, Warren, II. 317; III. 272, 285
seq., 291
Hawes, Stephen, I. 165
Hegel, I. 18, see footnote 244; II. 271, 331 seq.
Heine, I. 2, see footnote 10, 360; III. 39, 48, 74, 87
Hemling, Hans, I. 170
Henry Beauclerk, I. 76
Henry of Huntingdon, I. 36, see footnote 24, see footnote 34, see
footnote 35, 76
Henry VIII and his Court, I. 269; II. 15
Herbert, George, I. 240
Herbert, Lord, I. 246
Herder, John Godfrey von, I. 6
Herrick, Robert, I. 204, 238, see footnote 371
Hertford, Earl of, I. see footnote 402
Hervey, Lord, III. 26
Heywood, Mrs. Eliza, III. 18
Heywood, John, I. 186, 280, see footnote 425, see footnote 488
Hill, Aaron, III. 8
History, philosophy of. See the Introduction,
passim.
Hobbes, Thomas, II. 147-152, 250
Hogarth, William, II. 450-453; III. 18
Holinslied's Chronicles, I. 176, 246, 275
Holland, I. 31
Homer and Spenser, I. 217
Hooker, Richard, I. 245; II. 35 seq.
Horn, Ring, romance of, I. 77, 100
Hoveden, John, I. 90
Howard, John, II. 320
Howe, John, III. 299
Hugo, Victor, I. 2, see footnote 263, see footnote 606; II. 270;
III. 74, 87
Hume, David, II. 304, 440; III. 294, 352
Hunter, William, martyrdom of, II.
31, 32
Hutcheson, Francis, II. 304, 320; III. 271

Iceland and its legends, I. 35, 42
Independency in the sixteenth century,
II. 49 seq., 90
Industry, British, in the nineteenth century,
III. 165 seq.
Irish, the ancient, I. 38
Italian writings and ideas, taste for, in
sixteenth century, I. 181, 182; vices of
the Italian Renaissance, II. 3-7

James I and his Court, I. 237
James II, III. 282
Jewell, Bishop, I. 277
Johnson, Samuel, I. 319; II. 303, 321, 444-453;
III. 10, 38, 345
Joinville, Sire de, I. 83
Jones, Inigo, I. see footnote 276, 321
Jones, Sir William, II. 444
Jonson, Ben, I. see footnote 282, 208, see footnote 394, see footnote 398,
280, see footnote 520;
II. 100; III. 155; sketch of his life, I. 318; his
learning, style, etc., 321; his
dramas, 327; his comedies, 333;
compared with Molière, 345; fanciful
comedies and smaller poems, 345
Jordaens, Jacob, I. 178
Jowett, Benjamin, III. 100, 334
Judith, poem of, I. 60, 61
Junius, Letters of, II. 311 seq.; III. 106
Jutes, the, and their country, I. 31

Keats, John, III. 130
Kemble, John M., I. see footnote 26, see footnote 35, see footnote 39,
see footnote 58, see footnote 59
see footnote 63, see footnote 77
Knighton, Henry, I. see footnote 186
Knolles, Richard, I. 246
Knox, John, II. 8, 28; III. 354
Kyd, Thomas, I. 280

Lackland, John, I. 102
LaHarpe, III. 345
Lamartine, I. 2; III. 74, 87
Lamb, Charles, III. 73, 76
Languet, Hubert, I. 194
Latimer, Bishop, I. 109; II. 17, 27 seq.
Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of
Canterbury, I. 76
Langtoft, Peter, I. 90
Laud, Archbishop, II. 38; III. 287
Lavergne, Léonce de, I. see footnote 15
Law, William, II. 303
Layamon, I. 92, see footnote 131
Lebrun, Ponce Denis Econchard, I. 163, see footnote 256
Lee, Nathaniel, II. 241
Leibnitz, III. 23
Leighton, Dr. Alexander, II. 49, 88
Lely, Sir Peter, II. 320
Leo X, Pope, II. 4
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, I. 4
Lingard, Dr. John, I. see footnote 18, see footnote 21, see footnote 30,
see footnote 32, see footnote 148
Locke, John, II. 71, 300, 303 seq., 320
Lockhart, John Gibson, III. 78 seq.
Lodge, Thomas, I. 204, 280
Lombard, Peter, I. 157, see footnote 245
Loménie de Brienne, Cardinal, III. 311
London in Henry VIII's time, I. 173;
in the present day, III. 164
Longchamps, William, I. 97
Longus, Greek romance-writer, I. 209
Lorris, Guillaume de, I. 84, 95
Loyola, I. 161, 171; III. 273
Ludlow, Edmund, II. 51
Lulli, a renowned Italian composer, II.
233
Lully, Raymond; I. 161
Luther, Martin, I. 26, 171; II. 3-7; and the
Reformation, 7
Lydgate, John, I. 158, 163, 164, see footnote 257, 165, see footnote 259
Lyly, John, I. see footnote 287, 192, 194
Lyly, William, I. 180

Macaulay, Thomas Babington (Lord),
III. 100; his works, 267-307
Machiavelli, I. 183
Mackenzie, Henry, III. 35, 51
Mackintosh, Sir James, III. 276
Macpherson, James, III. 36
Malcolm, Sir John, III. 78
Malherbe, Francis de, III. 329
Malte-brun, Conrad, I. see footnote 8
Mandeville, Bernard, II. 303
Manners of the people in the sixteenth
century, I. 178
Marguerite of Navarre, I. 132
Marlborough, Duchess of, III. 26
Marlborough, Duke of, II. 275, 307; III.
259
Marlowe, Christopher, I. 211, see footnote 344, 280, see footnote 429,
see footnote 433, see footnote 344, see footnote 442, see footnote 445,
see footnote 446, see footnote 447, see footnote 449, see footnote 452;
III. 73;
his dramas, I. 282
Marston, John, I. 320
Martyr, Peter, II. 23
Martyrs in the reign of Mary, II. 30-34
Marvell, Andrew, II. 254
Masques, under James I, I. 177, 348
Massillon, II. 28
Massinger, Philip, I. see footnote 400, 280, see footnote 424, see
footnote 459, see footnote 460, see footnote 462, 297
Maundeville, Sir John, I. 91, see footnote 128, see footnote 129, see
footnote 130, 102
May, Thomas, II. 57
Medici, Lorenzo de, I. 182
Melanchthon, Philip, II. 13, 23
Merlin, I. 77, see footnote 124
Meung, Jean de, I. 93, 162
Michelet, Jules, I. 4, see footnote 71; III. 325
Middleton, Thomas, I. see footnote 401, 273, 277, 291, see footnote 458
Mill, John Stuart, III. 100, 176, 360-408
Milton, John, I. 62, see footnote 86, 215, 245; II. 71-84; his
prose writings, 84-100; his poetry, 100-128,
347, 348; III. 272
Molière, I. see footnote 347, see footnote 348, see footnote 489, see
footnote 563, see footnote 608, 361; II. 188 seq., 418; III. 214
Mommsen, Theodor, I. see footnote 3
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, II. 424;
III. 8, 15
Montesquieu, Ch., I. see footnote 4, 25
Moore, Thomas, II. 440; III. 75 seq., 138
More, Sir Thomas, I. 246, 275
Müller, Max, III. 361
Muller, Ottfried, I. 6
Murray, John, III. 78, 138, 140
Musset, Alfred de, I. 2, 199, see footnote 426, see footnote 427, see
footnote 459, see footnote 523, 358;
II. 267; III. 39, 74, 87, 430 seq.

Nash, Thomas, I. 281
Nayler, James, II. 53, 57
Neal's History of the Puritans, II. 53, 88
Newcastle, Duchess of (Margaret Lucas),
II. 187
Newspaper, first daily, III. 44
Newton, Sir Isaac, II. 289, 301
Nicole, Peter, II. 283
Norman Conquest, the, I. 71, 72, 73; its
effects on the national language and
literature, 87, 123; III. 151
Normans, the character of, I. 74; how
they became French, 75; their taste
and architecture, 75; their literature,
chivalry, and success, 76; their position
and tyranny in England, 87; III.
152
Nott, Dr. John, I. 191
Novel, the English--its characteristics,
II. 402 seq.; the modern school of novelists,
III. 185 seq.
Nut-brown Maid, the--an ancient ballad,
I. see footnote 192

Oates, Titus, II. 257
Occam, William, I. 161
Occleve, Thomas, I. 163
Ochin, Bernard, II. 23
Oliphant, Mrs., II. 424
Olivers, Thomas, II. 290
Orrery, Earl of, III. 8
Otway, Thomas, II. 241, 248
Ouseley, Sir William, III. 78
Overbury, Sir Thomas, I. see footnote 192, 246
Owen, John, II. 58

Paganism of poetry and painting in
Italy in the sixteenth century, I. 181
Paley, William, II. 300
Palgrave, Sir Francis, I. see footnote 13, see footnote 344
Parnell, Dr. Thomas, III. 4
Pascal, III. 300, 400; III. 25, 306
Pastoral poetry, I. 204
Peele, George, I. 280
Penn, William, II. 288; III. 299
Pepys, Samuel, II. 142, 143, 146
Percy, Thomas, III. 73
Petrarch, I. 126, 185, 163
Philips, Ambrose, III. 4
Philosophy and history, III. 308 seq.
Philosophy and poetry, connection of,
I. 157
Picts, I. 38
Pickering, Dr. Gilbert, II. 223
Piers Plowman's Crede, I. 122
Piers Ploughman, Vision of, I. 120
185
Pitt, William, first Earl of Chatham, II.
276, 310 seq.; III. 275
Pitt, William (second son of the preceding),
II. 311, 217 seq.; III. 65
Pleiad, the, I. 18
Pluche, Abbé, II. 342
Poe, Edgar Allan, II. 405
Pope, Alexander, II. 252, 328, 332, 381;
III. 5-28, 112, 117, 28O
Prayer-book, English, II. 23-27
Preaching at the Reformation period,
II. 27
Presbyterians and Independents in the
sixteenth century, II. 49 seq., 90
Price, Dr. Richard, II. 304, 321; III. 271
Priestly, Dr., III. 66
Prior, Matthew, III. 4, 28
Proclus, I. see footnote 5, see footnote 244
Prynne, William, II. 57
Pulci, an Italian painter, I. 182
Pultock, Robert, II. 438
Purchas, Samuel, I. 246
Puritans, the, II. 45 seq., 132 seq.
Puttenham, George, I. 185, see footnote 294, 246
Pym, John, III. 276

Quarles, Francis, I. 240, see footnote 371

Rabelais, I. 149, 222, see footnote 360, 265, 366; II. 144, 388,
438
Racine, I. 371; II. 224, 284; III. 218, 306
Raleigh, Sir Walter, I. 214, 246, 273; II, 34
Rapin, II. 224
Ray, John, II. 303
Reformation in England made way for
by the Saxon character and the situation
of the Norman Church, I. 122,
165; II. 7 seq.
Reid, Thomas, II. 304, 320, 440
Renaissance, the English; manners of
the time, I. 169; the theatre its
original product, 264
Renan, Ernest, I. see footnote 3, see footnote 194
Restoration, period of the, in England,
II. 131 seq., 209
Revolution, period of the, in England,
II. 273 seq.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, II. 220, 320, 444
Richard Cœur de Lion, I. 101
Richardson, Samuel, II. 135, 303, 412-424,
444; III. 8, 35
Ridley, Nicholas, II. 30
Ritson, Joseph, I. see footnote 157, see footnote 159, see footnote 162,
see footnote 164
Robert of Brunne, I. 93
Robert of Gloucester, I. 93
Robertson, Dr. William, II. 440; III. 3,
38, 352
Robespierre, II. 284
Robin Hood ballads, I. 109, 178, 185
Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot), II.
143 seq., 184, 337; III. 28, 140
Rogers, John, martyrdom of, II. 31
Rogers, Samuel, III. 112
Roland, Song of, I. 77, 81
Rollo, a Norse leader, I. 74
Ronsard, Peter de, I. 18
Roscellinus, I. 160
Roscommon, Earl of, II. 184
Roses, wars of the, I. 114, 124, 169, 287
Rotheland, Hugh de, I. 90
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, III. 22
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, II. 447; III. 16, 34
Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, III. 392
Rubens, I. 151, 177, 178, 232, 366; III. 27
Rückert, III. 74
Russel, Lord William, II. 141

Sacheverell, Dr., II. 273, 306
Sacy, Lemaistre de, II. 22
Sadeler, I. 196
Sainte-Beuve, I. 6
St. John. See Bolingbroke, Lord
Saint-Simon, I. 3; III. 217
St. Theresa, I. 161
Saintré, Jehan de, I. 102
Sand, George. See Dudevant, Madame
Savage, Richard, III. 18
Sawtré, William, I. 124
Saxons, the, I. 31; characteristics of
the race, 71; contrast with the Normans,
74, 75; their endurance, 103;
their invasion of England, III. 151, 152
Scaliger, III. 345
Schelling, I. 22
Schiller, III. 48, 74, 87
Scotland in the seventeenth century, II.
134
Scott, Sir Walter, I. 4; II. 222, 361 seq.,
440; III. 74, 105, 107, 260; his novels and
poems, 78-85
Scotus, Duns, I. 159
Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, I. 195
Sedley, Sir Charles, I. 240; II. 179
Selden, John, I. 246
Seres, William, II. 47
Settle, Elkanah, II. 225, 240
Sévigné, Madame de, III. 15, 306
Shadwell, Thomas, II. 157, 240, 261
Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, third
Earl of, II. 304
Shakespeare, William, I. see footnote 169, see footnote 274, 186, see
footnote 301, see footnote 308, 206, see footnote 331, 245
280; II. 230, 238 seq.; III. 155; general
idea of, I. 350; his life and character,
354; his style, 366, and manners,
372; his dramatis personæ,
377; his men of wit, 382, and
women, 386; his villains, 391, 392;
the principal characters in his plays,
393; fancy, imagination--ideas of
existence--love; harmony between the
artist and his work, 407
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, III. 74, 95-100, 130
Shenstone, William, III. 37
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, II. 212 seq.,
311, 440
Sherlock, Bishop, II. 292, 301, 412
Shirley, James, I. 280; II. 153
Sidney, Algernon, I. 245; II. 71, 141
Sidney, Sir Phillip, I. 186, 194, 245,
266; II. 39; III. 155
Skelton, John, I. 165
Smart, Christopher, III. 37
Smith, Adam, II. 304, 320
Smith, Sidney, II. 282; III. 100
Smollett, Tobias, II. 308, 433-437, 440
Society in Great Britain in the present
day, III. 169 seq.; in England and in
France, 430 seq.
South, Dr. Robert, II. 292, 295
Southern, Thomas, II. 241
Southey, Robert, II. 438; III. 72, 76, 134,
287
Speed, John, I. 246
Spelman, Sir Henry, I. 246
Spencer, Herbert, III. 185
Spencer, Edmund, I. 186, 207, 213,245;
II. 71, 110; his life, character and
poetry, I. 214; II. 236; III. 155, 424
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, III. 100, 334
Steele, Sir Richard, II. 311, 327; III. 259
Stendhal, Count de, I. 25, see footnote 214, see footnote 471, see
footnote 487
Sterling, John, III. 309 seq.
Sterne, Laurence, II. 437-440; III. 35
Stewart, Dugald, II. 320, 440; III. 61
Stillingfleet, Bishop, II. 292, 301
Stowe, John, I. 246
Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of,
III. 276 seq.
Strafford, William, I. 172
Strype, John, I. 268
Stubbes, John, I. see footnote 277, 179, see footnote 285
Suckling, Sir John, I. 238, see footnote 371; II. 181
Sue, Eugène, III. 220
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, I. 185;
II. 16
Swift, Jonathan, II. 135. 224, 303, 311, 327
seq.; III. 259, 288; sketch of his life, II.
360-368; his wit, 368-371; his pamphlets,
371-379; his poetry, 380-389; his philosophy,
etc., 389-401

Taillefer, I. 79, 89
Tasso, I. 222, see footnote 360, see footnote 366, see footnote 512
Taylor, Jeremy, I. 246; II. 35, 38, 44
Temple, Sir William, II. 173, 365, 389;
III. 3, 272
Teniers, David, III. 83
Tennyson, Alfred, III. 100, 185, 410-438
Thackeray, William M. III. 85, 100; his
novels, 223-265
Theatre, the, in the sixteenth century, I.
264; after the Restoration, II. 153-155,
188 seq., 226 seq.
Thibaut of Champagne, I. 84
Thierry, Augustin, I. 4, see footnote 20, see footnote 69, see footnote 99,
see footnote 118, see footnote 119, see footnote 120, see footnote 157,
see footnote 178; III. 305
Thiers, Louis Adolphe, III. 282, 305
Thomson, James, III. 32-35
Thorpe, John, I. see footnote 46, see footnote 48, see footnote 50,
see footnote 66, see footnote 72, see footnote 83, see footnote 87
Tickell, Thomas, III. 4
Tillotson, Archbishop, II. 292 seq.
Tindal, Matthew, II. 303
Titian, I. 236, see footnote 600, 366
Tocqueville, Alexis de, I. see footnote 3
Toland, John, II. 303
Toleration Act, the, III. 298, 299, 300
Tomkins, Thomas, II. 32
Townley, James, II. 220
Turner, Sharon, I. see footnote 9, see footnote 28, see footnote 32,
see footnote 34, see footnote 35, see footnote 56, see footnote 65,
see footnote 66, see footnote 67, see footnote 28, see footnote 79,
see footnote 81, see footnote 95,54
Tutchin, John, III. 18
Tyndale, William, II. 19 seq., 28, 47

Urfé, Honoré d', I. see footnote 311, 315
Usher, James, I. 246

Vanbrugh, Sir John, II. 187-209
Vane, Sir Harry, II. 143
Vega, Lope de, I. 161, 279; II. 155
Village feasts of sixteenth century described,
I. 178
Villehardouin, a French chronicler, I.
83, 102
Vinci, Leonardo da, I. 16
Voltaire, I. 16; II. 447; III. 22, 137, 346
Vos, Martin de, I. 196

Wace, Robert, I. 76, 78, see footnote 106, see footnote 108, 89, see
footnote 130, see footnote 131
Waller, Edmund, I. 240; II. 71, 153, 181-184;
III. 3
Walpole, Horace, III. 15
Walpole, Sir Robert, II. 274, 280
Walton, Isaac, I. 246
Warburton, Bishop, II. 303
Warner, William, I. 212
Warton, Thomas, I. see footnote 96, see footnote 122, see footnote 124,
see footnote 126, see footnote 127, see footnote 135, see footnote 137,
see footnote 145, see footnote 146, see footnote 147, see footnote 252,
see footnote 259, see footnote 287; III. 73
Watt, James, II. 320
Watteau, Anthony, III. 14
Watts, Isaac, III. 37
Webster, John, I. 291, 297; II. 248
Wesley, John, II. 280-291
Wetherell, Elizabeth, III. 179
Wharton, Lord, III. 26
Whitfield, George, II. 289-230
Wiclif, John, I. 123, 286; II. 15
Wilkes, John, II. 310
William III, II. 173
Wither, George, II. 35
William of Malmesbury, I. 75
William the Conqueror, I. 78
Windham, William, II. 311
Witenagemote, the, I. 46
Wollastom William Hyde, III. 271
Wolsey, Cardinal, I. 165; II. 16
Wordsworth, William, III. 73, 88-95
Wortley, Lady Mary. See Montagu
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, I. 185, 180, 187
Wycherley, William, I. 18; II. 157-167,
178, 187, 188, 202, 250, 337

Yonge, Charlotte Mary, III. 179
Young, Arthur, II. 320
Young, Edward, III. 37





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