Poets passed into metaphysicians as they strove to unravel the workings of conscience within the soul. From that hour one dominant influence told on human action: and all the various energies that had been called into life by the age that was passing away were seized, concentrated, and steadied to a definite aim by the spirit of religion.

5

small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every home, and wove it into the life of every English family.

Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the intellectual development of the people. All the prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue when

Churches. Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State roll and biography, and the mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stories of Greek literature had wrought the

The whole temper of the nation felt the change: "Theology rules there;" said Grotius1 10 of England only two years after Elizabeth's death; and when Casaubon was invited by her successor to his court he found both king and people indifferent to pure letters. "There is a great abundance of theologians in Eng- 15 the Bible was ordered to be set up in the land," he says; "all point their studies in that direction." Even a country gentleman, like Colonel Hutchinson, felt the theological impulse. "As soon as he had improved his natural understanding with the acquisition of 20 learning, the first studies he exercised himself in were the principles of religion." It was natural that literature should reflect the tendency of the time; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety which still crowd our 25 older libraries drove before them the classical translations and Italian novelettes of the age of the Renascence. But their influence was small beside that of the Bible. The popularity of the Bible had been growing fast from the 30 revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St. Paul's. Even then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice 35 fer to another tongue the peculiar charm of to read to them." "One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature; and great multitudes would 40 exception of Colet and More,' or of the pedants

of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could trans

language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few; and among these, with the

8

who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual. But the language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellen

resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued recitation of both Old Testament and New in 45 istic Greek, lent themselves with a curious the public services of the Church; while the

1 Hugo Grotius, a famous Dutch theologian, statesman, jurist and historian.

2 Isaac Casaubon, a French theologian and student of the classics. On coming to England in 1610 he was appointed prebendary to Canterbury and Westminster by James I. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

3 Col. John Hutchinson (1616-64), one of the Commissioners who signed the death warrant of Charles I, is remembered as an example of the nobler and more liberal type of Puritanism. He combined an intense religious earnestness, with a love of music and beauty, and his disposition was at once serious and free from a narrow fanaticism. The quotation is from his wife's Memoir of Colonel Hutchinson.

Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, procured six copies of the Great Bible and set them in convenient places in St. Paul's cathedral, shortly after the King's proclamation of 1538, ordering a copy to be put in every

church.

felicity to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of

Copies of the Bible prepared at Geneva, 1557-60, by English refugees who had fled there in Mary's reign. They were in plain type, divided into chapters and verses, with marginal notes.

6 William Tyndale published a New Testament at Worms, 1525, and in 1530 translations of parts of the Old Testament. Miles Coverdale published the first complete English Bible, including the Apocrypha.

7 John Colet. Dean of St. Paul's, and Sir Thomas More, Chancellor under Henry VIII, were not only learned students but popular preachers and teachers as well.

8 Some of the enthusiasts of the new learning forme a Platonic Academy at Florence in the 15th century and attempted to harmonize mythology and philosophy with Christianity.

the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language.

of Shakespeare's day, pressed for an answer not only from noble and scholar but from farmer and shopkeeper in the age that followed him. The answer they found was almost of 5 necessity a Calvinistic answer. Unlike as the spirit of Calvinism seemed to the spirit of the Renascence, both found a point of union in their exaltation of the individual man. The mighty strife of good and evil within the soul

For the moment however its literary effect was less than its social. The power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which was 10 itself which had overawed the imagination of practically accessible to ordinary Englishinen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe to great authors, the bits of Shakespeare or Milton, or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave 15 themselves in our ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which coloured English talk two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we 20 of life and death. It was in each Christian

dramatist and poet became the one spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan. The Calvinist looked on churches and communions as convenient groupings of pious Christians; it might be as even indispensable parts of a Christian order. But religion in its deepest and innermost sense had to do not with churches but with the individual soul. It was each Christian man who held in his power the issues

conscience that the strife was waged between Heaven and Hell. Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim his part in the mystery of redemption. In the outer world of worship and discipline the Calvinist might call himself one of many brethren, but at every moment of his inner existence, in the hour of temptation and of struggle, in his dark and troubled wrestling with sin, in

borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were forced to borrow from one; and the borrowing was the easier and the more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature fitted it for the expression of every phase of feeling. 25 When Spenser poured forth his warmest lovenotes in the "Epithalamion," he adopted the very words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the entrance of his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills 30 the glory of conversion, in the peace of ac

ceptance with God, he stood utterly alone. With such a conception of human life Puritanism offered the natural form for English religion at a time when the feeling with which

of Dunbar, he hailed the sunburst with the cry of David: "Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt Thou drive them away!"'10 Even to common minds this familiarity with 35 religion could most easily ally itself was the

grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness and ardour of expression that with all its tendency to exaggeration and bombast we may prefer to the slip-shod vulgarisms of to-day.

sense of individuality. The 'prentice who sate awed in the pit of the theatre as the storm in the mind of Lear outdid the storm among the elements passed easily into the Calvinist 40 who saw himself day by day the theatre of a yet mightier struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, and his soul the prize of an eternal conflict between Heaven and Hell.

Walter Pater

But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. The Bible was as yet the one book which was familiar to every Englishman; and everywhere its 45 words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole moral effect which is produced now-a-days by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the missionary 50 report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way however dispassionately we examine it was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church. The problems of life and death, whose ques- 55 on art and poetry to define beauty in the abtionings found no answer in the higher minds

If, as appears probable, Green had in mind Psalm xxiv. 7, Spenser's language is similar, but not identical. 10 Psalms, lxviii. 1-2.

1839-1894

THE PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY (From the Preface to The Renaissance, 1873) Many attempts have been made by writers

stract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. The value of such attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the

way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with more meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness.

2

Gioconda, The hills of Carrara,3 Pico of Mirandola,' are valuable for their virtues, as we say in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special 5 unique impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the æsthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, and separate To define 10 from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what

beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true 15 conditions it is experienced. His end is reached student of æsthetics.

when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach this end is stated with great

Sainte-Beuve:-De se borner à connaitre de près les belles choses, et à s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, en humanistes accomplis.5

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question he asks is always-In whom did

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in æsthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it 20 exactness in the words of a recent critic of really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate, to realize it distinctly. The objects with which æsthetic criticism deals, music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life, are indeed 25 receptacles of so many powers or forces; they possess, like natural elements so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really 30 produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the 35 the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period æsthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimina- 40 tion and analysis of them, need not trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience-metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions else- 45 us only what the heat of their imagination has

where. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

The æsthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human 50 life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it, and reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, 55 the engaging personality in life or in a book, La

1 Matthew Arnold in his essay "On the Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in Essays in Criticism, First Series.

find itself? who was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages are all equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all débris, and leaving

wholly fused and transformed. Take for instance the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the

2 La Gioconda, the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, better known as Mona Lisa.

3 Carrara in northern Italy is famous for its marble. An Italian philosopher and theologian (1463-94), one of the most astonishingly facile scholars of the renaissance. "To satisfy one's self with beautiful things, and to nourish one's self as an exquisite amateur and accomplished humanist."

Stanzas on Resolution and Independence and the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, turning a fine crystal here and there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transform, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and 10 from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to trace that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree 15 main in his work. And this duality there—the in which it penetrates his verse.

And the mixture in his work, as it actually stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the least promising composition, lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden within 5 the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps, to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a measure was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and relapse; and he has permitted the impress of these too to re

fitfulness with which the higher qualities manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his poetry of a power not altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in itself; so that that old fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems almost literally true of him. . . .

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of it, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent, had

Nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of almost no character at all. He has much 25 conventional sentiment, and some of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most serious critical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political ideas, consequent on the excesses of 1795,1 makes him, at times, a mere 30 the writer himself purged away that alien eledeclaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes, to force an unwilling pen, and write by rule. By making the most of these blemishes it is possible to obscure the true æsthetic value of his work, just as his life 35 also, a life of much quiet delicacy and independence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious parochial virtues. And those who wish to 40 understand his influence, and experience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his special 45 power. Who that values his writings most has not felt the intrusion there, from time to time, of something tedious and prosaic? Of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skilfully made anthology. Such a selection would 50 reveals itself in many forms; but is strongest

show, in truth, not so much what he was, or to himself or others seemed to be, as what, by the more energetic and fertile quality in his writings, he was ever tending to become.

V. pp. 478, and 481, supra.

The great reacuon in Wordsworth's sentiments began in 1793, when, at the time of the Reign of Terror, England declared war against France. Wordsworth describes the effect as being a revolution in his whole moral nature.

ment. How perfect would have been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how thin a book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread untwined, the golden pieces, great and small, lying apart together. What are the peculiarities of this residue? What special sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy? What are the subjects and the motives which in him excite the imaginative faculty? What are the qualities in things and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to others in an extraordinary way?

An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has been remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It

and most attractive in what is strongest and most attractive in modern literature.

It has doubtless some latent connection with those pantheistic theories2 which locate 55 an intelligent soul in material things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modern

2. e. theories of the all-pervading presence and influence of spirit or soul; the theory that the Divine Spirit is in all inanimate, as well as in animate creation.

sound as even moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something actually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image. He has a power likewise of realising, 5 and conveying to the consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary impressionssilence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the whole complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular folding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special day or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a spirit or angel given to it, by which,

upon it, it has a presence in one's history, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and he has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit," which, as he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.

systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in the graver writings of historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modern landscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense, the writings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression: he is more simply and entirely occupied with it than any other poet, though there are fine expressions of pre- 10 cisely the same thing in so different a poet as Shelley. There was in his own character a certain contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united with a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable 15 for its exceptional insight, or the happy light to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate or imperfectly animate, existence. His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into broad, untroubled, 20 perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it most resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed some of them, the better part of sixty years 25 The Recluse-taking leave, without much in quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured a quite unusual sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the natural world-the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem 30 of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of such records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to Keats's St. Agnes' Eve.3 To read one of his longer pastoral poems for the first time, is like a day spent in a new country: 35 the memory is crowded for awhile with its precise and vivid incidents

"The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze On some grey rock;"-4

"The single sheep and the one blasted tree, And the bleak music from that old stone wall;"5

"In the meadows and the lower ground Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;"

"And that green corn all day is rustling in thine

ears.

דיי

It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon, that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of

count of costs, of the world of business, of action and ambition, as also of all that for the majority of mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment.

And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice; is with Wordsworth the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse. An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves 40 or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain 45 weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have

Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the 50 traced in the general history of human culture, outlining of visible imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous, in the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble

wherein all outward objects alike, including even the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with animation, and the world was "full of souls"-that mood in which the 55 old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange aftergrowths.