when they shall see Him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will as little bargain to pray pleasantly now, as they will think of doing so then." a present object for your heart and imaginstion. That is surely the most potent of all influences! nothing can come up to it. To us at Oxford Emerson was but a voice speaking 5 from three thousand miles away. But so wel he spoke, that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me the names of Oxford and of 10 Weimar; and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent words which I have been just now quoting. "Then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of ar Somewhere or other I have spoken of those "last enchantments of the Middle Age" which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman's. There was the puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and misused since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle 15 poetry, and science, as they have died already upon Edward Irving, then just dead: "Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines, and it took her twelve years!" A greater voice still,-the greatest voice of that 20 century, came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of Goethe. To this day, such is the force of youthful associations, I read the Wilhelm Meister with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation than in the 25 original. The large, liberal view of human life in Wilhelm Meister, how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But what moved us most in Wilhelm 30 Meister was that which, after all, will always move the young most,-the poetry, the eloquence. Never, surely, was Carlyle's prose so beautiful and pure as in the rendering of the Youth's dirge over Mignon!-"Well is our 35 treasure now laid up, the fair image of the past. Here sleeps it in the marble, undecaying; in your hearts, also, it lives, it works. Travel, travel, back into life! Take along with you this holy earnestness, for earnestness alone 40 makes life eternity." Here we had the voice of the great Goethe;-not the stiff, and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too often from those sixty volumes of his, but of the great Goethe, and the true 45 one. And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a voice also from this side of the Atlantic,-a clear and pure voice, in a thousand thousand men." "What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand." "Trust thyself! every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age; betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest spirit the same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing be fore a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay plastie under the Almighty effort, let us advance and advance on chaos and the dark!" These lofty sentences of Emerson, and a hundred others of like strain, I have never lost out of my memory; I never can lose them. WORDSWORTH (From Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888) Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble and profound application of ideas to life is the most essential part of poetic greatness. I said that a great poet receives his distinctive character of superiority from his which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain 50 application, under the conditions immutably as new, and moving, and unforgettable, as fixed by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his application, I say, to his subject, whatever it may be, of the ideas "On man, on nature, and on human life," which he has acquired for himself. The line quoted is Wordsworth's own; and his superiority arises from his powerful use; in his best pieces, his powerful application to his subject, of ideas "on man, on nature, and on human life." makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to 5 this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, to the question: How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion; Voltaire with his signal acuteness, most truly remarked that "no nation has treated in poetry moral ideas with more energy and depth than the English nation." And he adds: "There, it seems to me, is the great merit of the English poets." Voltaire does not mean, by "treating in poetry moral ideas," the composing moral and didactic poems;-that 10 they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day; they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers; they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayyám's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent brings us but a very little way in poetry. He really so main a part of human life. The ques- "Nor love thy life, nor hate; but, what thou liv'st, Live well; how long or short, permit to heaven." 30 In those fine lines Milton utters, as every one "We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life he utters a moral idea. Voltaire was right in thinking that the energetic and profound treatment of moral ideas, be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life. Epictetus had a happy figure for things like the play of the senses, or literary form and finish, or argumentative ingenuity, in comparison with "the best and master thing" for us, as he called it, the concern, how to live. Some people were afraid of them, he said, or they disliked and undervalued them. Such people were wrong; they were unthankful or cowardly. But the things might also be over-prized, and treated as final when they are not. They bear 40 to life the relation which inns bear to home. "As if a man, journeying home, and finding a nice inn on the road, and liking it, were to stay for ever at the inn! Man, thou hast forgotten thine object; thy journey was not to this, but 45 through this. 'But this inn is taking.' how many other inns, too, are taking, and how many fields and meadows! but as places of passage merely. You have an object, which is this: to get home, to do your duty to your And in this large sense, is what distinguishes the 50 family, friends, and fellow-countrymen, to English poetry. He sincerely meant praise, not dispraise or hint of limitation; and they err who suppose that poetic limitation is a necessary consequence of the fact, the fact being granted as Voltaire states it. If what 55 distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the term ideas here the term moral attain inward freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment. Style takes your fancy, arguing takes your fancy, and you forget your home and want to make your abode with them and to stay with them, on the plea that they are taking. Who denies that they are taking? but as places of passage, as inns. And when I say this, you suppose me to be attacking the care for style, the care for argument. I am not; I attack the resting in them, the not looking to the end which is beyond them." that his poetry is informed by ideas which "fall spontaneously into a scientific system of thought." But we must be on our guard against the Wordsworthians, if we want to 5 secure for Wordsworth his due rank as a poet. The Wordsworthians are apt to praise him for the wrong things, and to lay far too much stress upon what they call his philosophy. His poetry is the reality, his philosophy,—so far, Now, when we come across a poet like Théophile Gautier, we have a poet who has taken up his abode at an inn, and never got farther. There may be inducements to this or to that one of us, at this or that moment, to find delight in him, to cleave to him,—we only stay ourselves in his inn along with him. And when we come across a poet like Wordsworth, who 10 at least, as it may put on the form and habit sings of "a scientific system of thought," and the more that it puts them on,-is the illusion. "Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love and hope, Perhaps we shall one day learn to make the And melancholy fear subdued by faith, Of blessed consolations in distress, Of moral strength and intellectual power, proposition general, and to say: Poetry is the 15 reality, philosophy the illusion. But in Words worth's case, at any rate, we cannot do hiri justice until we dismiss his formal philosophy. Then we have a poet intent on "the best and The Excursion abounds with philosophy. and therefore the Excursion is to the Words worthian what it can never be to the disinterested lover of poetry,-a satisfactory work. 'Duty exists," says Wordsworth, in the Excur sion; and then he proceeds thus 66 “Immutably survive, For our support, the measures and the forms, 30 And the Wordsworthian is delighted, and Wordsworth deals with it, and his greatness lies in his dealing with it so powerfully. I have named a number of celebrated poets above all of whom he, in my opinion, deserves to be placed. He is to be placed above poets like 35 Voltaire, Dryden, Pope, Lessing, Schiller, because these famous personages with a thousand gifts and merits, never, or scarcely ever, attain the distinctive accent and utterance of the high and genuine poets Or let us come direct to the centre of Wordsworth's philosophy, as "an ethical system, as 40 distinctive and capable of systematical exposition as Bishop Butler's"— "Quiqui pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti," at all. Burns, Keats, Heine, not to speak of others in our list, have this accent;-who can doubt it? And at the same time they have 45 treasures of humour, felicity, passion, for which in Wordsworth we shall look in vain. Where, then, is Wordsworth's superiority? It is here; he deals with more of life than they do; he deals with life, as a whole, more power- 50 fully. No Wordsworthian will doubt this. Nay, the fervent Wordsworthian will add, as Mr. Leslie Stephen does, that Wordsworth's poetry is precious because his philosophy is sound; 55 that his "ethical system is as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's;" "All the holy poet-prophets, who spoke things worthy of Apollo.' "... One adequate support That is doctrine such as we hear in church. of a "scientific system of thought" in Wordsworth's poetry. The poetry will never be seen aright while they thus exhibit it. The cause of its greatness is simple, and may be told 5 quite simply. Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the ex Even the "intimations" of the famous Ode,2 those corner-stones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth,-the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds,this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her 10 traordinary power with which, in case after case, beauty had no doubt extraordinary strength he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say make us share it. that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful. In many 15 people, perhaps with the majority of educated persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. In general we may say of these high instincts of early childhood, the base of 20 the alleged systematic philosophy of Wordsworth, what Thucydides says of the earliest achievements of the Greek race: "It is impossible to speak with certainty of what is so remote; but from all that we can really investi- 25 fathers who inhabited this great and ancient gate, I should say that they were no very great things." Thomas Henry Hurley 1825-1895 ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROV- This time two hundred years ago1 in the beginning of January, 1666-those of our fore city, took breath between the shocks of two fearful calamities: one not quite past, although its fury had abated; the other to come. Finally, the "scientific system of thought" in Wordsworth gives us at last such poetry as this, which the devout Wordsworthian accepts: 30 "O for the coming of that glorious time When prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth And best protection, this Imperial Realm, While she exacts allegiance, shall admit An obligation, on her part, to teach Them who are born to serve her and obey; Binding herself by statute to secure, For all the children whom her soil maintains, The rudiments of letters, and inform The mind with moral and religious truth." Wordsworth calls Voltaire dull, and surely the production of these unVoltarian lines must have been imposed on him as a judgment! One can hear them being quoted at a Social Science Congress; one can call up the whole scene. A 45 nunciations and mad prayers of fanatics; and Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady, the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664; and, though no new visitor, smote the people of England and especially of her capital, with a 35 violence unknown before, in the course of the following year. The hand of a master has pictured what happened in those dismal months; and in the truest of fictions, "The History of the Plague Year," Defoe shows death, with 40 every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking through the narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into a silence broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty thousand dead; by the woful de great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon daylight; benches full of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; an orator lifting up his face from by the madder yells of despairing profligates. But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to nearly its ordinary amount; a case of plague occurred only here and there, and a manuscript written within and without to 50 the richer citizens who had flown from the declaim these lines of Wordsworth; and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, and mourning, and woe! pest had returned to their dwellings. The remnant of the people began to toil at the accustomed round of duty, or of pleasure; and the stream of city life bid fair to flow back "But turn we," as Wordsworth says, "from 55 along its old bed, with renewed and uninter these bold, bad men," the haunters of Social Science Congresses. And let us be on our guard, too, against the exhibitors and extollers 2 V. p. 478, supra. rupted vigour. 1 Huxley's Address was delivered in 1866. 2 St. Martin's Borough Hall and Public Library, near Trafalgar Square, London. 3 V. p. 316, supra. The newly kindled hope was deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city within the walls. 5 knowledge." The ends they proposed to attain cannot be stated more clearly than in the words of one of the founders of the organiz tion: "Our business was (precluding matters a theology and state affairs) to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries, and sod as related thereunto:-as Physic, Anatomy Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statick Our forefathers had their own ways of accounting for each of these calamities. They 10 Magneticks, Chymicks, Mechanicks, and Na ural Experiments; with the state of the studies and their cultivation at home a abroad. We then discoursed of the circulation of the blood, the valves in the veins, the ver submitted to the plague in humility and in penitence, for they believed it to be the judgment of God. But, towards the fire they were furiously indignant, interpreting it as the effect of the malice of man,-as the work of the 15 lacteæ, the lymphatic vessels, the Copernican Republicans, or of the Papists, according as their prepossessions ran in favour of loyalty or Puritanism. hypothesis, the nature of comets and new stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape (as it then appeared) of Saturn, the spots oc the sun and its turning on its own axis, the the several phases of Venus and Mercury, the improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose, the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities an nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, the descent d heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, with divers other things of like nature, some of which were then new discoveries, and It would, I fancy, have fared but ill with one who, standing where I now stand, in what was 20 inequalities and selenography of the moon, then a thickly peopled and fashionable part of London, should have broached to our ancestors the doctrine which I now propound to you that all their hypotheses were alike wrong; that the plague was no more, in their 25 sense, Divine judgment, than the fire was the work of any political, or of any religious, sect; but that they were themselves the authors of both plague and fire, and that they must look to themselves to prevent the recurrence of 30 others not so generally known and embraced calamities, to all appearance so peculiarly beyond the reach of human control-so evidently the result of the wrath of God, or of the craft and subtlety of an enemy. as now they are; with other things appertain ing to what hath been called the New Philos ophy, which, from the times of Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam' in England, hath been much cultivated m Italy, France, Germany, and other parts abroad, as well as with us in England.” The learned Dr. Wallis, writing in 1696 narrates, in these words, what happened half And one may picture to oneself how har- 35 moniously the holy cursing of the Puritan of that day would have chimed in with the unholy cursing and the crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys, and with the revilings of the political fanatics, if my imaginary plain dealer 40 a century before, or about 1645. The assohad gone on to say that, if the return of such misfortunes were ever rendered impossible, it would not be in virtue of the victory of the faith of Laud, or of that of Milton; and, as little, by the triumph of republicanism, as by 45 that of monarchy. But that the one thing needful for the compassing this end was, that the people of England should second the efforts of an insignificant corporation, the establishment of which, a few years before the epoch 50 but did wise things with regard to them. For of the great plague and the great fire, had been as little noticed, as they were conspicuous. Some twenty years before the outbreak of the plague a few calm and thoughtful students ciates met at Oxford, in the rooms of Dr. Wil kins, who was destined to become a bishop; and subsequently coming together in Londoc. they attracted the notice of the king. And i is a strange evidence of the taste for knowledge which the most obviously worthless of the Stuarts shared with his father and grandfather. that Charles the Second was not content with saying witty things about his philosophers he not only bestowed upon them such atten tion as he could spare from his poodles and his mistresses, but, being in his usual state di impecuniosity, begged for them of the Duke banded themselves together for the purpose, 55 of Ormond; and, that step being without as they phrased it, of "improving natural The study of the physical condition of the moon. 7 Torricelli, an Italian, discoverer of the principle of the barometer in 1643. The greatest of Newton's predecessors in the field of mathematics (1616-1703). |