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167
¿2.
'•* r " . . ziOY-
A?'.' f? - 4
'f
c-fc
s."..:
Jn J^ove’s
an
, 0
^TERNITY
By Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy.
My body was part of the sun and the dew,
Not a trace of my death to me clave;
There was scarce a man left on the earth whom I knew,
And another was laid in my grave ;—
I was changed and in heaven; the great sea of blue
Had long washed my soul pure in its wave.
My sorrow was turned to a beautiful dress;
Very fair for my weeping was I,
Arid my heart was renewed, but it bore, none the less,
The great wound that had brought me to die—
The deep wound that She gave who wrought all my distress
Ah, my heart loved her still in the sky !
I wandered alone where the stars’ tracks were bright;
I was beauteous and holy and sad;
I was thinking of her who of old had the might
To have blest me and made my death glad;
I remembered how faithless she was, and how light,
Yea, and how little pity she had.
The love that I bore her was now more sublime,
It could, never be shared now or known ;
And her wound in my heart was a pledge in love’s clime,
Eor her sake I was ever alone,
Till the spirit of God in the fulness of time
Should make perfect all love in his own.
My soul had forgiven each separate tear
She had bitterly wrung from my eyes ;
But I thought of her lightness—ah, sore was my fear
She would fall somewhere never to rise,
And that no one would love her to bring her soul near
To the heaven where love never dies.
�168
IN love’s eternity.
She had drawn me with feigning, and held me a day;
She had taken the passionate price
That my heart gave for love—with no doubt or delay—
For I thought that her smile would suffice ;
She had played with, and wasted, and then cast away
The true heart that could never love twice.
And false must she be; she had followed the cheat
That ends loveless and hopeless below ;
I remembered her words’ cruel worldly deceit
When she bade me forget her and go.
She could ne’er have believed after death we might meet,
Or she would not have let me die so !
I thought and was sad ; the blue fathomless seas
Bore the white clouds in luminous throng,
And the souls that had love were in each one of these ;
They passed by with a great upward song :
They were going to wander beneath the fair trees
In high Eden—their joy would be long.
An age it is since : the great passionate bloom
Of eternity burns more intense ;
The whole heaven draws near to its beautiful doom
With a deeper, a holier sense ;
It feels ready to fall on His bosom in whom
Is each love and each love’s recompense.
How sweet to look back to that desolate space
When the heaven scarce my heaven seemed !
She came suddenly, swiftly, a great healing grace
Filled her features and forth from her streamed !
With a cry our lips met, and a long close embrace
Made the past like a thing I had dreamed.
‘ Ah, love,’ she began, ‘ when I found you were dead
I was changed and the world was changed too ;
On a sudden I felt that the sunshine had fled,
And the flowers and summer gone too ;
Life but mocked me ; I found there was nothing instead
But to turn back and weep all in you.
When you were not there to fall down at my feet,
And pour out the whole passionate store
Of the heart that was made to make my heart complete,
In true words that my memory bore,
Then I found that those words were the only words sweet,
And I knew I should hear them no more.
*
�in love’s eternity.
‘ I found that my life was grown empty again ;
Day and year now I had but to learn
How my heaven had come to me—sought me in vain,
And was gone from me ne’er to return :
Too earthly and winterly now seemed the plain
Of dull life where the heart ceased to burn !
‘ And soon with a gathering halo was seen,
O’er a dim waste that fell into night,
Your coming, your going—as though it had been
The fair track of an angel of light;
And my dream showed you changed in a spirit’s full sheen
Fleeing from me in far lonely flight.
‘ My Angel! ’twas then with a soul’s perfect stake '
You came wooing me, day after day,
With soft eyes that shed tears for my sake and the sake
Of intense thoughts your lips would not say ;
’Twas a love, then, like this my heart cared not to take !
’Twas a heart like this I cast away !
‘ Ah yes !—but your love was a fair magic toy
That you gave to a child who scarce deigned
To receive it—forsook it for some passing joy,
Never guessing the charm it contained :
But you gave it and left it, and none could destroy
The fair talisman where it remained.
‘And, surely, no child—but a woman at last
Found your gift where the child let it lie,
Understood the whole secret it held, sweet and vast,
The fair treasure a world could not buy;
And believed not the meaning could ever have past,
Any more than the giver could die.
‘ And then did that woman’s whole life, with a start,
Own its lover, its saviour, its lord ;
He had come, he had wooed her,—and lo, her dull heart
Had not hailed him with one stricken chord
Of whole passion—had suffered him e’en to depart
Without hope of a lover’s reward !
‘ But, surely, there failed not at length his least look,
His least pleading, his most secret tear
Quite to win her and save her; her heart truly took
A fond record of all: very dear,
Very gracious he seemed; and for him she forsook
The drear ruin her soul had come near.
169
�170
IN love’s ETERNITY.
‘ For him she made perfect her life, till she laved
Her soul pure in the infinite blue :
O thou Lover, who once, for a love deathless ci'aved
A brief heaven of years frail and few,
Take the child whom you loved and the woman you saved
In the Angel who now blesses you ! ’
She ceased. To my soul’s deepest sources the sense
Of her words with a full healing crept,
And my heart was delivered with rapture intense
From the wound and the void it had kept;
Then I saw that her heart was a heaven—immense
As my love ! And together we wept.
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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In love's eternity
Creator
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O'Shaughnessy, Arthur William Edgar
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 167-170 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2. Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
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[1871]
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G5316
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (In love's eternity), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
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LAUREATE DESPAIR
A DISCOURSE GIVEN AT
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL
DECEMBER nth 1SS1.
BY
Moncure D. Conway, M.A.
LONDON
II, SOUTH PLACE FINSBURY.
PRICE
TWOPENCE.
�FREDERICK G. HICKSON & Co.
257,
High Holborn,
London, W.c.
�LAUREATE DESPAIR.
T ET me say at once that I am glad the Poet Laureate
J—4 has written the poem called “ Despair/’ which I
propose to criticise. It is a cry out of the heart of an
earnest man; it utters the sorrow with which many
people in our time see their old dreams fading, and no
new ones rising in their place; and it reminds free
thinkers that theirs is a heavy responsibility and duty.
They have to meet and respond to that need and pain
■which thousands feel where one can give it expression.
Men of science and philosophers do not always under
stand this. The most eminent of them are pursuing
ndeals far more beautiful to them than those that have set.
They have special knowledge, or special aims, which
Kindle into pillars of fire before their enthusiasm, and can
Inot see how to those of other studies and pursuits their
guiding splendour is a pillar of smoke rising from a fair
world slowly consumed. The 'man of science, hourly
joccupied with discoveries which blaze upon him, star by
fetar, till his reason is as a vault sown with eternal lights,
feels that he is in the presence of conceptions beside
Which the visions of Dante and Milton are frescoes of a
�( 4 )
in his eye a latter-day glory of which history is the pro
phecy and developed man the fulfilment. Such enthu
siasms imply continual studies, occupations, duties, which,
leave little room for attention to the shadows these lights
cast upon the old world of dreams—each shadow a dogma
or its phantom. Nevertheless, that world of dreams,,
shades, phantoms, is still real to many. It is real not
only to the ignorant, whom it terrifies, and to the selfish,
whose power rests on it, but to spiritual invalids, whoneed sympathy. And, beyond this reality, the phantasmson which religion and society were'lfounded possess a
quasi-reality even for robust minds. You may recall the
saying of Madame de Stael, that “ she did not believe in
ghosts, but was afraid of them.” After dogmas are dead
their ghosts walk the earth; and even some who no
longer believe in the ghosts are still afraid of them.
When their intellects are no longer haunted their nerves
are.
There are others, again, for whose vision’or nerves the
pleasant dogmas alone survive in this attenuated, ghostly
form. They no longer believe in the ghosts, but still love
them. Of this class is the literary artist. To the pictorial
artist a ruin is more picturesque than the most comfort
able dwelling. ’Tis said of an eminent art-critic that,
being invited to visit America, he replied that he could
not think of visiting a country where'there were no ruins.
Alfred Tennyson is the consummate artist in poetry. We
all know with what tender sentiment Tennyson has
�( 5
)
■' painted the scenery of Arthur’s time, with what felicity
described many other reliques of human antiquity.
“ His eye will not look upon a bad colour.” He sees
■'® the mouldering ruins in their picturesque aspects, leaving
lout of sight the noxious weeds and vermin that infest
Anthem. Where these loathsome things appear no man
more recoils from them. If the White Ladies of Superstition haunt them, these he admires ; but he impales the
gnomes and vampyres.
j In this, his latest poem, “ Despair,” he shows a childlike
lil simplicity of desire to retain all the pleasant and reject all
-f| the unpleasant consequences of the same principles. His
Jl attitude is indeed kindlier to the agnostic than to the
-J orthodox ; for the first he has lamentation, for the other
His denunciation of orthodoxy is bitter. The
Tf anathema.
r poem is the supposed utterance of a man to his former
ffi ■ minister. “ A man and his wife, having lost faith in God
u and hope of a life to come, and being utterly miserable in
this, resolve to end themselves by drowning. The woman
is drowned, but the man is saved by the minister of the
sect he had attended.” He has no gratitude for the
rf! minister who rescued him, only a curse, attributing to him
[fi the first cause of the hopeless horrors amid which the two
01 found themselves.
He tells the minister they broke away
111 from Christ because Christ seemed to speak of hell, and
331 so they passed from a cheerless night to a drearier day—
rt from horrible belief to total unbelief.
Where you bawl'd the dark side of your faith, and a God of
eternal rage
�( 6
)
Till you flung us back on ourselves, and the human heart, and
the Age.
But pity that Pagan held it a vice—was in her and in me,
Helpless, taking the place of the pitying God that should be I
Pity for all that aches in the grasp of an idiot power,
And pity for our own selves on an earth that bore not a
flower.
Again he says :
Were there a God, as you say,
His Love would have power over hell till it utterly vanish’d
away.
Ah, yet—I have had some glimmer at times, in my gloomiest
woe,
Of a God behind all—after all—the Great God, for aught that
I know :
But the God of Love and of Hell together-they cannot;be™ Jhou?ht: ,
It there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and
bring him to nought!
This is what the Poet Laureate thinks of the God of every
creed in Christendom, for every creed maintains an
eternal hell.
But the agnostic, the know-nothing sceptic, is summoned
to bear his share in this tragedy of hopelessness and
suicide, fl he poet does not suggest that disbelief in a
future life or in a Deity would alone lead to suicide. In
his imaginary case unbelief is only a factor. The man
and wife were in terrible trouble. One of their two sons
had died ; the eldest had fled after committing forgery on
his own father, bringing him to ruin. It is under such
fearful circumstances that, without faith or hope, they sink
into despair. The man says :
Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of
pain,
If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,
�( 7 )
And the homeless planet at length will be wheeled thro’ the
silence of space,
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race ?
*
*
*
*
*
*
For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press,
When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are
whooping at noon,
And Doubt is the lord of this dunghill, and crows to the sun
and moon,
Till the Sun and Moon of our science are both of them turned
to blood,
And Hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow
of good.
It is a striking fact, in our sceptical age, that such
lamentations as these are not heard from among the poor
and the drudges of society. They who are asking whether
life be worth living without the old faith in immortality,
and they who say it is not, are persons of position and
wealth. Any one who has taken the pains to observe the
crowds of working people who attend the lectures of
secularists, or to read their journals, will know they are
cheery enough. We never hear any of them bemoaning
the vanished faith. In truth the more important fact is
not that the belief in immortality is gone, or the belief in
Deity, but that belief in a desirable immortality and a
desirable Deity has gone out of the hearts of many. In
one of his humourous pieces Lucian, describing his ima
ginary journey through Hades, says he could recognise
those who had been kings or rich people on earth by theii
loud lamentations. They had parted with so much.
Those who on earth had been poor and wretched were
quiet enough. "We may observe similai phenomena in
�( 8 )
this psychological Hades, or realm of the Unseen and
Unknown, into which modern thought has entered. Those
to whom God has allotted palaces, plenty, culture, beauty,
can eas ly believe Him a God of Love ,• and it were to
them heaven enough to wake from the grave to a continu
ance of the same. But they who have known hunger,
cold, drudgery, ignorance, have no such reason to say
God is Love. Such may naturally say, “ If we have
waked up in this world in dens of misery, why, under the
same providence, may we not wake up to a future of
misery ?” The old creeds met that difficulty. They
showed a miraculous revelation on the subject, by which
God had established an insurance against future misery,
an assurance of future luxury. It was all to be super
natural. By miraculous might poverty was to be changed
to wealth, the hovel to a palace, rags to fine raiment,
ignorance to knowledge, folly to wisdom, and scarlet sin
to snow-pure virtue. Without such tremendous trans
formations the masses of the miserable could have no
interest in immortality. But gradually the comfortable
scholarship and theology of our time, in trying to prove a
God of nature, have done away with the God of super
nature. Their deity of design is loaded with all the bad
designs under which men suffer. Fifty years ago Carlyle
groaned because he could not believe in a Devil any more.
Philosophy had reasoned a Devil out of existence. The
result was to make the remaining power responsible for
all the evils in the world, and ultimately bling him into
�( 9
X
J loubt and disgrace too. Dismssing the Devil out of faith
alias not dismissed evil, the mad work of earthquake, hurriiAane and fire. As we think of the shores with their wrecks,
$.s we think of those people in Vienna gathered around the
^harre 1 remains of their families and friends, must we not
z.iisk if this is providential work what would be diabolical
oivork ? Reason says to Theology, “ At least you can be
QKilent, and not malign the spirit of good within us by
z'asking us to call that without good which we know to be
JIDad ! ”
. .
P| Similarly theologians in trying to rationalise the idea of
S
They have tacked it on
1®immortality have naturalised it.
;o evolution. But what the miserable suffer by is evolu
tion : unless they can be assured of a supernatural change,
pf a heaven, they do not want to be evolved any more.
. Only a miraculous revelation could promise them that
ijBniraculous heaven; and the. only alleged revelation is
. Rejected by the culture and the charity of our age. It is
n&enied by Culture, because it reveals some impossibilities ;
Xy Charity, because it reveals a God capable of torturing
Q|Deople more than they are tortured here. What are eight
.lihundred people burned swiftly in a theatre compared to
ijlnillions burning in hell for ages, if not for ever, as Revelaidkon declares ? Our ?oet Laureate is a man of both
iXulture and charity ; he cannot sing pf a revelation which
^Includes Hell, however he may cling to hopes that came
Xy the sanae revelation, or mourn at thought of pai ting
icKrom a world so fair.
�(
10 )
Candour compels us to admit that there is as yet no
certainty of a future life for the individual consciousness.
The surviving seed of the human organism if it exist has
not been discovered. There is nothing unnatural in the
theory. It would not be more miraculous to find our
selves in another world than to find ourselves in this. If
two atoms of the primeval nebula, thrown together, had
been for one instant capable of speculation, how little
could they have imagined a company of men and women
gathered to meditate on life and eternity 1 All this is
very marvellous if we conceive it contemplated from a
point of non-existence. For all we know there are more
marvels beyond.
But suppose there are none ; suppose death be the end
of us; is there any reason for despair ? Even for the
man and woman on whom life had brought dire
calamities, was there any reason for suicide ? Just the
reverse, I should say. Belief that this life was all were
reason for making the most of it. Belief that their ruin
would not be repaired hereafter were reason for trying torepair it here, as well as they could. Has Tennyson
evolved his man and woman out of his inner con
sciousness ? It is doubtful if in the annals of freethought
such a case can be pointed out; though many instances
may be shown where believers in a future world slew
themselves to get there. Suicide was a mania in some
old convents until the church fixed its ' canon 'gainst self
slaughter.’
�(
II
)
• However, it may be that instances ofthe kind Tennyson
■describes may occur. We are but on the threshold ofthe
age when men are to live and work without certainty
of future rewards and payments. The doubts now in the
head must presently reach the heart, then influence the
hand ; if people have built their houses on the sand of
mythology, and they fall, it may be that some will not
have the heart to begin new buildings on the rock.
What then ? It will be only the continuation of the old
law—survival of the fittest. Suicides at least do not live
to increase their race. Only those tend to prevail in
nature who can 'adapt themselves to the conditions ofnature. If nature has arrived at a period of culture when
•supernaturalism passes out of the human faith, then they
"who sink into despair or death, on that account, show
themselves no longer adapted to nature. There will be a
■survival of those more adapted to the new ideas ; who
prefer them ; who do not aspire to live for ever, but have
.a heart for any fate, and a religion whose forces and joys
are concentrated in the life that now is. If natuie and
humanity need such a race for their furtherance, such a
race will be produced ; and they will read poems like
this “ Despair,” with a curiosity mixed with compassion,
wondering how their ancestors could have been troubled,
about such a matter.
. Something like this has occurred in the past in several
instances.
While Christians find fullest expression of
their joyful emotions in the psalmody and prophecy ofthe
�(
I2
)
Hebrews they often forget that those glowing hymns say
no word about a future life. There is no clear affirmation
of immortality in the Old Testament, but much to the
contrary.
Buddhism also, which has awakened the
enthusiasm of a third of a human race, arose as a protest
against theism and immortality. In such instances therewould appear to have been reactions against previous,
theologies, which had so absorbed mankind in metaphysics
and' speculations about the future as to belittle this life and
cause neglect of this world. Despised and degraded nature
avenged this wrong by making asceticism its own
destruction, and worldliness a source of strength and
*
survival.
Some such Nemesis seems to be following
the extreme other-worldliness which, for so many Christian
centuries, has bestowed the fruits of human toil upon
supposed supernatural interests. This earthward swing of
the slow pendulum of faith is not likely to be arrested
until religion has been thoroughly humanised. As a
brave clergyman (Rev. Harry Jones) warned the Church
Congress at York, the Church will never conquer
Secularism, except by doing more for mankind than
Secularism does.
We must almost remember that no oscillations of the
pendulum between theology and humanity, no reactions,
determine the question. As Old Testament Secularism
* As it is said in Ecclesiasticus : “ He has also, set worldli
ness in their heart, which man cannot understand the works
that God does, from beginning to end.”—Dr. Kalisch’s
Translation.
�s
i:
fi
r
'I
followed Egyptian Mysticism, Talmudic visions of heaven
succeeded. Every ebb alternates with a flow in the tides
of human feeling; and these tides are the generations which
nature successively creates to fufil successive conditions,
and to find their joy in such fufilment, whatever be the
despair of the ebbing at faith of the flowing tide.
| But, no doubt, these rising and falling ages of speculation
:j and religion will show calmer and happier phenomena in
h] the future than in the past. There are traces in the earth
'>j of tremendous operations in the past, which geology
was unable to account for by any forces now acting,
i| until Astronomy discovered that the Moon had been
steadily receding from the earth, its mother. The moon
is now 240,000 miles away, but is proved to have b^en
o once only 40,000 miles distant. At that period the tides
were to the tides of our time as 216 to 1. This country
r 4 and many others must then have been flooded with every
if tide, and the enormous geologic results are now understood. There would appear to be some correspondence in
id all this with mental and moral phenomena. In religious
‘31 geology also there are traces of convulsions and huge
511 formations which it has been difficult to account for,—
at mighty religious wars, massacres, whole races committing
I?) slow suicide for the sake of their Gods. Comparative.
studies now show that the lunar theology was much nearer
of to mankind then than now, and the tides more furious.
T1 The extraneous influence is withdrawing more and more.
Where theologians used to burn each other they now fight
o| combats with pens. Where heretics were massacred they
�(
U )
are now only visited with dislike. Instead of crusades,,
with Richard and Saladin, we have young poets singing
on the crest of a sparkling tide, and their elder, from
refluent waves, murmuring rhythmic Despair. There isa vast difference between the emotions awakened
by belief in a deity near at hand, pressing down upon the
life, and those awakened by a hypothetical deity of
philosophy or ethics. When men attributed their every
hourly hap, good or bad, to the personal favour or to the
anger of their deity, their feeling at any supposed affront
to their deity, mingled with selfishness and terror, rose to
a pitch very different from any now known when few
men refer any event to supernatural intervention. Yet
do the great movements of the universe go on, the cycles
and the periods fufil themselves, the planets roll on new
orbits with changed revolutions; and, whatever be the
corresponding changes in human opinion, they cannot alter
the eternal fact.
If immortality be the law of the universe, it will be
reached by believers and disbelievers alike. But, could
the world be made absolutely certain of it beforehand, by
the only means of certainty—scientific proof—what were
the advantage ? It would no longer be a miraculous thing
promising all a leap from earthly sorrow to heavenly
bliss, but merely a law of nature—mere continuance—the
millions rising from their graves to go on with existence,
just as they will rise from their beds to-morrow. There
would be no further note of despair from the Laureates ;
but how would it be with the general world ? One of the
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most powerful poems of our time has been written by a.
French lady, Louise Ackermann. It is entitled “LesMalheueux”—the Unhappy. The last day has come ; the
trumpet has sounded. A great angel descends ; uncovers
all the graves of the dead, and bids them come forth for
everlasting life. Some eagerly come forth, but a large
number refuse. To the divine command that they shall
emerge, their voice is heard in one utterance. They tell
him they have had enough of life in His creation ; they
have passed through thorns, and over flinty paths—from
agony to agony. To such an existence He called them—
they suffered it; and now they will forgive Him only if
He will let them rest, and forget that they have lived,
Such is the despair with which one half of the world
might answer the joy of the other should a mere natural
immortality be proved.
A great deal of the poetry of the world has invested
with glory man’s visions of heaven and heavenly beings.
The very greatest poets have invested nature and theearth with glory, and set the pulses of the human heart
to music. This has been the greatness of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe. But the majority have given the world
visions of heaven, divine dramas, and hymns of immortality ; and it is these that have been taught to earth’s
millions in their infancy. These happy hymns have for
ages soothed sorrowing hearts, and helped the masses of
mankind to bear the burthens of life—this not only in
Christendom, but in so-called Pagan lands and ages..
These have been as the songs of Israfel in Eastern faith.
�They said a sweet singer among the angels left heaven to
go forth over the suffering world and soothe mortals with
his heavenly lyre and his hymns, until all were able to
Tear the griefs of life because of the joys beyond,
rehearsed by Israfel. But once—while this angel was
^singing with his celestial seven-stringed lyre—one string
of it snapped. No one could be found to mend the string
-or supply its place; and, every time Israfel tried to make
music, it was all jangling discords, through that broken
■string. So Israfel took his flight, and never returned to
the world. The tale sounds like a foreboding of what has
in these last days befallen the sacred poetry which so long
made the world forget its griefs. The lyre of Israfel is
the human heart, and the snapped string is its faith in a
supernatural heaven. It has been snapped by the
development of nature ; it therefore cannot be restored
unless by a further development: and so Sacred Poetry
has taken its flight from the world—its last great song
being of a Paradise Lost. In other words, the hope of
immortality has ceased to have power to soothe and
uplift those who most needed it, because the recognized
reign of law forbids belief that such life—should it come
—would be very different from the life that uow is.
■»
But there is another story of a broken string, with a
•different ending. It comes from Greece (Browning
has finely told it in The Two Poets of Croisic), the land
of Art and of the Beauty that adorns the earth. It is of
a bard who came with his lyre to sing for a prize. He
•came with other competitors before the solemn judges.
�The others had all sung their poems ; now came our youth,
with his. His theme rose high and higher, till at length
he came to the great theme of his song—Love. Just then,
he felt beneath his finger that one string of his lyre had
snapt, a string that presently must do its part, or else his
song be put to shame. On, on, his strain went, as if to
its death ; but just as he drew near his note’ of Despair,
lo, a cricket chirped loud, chimed in with just that needed
note ! Saved, he went on, and ever as he returned to this
broken string the cricket duly made good the snapt string,
and thus the judges missed no note of the music, which
won the crown. On the poet’s statue was carved the
cricket which contributed from the lowly hearth the
needed note in that hymn of Love, when the old string
had broken. That tale too, I doubt not, came out of that
truest of all poets, the human heart. For the heart of our
race is aged in such experiences as those which elicit
rhymes of Despair. It has seen beautiful symbols fade in
myriads ; symbols of heavens innumerable, every one
clung to by suffering Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, as
much as any Christian clings to their successors. It has
seen troops of bright gods and goddesses perish, nymphs
and fairies leaving wood and vale desolate ; and yet, just
as its gladdest heart-string has snapt, its faith in heaven
given way, some cheery note from the earth has come to
remind it of the love near at hand, of the divine joy van
ished from its ancient heavens only to be revealed at the
hearth.
A cricket-chirp ! That is all. While our great Laureate
�(
i8
)
is employing his art to sing of despair, and other poets
aspire to ambitious themes, the notes are as yet but few
and humble, which cheer man with a trust in the love that
is near him. But there are such notes making up for the
■creed’s snapt string. Nor are they near only the happy.
The cricket sings from many an overshadowed hearth. It
tells the heart to be brave, and never count life lost so
long as courage remain. It bids man cease thinking so
much about himself—whether he be likely to die next year,
or die for ever—and go fall in love with something, an
out-self; to dispel morbid meditations. It warns us not to
worry over what may never happen, or, if it happen, may
be for the best, but turn to make what paradise we can on
•earth ; nor admit into it the destroyer of every paradise,
■care about the morrow, or about the far future. All these
spiritual despairs are diseases of the imagination. In a
sense, it is hereditary disease. For many generations our
ancestors employed their imaginations for little else than
to realise the charnal-house and picture happiness or
horrors beyond it. So their children have inherited a
morbid tendency of imagination, whereby they may turn
from the happiness they have and make themselves
miserable with dreams about its vanishing. Such work of
the imagination is illegitimate. Imagination is the
brightest angel of the head, as Love is of the heart; they
are twin angels and their office is to make life rich and
beautiful. And they can so enrich and adorn life, though
passed in a hovel, though amid pain, though destined to
end for ever, provided they be not dismissed from their
�(
W )
post of present duty and sent wandering through clouds
| to find love’s objects, or digging into graves to find life’s
i fountain. I love and admire our Laureate for his great
; heart and his beautiful art, but will not follow his muse,
I singing of Despaii, except with a hope that it is his way
I of writing its epitaph. I will follow the happy minstrel.
[ That poet who shows life to be environed with beauty,
I makes deserts blossom in his song, whose poem is a
! fountain of joy for all the living, bringing forgetfulness
[to pain, and a sweet lullaby for the dying—that shall be
I my poet. And if, among the minstrels of our time, such
[happy ones connot be found, because some string of faith
[or heart is snapped, then let us listen to the cheery
[ cricket, to the voices of children, to the gentle words of
affection, to the unbroken song of the merry hearts in
nature that remember only its loveliness. We will listen
Ito these until the new Poetry shall arise—as arise it will
|—with fresh songs, to bid all spirits rejoice in that which
to the old brought despair. That is the task of Poetry
and Art. Every new thing destroying the old brings
(despair; none brought more than Christianity—shatter
ing the fair gods, and Protestantism—over whose havoc of
prayers and pieties Luther’s poor wife wept; but Poetry
(and Art did their work, and none now long for restoration
|of Aphrodite or Madonna. So also shall our age of
iscience find its poets and artists, and our children shall no
snore long for a buried faith than we for the holy dolls of
jcrumbled altars, whose power to charm has fled.
�SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL
WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
Prices.
Demonology and Devil-lore................
.............................£1 3
The Wandering Jew ...
.............................
5
Thomas Carlyle
.............................
.............................
5
The Sacred Anthology : A Book of Ethnical Scriptures ... IO
Idols and Ideals
............................
6
The Earthward Pilgrimage ...
............................
5
Republican Superstitions
................
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2
Christianity ....
............................
1
Human Sacrifices in England
............................
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Sterling and Maurice...
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Intellectual Suicide ...
................
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The First Love Again
............................
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Entering Society
.............................
.............................
0
The Religion of Children
.............................
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The Criminal’s Ascension
............................
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The Religion of Humanity ...
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The Rising Generation
.............................
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A Last Word
.............................
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Thomas Carlyle
............................
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The Oath and its Ethics
................
............................ .02
BY Mr. FREDERIC
“ Pantheism and Cosmic Emotion ”...
4
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6
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2
2
2
2
2
2
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HARRISON.
.............................
0 2
BY Dr. ANDREW WILSON.
The Religious Aspects of Health
............................
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BY A J. ELLIS, B.A., F.R.S., &c., &c.
Salvation
.........................................
Truth......................................................
Speculation .........................................
Duty......................................................
The Dyer’s Hand
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Comte’s Religion of Humanity
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BY W. C. COUPLAND, M.A.
.............................
The Conduct of Life ...
Hymns and Anthems
................
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Is., 2s., 3s-
REPORT OF THE CONFERENCE OF LIBERAL THINKERS,
1878
...............................................................................
1 0
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Laureate despair: a discourse given at South Place Chapel December 11th 1881
Creator
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 20, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2. A list of works available from the South Place Chapel Library on back page.
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South Place Chapel
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[1881]
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G3352
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Laureate despair: a discourse given at South Place Chapel December 11th 1881), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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English
Alfred Tennyson
Belief and Doubt
Free Thought
Morris Tracts
Poetry
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Text
THE
BEAUTY OF HOLINESS,”
AND
THE HARP OF HELL.
BY
SALADIN,
AUTHOR OF “ GOD AND HIS BOOK,” ETC.
London:
W. STEWART & CO., 41 FARRINGDON ST., E.C-
�New Edition, price is., by post is. id.
THE CONFESSIONAL:
ROMISH AND ANGLICAN.
An Exposure.
By SALADIN.
Contents:—Introduction — Licentiousness of the
Pre-Reformation Church—Lechery of the ConfessionalRitualism : “The Priest in Absolution”—The Anglican
Confessional—Ineffectual Efforts to Suppress Reforming
Tendencies in the Anglican Church—Confessions of an
Escaped Nun—Extracts from Dens and Liguori—Ex
amination of the Church’s Claim to have Fostered
Learning : Pier Attempts at Continency even more
Ruinous than her Self-indulgence—The Relative Crimi
nal Statistics of Catholicism and Protestantism—Ap
pendix.
London:
W. Stewart & Co., 41 Farringdon Street, E.C.
�Q(,cThe "Beauty of Holiness.”
“ Bible Extracts and Assertions in Proof of its Origin ”
is the title of a brochure which I have received by post.
Like all works which feel their position before the law
rather shaky, no printer’s or publisher’s address is given ;
and thus, to escape the possibility of prosecution, by
doubtful means this work has leapt into the greater
evil of making successful prosecution certain, should any
one feel it to be his mission to set the law in motion.
The compiler’s name is not given; but the author from
whom the compilation is made is well known; he is
none other than the Christian deity, and, as he is the
author of one literary production only, and every babe in
this country knows the name of his book, and as my forte
is not supererogation, I need not name it here.
When I was a boy I read a work entitled “ Dodd’s
Beauties of Shakespeare,” this anonymous brochure
should be entitled “Somebody’s Beauties of Deity.” I
confess I do not know much of Deity; but, from the
extracts from his writings which are before me, he must
be a very plain-spoken sort of person, who certainly calls
a spade a spade, and that with a vengeance too. Judging
from modern standards of etiquette, he must evidently
have spent a good deal of his life among costermongers
and the rest of it as bully in a maison-de-joie. Should
any of his own well-paid priests resent this as an asper
sion upon the culture and gentlemanly bearing of “ the
Lord,” I have the pleasure to refer them to what “Rabshakeh said unto them,” * and to the pleasing little
anecdote anent Judah and his daughter-in-law.f “The
* 2 Kings xviii. 27.
f Genesis xxxviii., passim.
�THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.
4
Lord,” judging from the extracts from his book, maybe a
decent enough body in his way; but he can hardly be
described as a cultured writer, and he would certainly be
very questionable company at a young lady’s tea-party.
He has not had the advantage of having James Boswell
for a biographer; but he has got along remarkably well
without him ; and I make bold to say that Dr Johnson
and Jehovah-jireth are the most minutely-biographed
persons in the temple of Fame, and Jehovah has the
advantage of Johnson in this—he himself is the recorder
of his own life and achievements. It must be admitted
that these achievements evince a remarkable versatility
of talent. In his autobiography I find that he “ created
the heavens and the earth,” but that all that he did sub
sequently was not on so magnificent a scale. After
creating the heavens and the earth he did not “ live up to
it,” for I read that, condescendingly, he spued and sent
scabs and winked, and chatted with the devil, and was
troubled with his bowels, and took no pleasure in men’s
legs—neither do gentlemen who go to the Alhambra to
see the ballet; they have no pleasure in men's legs,
and in this they resemble “ the Lord.”
I should be inclined to think that talents that range
from world-making to spueing and winking are of an
order to which the Admirable Crichton could not have
held a candle. The compiler of the “Bible Extracts” has
arranged, with loving care, a list of the feats of the
“ Almighty Maker of heaven and earth.” With a pious
hand, I transcribe them here for the refutation and dis
comfiture of such as allege that of Deity nothing can be
known. I transcribe chapter and verse, which proves
to demonstration that a great deal can be known about
him:—
God
God
God
God
God
God
God
God
walks—Gen. iii. 8.
talks—Deut. v. 24.
smells—Gen. viii. 21.
works—Gen. ii. 2.
rests—Gen. ii. 2.
repents—Gen. vi. 6.
flies—2 Sam. xxii. xi.
sits—Psalm xcix. 1.
�THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.
5
God stands on a wall with a plumb-line—Amos vii. 7.
God spues—Rev. iii. 16.
God laughs—Psalm xxxvii. 13.
God runs like a giant—Job xvi. 14.
God roars like a lion—Hosea xi. 10.
God curses—Gen. viii. 21.
God changes his mind—Exodus xxxii. 14.
God sends lice—Exodus viii. 16.
God sends scabs—Deut. xxviii. 27.
God wrestles with Jacob—Gen. xxxii. 24, 26, 30.
God a tailor and clothier—Gen. iii. 21.
God writes on stone—Deut. iv. 13.
God afraid of man—Gen. iii. 22, 23.
God is a husband—Isa. liv. 5.
God shows his back parts—Exodus xxxiii. 23.
God shaves with a razor that is hired—Isa. vii. 20.
God winks—Acts xvii. 30.
God chats with the devil—Job. i. 7, 8.
God hardens men’s hearts—Exodus xiv. 4.
God takes no pleasure in men’s legs—Psalm cxlvii. 10.
God argues—Job xxiii. 4.
God graves on his palms—Isa. xlix. 16.
God delivers men into the devil’s power—Job ii. 6.
God charges his angels with folly—Job iv. 18.
God distrusts his saints—Job xv. 15.
God causes adultery—2 Sam. xii. xi.
God causes suicide—Jer. viii. 3.
God causes cannibalism—Jer. xix. 9.
God causes desecration of the dead—Jer. viii. 1, 2.
God causes indecency—Isa. xx. 4.
God orders the slaughter of men, women, and chil
dren—1 Sam. xv. 3.
God causes lying—1 Sam. xvi. 1, 2.
God punishes the guiltless—1 Sam. xv. 3.
God uses low language—Jer. xxv. 27.
God is said to possess foolishness—1 Cor. i. 25.
God makes Moses a god—Exodus vii. 1.
God sanctions borrowing without repaying—Exodus
xi. 2 ; xii. 36.
God creates evil—Isa. xlv. 7.
God is a merchant—Hosea xii. 7.
God loves to oppress—Hosea xii. 7.
�6
THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.
God is troubled in his bowels—Jer. iv. 19.
God smites his hands together—Ezek. xxi. 17.
God speaks to fishes—Jonah ii. 10.
God breathes—Gen. ii. 7.
God’s breath causes frost—Jobxxxvii. 10.
God asks questions—Gen. iii. 9.
God is a baker—Exodus xvi. 4.
God works with his fingers—Psalm viii. 3.
God swears—Deut. xxxiv. 4.
God bares his arm—Isa. lii. 10.
God is in hell—Psalm cxxxix. 8.
God considers some men as a smoke in his nose—
Isa. lxv. 5.
God gives bad laws—Ezek. xx. 25.
God finds rest refreshing—Exodus xxxi. 17.
God rewards transgressors—Prov. xxvi. 10.
God creates the wicked for the day of evil—Prov.
xvi. 4.
God is a man—Exodus xv. 3.
God rewards fools—Prov. xxvi. 10.
God is a consuming fire—Deut. iv. 24.
God orders men to drink, be drunken, and spue—
Jer. xxv. 27.
God blasts through his nostrils—Exodus xv. 8.
God requests Moses to “let him alone”—Exodus
xxxii. 9, 10.
God came down to earth in form of a bird—Luke
iii. 22.
God is like soap—Mai. iii. 2.
God takes away nose jewels, etc.—Isa. iii. 21.
God hisses—Zechariah x. 8.
God visits the earth to inspect buildings—Gen. xi. 5.
God was born—Colos. i. 15.
God is weary with repenting—Jer. xv. 1.
God spreads dung on men’s faces—Mai. ii. 3.
And His Son
Jesus orders us to hate our parents and all belongings
—Luke xiv. 26.
Jesus ordered swords—Luke xxii. 36.
Jesus tells us to be improvident—Luke xii. 24.
Jesus sent devils into pigs—Mark v. 13.
�THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.
7
Jesus says he came to cause war, not peace—Matt,
x. 34.
Jesus rode upon two animals at once—Matt. xxi. 7.
Jesus supped after resurrection on broiled fish and
honeycomb—Luke xxiv. 42.
Jesus says all who disbelieve him shall be damned—
Mark xvi. 16.
Jesus says all who ever came before him were as thieves
and robbers—John x. 8.
If the work before us had been a chemical, instead of a
literary, production, it might have been put into a phial
and labelled “ Pure Essence of Dunghills.’’ Only a
stern sense of duty could have induced the compiler to
engage in such a labour of disgust. I have gone through
the Greek and Roman classics, Boccacio, and “ The
Merry Muses,’’ as well as the pages of “ Thomas Little,”
and Tobias Smollett; but “the Lord” beats all of them
at writing clean dirt.
The worst of “ the Lord ” is, he has few traits to redeem
liis coarseness. We find in Psalm xxxvii. 13 that he
laughs : but it certainly cannot be at his own jokes. Wit
will redeem much; but pure coarseness is irredeemable.
However, let me say it to his credit (I have always
tried to give the very devil his due), he never seems, to
me, to indulge in a libidinous tale just for the mere
love of the thing. At a moment's notice he will go off
from his dirt into a rigmarole about breeches and candle
sticks and fringes, which shows that he does not deal in
dirt for dirt's dear sake, but that he is such an unsophisti
cated old innocent that he does not know dirt when
he sees it. In this age and country we have come to be
aesthetic and fastidious ; and, as for “the Lord,” “his
ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts,”
and, for this same fact, those who glance at the “ Bible
Extracts’’ will be devoutly thankful.
Again, in the interests of “the Lord,” I willingly admit
that there is no absolutely fixed standard of taste, more
than there is an absolutely fixed standard of morals. The
England that accepted the English Bible of 1611 was
leagues away from the England of to-day. Its English
is that of the Shakspearian era, and, upon the whole,
�THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.
Shakspeare is just about as indecent as “his maker.”
The tastes of England and Heaven were, at that time,
about on a par ; and, with the then standard of taste, the
Bible did not strike any one as indecent. The Black
friar’s theatre, in which Shakespeare himself had a share,
has been described, and, from the description, we can
gauge the state of public taste and morals. There was
no chalet to which the playgoers could retire; but, as
substitute, a big tub stood on the floor, serving an ex
ceedingly useful, if not over-ornamental, purpose. Plain
old Jah, in i Kings xvi. ii, and elsewhere, refers to
a “wall,” and the English playgoers, who used their
tub and cracked their now unspeakable jokes, did not
see anything improper in Jehovah-jireth and his “wall.”
So much for the manners of England about the time
when the country was first made acquainted with the
manners of Heaven.
Gadzooks and marry-come-up, Jehovah could get along
well with Queen Elizabeth ; but he is out of all harmony
with Queen Victoria. Elizabeth could have read these
“ Bible Extracts,” and had a good guffaw over them with
Cecil or Raleigh ; but the sight of the very first page
would drive Victoria into the hands of Sir William Gull.
The truth is, modern intellect has not done so much as
modern sentiment to knock a hole in the drum of
Holy Writ. The flames of hell still roar and sputter
away at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, and at one or two
Bethels of the vulgarian order; but nowhere that culti
vated nineteenth-century men and women do congregate
is the doctrine of hell now preached. Hell has not been
reasoned out of the Christian creed; it has simply been
rejected because it is revolting to the moral sentiment of
modern times. When you reason Hell away, you will
reason away Heaven also; for, in theology, they are
correlated, and stand or fall together.
Heaven still
stands, not because it is more reasonable than Hell, but
simply because it is not so repugnant to the moral senti
ment of this latter quarter of the nineteenth century.
zEstheticism has not reached a very high level even yet.
It can stand wing-flapping and “holy, holy!” but it
draws the line at chain-clanking and yelling and brim
stone.
�THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.
9
The “ Bible Extracts ” is far from commendable
reading; but the disagreeable task of noticing it, and
what must have been the still more disagreeable task of
compiling it, will be served if it, to some extent, help to
rend away the veil of pseudo-sanctity which hangs around
the book which is the Protestant fetish. It cannot be
urged that it is a small matter that the Bible offends
against the canons of taste; for, had I space, I could show
that this is only another way of saying that it offends
against the canons of morals. True, the standard of
morals differs in different ages ; but the standard of
morals which obtains in any particular epoch is, practic
ally, fixed and immutable for that epoch, and to attempt to
roughly and hastily upset that standard is more than a
venial offence against Mrs Grundy and Mrs Gamp—it is
treason against the best interests of mankind. Such
treason Holy Writ is perpetrating in Europe to-day wher
ever it is read; but the saving clause is, it is not read
by one in a thousand even of those who pretend to
regard it as infallible and associated with the highest
solemnities of their career in life, and their destiny when
life is over. The principal part of the Bible with the
ordinary Protestant John Smith is the fly leaf in front of
it, on which are inscribed the date of his marriage with
Janet, and the dates of the births of all the young Smiths
which were the result of the union of John and Janet.
If the book be big enough and gilt enough, it is also
useful for laying on the window-sill with a small anti
macassar over it, the whole surmounted with a little vase
of flowers. The ordinary chapel-goer is as ignorant of
the Bible as he is of the Koran or the Zend-Avesta.
And it is through this very ignorance of it that it has
been possible for him to rise to an elevation of purity
and delicacy of word and deed which leaves “ the Lord ”
and his crude and plain-spoken book far behind—a land
mark nearly out of sight, away back in the wilderness
through which the human race has marched to the
comparatively green pastures and relatively still waters
that are now theirs to enjoy.
�The Harp of Hell.
Robert Burns wished, in the interest of the deil him
self, as well as in the interest of others concerned, that
he (the deil) might—
“ Aiblins tak’ a thocht and men’.”
The deil has certainly followed the suggestion. He is
not the malefic fiend he once was; and, as I have said, he
is the most interesting character in the Christian drama,
and he has the most “go ” in him. His personal friend,
Burns, wrote an address to him, distinguished by great
candour, and John Lapraik responded on behalf of the
deil; but I should say the deil had not authorised him
to do so, as the “answer” is but poor, and has nothing
devilish in the ring of it.
As I am more of a heretic than “ blithe Lapraik ” was,
and, in consequence, presumably more of a personal
friend of the deil, I will take the liberty of replying to
Burns on the deil’s behalf. My reply is based upon an
anonymous and fugitive performance which fell into my
hands some years ago.
THE DEIL’S ADDRESS TO ROBERT BURNS.
Oh, wae’s me, Rab 1 hae ye gane gyte ?
What is’t that gar’s ye tak’ delight
To jeer at me, and ban, and flyte,
In Scottish rhyme,
And falsely gie me a’ the wyte
O’ ilka crime ?
�THE HARP OF HELL.
“Auld Hangie’s” no a bonnie name,
But just the warst word in your wame,
But I forgie ye a’ the same ;
I’ll let ye see
Quite plain what’s what, when ye come hame,
And live wi’ me.
An’, Rab, fu’ frankly let me tell,
Ilk ane o’ mettle like yoursel’
Had far, far better mop and mell
Wi’ rattlin’ chiels
Sic as ye’ll fin’ down deep in hell
Amang the deils
Than ye had lie in Abram’s lap,
Or hingin’ on by Sara’s pap,
Giein’ yer wings an extra flap,
A heevenly hen,
And leavin’ aff the milky drap
To scraich “ Amen/”
O’ auld nicknames ye hae a fouth,
O’ sharp, sarcastic rhymes a routh,
And as you’re bent to gie them scouth,
’Twere just as weel
For ye to tell the honest truth,
Just like the deil.
Rab, far mair lees are tauld in kirk
By every bletherin’, preachin’ stirk
Wi’ whinin’ theologic quirk
Than deils daur tell
Down in the blackest brumstane mirk
O’ lowest hell.
I dinna mean to note the whole
O’ your unfounded rigmarole ;
I’d rather haud my tongue, and thole
Your clishmaclavers,
Than try to plod through sic a scroll
O’ senseless havers.
O’ warlocks and o’ witches a’,
O’ spunkies, kelpies, great or sma’,
There isna’ ony truth ava’
In what you say ;
For siccan frichts I never saw,
Up to this day.
11
�12
THE HARP OF HELL.
The truth is, Rab, that wicked men,
When caught in crimes that are their ain,
To find a help, are unco’ fain
To share the shame ;
And so they shout, wi’ micht and main,
The deil’s to blame.
Thus I am blamed for Adam’s fa’ ;
You say that I maist ruined a’ ;
I’ll tell you ae thing, that’s no twa,
It’s just a lee ;
I fasht nae wi’ the pair ava’,
But loot them be.
I’d nae mair haun in that transgression,
Ye deem the source o’ a’ oppression,
And wae, and daith, and man’s damnation,
Than you yoursel’;
I filled a decent situation
When Adam fell.
I was a god o’ the first water,
An’ wad tae Heeven’s auldest daughter ;
But, by my sooth, the dad that gat her
Trod on my taes—
I took my sword an’ tae the slaughter,
Amang his faes.
For I could neither thole nor dree
Or god or deil to tramp on me ;
An’, Rab, in this I’m like to thee,
Fu’ croose and bauld,
Wha car’d na no a single flea
For Daddy Auld.
Nae doot I hae o’ sins enoo,
But lees, an’ neither sma’ nor few,
A tail like dragon, foot like coo,
Hae gien to me,
As, Rabbin, mony an evil mou’
Has spak’ o’ thee.
And, Rab, gin ye’ll just read your Bible
Instead o’ blin’ Jock Milton’s fable,
I’ll plank a croon on ony table
Against a groat,
Tae fin’ my name ye’ll no be able
In a’ the plot.
�THE HARP OF HELL.
Your mither, Eve, I kent her b rawly ;
A dainty quean she was, and wally,
But destitute o’ prudence haly,
The witeless hissie ;
Aye bent on fun, and whiles on folly
And mischief busy.
But, by my saul, she was a limmer
At ever kittled heart o’ kimmer ;
Nane were bonnier, some were primmer,
For, gif ye please,
She jinked about, through a’ the simmer,
Without chemise.
The loesome lassie wadna bin’,
Just whaur forbidden she wad rin,
A’ Natur’ sought her smile to win,
An’ deil may care,
Up tae her bonnie waist in sin,
She jumpit fair.
An’, Rantin Rab, I tell ye true
There’s much o’ mither Eve in you ;
So rein ye up, or ye sail rue,
I rede ye weel,
An’ tak’ a word o’ warnin’ noo,
Though frae the deil.
Eve had a leg like Bonnie Jean ;
She was a wily, winsome quean,
Wi’ rosy mou’ an’ pawky een,
Airms warm an’ saft,
She needit only to be seen
To drive ane daft.
Had Jah himsel’ been in that yaird
An’ tae that witchin’ lassie pair’d,
As sure as daith he’d kissed the swaird
E’en Jah himsel’;
E’en he wad no hae better fared
Whaur Adam fell.
An’, Rab, my birkie, gie’s yer haun’,
Now whether ye be deil or man,
If she says Na ye winna stan’
Her wiles ava,
But like a tree by wind up-blawn
Ye feckless fa’.
13
�14
THE HARP OE HELL.
As for that famous serpent story,
Tae lee’ I’d baith be shamed and sorry ;
It’s just a clever allegory,
An’ weel writ doon ;
The wark o’ an Egyptian Tory—
I ken’t the loon.
Your tale o’ Job, the man o’ Uz,
Wi’ reekit claes, and reested guiz,
My hornie hooves and brocket phiz,
Wi’ ither clatter,
Is maistly, after a’ the bizz,
A moonshine matter.
Auld Job, I ken’t the carl richt weel;
An honest, decent, kintra chiel,
Wi’ heid to plan and heart to feel
And haun tae gie—
He wadna wrang’d the verra deil,
A broon bawbee.
The man was gey and weel tae do,
Had horse, and kye, and ousen too,
And sheep, and stots. and stirks enoo,
Tae fill a byre ;
O’ meat and claes, a’ maistly new,
His heart’s desire.
Foreby, he had within his dwallins
Three winsome queans, and five braw callans,
Ye wadna, in the hale braid Lallans,
Hae fund theii' marrow,
Were ye to search frae auld Tantallans
Tae Braes o’ Yarrow.
It happened that three breekless bands
O’ caterans cam frae distant lands,
And took what fell amang their hands,
O’ sheep and duddies,
Just like your reivin’ Hielan’ clans,
Or Border bodies.
I tell thee, Rab, I had nae share
In a’ the tulzie, here or there ;
I lookit on, I do declare,
A mere spectator,
Nor said, nor acted, less or mair
About the matter.
�THE HARP OF HELL.
Job had a minstrel o’ his ain,
A genius rare, and somewhat vain
O’ rhyme and leir ; but then, again,
Just like yersel’,
O’ drink and lasses unco fain,
The ne’er-do-well.
So wi’ intention fully bent,
My doin’ to misrepresent,
That book o’ Job he did invent,
And then his rhymes
Got published in Arabic prent,
Tae suit the times.
You poets, Rab, are a’ the same,
O’ ilka kintra, age and name ;
Nae matter what may be your aim,
Or your intentions,
Maist o’ your characters o’ fame
Are pure inventions.
Your dogs are baith debaters, rare,
Wi’ sense galore and some to spare,
While e’en the verra brigs o’ Ayr
Ye gar them quarrel—
Tak’ Coila ben tae deck your hair
Wi’ Scottish laurel.
Haith ! Michael ne’er laid haun’s on me ;
Your tale, Jock Milton’s, a’ a lee,
Tak’ tent, puir crater though ye be,
Puir Roundhead loon,
Had ye had but had een to see,
I’d crack ye’re croon.
I like Rab’s deevil mair than Jock’s,
A hamely deil for hamely folks ;
He swirls his tail, his bonnet cocks,
An’ aff he goes
To sup among the preachers’ “ flocks,”
His Scottish brose.
Yet, Rabin, lad, for a’ your spite,
And taunts, and jeers, and wrangfu’ wyte,
I find, before you end your flyte,
And win your pirn
Ye’re nae sae cankered in the bite
As in the girn.
]5
�THE HARP OF HELL.
For when ye think he’s doomed to dwell
The lang for ever mair in hell,
Ye come and bid a kind farewell,
And guid be here,
E’en for the verra deil himsel’
Let fa’ a tear.
I own it, Rab I like it weel
To be auld Scotian’s ain auld deil,
An’ 1’11 stan’ by her staunch and leal,
Whate’er may be,
An’ ne’er a son o’ hers sail “ squeal ”
That comes to me.
An’ I hae brimstone for their yeuk,
An’ down in hell I’ll hae your buik,
An’ aqua vita in the neuk
In kegs galore,
An’ never parson, plague, or spook
Shall vex them more.
When e’er I hear the Scottish tongue
I’ll frae the barrel knock the bung,
Sing “ Scots Wha Hae ” wi’ lusty lung,
An’ by the urns
O’ a’ the great wha Scotian’ sung
The deil an’ Burns
Sall stan’ the rough burr thistle by,
An’ haud the drinking quaich on high
Wi’ heather wreathed frae Ayr or Skye,
Frae Clyde or Dee.—
“ Lo, Dogma perish, Priestcraft die ;
Scotian’ !—Tae thee ! ”
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The "Beauty of holiness, and The harp of hell, by Saladin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: The Harp of Hell is a poem by Ross in the style of Robert Burns. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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W. Stewart & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Identifier
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N575
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The "Beauty of holiness, and The harp of hell, by Saladin), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Bible-Evidences
NSS
-
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ac96bb432dc5570fbfc8c92275f1eb10
PDF Text
Text
SUB LI MATED.
BY FRANCIS 'GERRY FAIRFIELD.
A
HALO round his head,
Like one who is transfigured
He was. “ Still Man, I am God-man,” he said.
He spake. His voice, at will,
It had strange power to soothe or thrill—
Music to recreate a soul, or kill.
I did not seem to hear
His voice with merely sensuous ear:
It thrilled within me: heart stood still with fear.
From him did presence well:
About him glory visible'
I saw. Upon my face in fear I fell.
“A thing of limits—laws—
Long ages since,” quoth he, “ I was—
Mistaking what was mere effect for cause.
“Upon the ultimate
I could but dream and speculate;
Then sit me sadly down—or work and wait.
“ Oft feverishly I wrought,
Quarrying out in deeds my thought;
But found a phantom in the good I sought.
“ To be—I knew not why—
To think I was, and then to die:
What after that came next ? That knew not I.
“ Through all my thought there ran
The feverish fantasy—I can
Be more than this: there’s more than this in Man.
“ So, human history—
My toil and struggle to be free!—
Thus dimly self-expression unto me.
�S UDLIMA TED.
“ As one who hath been sent,
Though, blindly to and fro I went—
Knowing not even what my message meant.
“ Would _ decipher it
And read—it was to me but fit
ful, vague, and uninterpretable writ.
“ I am,” quoth he. “ Is won
The goal. The work is ended—done:
Jehovah, God who spake, and Man are one.
4‘As if I were its soul,
Matter doth feel my weird control—
Thrills, blossoms, lives. I animate the whole.
“All things phenomenal
In quick ephemera I call. .
I will they shall be, merely: that is all
“ I need no tools—no skill—
No travail. With immediate thrill,
All stirs and palpitates: I merely will
“ I toil not, neither plod
To compass what I will or would:
Repeating in myself the self of God.
“ Yet I am Man, as when
Jehovah walked and talked with men
In dim, prismatic symbols—Man as then.
“No nation-prejudice
Have I. Broad as himself Man is;
And Earth, a single proud Cosmopolis.”
A halo round his head,
Like one who is transfigured
He was—or one who speaketh from the dead.
He ceased—was gone. Since then
Have I more faith and joy in men,
And things beyond mere philosophic ken.
For though the mist be dense,
Faith giveth me this recompense:
To see beyond as with an inner sense.
To know that, though mere clod
Or serf under the master’s rod,
There comes a Man- Historic, who is God.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Sublimated
Creator
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Fairfield, Francis Gerry
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [New York]
Collation: [151]-152 p. ; 26 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Modern Thinker, no. 1, 1870. A poem. Francis Gerry Fairfield was a spiritualist and one of the earliest researchers into psychic phenomena.
Publisher
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[American News Company]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1870]
Identifier
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G5420
Rights
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<p class="western"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Sublimated), identified by <span style="color:#0000ff;"><span lang="zxx"><u>Humanist Library and Archives</u></span></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Subject
The topic of the resource
Poetry
Conway Tracts
Poetry in English
-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The missing links to Darwin's origin of species
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Merriam, A.W.
Mistick Krewe of Comus
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [New Orleans]
Collation: [38] p. : ill. (engravings) ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Text printed within decorative ruled borders. "Keepsake, in verse, distributed to guests at the ball given by the Mistick Krewe of Comus on Mardi Gras, Feb. 25, 1873. Instead of the traditional float, the members marched in costumes that were not only a satire on the Darwinian theory, but made fun of carpetbaggers who were then in control of New Orleans. In 1873 the captain of Comus, whose duty it was to design, produce and manage the pageant and ball, and who presumably wrote the keepsake, was A.W. Merriam. Cf. One hundred years of Comus (New Orleans, 1956)." [From Worldcat, accessed 11/2017]. Adolph Zenneck was a German-born engraver active and living in Louisiana.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1873]
Identifier
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G5451
Contributor
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Zenneck-Buckingham (ill)
Subject
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Poetry
USA
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English
American Poetry
American Reconstruction
Charles Darwin
Conway Tracts
Origin of the Species
Poetry in English
Satire
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HE praise of Venus has been often sung, but never in any existing verse
of high order with the unhesitating frankness and untempered fervor
which distinguish Mr. Swinburne’s last volume of poems* Disdaining apol
ogy or subterfuge, he lifts up his voice, and with unfaltering tongue and un
ambiguous phrase he tells in the rich music of his verse the joys of Aphrodite.
Of his capacity and his inclination to treat this theme in this manner every
attentive reader of his last two poems “ Atalanta in Calydon ” and “ Chastelard ” must be well aware. Both those poems were distinguished by a large
simplicity and directness of utterance which showed that the poet had risen
far above the plane of timid conventionality ; and the latter showed a ten
dency toward an open recognition of the power of sexual love and an intense,
if not an ideal, expression of its working. The promise of those two dramatic
poems in this regard has been amply, but somewhat hastily fulfilled in the
present volume, which, as Mr. Swinburne of course expected, is loudly con
demned by all that class of critics who are content to “ dwell in decencies for
ever.” We have heard of editors who have refused to notice the book even
by way of condemnation, lest they should thus contribute to its notoriety.
A weak, unwise, shortsighted policy. Poets of Mr. Swinburne’s grade are
not to be crushed by condemnation or extinguished by neglect; least of all
when they find their inspiration in a passion which has stirred and swayed
the world ever since it became the habitation of two sexes. If they do wrong,
if they soil their plumes by too close a contact with unmitigated human
nature, let them be convicted and condemned; but let us not fondly sup
pose, when one of them gives voice to the delight of men in the beauty of
. women and of women in the manliness of men that we can stop the world’s
ears by pretending that we don’t hear him. No, Mr. Swinburne’s book, like
all books that, whether good or bad, are bold and able and high-toned, must
be taken up and discussed and its place in literature decided by the general
judgment of men, aided through, not controlled by, the decisions of criticism.
The very fact that a Jftrge edition of the book was bought up here in three or
four days, and that it is the subject of conversation among cultivated and
thoughtful people should of itself show critics that it is not to be ignored.
We have called these poems high-toned; and this epithet against which
some of Mr. Swinburne's censors would most loudly protest, is the one of all
at our command which we regard as most particularly expressive of their dis
tinctive character. Their subject we have stated in plain terms ; and they
present that subject unveiled, simply, without mitigation, as bare of conceal
ment as a naked, un-fig-leaved statue. Yet, in the very essence of their
thought they are high-toned. They are filled full of the utterance of that joy
T
* “Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads.” By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Author’s Edition. New York: Carleton. London : Moxon & Co.
�666
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
which to gross souls is gross, but which to all others is mysteriously no les3
imaginative than Bensuous; but there is in them not one .passage that is
vulgar, or coarse, or even immodest. There is in Pope’s “ Rape of the Lock,”
a poem which is within the reach of any girl who desires to read it, a line of
more immodesty than could be made of all Charles Swinburne’s poems concen
trated within the same compass. And by calling Mr. Swinburne’s lyrics
high-toned we do not mean merely that they are the product of genius.
They are that indeed ; but so is “ Don Juan,” a poem open to objection of the
same kind as those which are urged against “ Laus Veneris; ” but “ Don
Juan,” work of genius although it be, is as low in tone, as light and as frivo
lous as “ Laus Veneris” is high and impressive and serious. “ Don Juan ”
was written to furnish amusement by the prurient treatment of forbidden
subjects; “ Laus Veneris ” is the presentation in the naked ideal of an over
powering passion. It is not immodest but, like other things that are also not
immodest, under certain circumstances it is indecent. The line above alluded
to in the “ Rape of the Lock ” is immodest and under all circumstances inde
cent, because it belittles, and degrades, and treats with gross familiarity, and
sets up for jeers and laughter one of the most masterful of human passions,
and one which more than any other sways, through soul and sense, the whole
being of every perfect human creature. Mr. Swinburne writes with no such
motive. He shows us the figure of Love stripped bare, but never grovelling.
Yet, as we have said, his book is, or rather it becomes indecent under certain
circumstances. The man who would read in mixed society, at this day, or
read to a young woman, or, for that matter, to an old one, such a poem as Mr.
Swinburne’s sonnet, rf Love and Sleep ” would commit an act so indecent as to
merit the immediate ejection from the house, which he would, probably re
ceive. But so would he be indecent if he offered the woman a caress, which,
under other circumstances, she would both desire and expect. So would he
be if he read many passages in the “ Song of Solomon,” which are in every
respect as plain-spoken and as fervid as anything that Mr. Swinburne has
written, and certain others in the fourth and the eighth books of “ Paradise
Lost.” And yet, the woman who cannot read any of these herself without harm,
is already long past mental contamination. The question is plainly this, Is
sexual love in itself impure ? or is it in itself entirely without moral charac
ter, and under certain circumstances as rightful as it is joyful, and under
others criminal, and in the end full of bitterness ? Will men who have wives
and mothers, and women who hope to be wives and mothers decide for the
former ? And if it is not impure, filling, as it does, so large a place and hav
ing so important a function in man’s life, shall it be excluded from the domain
of art, of high art ? No, but let it be draped, is th^ reply that will come
from some quarters. Surely, let it be draped, except he comes who shows
that he has the right to lift its veil. He will show his right by the way in
which he exercises it. We do not go about unclothed. We do not put any
undraped picture upon our walls, because there are few painters who have
the right to paint nude figures for pure-minded people. But when one of
those who have the right paints such a picture, then it hangs before our eyes
and we see that it is naked, and are not ashamed. What genius and high
mental tone are in art love as well as in real life—so our poet says ;
Behold my Venus, my soul’s body, lies
With my love laid upon her garment-wise.
This is the key note of his song.
To a woman who loves, the love of the
�MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
667
man she loves is as a garment. A modest woman never lays aside her mod
esty ; but as to shame, one of the greatest of moralists tells us that that may be
< taken off and put on like her petticoat. It is from this moral plane, and through
this moral medium that Mr. Swinburne contemplates his subject. We have
said that his lyrics, under certain circumstances, would be indecent: more, to
many people, they will be blasphemous. Take this passage as an example
curiously framed to elicit both those epithets :
Lo she was thus when her clear limbs enticed
All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ,
Stained with the blood fallen from the feet of God,
The feet and hands where at our souls were priced.
Alas, Lord, surely thoH art great and fair.
But lo her wonderfully woven hair !
And thou didst heal us with thy piteous kiss;
But see now, Lord ; her mouth is lovelier.
She is right fair; what hath she done to thee ?
Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see;
Had now thy mother such a lip—like this ?
Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me.
Could the ingenuity of genius, taxed for the sole purpose, contrive to bring
together within twelve lines anything more shocking to the ascetic religionist
than this ? Let every man who can see in this passage only blasphemy and
impurity, let every man who measures a woman’s innocence by her physio
logical ignorance and her bodily torpidity, exclude this book from his house
and the houses of all those in whom he takes an interest, as he would keep
poison from his table; for it swells to bursting with such venom. There will
be others who, perceiving at once the dramatic spirit through the lyric form
of these poems, will find in them neither blasphemy nor the intention of
blasphemy, and who, breathing the same moral atmosphere as the poet, will
find in his song impurity neither of word nor thought. To all such readers
they will not only be harmless, but full of deep and strong delight. Their
beauty, and the joy they give, is heroic, and will consume small souls It is
like the beauty of the poet's “ Dolores,” to whom he says •
Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,
And thy limbs are as melodies yet.
His whole book is an expression of beauty and of passion in this fearless
old fashion: naked, free and strong. Naked not for the sake of nakedness,
but for the sake of freedom, strength and beauty. In this as in the dramatic
motive of these lyrics, and also in his way of not beginning at the beginning,
but, as it were, in the middle, and implying what has gone before, Mr. Swin
burne is very like the greatest dramatic poet the world has seen for two cen
turies—Robert Browning. A failure to perceive the purely dramatic charac
ter of almost all the erotic poems in this volume must lead to a very errone
ous and unjust judgment of the poet. Thus, in “Before Dawn" the sup
posed speaker says, that amid the fierce joys to which he has abandoned him
self, he is ready,
**’’. •
To say of shame—what is it ?
Of virtue—we can miss it;
Of sin—we can but kiss it
And it’s no longer sin.
�668
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
And of a beautiful woman it is said elsewhere,
All her body was more virtuous
Than souls of women fashioned otherwise.
These passages cause sentence to be pronounced upon him in various quarters
for the crime of asserting that delight purges sin of wrong and that beauty
makes vice virtue. But the poet is not preaching, he is painting. And the
spirit, if not the very thought of both these passages is expressed by Brown
ing in one of his finest poems, “ Pippa Passes.” Lucca’s wife Ottima is with
her paramour Sebald, to whom she says,
Sebald, as we lay
Rising and falling only with our pants
Who said, Let death come now—'tis right to die !
Right to be punished—naught completes such bliss
But woe ?
. . . Bind it [her hair] thrice about my brow
Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent in sin.
True, Browning makes the voice of Pippa singing “ God is in his heaven ”
rouse Sebald from his guilty trance, to loathe his paramour. But so Swin
burne closes his poem thus :
Lest all who love and choose him
See Love and so refuse him ;
For all who find him lose him,
But all have found him fair.
Whoever will read this scene of Browning’s—poet without reproach—will find
in it an expression of delight in physical beauty and of abandonment to pas
sion which it would almost seem that Mr. Swinburne had imitated and not
surpassed. And in Browning’s “ Dramatic Lyrics ” and in his “ Men and
Women” are other passages that glow with all the amorous fire that burns in
Mr. Swinburne’s pages. There is this great difference, however, among others,
between the poets, that Browning has not published a volume devoted to the
celebration of sexual love and fleshly beauty. But that Mr. Swinburne fias
done so is at once his sin and his salvation, as a poet writing for the general
public. Whoever takes up this volume knows beforehand exactly the en
tertainment to which he is bidden; no reader finds himself 'betrayed into
reading erotic poetry. For one of the poems in this book we can, however,
find no excuse, even in its marvellous beauty, because its subject is without
the pale of nature. True, it is purely dramatic ; but why the poet should
choose such a subject as that incomprehensible, monstrous passion known as
“ Sapphic love,” and name his poem by the Greek word “ Anactoria,” i. e.,
sovereignty, we cannot conjecture. Had he exhausted nature and the love
of man and woman for each other? Yet, in this poem, as we have already
intimated, are some of the finest passages that he has written, some of the
very finest in all modern poetry. We do not refer only or chiefly to such ex
quisite expressions of love as,
The fervent under lid, and that above
Lifted with laughter or abashed with love,
Thine amorous girdle, full of thee and fair,
And leavings of the lilies in thine hair.
The poem passes beyond these limits, and deals not reverentially with sub-
�MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
669
jeets higher and vaster than mere human passion. In a passage of this kind
are the following lines, of strange power and awful beauty :
For who shall change with prayers and thanksgivings
The mystery of the cruelty of things ?
Or say what God above all gods and years
With offering and blood and sacrifice of tears,
With lamentation from strange lands, from graves
Where the snake pastures, from scarred mouths of slaves,
From prison, and from plunging prows of ships
Through flame-like foam of the sea’s closing lips—
With thwarting of strange signs, and wind-blown hair
Of comets, desolating the dim air,
When darkness is made fast with seals and bars
And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars,
Eclipse, and sound of shaken hills, and wings
Darkening, and blind inexplicable things—
With sorrow of laboring moons, and altering light
And travail of the planets of the night,
And weeping of the weary Pleiad’s seven,
Feeds the mute, melancholy lust of heaven
This may be frightfully impious, even when put into the mouth of the
heathen Sappho ; but it is not, therefore, one whit less grand. Has there
lived more than one other poet who could think such thoughts and use lan
guage with such supreme mastery ? We do not remember in all poetical
literature a passage which expresses with such sustained power the vague
terror and mysterious woe of the whole universe. It is in his daring use of
language and his ability to justify his daring that half Mr. Swinburne’s power
resides. In the above passage this power is very striking. The very phrase
“ disastrous stars,” against which the etymological criticism might be brought
that it is tautological—“ disastrous ” having come to mean fraught with
calamity because it first meant ill-starred—is yet evidence of the poet’s right
ful consciousness of a power which places him above all such pedagogic con
siderations in his choice of words. A scholar himself, he can yet leave his
scholarship out of sight and out of mind, while yet with the trained skill of
an intellectual athlete he does feats of language which to mere scholars would
be impossible. He is the master, not the servant of words, and uses them
for the service that they can do to-day, not for that which they could do in days
gone by. Yet that he can use them thus, as if he had been born four hun
dred years ago, he shows in “ The Masque of Queen Bersabe ” and “ St.
Dorothy.” And the name of the latter poem reminds us to mention it as one
that for its spirit might have been written by a saintly nun. It is a poetic
exaltation of the legend of the Christian virgin who died in Rome by the axe
rather than enter the service of Venus, as that service was in the decadence
of the Empire. There are other poems of like spirit in the volume. Such are
“Itylus,” one of the sweetest and tenderest, as well as most musical lyric
poems in the language, “ A Lamentation ” and “ Amina Ancepsand
although such as these are rare, those are frequent which tell terribly of
the woes that wrongful love may bring. There is not a sadder, more
remorseful poem to be read than “ The Triumph of Time.” But magazines
have limits, and we must stay our hand. Mr. Swinburne’s poems are
not without faults, but these are trifling indeed compared with the strange,
fresh beauty of the pages that they spot. One blemish of frequent occur
�670
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
rence we have noticed—the more because it should not have appeared in the
work of a poet who is so fertile .of fancy, so rich in language, and who has
such a remarkable gift of rhyme. The kisses that, whether implied or named
must needs be plentifully scattered over the pages of an erotic poet, are too
often used for sound as well as sense by Mr. Swinburne—who ought to be
above making "kiss” rhyme to “bliss”—and, moreover, are incessantly repre
sented as stings or wounds. The lips that give and take them are described
as flecked with blood and very often with salt foam ; so often, indeed, that it
provokes the thought that Mr. Swinburne gets his lovers into a very sad
pickle. This blemish is one symptom of the general evil of these poems—
that they are overwrought and have too little of the repose which is a neces
sary condition of all high art. The turbulence is grand, the passion is real
as well as fervid; but we do not li_a to live in a tempest. We cannot refrain
from remarking that Mr. Swinburne has the high distinction of being the first
poet since Shakespeare who has written lines that Shakespeare might have
written. We do not mean to liken him to Shakespeare; and we refer not to
his thoughts but to his turn of phrase, which is sometimes like Shakespeare’s
in his sonnets. We can only quote as example these lines from the beautiful
poem upon the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis :
Where between sleep and life some brief space is
With love like gold bound round about the head,
Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,
Turning the fruitful feud of hers and his
To the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss.
That last line Mr. Swinburne might have recovered from some lost sonnet
of Shakespeare’s; so might he this whole passage.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?
Hid love in all the folds of all thy hair
Fed thee on Summers, watered thee with showers
Given all the gold that all the seasons wear
To thee that art a thing of barren hours ?
But wide as are the bounds of our admiration, our expression of it must
be compressed within narrow limits. Let no one misunderstand us. These
poems are of the flesh fleshly. They are not of the kind that “ will not bring
a blush to the cheek of innocence,” and they should be shunned and execrated
by all people who believe that a blush of awakened consciousness is the first
warning of the flight of purity. Nor would those who do not so believe, and
who think that these dramatic lyrics have their place in poetry, and that no
mean one, be pleased to see any friend, young or old, male or female, choose
them for frequent perusal. They are not written virginibus puerisque. Yet
the spirit that animates them is not that of Aretino ; the pictures that they
present do not bring up those that Giulio Romano drew. The men and
women who speak through them are such as Raphael painted -after he had
touched the lips of the Fornarina. Let every man avert his eyes who be
lieves that there is sin in passion or pollution in beauty.
Richard Grant White.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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Mr Swinburne's poems
Creator
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White, Richard Grant [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: [665]-670 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Review of 'Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads' by Swinburne. Author's edition. New York: Carleton; London: Moxon & Co. From Galaxy 2. Attribution: Virginia Clark catalogue.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[n.d.]
Identifier
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G5315
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Mr Swinburne's poems), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
-
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Text
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Keble and "The Christian year"
Creator
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Shairp, J.C.
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: p. 229-264 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Attribution of author and journal title from Wellesley Guide to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From North British Review, no. 6 (September, 1866). The North British Review was a Scottish periodical founded in 1844 to act as the organ of the new Free Church of Scotland.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1866]
Identifier
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CT30
Subject
The topic of the resource
Poetry
Christianity
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Keble and "The Christian year"), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Christianity
Conway Tracts
John Keble
Poetry
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Epic Philosophy.
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necessity. On the same basis, we must allow at least a miocene
emigration to the platyrhine monkey which first came to
America with his thirty-six teeth and his prehensile tail, while
we must be prepared to find the origin of the monkey tribe it
self disappear in the enormous gap which divides the eocene
from the cretaceous age. In all this there would be nothing
inconsistent with our present vague geological knowledge ; for,
although no pliocene man has yet been identified, few geolo
gists would care to deny the possibility of his existence, while
an eocene monkey not unlike an American type is known to
have lived in Switzerland. All that we have assumed is the
truth of Lamarck’s hypothesis, a purely scientific matter, about
which we shall certainly not venture to express an opinion.
Henry Brooks Adams.
----------
.
CT
Art. V. — Epic Philosophy.
Homer begins the Iliad with “ Sing, Goddess,” as if not
himself, but a divine being, were the true poet. Shall we
suppose that his invocation is merely formal ? that it is con
sciously addressed to Nothing ? To do so were to appreciate
ill the simplicity and sincerity of Homer. Were it not also to
misinterpret the law of all language ? Words are never empty
formalities at the outset; it was only a veritable meaning that
made them. Men do not go about consciously giving names to
nonentities. As well suppose a living body to have come into
being without the action of any organizing force as persuade
one’s self that language is originated without belief. Words, like
men, may grow old and die ; but only by sincere, vital action
are they born. It is true that defunct vocables sometimes have
their Hades here above ground, wandering about as shadowy
semblances of their former selves, neither well dead nor yet
alive. But Homer belongs to the young world; and his words
are not merely living, they are in excellent health, with red
blood in them, and a bloom on the cheek. When, therefore,
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he says, “ Sing, 0 Goddess,” one may be sure that the invoca
tion is no piece of perfunctory compliment, but that his heart
keeps pace with his tongue.
Upon whom does he call ? The question may be asked with
interest, for there is in this part of the old Greek mythology a
profound significance, a fine soul of meaning, which remains
true for us, and will be true forever, however its forms may
prove transitory or grow strange. The “ Goddess ” is the
Muse, — the Muses considered as one divinity. The Muses,
again, were said to be daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or
Memory. It will be no waste of study to inquire into the sig
nificance of this parentage, and with Homer’s devout appeal in
mind.
Zeus, in the old Hellenic conception, is the eternal One, the
unitive, sovereign genius of being. The physical meaning of
the word, we are told, is sky, the pure heaven, changeless, allembracing ; but by a deeper and truer meaning it denotes the
inner divine sky of the soul, rounding in, with its translucent,
indivisible unity, the divided opacity and discord of time.
*
“ From One all things proceed, and into the same are re
solved,” says Musaeus, as quoted by Diogenes Laertius. Zeus is
this One, but rather in the moral sense, that of rule, than in
the more metaphysical sense, which Musaeus seems to have in
* All strictly primitive words seem to have at first a like twofold significance,
physical-spiritual. It is the trick of lexicographers to represent the physical mean
ing as primary, the higher sense as only secondary and superinduced. Let us test
this procedure in a single instance. The original sense of rectus is said to be
straight; the secondary sense, right. We turn, however, to the root, reg, and find
that the nearest word to this, formed immediately from it, is rex (regs), a king, or
straightener in the strictly moral sense. Could evidence be clearer that the moral
meaning was in the word from the first, at the root of it, and that, in making it a
mere afterthought, the lexicographer has followed, not the indications of language,
but his own whim of opinion ? I cannot but anticipate a sure determination of the
fact, one day, that man is a speaker only as he is a spiritual being; pure spiritual
sensibility joined with a lower kind of impressibility to produce root-words. At
first the words are held as common property by the two producing factors, nor is
their twofold character for a long time, it may be, explicitly recognized. Zeus
meant originally, I suppose, both a physical object, and a spiritual reality signified
by that object; but to the first namers this meaning was strictly single, not double.
When reflective discrimination began, and the word, instead of being divided in
itself, and made to bear two widely distinct meanings, like our word heaven, went
wholly over to the higher, the indication is that this import was the more powerful
in it from the start.
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Epic Philosophy.
503
mind. It is the testimony of language that man uttered his
impression of this comprehending One when he first said sky ;
and since such an object must have been among the earliest
named, we can trace that supreme recognition to the very
dawn of his conscious being. All-comprehending, all-recon
ciling spiritual unity, —it is an import which the soul en
shrines from the first and forever. And this is the Homeric
Zeus, progenitor of the Muse.
On the other hand, Mnemosyne, Memory, symbolizes the sum
total of such things as memory is concerned with, — incident,
accident, event, whatever happens. In wide contrast, there
fore, to the peace of eternity, she images the storied variety
and conflict of time, the world of things eventful, — of multi
plicity, diversity, contrariety, contention, the surface-world of
Nature and man, with heterogeneity and mutation for its insep
arable characteristics.
Thus in Zeus and Mnemosyne we have, on the one side, the
universe in the everlasting peace and rest of pure unity, — on
the other side, the universe in the character of dividedness,
changefulness, with a myriad of diverse features and conflict
ing energies, here playing through a colored pliantasmagory
of magic mutation, there yawning in chasms of hate, set against
itself, crashing in upon itself, blind with contending passion,
black with tragic fate. From these opposites the Muse is born,,
— from these as at once opposite, and yet joined, made one in
spousal love.
The Muse, then, is that symphony of existence which arises
from the conjunction of these two terms, Spiritual Being in its
essential pure oneness, and the world of finite character and
action, of diversity and evanescence, the world of time. This
conjunction is Music, — “ music of the spheres,” in the Pythag
orean phrase: an imagination peculiar to Pythagoras only in
form of statement. It is upon this melodious Voice of the
All that Homer calls devoutly, and of which he would be but
the reporter or secretary.
Here we lay hold upon the prime fact by which he stands as
the type of poetic genius. To him it is existence itself that is
tuneful. Through the diversity of characters, the conflict of
passions, and the whirl of events, the divine secret of the world
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sings to his soul.
*
The impassioned, it may be infuriate, toss
ing, warring, woe of time gives, as he deems, but the notes, out
of which the Spirit of the All makes up its eternal harmony.
That antique imagination may be embraced with serious
modern conviction. Zeus and Mnemosyne symbolize still the
two opposites, of which poesy is the wedding festival. Who
ever truly sings, be it “ the sweet psalmist of Israel” or Greek
2Eschylus, the author of the Book of Job or that of the Excur
sion, sings their espousal. The universe is unity ; being rests
in spiritual peace and poise forever. The sky is never clouded ;
only the earth is clouded. Nevertheless, there is the constant
antithesis to this wholeness and repose, — antithesis expressed
in ten thousand shapes, and pushed with such inexorable
energy and excess that we wonder how the bands of eternity
do not burst, and suffer the world to welter in immitigable
craze. Oppositions and emulations arise, multiply, rage, gain
appetite by what they feed on; countless tribes of creatures live
only by slaughter, created to kill; existence sprouts all over
in horns, fangs, tusks, claws, while from its horrid alembic
venoms, hates, envies distil, and drip, drip upon its own blister
ing heart; hungry pestilences devour nations, — then, like the
boa, retire and sleep into new hunger, that they may return to
new feast; “ the earthquake smacks its mumbling lips o’er
some thick-peopled city,” or the volcano binds about it, while yet
living, a shroud of fire; strife is around man, and strife is with
in him; the lightning thrusts its blazing scymitar through
his roof, the thief creeps in at his door, and remorse at his
heart. Who, looking on these things, does not acknowledge
that man is indeed fearfully as well as wonderfully made ?
Who would not sometimes cry, 0 that my eyes were a foun
tain of tears, that I might weep, not the desolations of Israel
alone, but the hate of Israel to Edom and of Edom to Israel,
the jar, the horror, the ensanguined passion and ferocity of Na
* Virgil, on the contrary, regards himself only as the singer. It is true, that, after
announcing himself as such, he makes a formal invocation to the Muse, but misses
even formal propriety in doing so. For he does not pray the Divinity to pour
for his ear the melody of existence, nor even to exalt his soul and make it melo
dious, but only to apologize, if possible, for the strange conduct of the Olympians :
Mihi causas memora: Let the Muse, since she visits in that family, tell what set on
Juno to pursue with revenges that remarkably nice man, my hero.
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Epic Philosophy.
505
ture ? But when we would despair, behold we cannot. Out
of the conscious heart of humanity issues forever, more or less
clearly, a voice of infinite, pure content: “ Though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;
for Thou art with me.” Sometimes, when our trial is sorest,
that voice is clearest, singing as from the jaws of death and
the gates of hell. And now, though the tears fall, they become
jewels as they fall; and the sorrow that begot them wears
them in the diadem of its more than regal felicity. We, too,
rest in the rest of Being; the changeless axis is here, it is in our
souls ; an’d around it all the movement of existence becomes
orbital.
Eternal rest, endless unrest, — rest and unrest, it would
seem, of the same universal whole. There is comprehending
unity, that nothing invades, nothing eludes ; there is yawn
ing chasm that seems to go through the world, cleaving its
very heart. Every globule of existence spins between these
irreconcilable opposites.
And yet they are not irreconcil
able, for they are reconciled, though it be ineffably.
Now it is this tossing rest, this multiple unity, this contradic
tory and contending identity, that makes the universe epical;
and to represent this within practicable limits, embodying in
human speech the enticement, the awful, infinite charm of that
mystery forever resolved and forever remaining, is the grand
task of the epic artist.
The poet is the restorer of wholeness. He can strike the
universal chord, that of identity, or spiritual unity. But he does
this, observe, not by confounding distinction, blurring charac
teristic, hiding difference, explaining away contradiction, but,
on the contrary, by displaying them. No one adheres with
a fidelity religious like his to special character, finite fact.
Individual feature and complexion, the peculiar expression of
all objects, the circumstance and finest edge of all events, are,
as it were, sacred to him, and come forth from beneath his pen
with an exquisite, loving exactness of rendering. He will
give you form, color, manner, gait, garb, tone of voice, measure
of stature, tune of thought; minute he will be as Nature her
self, nothing small to him which is characteristic; his very hu
man condition he will, as it were, forsake, to spring with
vol. evil. — no. 221.
33
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grass-blades and hum with bees, to ripple with the ripening
wheat and pass in the shadow of flying clouds, to dance with
sunshine on the sea, or join its sprite-like hide-and-seek among
quivering leaves ; sorrow, too, and dismay he will depict as
with a kind of love, — tempests that rage across the green
fields of humanity, clothed in night and whirling along boughs
rent from the tree of life, — frosts that descend untimely upon
vernal years, to leave their blossoms shrivelled and all the
glory of their garniture gone forever ; and by this chase of di
versities and celebration of contradictions he will bring out the
refrain of the living whole, the repose, the unity, the infinite
content of being.
Contrast this procedure with that of the mere generalizer.
The latter spares himself all this delicate and subtile exacti
tude, very likely thinks it trivial. Betaking himself to gen
eralities, he evaporates one generality into another more diffuse
and vague, and, by an incessant elimination of feature, arrives
finally at a statement the most general possible. At best he
has attained only congruity, not consanguinity. His thought
holds together, suppose, in itself; it does not bring souls, na
tures, together; it does not awaken the sense of a universal
kindred, wherein the one immortal heart is felt to beat.
Even the naturalist, patient, tireless observer, faithful by his
good-will to Nature in her speciality and her unity alike, can
draw creatures into association only by mere points of outward
resemblance,’ as two kinds here by a likeness in the hoof, two
kinds there by a similarity in the hide, again two kinds by ap
proximation in the shape of a scale. There is a catalogue of
superficial resemblances, not community. The poet does not
thus go on merely to enumerate points of external peculiarity
and resemblance; he, on the one side, delineates the individ
ual thing in the very feature, color, and aroma of its special
being, yet, on the other hand, keeps up the interior conversa
tion of each with all. Not by dead similarities, but by the liv
ing, flowing fellowship of heart-language, do the unlikes of
voiceful Nature blend and symphonize in his thought.
Mr. Ruskin censures a dictum of Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the
effect that poetry deals only with what is general and perma
nent, to the exclusion of transient particulars. The eloquent
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Epic Philosophy.
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critic brings forward good instances, with which Wordsworth
offered him an abundant supply, to show, on the contrary, that
the poet has an inevitable eye for minute traits and evanescent
expression. The truth is parted between them. The poet sees
the varying surfaces of Nature, and feels in them her constant
heart. By a delicately true portrayal of what is most limited
and transient, he appeals to a sentiment universal and peren
nial. Playing with the play of Nature, flitting with winged
fancy through all the variety of her manifold forms and
changing hues, he yet feels in all, and by the magic of melodi
ous suggestion can make others to feel, that inner identity, that
unceasing, ineffable return into oneness, which in the hidden
sanctuary of existence is a joy of espousal forever. It is the
ringing of these marriage-bells of Nature that is the music be
hind the words of his verse.
To be cordially sensible of an illimitable kindred, which,
moreover, is not only boundless in scope, but divine in kind,
purer far and richer in every beautiful claim and blessed re
sponse than any blood relationship, — is it not a surpassing
delight ? But the felicity comes to the last, finest edge, when
one may enter into this immortal fellowship without loss of in
dividual character, and, speaking there only his own vernacular,
may join by means of it, and with no foreign nor provincial ac
cent, in that language of the heart of humanity wherein was
never yet a confusion of tongues.
Man is a stranger in the world, looking on with remote, un
related eye, till the Muse make him at home there. This,
touching upon all that seems most shut up to itself, most set
apart from the spirit and sympathy of man, awakens a surpris
ing refrain of fellowship in his breast. Now he lives a life not
bounded by the limits of his individual constitution. It is as if
an invisible system of nerves ramified from his breast, with a
pole in every passing shadow, in every star, in whatsoever has
form of being or seeming to the sense. Once that this is rightly
addressed, his own being is reflected in all, claimed by all; his
voice has an illimitable echo ; his heart blends its beating with
the vast rhythm of Nature; everywhere are relation and re
sponse ; from sun and moon look down glorified human faces ;
wood and river teem with half-humanities, that sway in the
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trees and slip in the tide ; from the lifted mountain-tops, and
from the waste grandeur of the reticent, never-covenanting sea,
comes a language at once theirs and his own ; the bladed grass
claims kindred from beneath his feet, and the shadow cast by
a stone on the moor moves him with some deep home-feeling,
as if it were inscrutably inwrought with shadowy memories of
the cradle and the mother’s lullaby.
The poet can touch these nerves, and give sympathy the
happiness of that unmeasured scope. But he can thus touch
them, observe, only at their poles on the surfaces of Nature.
Of this a sufficient suggestion is given by the economy of the
human body. The brain itself is insensitive; its feeling, at
least its pleasurable feeling, is found at the fingers’ ends, at the
surfaces and extremes of the body. So it is that this univer
sal heart in man is to be happily awakened only at the fingers’
ends, the farthest reach, of its manifold relationship. Hence
it is that the purest poetry is most objective. This touches the
heart healthily, where the nerves of imaginative sympathy
come to the surface. Introspection, on the contrary, invades
the system, and strikes the nerves midway, hence is unhealth
ful and painful.
It is only in the sense of uni’ty with the whole that the
heart finds peace. Chasm is brutal. Yet he who seeks unity
otherwise than in the diversity of Nature and movement of
life, he who seeks it by prying and intrusion, finds, not a
charmed repose, but only sickness. Nature sings to him who
respects her secret, and who only by a reverent remoteness
comes near; and he who sings to others will scrupulously
keep up the polarity of life, displaying identity only through
the medium of peculiarity.
Take as an illustration Burns’s “ To a Mouse.” The “ wee
beastie ” is represented to the life, its habit and condition given
without varnish.
“ That wee bit heap o leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble ! ”
Leaves and stubble, got by nibbling: this is a veritable mouse,
no transparent sham, like Dryden’s “ Hind and Panther,”
which are seen at a glance to be no more than a pair of cut
and dried, theologues masquerading on four legs, whereof
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Epic Philosophy.
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two are evidently broomsticks. But while a mouse, it is yet
man ; and the poet only brings his delineation to ripeness,
when he says,—
“ Me, thy poor earthborn companion
And fellow mortal.”
The outward circumstance retains its distinction, the hearts
touch and beat together, and we have a truly poetical situation.
Emerson’s “Humble-Bee” furnishes an illustration that will
bear even closer inspection; for the external peculiarity is
shown yet more pointedly, while the interior sympathy is not
less, though 'suggested with a delicate reticence that adds to
the charm. The painting is so minutely and exquisitely exact
that I have sometimes said, should Nature one day lose the
breed of bees, and forget what they were, she might recover
the type from this model. Yet who reads without feeling that
the humble-bee is one of us ?
“ Yellow-breeched philosopher,” —
it does not come jarring in, but belongs there ; and because
this open stroke of sympathy — in which, however, the humor
still hints at distinction — is consistent with a piece of painting
so objective, we have here a poem in the right sense of the word.
A like effect is reached, when a peculiar human character is
so pictured that we at once perceive its remoteness from our
selves and feel it all in ourselves. The more entire, isolated,
unapproachable, the more poetic its impression, if only it be
so depicted that to every stroke of the delineation our hearts
vibrate response. The more peculiar it shows itself, the more
does it awaken in us the sense of our community. This is
poetry.
It may be said, then, that poetry is the expression of com
prehending spiritual unity by means of that which opposes and
apparently denies it. This definition, however, is here only
provisional. I hope soon to substitute for it another, which,
while embracing this, shall be more adequate. At present let
us obtain with precision what is in this.
First, let it be observed that the character of things which is
opposed to their unity with the soul must not be in its own
place denied. Even to disguise it there is to make its sub
sequent identification with the heart ridiculous. Dress the
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mouse in jacket and trousers, as we sometimes see monkeys in
the street, then say, “Fellow mortal,” and the by-standers burst
out laughing. Set the bee to discoursing on fate and free-will,
and “ yellow-breeched philosopher ” loses its tone of fine sym
pathetic humor, to become a sorry jest.
Observe, secondly, that the separation of objects from the
heart of the poet and of man is maintained by one order of ap
prehension, while the identity exists only to another. The one
is bluntly, stubbornly, indomitably maintained by the prosaic
understanding; the other is melodiously affirmed by the imag
ining heart, eternal priest at the marriage altars of Nature.
Moreover, it is the interest of imagination that the prosaic fac
ulty should hold its ground, yielding never an inch. There
can be no espousal, if there is no duality, — no making one, un
less there are two. The sense of spiritual community plays
over somewhat which contradicts it; and it is this playing
over which constitutes the poetic act. The imagination abhors
confusion, though it craves community. It leaves finite objects,
merely as such, to stand by and for themselves, refusing all
cordial kindred with the spirit of man ; and then, in neverthe
less making fellowship between them and the human soul, it
shows these objects to be capable of such fellowship only in
quite another character than that which is proper to them
as things merely. I will illustrate these points by a stanza of
description taken from Wordsworth : —
“ The sylvan slopes with corn-clad fields
Are hung, as if with golden shields,
Bright trophies of the sun !
Like a fair sister of the sky,
Unruffled doth the blue lake lie,
The mountains looking on.”
Well, this is fine ! — the understanding would say. Are we to
believe that the fields have put on the corn as a suit of clothes ?
or that the said patches of corn, while having that sartorial
character, are also captured shields, which the sun has hung
up to commemorate his victories ? or that the sky and lake
are a kind of Jane and Nancy in the same family? or that
the mountains really do look on ? No ; so far as the under
standing is concerned, these statements are made only to be
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Epic Philosophy.
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disbelieved. To it they are sheer untruth, and are meant for un
truth. The understanding is pre-engaged to dispute, to deny, to
repugn them altogether. Just that is a part of the programme;
and to leave it out would spoil the performance. Did not the
statement infold its own contradiction on a lower scale, and
thereby obtain the opposition of the prosaic understanding, like
the opposition of the viol-string to the bow, it were not poetic
truth. To say that Peter is clad, that Jane and Nancy are sis
ters, or look as if they were sisters, and that Hezekiah looks on,
might be to affirm what is entirely credible ; but such truth is
not poetic truth, for the reason that it does not address itself to
spiritual credence. In order that imagination and spiritual ap
prehension may be reached,there must be that “play over” we
have spoken of, — therefore somewhat over which, and in con
trariety to which, the play goes on. Thus the great privilege of
the spirit to find the whole world kin is freed from confusion
with any such community as the prosaic mind can recognize.
I have thus far spoken only of poetry ; let it now be said
that I have constantly had in view the being of man, regarding
this as the poem of poems, — fast locked to any metaphysic
which does not approach with a key corresponding to its poetic
quality. In the being of man, in the universe of God, there is
that “ play over.” It is, indeed, the grand secret; he that finds
it out reads the Sphinx’s riddle, and may save his soul alive.
Finding it out perfectly, he will know what Spirit is ; and until
one knows that, does he in the highest sense know anything ?
In order to clear up this matter, and prepare the way for
further exposition, I wish now to establish a primary scale of
degrees, that we may see definitely what is over, what under,
and the validity of each in its own kind. And to invite a
vigorous attention, I may say that we have now come to the
hinge upon which all turns.
Nature as thing is Force and Form, no more. Scrutinized
to any extent, it will exhibit only these characters, fixed force
and form.
To the world of things corresponds in man the perceptive
understanding. This finds in things a thing, — character, if
one may speak so, — finds, that is, their special determinations,
and the consequent isolation of each thing in itself. It is, we
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might say, a brace between things, to keep them.forever apart,
without interior communication. It sees every object—ox,
grass, hill, river, stone, man — as only itself, utterly locked up
in its special identity.
Becoming scientific, however, the understanding not only
discriminates, and specially identifies, but finds connections,
and looks toward unity. But the unity is on the same level
with the diversity, and is therefore only partial. There is
unity of form between man and a fish, as both are vertebrate
animals; there is diversity of form, as the one is a mammal
and the other not such. The community of the two, and the
special, isolate identity of each, are alike of form, and are
therefore mutually limiting. Unity, accordingly, is never
attained. The scientific intellect is more full than the ordinary
perceptive understanding; but it works within the same limits,
has the same kind of recognitions. It recognizes form, force,
the constancy of force, and, lastly, as its highest perception,
the form offorce. What we call “ natural law ” is, of course,
simply force formulated, that is, constant in measure and
definite in character. Gravitation, electricity, chemical affinity,
do not differ as force, but only as forms of force. Force and
form, then, constitute the whole character of Nature in one
aspect; and to it in this aspect the prosaic understanding cor
responds.
Accordingly, the understanding can never, in any adequate
manner, say God. It attempts often enough, with stretched
mouth, to achieve that grand enunciation, and often supposes
the feat accomplished. But its God can be only some partic
ular object or force, supposably an immensely great thing, but
after all only a thing, one thing among others. Of late some
of its officers are making bold to say that no such Thing is discoverable. “ God ? ” some Lewes will say ; u what force or
form of force is it ? Is gravitation God ? Is chemical affinity
God ? If neither of these, what force, then, and where is it ? ”
Suppose I answer, that God is in those forces, and in all others ?
u In them ? ” he may reply ; “ how in them ? how in gravi
tation ? As gravitation ? Then he is gravitation; and we
have two words for the same thing. As somewhat other than
gravitation ? But what ? Do we discern in gravitation any
thing but itself ? ”
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513
“ But there is somewhat which makes it,” I plead.
“ Makes what ? ” he will say. “ Makes stones fall ? Grav
itation does that. Is there a making behind this making ?
Well, double, triple, centuple, if you will, the makings, all we
come to is that stones are made to fall. There is a force which
has this character; and wherever it is, the character of it is
the same. Though the note of hand be indorsed by a hun
dred individuals one after another, the value of it remains
the same.”
“ But,” I say, making a last effort, “ God is the unity of all
forces.”
He smiles provokingly. “ You mean, perhaps, that he is
that correlation and mutual convertibility of forces of which
we are beginning to learn. Truly, I give you joy of a God so
substantial! ”
I leave the savant in possession of the field, easily victorious.
It should be frankly confessed, that, as by no peeping and pry
ing and inferring among the fiddle-strings can we discover the
genius of the composer, so by no inspection of the formulations
of force do we obtain the smallest glimpse of infinite Spirit.
Here we are, then, locked utterly into the limits of finite
Nature. Can we, after all, make escape ? I do not inquire
whether we find in our own breasts a hint of spiritual compre
hension and freedom, — we undoubtedly do find such; but it
is said that this subjective impression, being contradicted by
everything else in the universe, must be suppressed as mere
private prejudice or illusion. Some indeed bravely refuse, and
pledge their faith to the testimony of “ consciousness ” ; the
other party smile superior to “ consciousness ” none the less ;
the contestants find no common ground. We will therefore
face the difficulty, and inquire whether it is possible to dis
cover a road leading from Nature to Spirit, and to Spirit as in
itself all. I think it can be found, and without any tedious
groping.
Be it observed, then, that Nature has another character, very
different frqm the one just noted, — the character, namely, of
Sign or Expressiveness. To the primitive civilizers of hu
manity it is scarcely known otherwise than in this nobler char
acter. Everywhere the first grand sallies of the human mind
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Epic Philosophy.
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overleap the fixed constitution of things, and alight upon some
what of a higher order, which the world of things suggests.
Is it not to this overleaping that all human speech is due ?
Man looks upon an object, and between it and the eye there
springs up a felt poetic significance, which, before reflection
has come to complicate mental action, is no sooner felt than it
issues by a responsive sign, a word. Spontaneous naming is
the act of identifying an object with its poetic significance,
declaring that the thing is what it signifies. Only while the
expression or suggestion of objects is taken in entire good faith
as their reality is man a producer of root-words.
In the case of words which convey distinctively a moral,
metaphysical, or spiritual import, this repose upon the sign
character of Nature is obvious. Spirit is breath; right is
straight; wrong is crooked, — wrung, turned forcibly aside;
light is truth or knowledge, — “ the light which enlighteneth
every man that cometh into the world ” (the Parsees are said
to worship fire or light, that is, they worship what it signifies,
as Christians also do) ; heaven, too, is God, — “ kingdom of
God ” and “ kingdom of heaven ” we say indifferently; warmth
is love; coldness is indifference; and so on: it were easy to
multiply familiar examples, — and I seek no others, — to the
weariness of the reader.
But I believe, still further, that man’s ability to name physi
cal objects in the directest manner depends no less, though
less obviously, upon their sign-character. Were they to man,
as to the dog and ox, mere force and form, he would respond
to them, in the animal fashion, by the forces of his organism
only, by appetite, aversion, anger, fear, and the like. The
aspect of green grass excites only the stomach of a cow : here
is the mere relation of finite to finite ; and accordingly the
creature opens its mouth, not to speak, but to bite, — not to
utter the object, but to swallow it. Man, on the contrary, sees
natural objects as picture, suggestion, significance, and speaks
them because to him they are speaking. How could he repre
sent them by signs, did they not present themselves as signifi
cant, and as veritably present in their significance ?
“ Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge.” Verily, statements so noble as this,
�1868.]
Epic' Philosophy.
515
coming to us from a far-off antiquity, might tempt one to think
that the primitive poetic mind of humanity took off the cream
of truth, and left its skimmed milk to science. But can we
not perceive that day and night are indeed and forever voice
ful ? Speech runs and ripples over all the surfaces of Nature:
here in grand affirmative tides, Amazons and Missouris of sig
nificance ; there in vast, perpetual eddies of reverse meaning;
again in whirling and dancing equivocations, evanescent half
expressions, with which only the flitting instability of fancy
can keep pace. Speech breaks out as from an inner heart in
things, and wraps itself as a many-colored mantle about them,
hiding what they are in what they suggest; insomuch that the
understanding must search as with a candle to discover be
neath that glorious disguise their fixed and specific character.
Science, coming late and with labor, tries to lift the mantle,
tries to divest Nature of her garment of meaning; but one fold
falls down as another is raised ; only by endless pertinacity of
industry and wide combination of effort is the thing at last de
nuded, and seen as it is in itself.
.Half the world is now busy in this labor. “ Off with it! ”
men say; “off with that garment of suggestion wherewith
Nature clothed herself to the untaught intelligence of hu
manity!” As the work goes on, there are huzzas mingled with
moanings, complainings, reproaches, — huzzas over notable pro
gress achieved, complaint that so great a labor needs now
to be done. The first men did us a mischief, it would seem,
by permitting Nature to assume that array of significance.
Had things been seen from the start as things really are, then
what toil and difficulty had our age been spared 1 But those
men, perverse, must go and be “ theological,” or “ metaphysi
cal,” or the like : hinc illce lachrymce. The greater, however,
the glory of our age, when, despite these needless hindrances,
it peeps and pries, until at length the world of things appears
without disguise. We complain, but still more do we exult.
The great enterprise prospers ; off it comes, that pictured
array ; the Thing lies bare !
Not quite, however. Seen only as it is in itself, the world
of things is not yet, nor, in my judgment, is likely to be.
Never yet was there a mind dry and prosaic enough to behold
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Epic Philosophy.
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any object in the mere light of the understanding, — to see in
a horse, for example, only anatomy and physiology. To Dryas
dust also, even to that portentous specimen of the genus, the
Dryasdust of science, — Herbert Spencer, say, — the neck of
the war-horse is indeed clothed with thunder, the Pleiades
have sweet influences, the zephyr whispers, the storm roars,
morning blushes, the' sun rises rejoicing, night is vocal with
solemn suggestion, and the blue heaven more, much more, than
some gases and an optical illusion. Let Mr. Spencer do his
best to see in Nature, as he says, only “ force,” it will be
to him also a language, will speak to his sensibility. Let
Briareus use all his hundred hands, the mantle of meaning
will fall down, and with its lettered folds wrap the heart of the
Titan himself.
Por by the Word the worlds were indeed made, as the Scrip
tures say. “ And God said, Let there be light, and there
was light.” Was ; for light itself is but a shining syllable,
and darkness another, that shines only in the breast of the
Speaker, not outwardly; and all the universe exists, word-like,
only for and through its expressiveness. By the Word, by the
perpetual act of Spirit giving expression to its inherent import,
— which is its substance, itself, for Spirit is Absolute Import,
self-affirmed, — the worlds were made, and do exist. Because
Nature is spoken, it speaks ; because it speaks, the spirit of
man, kindred with the eternal Word, may espouse in Nature
its own import, and evoke the representative world of uttered
thought and feeling.
The imaginative intelligence recognizes in visible existence
this character of Sign, and reads off from it a significance for
the soul. Force and form, says the understanding; import,
says the poetic intelligence. This is thus and so, reports the
one; this means thus, announces the other. The former
regards the finite world as substantial, and as asserting only
itself; the latter regards the finite world as denying its own
substantiality in behalf of that which it signifies.
*
* Swedenborg sought to establish a science of significances, a science of Nature
on that higher degree. Hence the gulf which separates him from the ordinary man
of science. The latter is engaged in supplying what, with reference to the import
of Nature, we must call its grammar; he looks to the classification and syntactical
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
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“ As denying its own substantiality,” I say. How is that ?
I hope the reader will say, How is that ? and will say it with
a purpose to be pointedly dissatisfied, unless the question be
answered clearly and precisely.
A sign, observe, is necessarily the sign of that which itself is
not. It exists only to say, “ I am not it,” and in doing so to
point effectually toward that which is. As the finger on the
sign-board is not the road or city, as the spoken word man is
not man, but only sound, so is it with all signs whatsoever:
they point wholly away from themselves, being in themselves
nothing to the purpose ; they are there only for the eye to pass
over; and, considered with reference to their real purpose,
their entire being is a mere flitting away and vanishing into
that which they suggest. Plainly, that which is meant by a
word is the real thing. Plainly, a word, by the fact of having
a meaning, implicitly denies that itself is at all the real thing.
The meaning made the word, holds it in possession, and is all
the being of it. The significance is the substantial fact; the
sign, by the very fact of being such, professes itself the con
trary. If now we venture to apply to the universe this easy
and plain discrimination, all the difficulty will be in the ven
ture, none in the application. Two and two are still neither
more nor less than four, be the figures written in hundredths
of an inch, or from Labrador to Cape Horn. Making bold to
write our figures large, we may say with some confidence that
the natural universe, as Sign, only spoken into being, and
having its being only in its meaning, denies its own substantive
existence ; the meaning of it, not itself, is the real Fact; it is
but a pointing, as of an index-finger, to that which indeed is.
What does it say is ?
When one reads a word, considering it as a word, what does
he implicitly affirm ? Or what does the word itself, by the fact
relation of its etymons or elements. Now Shakespeare and Nature alike, merely
as parsed, are void of meaning : we arrive at an order of arrangement, and at nothing
more. Swedenborg sought not merely to parse, but to read ; he assumed a meaning,
and attempted a scientific exposition of it. I am not of those who think his success
perfect, or other than very imperfect; sometimes it is only the dignity of the enter
prise which forbids one to laugh. On the other hand, one must own that a gram
mar of the cosmos, were it complete, would not be sufficient. To do Lindley
Murray on that scale is to work at a large task indeed; but though one parse the
universe, is it enough merely to parse ?
�518
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
of being such, imply ? It implies, and he who reads it im
plicitly affirms, Mind. Only from Mind could words issue ;
only to it are they expressive, — that is, indeed words. When
the natural universe appears as expressive, a manifold sign, a
language, it affirms Absolute Mind, Spirit. Only from this
could a universal significance issue, only by it be embraced.
If Nature mean anything, Spirit is what it means. And so
the human race has thought; its apprehension of this truth is
embodied in the confessions and litanies of all ages.
Now to read the world as a language, finding in it an import
for the soul, is the essentially poetic act. We have thus ar
rived at the final definition promised: Poetry is the free read
ing up and down from Nature to Spirit and from Spirit to
Nature, each seen in the other. The outward feature of Nature
and life must be preserved, with the finest, most delicate ex
actitude, that we may not read in a blurred type; and yet in
all the soul must find its own immanent secret.
The understanding, meanwhile, holds out sturdily against
all this. Its business is to paint the index on the guide-board,
that this may be there for that traveller, the spiritual imagina
tion, to go by. Its utmost stretch is to observe that the travel
ler does go by, — that, looking on the sky, for example, the
untaught man has cried, “ Dyaus,” “ Zeus,” “ God,” making a
sign of it, and flying infinitely beyond. But it can never verify
this enunciation, nor indeed can believe in it; and, trying to
give some account of that passage, it will strain a point and
say, “ Rhetoric.” This, too, is liberal of it, extremely liberal;
it has grown to be a highly polite and tolerant understanding,
when it gives the name of rhetoric to that passing by; before
arriving at these handsome manners, it had bluntly said,
“ Nonsense.”
Has it now been made clear what poetry is ? And has it
also been rendered apparent, or at least credibly indicated,
that the conscious being of man is itself, in the sense ex
plained, a poem 1 If so, we may proceed to consider the epic
in particular, anticipating that epical truth will be found not
only in books, but in the fact of the universe.
We already know that the epic will represent comprehend
ing spiritual unity, and beneath this its apparent contradiction.
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
519
We know also that the latter will be made to suggest just that
which it seemingly contradicts, and so to negate its own nega
tion. This is the character of all poetry; but what distin
guishes the epic ?
Its primary distinction is, that here the scale of the draw
ing is strictly and explicitly universal. Existence in its full
breadth is the ground; the import of life in its full depth is
the theme. Here are to be the ultimate poles: the pure
Infinite, in contrast and correlation with finite Nature, — the
sovereign, perfect consciousness of man, in like contrast and
correlation with the most poignant contradiction supplied by
his natural experience.
First, the unity is here that of Being itself, absolute Spirit.
It is not merely a relative and subjective unity, that of mouse
and mountain daisy, beggar and king, with me, but the pure
One, which in oneness comprehends all. The oneness is, indeed,
the oneness, — the One to which, in the highest sense, there is
no Other, — absolute solvent, that liquefies all, englobing worlds
like drops of dew, cosmic dew of suns and stars, mist of milky
ways; and which, having pictured itself in Nature, whispers
in the enchanted heart of man, I am.
* First, then, the eter
nal Zeus, rest of all hearts, community of all natures. No
epical thought or genius has man without a consciousness of
this perfect, universal Identity, this all-embracing sky of the
soul.
Let this point be emphasized. What sort of epic were that
wherein this ultimate import of the spiritual consciousness
should not nobly and expressively appear ? The sort of epic
which is made such only by the title. The world has seen
such, but could not keep them long in view. The Genius of
the Whole is somewhat necessary to the parts, be it in a tree
or in a universe, and so in a poem which attempts to sing the
perennial character and relations of man’s life.
It is not a little curious to see how the grasshopper intelli
gence of Voltaire skips about this prime requisite of the epic
* It is peculiar also to the epic that this Unity is made explicit, represented ob
jectively, while in the drama proper it remains implicit, felt, not seen, a light to
enlighten, but no sun visible. Compare Homer and Shakespeare. -The Prometheus
hovers between the two.
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*
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
in his Essai sur La Poesie Epique. That he should attempt
such a topic is laughable. Few men have been more skilful
to break a jest; but here he was broken upon one. I once '
knew a youth who fancied himself a musical genius, because,
having not the slightest ear for music, he was never to his own
apprehension out of tune. At sight of a note he could promptly
produce a noise; and though, to compare small things with
great, it was like Milton’s gates of hell grating harsh thunder,
yet the innocent creature, not being deaf, as the hearers wished
they were, never doubted that he was melodious, since beyond
doubt he was vocal. I was reminded of him by reading the
“ philosopher ” of Ferney upon the Epic ; for never, perhaps,
was a very clever man more incapable of following on the track
of an epic imagination, or less aware of his own inability. He
perceives that in Homer the gods appear; whereupon he briskly
announces, that, in order to an epic, the “ marvellous ” must be
introduced. Now the marvellous, merely as such, has no more
a place in epic poetry than in science; nor, indeed, does it find
place in any form of noble literature. The blank gape it pro
duces is in the mind just that vacant 0, that annular eclipse
of intelligence, which the moon-mouth would indicate by the
shape it assumes.
The Olympus of Homer is his holding-ground in the
heavens. Therein he casts anchor, and so rides out the
storms of time in security and peace of heart. He would have
“ marvelled ” to find himself without it, and adrift on the sea
of events. He sings first of all that which sings itself in him,
the great faith of his soul.
Homer has, indeed, a keen sympathy with that which, per
haps ironically, is called “ real life ” ; and therefore is able to
paint it with an almost matchless precision and verisimilitude.
He is heroically faithful to Mnemosyne. Here is her whole story,
told without euphemism. Here is, now the struggle, and now
the stupor of passion, now the rolling resistless tide, and now
the sudden eddy and refluence, of courage, — rivalries, too,
mixed irresolvably of noble and ignoble, honor and infamy,
spun into the same thread ; here are the ebb and flow, the toss
and whirl, the interlacement, the twisted tangle, the blind and
blurting conclusion, of actual life. Here also is the charm of
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
521
feature and picturesque detail; individual action stands out in
boldest relief, individual portraiture is lavished, while to all
this is added the effect of diverse costumes, tongues, manners :
the details, handled in a way less masterly, were bewildering .in
their multiplicity ; and the picture, but for its breadth, would be
motley in the crowding of colors and contrasts. But the artist
is at his ease with much as with little, — always the master.
And yet, were this all, the Iliad would not be a poem: it were
only a wondrous piece of photography.
It is that Olympian repose with which Homer is able to over
arch this field of action, it is that peace of the All which he
makes to breathe about the storm and change of man’s little
world, that shows him a poet rather than a photographer,
Homer rather than De Foe. As his terrestrial observation is
wide, genial, and exact, so the faith of his soul, its hold upon
celestial Unity, is sure. To both he is just, and to each in. its
place and kind. And the objects of both, though opposite,
blend in harmony ; and the greater, though not only greater,
but all, does extinguish the less ; and the less, though it re
mains in vigor of feature and ruddiness of strength, passes
while it remains, and only the One-and-All is. Thus his pic
ture became a glass wherein the men of his time saw their life
with more than mortal vision. There the visible had become
ideal, yet retained its character ; there the invisible had be
come apparent, yet nowhere had broken the lines or blurred
the feature of actual experience. There the tempest of our
little life was seen rounded in with skies of everlasting calm :
participants in the divine secret, the mortal beholders looked
on and saw with new-informed eyes the cerulean circumambi
ent eternity, as now it condensed its viewless burden into our
whirling cloudlet of time, and anon drank it off into its own
transparent peace.
I confess we can no longer see the same perfectly in the
same mirror. To us the Iliad is not, cannot be, a pure epic.
Homer’s faith is not precisely that of the modern world; we
are able to follow him throughout only, as it were, by sympathy
prepense. That “ majestic, deathless head,” whose nod once
shook the world, and was the end of controversy to gods and
men, is now subject to the dispute of any too ready tongue,
vol. evil. — no. 221.
34
�522
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
sovereign no more. But the eternal Zeus lives under another
name, or without name ; Greece and Ilium we have, like the
poor, always with us ; the epos of existence remains; and
Homer’s speech needs but a translation into that diction which
is behind the words, to become ours.
Have we sufficiently dwelt upon the first grand requisite of
the epic ? Is it clear that this celestial unity must appear in
the written poem, because in the being of man that sovereign
import plays forever over the discord and disunity of our out
ward experience ? The matter has, indeed, been treated
slightly, but I will suppose that enough has been offered on
this head. Let us, then, turn the leaf.
That unity must have its opposite ; the nature of poetry, as
we are aware, requires this. The opposite, too, must in the
present case be no trivial one ; the play-over of Absolute Spirit
should be worthy of it. The eagle does not display his
strength of wing by merely flying across a ditch that a grass
hopper might leap. Show us a chasm yawning all the way
from east to west, wide as the world ; and when the genius of
the universe shall cast over that an arch whose keystone is the
zenith of eternity, it will do somewhat. Of this consummate
act the epic poet is to make us witness.
Every epic artist represents, as antithetic to the unitive
genius of being, the infernal, — that is, sheer moral inversion,
sheer head-down of moral order, the one thing with which the
soul cannot be directly reconciled. Moreover, he wellnigh
seems to give this abhorrent thing full possession of the field.
“ I read in Homer,” said Goethe, “ that properly we enact
hell here below.” Is this a true reading of 'Homer ? And if
so, does Homer read the world truly ? I think that in both
Goethe and Homer it is a true reading.
Goethe’s statement is, indeed, one-sided; and he perhaps
betrayed his own limit, while illustrating his penetration, in
making it. He himself is a little lame of the right foot. His
Mephistopheles is a lovely devil, cap-a-pie like a West Point
cadet turned out for parade, — magister artium in his kind,
compared with Milton’s Titanic undergraduate. Here Goethe
is perfect; but the sovereign term, the Zeus, he does not man
age so well.
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
523
Yet his statement about Homer can hardly be impeached.
What is the situation described in the Iliad ? It is this : the
crime of a coxcomb has bound two noble nations by the loftiest
public sentiment of antiquity, the sentiment of national honor,
to the work of mutual destruction. The occasion of their san
guinary struggle is a deed they alike despise, a deed of which
the fit notice were a hearty kicking to the culprit. And yet
just that in each which dignifies and adorns their humanity it
engages to the pitiless destruction of the other.
Is it said, that honor, rightly understood, engaged them to
nothing of the sort ? It would not in us ; in them it did so ;
nor could they disobey its mandate without moral collapse.
Hector says, the Trojan women, not to speak of the men, would
despise him, did he decline the combat, odious to him as it
was. I think it apparent that the nation which had yielded
would have seen all the bands of order dissolve in the caustic
of contempt.
Highest enslaved by lowest, and compelled to rivet and re
*
new its own bonds, — that is the spectacle. What is intrinsi
cally good, beautiful, noble, made not only to serve evil ends,
but even to accept and consecrate the service,— that is the
hateful situation which Homer places before us.
Does it seem that the dilemma might have been easily
escaped ? There is the very bite of it. So easy to escape, —
and impossible! In Shakespeare we find the same. How
easy for Cordelia, by two words, to save her father and herself
the misery that ensues ! Easy, — and she cannot utter them.
It is her true, honorable love that forbids ; it is the voluble
hypocrisy of Regan and Groneril that compels her love to make
its own misconstruction. The ease, and yet the impossibility ;
the nobleness that immediately makes the impossibility ; the
ape’s hand that behind all manipulates the dead-lock: there,
there is the poison of it.
Know we of nothing similar in actual life ? Have we never
seen petty interests, petty strifes, spites, jealousies, envies, of
no more importance than the spit-spat of belligerent tom-cats,
roping in worthy natures with abhorrent bands, that multiply
and tighten till the anguish is intolerable ?
Thackeray’s she-catamount of a “ campaigner ” can hunt
�524
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
Colonel Newcome to his death. What signifies her caterwaul,
pray ? He knows that it signifies nothing, and he dies of it;
the contemptibleness of the torture makes it only the more
torturing.
A politician rises in Congress, and proposes a compliment to
the shillalah invasion of Canada. Honorable men, who despise
the motion, feel compelled to sustain it; the election at New
York is at hand, and such a resolution once offered, they dare
not vote it down. In other circumstances, a war between
England and America might easily have arisen from this move
in the small game of an individual anxious to wipe out his
“ Know-Nothing ” record; and when it had arisen, the purest
patriotism in the land would have been driven, with loathing
stomach, to sustain its country’s quarrel. History, indeed, is
replete with instances — and did we see it behind the cur
tains, more instances would be known to us — wherein the
noblest sentiments of humanity have been harnessed beyond
help in the dirt-carts of sordid interest, while pitiful tricksters,
men who would sell what soul they have for a crossed sixpence,
and cheat Mephistopheles in the bargain, hold the reins, and
goad them on.
It is such a case from which the incident of Homer’s story
is drawn, — a case of moral head-down in the worst shape it
could assume to the mind of Grecian antiquity. The great
master does not hide, he is at pains to display, its hateful
features. By the avowed and intense revolt of Hector’s soul
from the work his hands must do, the abhorrent constraint of
the situation is made to the last degree biting. And that
nothing might be wanting to the keenness of the contradiction,
the Trojan prince is shown to us, not only in his valor, his
magnanimity, his sense of justice, but also in the tender nobility
of his domestic life. Andromache comes before us, queenly,
devoted, in all the pathos of wifely love; while the babe, drawn
to the father, shrinks away from the warrior, to suggest the
last rebuke of that dreadful strife. Meanwhile, in contrast
with this beautiful picture, — the noblest touch of tenderness
that has come to us from the old Hellenic world, — Paris has
signalized anew his luxurious infamy, and made the occasion
of the struggle, odious enough before, seem intolerable. And
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
525
yet Hector must go to the field and to his doom, and An
dromache remain behind, helplessly awaiting her doom, and
doomed Ilium also abide her day.
All that follows upon the main situation is painted with
the like pitiless fidelity, — pitiless only in fidelity; for deep,
tender compassion is in the poet’s soul. Hero after hero comes
forth, uplifted with all soaring thoughts, godlike in bearing,
glorious in form and in renown; then before our eyes he goes
down; we see him clutch the earth in blind agony, we hear
his armor clank over him, — his only knell. Nothing is ex
plained away; and the pathos reaches its acme in the stern,
stern words, “ all-ending death.” The poet cuts off his under
standing from all succors, — breaks down the bridges behind
him. Only by a transcendent process does he escape into
repose. The will of Zeus is accomplished: that is all. To
Homer this all was enough. To the author of the Book of
Job it was enough.
*
A deep sea in which to cast anchor!
We in our day like shallower waters.
Why is it that Homer selects the sentiment of honor to be
thus enslaved ? Because he has the keenest sympathy with it.
In his eyes it is noblest, best; its enslavement, therefore,
shows most strikingly that moral inversion he wishes to dis
play. Nor is he alone in this procedure; other epic poets
have done the same. Dante is pre-eminently the poet of Love :
read the story of Francesca, wherein the pathos of the Inferno
culminates, and you find him distilling from the honey of love
a cup that he swoons but to taste. Milton is the apostle of
Liberty: in the Paradise Lost he has opened the heavens to
show us the impulse to just this, Liberty, turned toward the
pit, and drawing after it one third part of heaven’s host.
Goethe’s noblest trait is his intellectual devotion, his worship
of Truth: it is precisely this that in his half-epic betrays
Faust. In the Ramayana, a supreme emphasis is laid upon
truth in the sense of veracity, respect for the plighted word.
Describing his hero, Kapila says: “ This illustrious prince could
• * It is true that at the end of the Book of Job a kind of offset is got up.
But we may observe, that, in representing this pay-off appreciable by the under
standing, the poet—if he wrote the conclusion — falls from poetry to prose. The
poem was already complete.
�526
Epic Philosophy. >
[Oct.
willihgly renounce life, fortune the most opulent, desire the
most dear, — but the truth never.” Now it is just this, respect
for the plighted word, that brings about the catastrophe of the
poem.
Somewhere in his picture, and generally in the foreground,
the epic artist casts in this quintessence of contradiction, this
ink of indelible darkness, Worst from Best, — all the juices of
sweet life going to feed cancers. Moreover, the higher the
art and the grander the genius of the poet, the more resolutely
does he leave this terrible fact in possession of its proper field.
In the Ramayana, those who had fallen in the war against the
demon were, after the victory, magically restored to life. That
is impure art. In the Iliad, death has his prey undisputed, and
tragic fates pursue even the living. This is the manner of the
master.
Worst from Best, — is it found only in poems? The stout
common sense of Theodore Parker led him to say that Religion
may become prince of the devils. Whence was the inquisition
generated ? It was bred out of the Beatitudes and the song of
the angels, “ Peace on earth, good-will to men! ” What is
wourali poison, in which South American Indians dip their
arrows, compared with the envenomed conscience that even
the spirit of Christendom has secreted ? “We enact hell here
below! ”
In the epics, then, of men, and in the epic of the Supreme
Poet, there is somewhat with which the heart of man cannot
be reconciled, nor should be reconciled, since it is antithetic to
moral order and unity: when man does not abhor it, he has
forsworn his own nature. What, precisely, is this somewhat,
this Satan ever going to and fro in the world, this serpent
always lurking in garden ? Let us see whether this thing can
be accurately defined. Having learned its nature, — if, indeed,
to do so be possible, — we may further inquire whether the epic
idea of the world can be seen as comprehending, commanding
it, and evoking melody from it. And if the attempt be daring,
and our space for exposition brief, all the more must precision
be sought; nor will a little formality in the statement, if it
help toward precision, be esteemed inexcusable.
1. In the world of the senses and of science all goes by law,
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
527
the savans tell us. Granted: force has definite characters and
constant measures ; in measure and character alike it is inva
riable. All there goes by law : by what kind of law, however ?
By a law that is absolutely and everlastingly indifferent to any
thought which man derives from his spiritual being, to any
sentiment, any ideal desire or purpose of the soul. You would
have a house, wherein to enshrine the sanctities and felicities
of domestic life : what cares gravitation for your wish ? These
Romans would build a city; Michel Angelo would lift St. Pe
ter’s dome: gravitation enters into no complicity with such
desires ; inexorably, stolidly faithful to its own business, it
holds down the rock in the quarry; whoever will get a block
of it away shall sweat for it. Well, the builders outwit gravi
tation, making it help them lift the stone, and put it in place,
where the stolid tug of that force shall serve their design : it
is outwitted, that is all; not in the least has it been won into
sympathy with a human purpose. The forces of Nature, as
they do not change to approach, so cannot change to elude, the
design of man: get the wind of them, and they are captive.
Now, as the soul has, through the body, a foothold in Nature,
and commands immediately a certain amount of force, it is
enabled to take natural law by surprise, and bring it to obe
dience. But in obedience it is remote as ever, maintaining
the same impassive, unconquerable indifference to all that the
soul imagines or intends. As with gravitation, so with all
natural forces : even when serving the most vital uses, they are
infinitely far away from man’s thought of use. Oxygen rushes
into the lungs, when they create a vacuum: it is but rushing
into a vacuum. It combines with the globules of the blood to
recreate life; to further decomposition would suit it as well :
growth and decay, life and death, man’s gain or loss, pleasure
or anguish, are to it quite the same. Thus it happens that
man, as a worker in the realm of finite Nature, must always
work among and upon forces that are no less than infinitely
removed from any sympathy with his spirit. The world serves
him, but does not know him even when it serves.
2. In using these forces, man puts himself somewhat in their
power. We lift the roof, but lift it over our own heads : gravi
tation has no respect for the heads ; its business is to draw
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Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
downward, which it attends to assiduously, not considering
who or what is beneath; and it holds the roof in place, I
must repeat, only as it is outwitted. When the earthquake
comes, comes its opportunity ; and now men fly the houses they
have built for their security. Moreover, for purposes of use
we must set free agencies that were not active before, that we
can never be sure of our ability to control, and that, despite
their services, ever continue terrible to us. Fire, for example,
is a demon that man has conjured up. It is needful, indispen
sable ; we must take it into our houses near the cradle and the
couch, must sleep with it for housefellow, knowing all the while
that it is an untamable demon, never a whit domesticated by
its long intimacy with man. Now fire is not bad; but the burn
ing of the house, for which it is at any moment ready, were
an evil. The burning of the house, and the fall, perchance, of
the flaming roof upon those it was designed to shelter, — de
spite all the glosses of optimism, a plain man may take leave
to regard that as indubitably an evil.
Here, therefore, is an evil, yet no evil principle. There is a
gap between human ends and natural means ; and evil — physi
cal evil only as yet — is incidental to it.
3. Man is not only in this world of forces thus indifferent
to every thought of his spirit, but, as an organized creature,
he is himself composed of such forces. Yet more, they assume
in him a new and peculiar intensity, becoming sensitive, and
rounding into an Ego heated with immeasurable desire. Nev
ertheless, these forces, though as an organized nature he is
compounded of them, belong to that world which is forever
infinitely remote from the pure thought and ideal desire of his
spirit. The relation of himself as spirit to himself as organ
ized in nature is the same with the general relation of man to
force in the external world. Hunger and thirst are no less
indifferent than gravitation to all that the soul believes and
loves. Temperamental force has its own orbit, moves by its
own springs, knows only its own ends. Indispensable utilities
are exacted from it; but it transmits them, as a mail-bag does
letters, without knowing what is in them.
Thus the soul must not only work upon, it must also work
by means of, an alien material. This material, moreover, is
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
529
not passive, it is force, fiercely intent, impersuasible. Accord
ingly, the soul can accomplish nothing, it is annulled, until by
an efflux of virtue it takes possession of the field; while only
by a continuance of the same energy does it keep possession.
Even in victory and supremacy, it may not retire and sleep :
its authority is dead, its victory vanishes, in the moment that
it ceases to act and to overcome. It is a sovereign whose sub
jects are all rebels at heart, and become such in act the moment
it does not make upon them an overmastering impression.
They are rebels, not by any concerted antagonism to the regal
principle, but because they are wholly moved by an intention
of their own, which is alien and indifferent to spiritual ideas.
4. The soul, in building up its own architectures, and pre
paring its own repast, must make immaterial fire, must liberate
demons in its own organic household, and so newly imperil
itself. For the better culture and discipline of mankind, it es
tablishes Property, — an institution which rests wholly upon an
ideal basis : instantly it creates cupidity, a very terrible demon
indeed, hungry beyond measure, sometimes in its rage of appe
tite devouring entire civilizations. What a raising of chimneys,
called courts of law, there has to be! What anxious binding
of the demon with precedents, statutes, legal forms! Despite
all which, it will sometimes break bounds : and, indeed, when
is it not breaking bounds, committing trespass, doing inde
scribable mischief ?
The soul, again, builds the state, to incarnate therein, as in
a larger body, the spirit of community : at once it sets free the
love of dominion,—fire again, and a fire that makes horrible
conflagrations. The desire of power and sway is not bad ; the
debt to it of civilization is immense, immeasurable ; never was
there a great ruler or statesman whose breast did not brim
with it; and only at far-distant periods of time do the Timoleons and Washingtons appear, who possess it largely without
being possessed by it. Often has it wrought prodigiously, when
Goodness lay asleep, wrapped in sweet dreams ; and history on
many a page
“ Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat
To earn his cream-bowl duly set,
Till in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-laborers could not end.”
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Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
Nor, on the other hand, is it good; for in itself it has no moral
quality whatsoever. But a force destitute of all moral char
acter, which nevertheless must be brought into the closest
intimacy with moral interests, and even fanned and stimulated
in their behalf, has in it capacities of evil.
The soul builds churches, architectures to house a thought
higher still; and again it makes fire ; and this time may make
the very fire of hell, bigotry, conscientious hatred, holy cruelty,
lying for God, tyranny that not only oppresses, but makes in
its victims a hunger to be oppressed. And once more we have
to say, that the force thus brought into action is in itself neither
good nor evil, though of both good and evil it is vastly capable.
Fire, — it may kindle fagots about the martyr, and blaze
abroad to devastate entire centuries and civilizations, or may
genially warm the hearts and households of believing ages.
Finally, this Ego of ours, —this also is demon, is fire. The
Spirit makes it: never could mere organic force become con
scious, and say I. But the Spirit makes it as the intensest
conceivable antithesis to its own pure, including universality.
I, — what a portentous exclusion the word implies ! It shuts
out all the universe beside itself; indeed, to the egoistic appre
hension pure and simple, I is universe, is god. A wonderful
thing is this particular, limited Self. It is eccentric centre,
— pure partiality in the state, and with the sense of perfect
wholeness. It is Spirit inverted or reverted from its compre
hending, universal self-identity, to sustain its own intensest
contradiction, a purely limited and excluding self-identification.
This special Self is demon all and only. Not good, it is yet
here as the strong caryatid to sustain a spiritual conscious
ness, which is God’s surpassing work of art. Not bad, it is
nevertheless a caryatid whose head is not kept under without
pains, and that at best seldom fails to put a wry face upon his
labor.
Fire is not bad ; but the burning 'of the house, which despite
all precautions may happen, were an evil. Egoism is not bad;
but its exaction and forage upon the soul, which in some degree
are sure to happen, are an evil. When the forces of finite Na
ture turn the virtue and providence of the soul against itself,
then there is evil, devil. Devil is not a person, it is not even
�Epic Philosophy.
531
a thing or a force ; it is simply an effect incidental to a par
ticular form of relation. With finite Nature, fixed, resolute,
inexorable in its finitude, the soul must make an intimacy, to
which intimacy Nature can never respond by the faintest blush
of sympathy; natural forces will seek forever, must forever
seek, to carry away in their own line whatever comes within
their reach; and when they succeed in appropriating and
bringing into their own line of action the virtue of the soul,
evil appears. The epic poet represents this most terrible inci
dent of the Spirit’s engagement in Nature, — the soul pulled
overboard by the fish it was drawing in, — the soul caught in
the mesh of its own mechanism, ground in its own mill.
If, now, the foregoing exposition be at all correct, it will
appear, that, though there is no evil principle, though Satan
is the boldest of impersonations, implying some temerity of
rhetoric, yet the Satanic, the infernal, exists nevertheless.
Disease is no entity; but epilepsy and lockjaw are quite real.
On the other hand, the epic “ play-over ” must not be for
gotten. Evil is real, but it is not commensurate with man’s
being. Man is properly supernatural; the soul is above all its
experience within the limits of finite Nature, and
“ Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”
Accordingly, I find two opposite classes of theorists, who,
severally following, though in contrary directions, a linear and
prosaic logic, arrive at a forced conclusion on this matter. The
one party, beginning from below, and perceiving evil to be real
relatively to the soul as engaged in Nature, reasons to the
eternal from the temporal, and asserts, a supernatural Satan,
conceived of either as a person or a state of existence. The
other party, setting out from man’s supreme consciousness,
wherein he feels the serene eminence of his spirit over Nature,
reasons downward, and declares that even within the limits of
Nature evil is not real.
The latter opinion seems to have been adopted with a degree
of enthusiasm by the Emersonian school in America, though
of Mr. Emerson himself one may rather say that he has shown
a marked predilection for it than that it is sustained by him
as a fixed dogma. The chief argument for it is an undeniable
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Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
fact, namely, that evil is often reconverted to use. But were
this always the case, evil would not lose its proper character.
At sight of somewhat with which it cannot be reconciled, the
soul is stung, and newly incited. Well, why is it stung ?
Whence the provocation ? It is the sight or the experience
of somewhat odious to the soul that stings. If we say, “ This
so-called evil is made to serve a use, therefore it is not evil;
whatever is is right; the soul can and must be reconciled with
it,” — where are we ? Let us shun huddled thinking.
Asafoetida is the best of antispasmodics ; it does not there
fore smell the better. Esteem me not narrow-minded, if I hold
my nose. The philosopher tells me, indeed, that only devil
knows devil, — that only because I am cousin-german to asa
foetida does its odor offend me. Perhaps so; it may be, that,
were the nose regenerate, it would find only frankincense in
foetor. I humbly confess such grace has not been given that
organ. Be it to my shame or no, I must distinguish between
scent of heliotrope and scent of carrion-flower. I follow my
nose as my fathers did before me. Nor in truth do I propose
to be shamefaced before Philosophy in doing so. Offence is
offence, make the best of it. Evil is a thing good to esteem
bad, good to be offended at, good to keep the cork on. Like
ipecacuanha and tartar-emetic, it is useful only as it creates
nausea and is intolerantly rejected by the system.
It is said further, that Good has a vast power of assimilation,
a chemistry that nothing can wholly resist. This also is true.
As in the physical world the organific force will masticate
quartz and porphyry, gnawing away at the frozen adamant of
mountain crags with teeth harder and more capable of self
repair than those of rodents, and solving all with the alchemy
of eupeptic life, until it has given the earth flesh, has clothed
this with the garniture of field and forest, and digested this
again into animal form and motion, so the higher genius that
works in humanity to dissolve and to organize does not live
upon spoon-victual alone, but has teeth to cut platinum, a
stomach to digest poison, and an art out of pus and gangrene
to make the vigor of dancing feet and bloom of dawning beauty.
Eyes that are not sick will see this without spectacles, and
sound minds will be apt to emphasize it. But let us not say
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
533
too much, and be like cowards who betray fear by voluble affir
mation that there is no danger. Good has diamond teeth, —
and it needs them! Poor logic, to say, that, because it has this
masticating and digestive force, therefore all is food for it,
artistically prepared by some cosmic Blot, and that what seems
odious is only pepper-sauce, a sharp condiment to provoke
appetite.
In fine, the universe will not be spun out in one thread, and
turned to prose. Our nice mental machinery can do much,
but cannot do that; and this new-patented method of optimism
fails like every other. It does good work of the kind, but the
poetic truth of existence will not be caught on the smooth
turning spindle.
The opposition of good and evil is never to be explained away.
But this opposition is itself prosaic, if only in itself consid
ered. To deny it is fatal to epic truth; to remain only in it,
the captive and jail-bird of Nature, is no less fatal. Evil, and
good as merely opposed to evil, belong alike to the soul only
as standing in organic connection with finite Nature; but the
soul’s true being is not in Nature, it is in Spirit, the self-affirmed,
eternal, indivisible Import, into which Nature, as sign, ever
more resolves itself. To the bird as walking the wall exists,
and is impassable: the bird takes wing, and the wall, though
solid as ever, becomes for it no wall. But man at once walks
and flies, — walks and works on these levels of Nature, yet by
- his true substantive being soars and circles in the divine ether;
and here, in unity with the One-and-All, he is himself the sky,
which rounds in and contains in harmony his natural experi
ence. In his breast is enshrined this exceeding great mystery,
—the infinite separation of Nature from Spirit, the perfect poetic
comprehension of Nature by Spirit. A mystery, nay, a very
dust in the eyes, to prose thought, it is far otherwise in the
being' of man, as in the universe of God: here it abides in
poetic clearness forever,— so clear, that the voice of it, when it
comes to speech, can be no other than a voice of singing, to
which only melodious numbers and concord of sweet sound
afford a fit expression. The universe rings with it like a bell;
and the heart of the poet, being whole, also rings silver-clear;,
and in the deep heart of humanity a poetic thought is peren
nial, though in general it is shattered on the lips.
�534
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
From the height of its perfect consciousness the soul looks
down upon the imperfect quasi world of Nature; and seeing
itself involved there, yet not involved, — locked into those
limits of inexorable finitude, yet above them, including them, ’
resolving them into that breath of Spirit which sings while it
passes, — it has the sentiment not only of a Whole, but of an
epic Whole, including within its flawless unity the intensest
contradiction.
We are now prepared, let it be supposed, to attempt a final *
survey of this epic Whole, this Iliad of existence, placing its
grand features in their true relation to each other. Only from
the summit of thought and consciousness can such a survey be
attempted sanely; we must therefore begin and end with the
all-comprehending Unity, with pure Spirit.
1. Man has the consciousness of Spirit in its integrity,
whole and the whole, nothing if not all. He knows this, and,
as knowing, is one with it. Never can it be. known as other ■
than that by which it is known ; if another, it is no longer the
One, but only a particular existence. Tell me not of a God,
one being particularized among others, though great or great
est. John Stuart Mill kindly explains, that, though it be
ridiculous to speak of the Infinite, the Absolute, yet God may '
be infinite in a particular way, — infinitely just and good in the
sense of being entirely just and good. His infinite is merely
unmixed quality. In the same sense a spider is infinitely a |
spider, if it be all and only spider. Should the creature ever I
be afflicted with a doubt about the propriety of catching flies, |
the spiderly nature, becoming mixed, would fall from infini- I
tude. Infinite in the sense of pure quality is perhaps as good !
an infinite as positivism admits of; but I quite agree with Mr.
Mill in thinking it ridiculous to call this the infinite.
The infinite of Spirit is not to be caught in a cobweb. The
ambitious broom of positivist logic will neither sweep it down
from the dark corners of the understanding nor sweep it to
gether from the floors of phenomenal Nature. What it is we
may a little conceive thus: though there were a myriad of
perfectly rational minds, there were but one Reason, and each
of them were it. The consciousness of reason is an integrating
consciousness; in it there is a unity, not numerical, but intrinsic:
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
535
multiple in manifestation, it is not divided, nor in itself multi
ple, but ever identical. Spirit is reason, and more than we
mean by reason distinctively. It is not only integral, but is
active, eternal, absolute integration. As there is not only a
possible rest in motion, but also a rest of motion,— as, for
example, in orbital movement, — so there is a unity, not only
in multiplicity, but of multiplicity, — a unity of comprehension
and embrace, which, though it contain contradiction, yet does
indeed contain it, and therefore remains itself unbroken. The
consciousness of this it is that the human race has confessed
so often as it has said God. There is no night there; there
all limit is swallowed up, freedom and necessity become one
and the same ; there the jars of Nature blend in the tune of the
eternal Whole, and the clash of oppositions is felt to be sus
tained by the very unity which they seemingly oppose. “ The
will of Zeus is accomplished ” : it is the key-note which to
every note is a key. Spirit is; and he is Spirit who is con
scious of it, and he the voice of it who hears its language.
Spirit is, the everlasting Only, only and all, playing over op
position, yet never opposed; abiding ever in itself, yet not
aloof; dwelling only with itself, yet housing the universe.
2. Nevertheless, in precise antithesis to this, there is the
world of finite Nature, also assuming to be all, and indeed
complete in its way, — no escape from it, when once you have
accepted its level and law. It bears, however, this ear-mark
of imperfection, that the essential character of it is to be ex
cluding. Excluding : every particle of matter shoulders away
every other; — every square inch of space says, as it were, to
universal space, “ Stand off! ” — every moment of time fixes
itself between the two eternities of time, denying them, saying,
“ Of time I alone am, I, the present moment! ” — every force,
so much as it acts, negates all other force. It is a universe of
exclusions, — purest conceivable opposite to the including sim
plicity of Spirit.
What then? We have a dual world: Spirit and Nature
standing in irreconcilable opposition, each, it should seem,
excluding the very possibility of the other. Yet as Spirit is
whole and the whole, or is nothing, dualism kills it. And,
indeed, many in our day espouse the cause of finite Nature to
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Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
this extent, saying, “ Spirit can be no more than a fiction of
speech, since for it as a reality Nature leaves no room.” True,
Nature has no room for it. Here is a difficulty, which to a
prosaic speculation is, and must remain, insuperable. But the
bolt turns to another key.
3. We have seen that this self-asserting finite Nature asserts
itself only to the same ear which itself makes, to the finite
understanding. To the higher poetic intelligence, it is only
Sign, only Language. As such, it declares itself to be in and
of itself nothing. A word, — for what is it here? To be
somewhat in itself? No, but expressly to be nothing in itself.
It is a word only as, vacating itself, pointing away from itself,
denying its own substantiality, it simply and unequivocally
stands for somewhat which indeed is, namely, an import exist
ing in the mind. The world, then, as Sign, denies its sub
stantial existence, vacates its own pretension to reality, and
affirms what is not itself, affirms a significance whose unity
and substantiality is Spirit.
It has been said, but will bear saying again, that to this
significant and therefore ever-vanishing character of Nature all
human speech is due. So all mythology, all theology, comes
of the impulse to render that language which Nature is into
the language man uses. Poetry, painting, every fine art, is a
fine art for the reason that it elects the significant impression
of Nature as the real fact of it, while the so-called useful arts
regard Nature only in its lower character, as force. Whence
the charm of landscape painting ? It is always inferior to that
which one may any day see from his doorstep. The charm of
it is this: it presents Nature as only picture, only significant
show, without its outdoor pretension to substantiality, — pre
sents Nature more as what it veritably is. Hence mere fac
simile painting, which foists upon the’picture Nature’s habitual
disguise of its true character, is but mock art.
4. Having thus affirmed Spirit, then shown finite Nature as
apparently denying it, then again shown the same Nature as
confessing itself a mere sign of that which it seems to deny,
we come to an act which concerns us human beings very
nearly, but of which there seems to be in the streets of our
cities little notice taken. I have never once seen mention of it
on the bulletin-boards, nor found it in the column of news.
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
537
Spirit issues in person, in the person, that is, of humanity,
upon this scene of finite Nature ; accepts the fiction of its sub
stantiality; and even so, upon these hard terms, extorts a con
fession of its presence and quality. Here, then, it is in the
militant state, a warrior in armor, overcoming a hostility that
never abates, compelling a confession ineffably alien to the lips
that utter it.
Spirit militant, Spirit accepting the fiction of Nature’s sub
stantiality to conquer it on its own level, — this is the moral life
of humanity. With this “ accepted fiction ” under the feet,
we cannot wonder that our life should divide itself into the
irreconcilable opposites, Right and Wrong, God and Devil.
A contradiction is involved in such a state of existence; the
t contradiction will appear, and make itself felt, sometimes to
the utter anguish of the soul.
Here the soul conquers, but always with costs; here it en
dures defeat, but in defeat still conquers, if its quality has
been signalized. No other business has it than to say effectu
ally, I am : achieving this, though in dungeons, at the stake,
on the cross, it is victorious.
Partial defeat it ever does and must suffer, optimism to the
contrary notwithstanding. “ All is well,” am I told ? Yes,
the All is very well, undoubtedly. One gets fresh intelligence
of that fact in his own breast now and then, and pipes his little
note of rejoicing accordingly. But is this taken to mean that
all goes well ? that in the line and on the level of outward
events there is perfect process ? that the moral life of man
involves no contradiction, in the midst of which the soul must
strive and suffer ? that we may lie on our oars and trust the
tide of events to take us to port? Enough, 0, more than
enough of this! In the line of events, as related to the moral
life of humanity, there is, there can be, no perfect process on
the earth: the very conception of our existence forbids. We
chant, with a sweet imbecility, “ the good time coming ” :
it is ever coming, and never come. Some say that the golden
age has been, and some that it is to be ; but I, that all events
are cheap and all times tawdry, — that only the soul is golden,
and that the shine of this metal out of the dust-cloud of history
is the true result.
vol. cvn. — no. 221.
35
�538
t
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
Here is the field of the tragic poet. He causes the soul to
show itself and to shine from out the utmost darkness and
devilishness of events. The one is helpless and inextinguish
able ; the other victorious and without honor. The soul suffers
every conceivable defeat, and is godlike still; the law of events
follows its own fatal course, making no clear distinction be
tween good and bad, and is seen in its proper under-foot char
acter. Thus, Shakespeare in his grand tragedies will give us
scarce a crumb of comfort, so far as the course of events is
concerned. Iago, indeed, ends his iniquity with his death :
who is consoled ? who cares ? You crush the snake that has
just fleshed its fang in priceless honor and innocence: well; it
was but a snake. Iago dies; but Desdemona, Othello! — who
talks of a balance struck ? Or who in this presence will pro
claim the “ good of evil ” ? What good ? Snake number two
is more likely to be regenerate ? St. Snake is somewhat less
beautiful to me than the creature uncanonized. Anything, if
you please, but Satan in a state of grace!
I thank Shakespeare that he gives no hint of these suspi
cious compensations. Out of wrong done and suffered the
soul has shown its quality: this is the true result. All the
grandeur of the great poet’s genius is found in this, his habit
ual manner of representing life. Had he stooped to patch up
events, pretending, after the fashion of the novelist, that the
significance of life is found in their course and result, he would
have stooped indeed, and been no longer Shakespeare.
Spirit by issuing upon this scene of things brings moral good
to a world which before was but a system of forces, incapable
of moral character: by the same act it makes the possibility
and the general (not particular) necessity of moral evil. It
does so by placing the virtue of the soul within reach of the
energies of the finite world, “ laws ” of Nature, organic im
pulses and desires, — huge polypi, that throw their long tena
cious tentacles about all that comes within their scope, and know
not what they devour. Thus the Hebrew “ God of battles ” —
the unity of Spirit in the militant state — says, “ I, God, make
good, and I create evil.” Does this sound harsh ? But is it
not true ? Are not moral good and moral evil correlative op
posites, each of which forever wars upon and forever implies
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy^
539
the other ? Does not the soul make both, the former by its
intrinsic quality, and the latter by the situation it accepts ?
As the human providence which evokes the element of fire
makes it possible that any house may burn and certain that
some houses will burn, so spiritual virtue, by creating moral
good, enables the characterless energies of Nature to attain the
higher, though abhorrent quality of evil.
But the divining sense of humanity has touched the ultimate
truth of this situation with a precision yet more admirable.
Spirit militant, appearing no longer as the “ God of battles,”
but as the suffering Prince of Peace, the crucified God, meekly
enduring, in the consciousness of an infinite resource, all the
utmost despite of Nature, — never yet has a nobler or truer
imagination inspired the worship of humanity. A great in
justice is, indeed, done this perennial poetic truth, when it is
Calvinized into prose ; yet what an appeal, even so, has it
made to the heart of man! Let the form change as it may
and must; but let the grand imagination remain, for the trage
dy of the world has this extent; and JEschylus and Shake
speare and every greatest poet has touched it most nearly just
then when his genius was at the supreme height.
The strictly moral consciousness is dualistic, not integrating;
for beneath its feet is an assumption contradictory to the eter
nal quality of Spirit, namely, the assumed substantiality of
finite Nature. Hence it dwells in a divided world, whose ulti
mate terms a^e God (the warring or suffering God) and Devil.
But optimism pretends that the moral consciousness is unitive
and entire. It blinks the underlying contradiction, and .there
fore must seek to persuade us that “ the Devil is not so black
as he is painted,” and indeed is not of a black complexion at
all, but is only a serviceable angel in soiled linen, — grimed
with necessary labor, and none the worse for not appearing in
holiday clothes. I freely make over my share in this charita
ble judgment to those who can find a use for it, and freely
confess that^a more limping, one-legged thing is not known to
us than a purely moralistic theology which sets out with deny
ing the necessary dualism of morals.
5. But the old religionists permitted themselves to speak of
mere morality, as if there were a consciousness in man and a
�540
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
truth in being that transcended morals, though without invali
dating them. Were they utterly deceived ? Has humanity no
consciousness, has being no character of this transcendent
kind ? Are right and wrong the supreme words ? — wrong,
however, being inscrutably wrung back, and so brought, as it
were clandestinely, into the line of right. Epic imagination,
whether as found in written poems, or as speaking in all the
higher spirituality of mankind, affirms a sovereign Unity, which,
indeed, becomes moral by descent into the limits of finite Na
ture, but which is in itself, as Hooker said, “ not only one, but
very oneness,” while in oneness it includes, and is, all. Let it
be permitted me to speak as I can, and without reproach, of this
Unspeakable, happy if the words shall in any manner or degree
hint what the best of words will never more than hint.
It may be read in epics, and as their supreme import, neces
sary to render them epical, that Spirit, even while provisionally
accepting this finite Nature as substantial, and issuing upon it
in the militant character, remains not the less and forever in
itself, in the consciousness of its pure, eternal integrity, un
broken by the dividedness of time, untouched by its tumult.
This One to which there is no Other, while yet it does not ex
clude, but embraces and houses all multiplicity and diversity,
— is it not the “ open secret,” always inaccessible to the criti
cal understanding, while to the adoring heart and spiritual
imagination it is not only accessible, but is alone to them in
the deepest sense native ? Inexplicable, indubitable, not to be
solved only because itself the universal solvent, it is the mys
tery of eternity, yet is mysterious only to the prosaic mind,
while only through its infinite reconciling presence is finite Na
ture itself other than an affronting mystery to the credent and
poetic soul. This is the blessed play-over, beneath which, and
yet within which, all the fortune of life, all the struggle and
process of existence, go on, and into which they evermore
vanish, to appear in vanishing and to die in renewal, as words
sink and are lost in the import that creates and sustains them.
An indestructible consciousness in man, fundamental fact of
his being, makes him a participant in this oneness, this whole
ness, this perfection of Spirit in itself. Spirit as engaged in
Nature, —it is Sarpedon, son of Zeus, warring, stricken, perish
�1868.]
Epic Philosophy.
541
ing, lying gory on the battle-field ; Spirit abiding in itself, —
it is Zeus poised in Olympian peace, and in himself containing
all. Sarpedon falling, dying, the victim of Nature ; Zeus im
mortal, hurtless as the blue heaven, and embracing Nature as
the sky the earth; — the one is the passionate experience of
man, and the other is his pure, integrating consciousness. But
the latter is his consciousness, not merely as his, and subjec
tive, but as veritable, substantial, the indivisible consciousness
of Spirit, existing only because Spirit is, one and indivisible,
— the eternal fact impressing itself with the sense of its own
infinite reality.
It follows from all the foregoing that man’s being is a scale
of three degrees. On the lowest, he is only an organized
nature, a mote or molecule in the immeasurable system of
things ; a little learning the trick of it, a little and a little
better able, from age to age, to take care of his small peculium; getting to be at length, from a mote, an insect, and
humming so as to be heard, 0, yards away!
On the de
gree above this, far above, he is moral, engaged in the battle
without truce between good and evil; at issue with others and
with himself ; finding a law in his members warring upon the
law of his mind and bringing him into captivity, till he cry,
“ Wretched man that I am ! ” Here he may have noble battle,
but never peace ; always there is a Hannibal in his Italy, or
the Gauls are gathering on the border ; and he is still bound
by the necessities of the conflict in the rare hours of his tri
umphal march. On the highest degree, he is one with the
One-and-All. Here, as from the height of eternity, he looks
down on his small fortunes in the world of time, and by all that
he there suffers renews and intensifies the consciousness of his
eternal security and sovereignty in God.
It was the door into this supreme consciousness that the
Christian evangel, particularly as represented .by Paul, un
barred and threw open to the access of mankind; the doc
trine of “ salvation by faith,” though its dryness now parches
the tongue, began the epopee of Christendom, and gave the
key-note to the largest symphony in which the imaginations
of nations and ages have as yet joined. This consciousness,
though not at all denying, but, on the contrary, admitting and
�542
Epic Philosophy.
[Oct.
using, what is beneath it, declares itself alone veritable.
Spirit only is ; all else appears, and is not. And here one can
not help asking by what fine luck it was that Hellenic tradition
made Homer blind; that which he sang he saw but as a
picture within his breast. For so the eye of absolute Spirit
sees Nature and the natural experience of man as things by
itself imagined, airy nothings with a local habitation and a
name.
The epic poet sets off all the worst that the soul can suffer
in Nature against that higher impossibility of its suffering at
all. He gives himself the divine pleasure of beholding this
troubled, tumultuous quasi existence as it vanishes momentarily
and forever into the peace and perfect comprehension of Spirit
in itself. That engagement in Nature, and yet an everlasting
ease and delight of self-rescue out of Nature, — the perpetual
play-up of finite life out of itself and into the infinite as its
truer self, while Spirit in its divine play-over stoops to the
world, and, stooping, remains infinitely above, and seeming tu
acknowledge another than itself, makes that apparent other an
instrument through which to blow its eternal affirmation, I
only am ; — this is that symphony of being whose choirs are
solar and stellar systems, and whose notes and numbers are in
dividual lives, while in each note the tune of the whole, the
tune of eternity, presides, and the Symphonist himself is pres
ent. And in finding this, we find the epic interpretation of
human life.
D. A. Wasson.
�
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Epic philosophy
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Wasson, David Atwood
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Place of publication: Boston
Collation: 501-542 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Article from North American Review, vol. CVII, no. 221. Annotations in pencil "N. Amer. Rev." page 501. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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[s.n.]
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Poetry
Mythology
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Ancient Greek Poetry
Epic Poetry
Homer
Mythology
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305
J3f\OWNING
AS
P^eachei^
A
SECOND PAPER.
'The first part of this essay was occupied with an attempt to define
some aspects of Mr. Browning’s position amongst contemporary poets;
¡and the tone and temper in which his poetry enters upon one of its
functions—preaching—(this word I used advisedly as better befitting
poetry than the term teaching}. His art and his preaching are, indeed,
inextricably interwoven in all his writings; and the result of an en•deavour to abstract either one or other from the whole, must of course
be unsatisfactory; nevertheless, in some measure I must aim at tracing
•one or two of his characteristics as preacher, to their expression in
some of his sermons. Within a space so limited, I can only allude
to a very few poems : a thorough analysis of any, would be, one need
hardly say, useless to attempt. ‘ Easter-day ’ is perhaps of all others,
the most strikingly illustrative of the Browning peculiarities, the one
which least of all could have been the work of any other man. Viewed
.side by side with his £ Christmas-eve,’ it is, one feels, the more
difficult of apprehension : it seems more complex in meaning, and
full of subtle transitions of thought and mood. It is possible to a cer
tain extent to content ourselves with an interpretation of ‘Christmas-eve,’
but the other poem seems to grow with each successive reading; and
by newly perceived connections of thought or feeling, to modify our old
exegeses. One feels that one is admitted more immediately in this,
into the mysterious presence of a human mind. The impression one
.gets from comparison of the two poems is that the whole of the vivid
artist and man-consciousness of which the £ Easter-day ’ is a product, is
not brought into action in the formation of the poem of ‘ Christmas-eve
and in this latter there is less absolute demand than in the other, that
his readers should have some degree of intellectual and moral affinity
■with the writer.
Granting that there is this difference in the poems, we may perhaps
VOL. II.---- NO. IX.
Q
�306
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
discern a reason for it in the difference of the subjects which occupy
them; the subject dealt with in £ Christmas-eve,’ belonging to the region
of matters practical—-that of ‘ Easter-day’ extending into the speculative.
Vigorous and clear-sighted though Browning is in his dealings with
these former, it is in a speculative region only that the full force of hisnature seems to develope itself in that passionate pressing on after
substantial reality of some sort or other—whether good or evil, at least
truth—which is the ultimate attitude of all his intellectual and emotional
action.
1 Christmas-eve’ starts from beliefs, which it takes for granted con
cerning the relations of humanity to an unseen spiritual world. It
belongs to the world of intercourse with our fellow men, a region where'
our beliefs are certainties, or as good as certainties. The question it treatsof is one within the Christian Church. The lesson it gives is a practical
one of broad charity and tolerance, a tolerance which, resulting out of the*
love to be learned by contemplation of the Human-Divine love, is to be
able to overcome all intellectual variances and fastidious repugnances of
taste. There is wrought out in the poem the grand feeling of a brother
hood, including witbin its comprehensive hold the manifold varieties of
human lives. Browning by his deep digging into humanity, finds
essential root-union, where Matthew Arnold with his languid scratching
at the surface, finds only dissimilarities forbidding sympathy. He unites
himself and us with the men and women of the Zion Chapel meeting,,
whose portraits he places before his readers in terms so grotesquely
graphic,—omitting no offensive detail to render them thoroughly life
like; and effectually preventing any mere aesthetic sentiment from being
the basis of our Christian charity. The absence of sweetness and light,
and the presence of certan repulsive characteristics (there is a vein off
humour akin to Dickens’s, in the way in which these are individualized),,
in the 1 preaching-man,’ alike, and in the flock that sat under the ‘ pig-oflead-like pressure,’ of his ‘ immense stupidity,’ are things that Browning:
insists on our realising to the full. Then, over the disgust awakened,
in us, he gains and makes us gain, as the poem proceeds, a victory
sublime, both as ethics and as art. (I said in the earlier pages of this,
essay, that Browning had no pathos—no sense of grand incongruities;.
I retract:—this is what one might call an inverted pathos. The un
looked-for discovery that the reality is nobler than the appearance, is.
the pathos belonging to Browning, and, to Christianity; just as the
finding truth to be smaller and meaner than illusion, had been the
pathos of Paganism). ‘Christmas-eve’ unites us, also, with the crowd
of ignorant worshippers in Rome at the ‘ raree show of Peter’s suc
cessor,’ who (typical of a multitude in all sections of the Church).,
remain in the days when the ‘world’s eyes are open’
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
307
Peevish as ever to be suckled,
Lulled by the same old baby prattle,
With intermixture of the rattle ;
and with the Gottingen professor who, with an inconsistency nobler than
his logic, retains the feeling of faith in and love for what his reason has
reduced to a myth. (Were it not that this paper must abstain from
viewing Browning as an artist, I would notice as a specimen of his
power as a portrait painter, the way in which with a few vigorous touches
he sets before us the whole ‘personnel ’ outer and inner, of this ‘ virginminded studious martyr to mild enthusiasm.’) The poem has its cul
minating idea in the grand trust that can say—
‘— Subsisteth. ever
God’s care above, and I exult
That God, by God’s own ways occult
May—doth. I will believe—bring back
All wanderers to a single track.’
Browning lets us see clearly what the nature of this feeling of brother
hood is j and guards jealously against any possibility of confounding it
with ‘ mild indifferentism’ or ‘lazy glow of benevolence over the various
modes of man’s beliefs.’ He makes no attempt to harmonize the different
creeds and tempers of religious feeling, by the modern method of elimi
nating the peculiarities of each as non-essentials. He, on the contrary,
insists that what constitutes each man’s earthly care, is to ‘ strive—to
find some one chief way of worship, and contrive ’ that his fellows ‘ take
their share.’ His tolerance is only the result of his confidence that here
where man’s care ends, ‘ God’s, which is above it and distinct,’ begins.
He cannot take the philosophical bird’s-eye view of the different creeds,
which is possible to men who are sufficiently impersonal to themselves to
contemplate at their ease, and compare impartially, the various religious
systems and cults spread out before them. All conclusions taking as
their premises only the aspects of men in masses, are unsatisfactory to
him. All problems of life, social or ecclesiastical, are unintelligible to
him until he have gained a solvent for them through the solution of the
problem of the life individual. The unit from which his reasonings
start is neither Humanity, nor the portion of it included within a church,
but the ego (the only ego he knows as a basis for argument being his
own). And it is only through his individual realisings, attained through
the toil and struggle of personal faith, that he gets his hope for the des
tinies of other men : it is only because of what he has himself discerned,
that he is enabled to reach—by a leap, not by a logical process—to the
trust that the discerning» of his fellows, though varying from his own,
are not illusory. The ratio of his power of sympathy and tolerance is
exactly that of the strength of his own dogmatic beliefs.
Q 2
�308
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
It is in tlie 1 Easter day ’ that we have to look for the record of how
an earnest human soul attains to that faith in the unseen, which in
‘ Christmas eve ’ is assumed all along as the basis of the argument. The
poem concerns itself with no questions of the ecclesiastical life, but of
the individual Christian life, which includes within itself the idea of the
objectively-including ecclesiastical life. Here Browning’s especial faculty
■—the strong venturing of faith—finds exercise. There are men (and
many amongst the highest orders of men) whose motions of thought and
feeling gain in firmness and freedom by the consciousness of belonging
to and acting with an ecclesiastical organisation or great public move
ment of opinion. But Browning’s mind has no place amongst minds of
this class : it is equally unfitted to move in an army organised under a
definite church system, or in an irregular force banded together by 1 the
spirit of an age;’ its victories must be won in single combat, if won
at all.
Here, parenthetically, we may notice this isolated working of Brown
ing’s thought, as the source of two characteristic imperfections—or,
more properly, limitations—in it. 1st, owing to this, his conception of
Christianity lacks the solidarity that arises out of the corporate feeling
and consciousness of historic permanence. It has never the broad firm
grandeur of the mood of the Ambrosian hymns, for instance, or the ‘ Te
Deum.’ According to his view, each generation of men have just the
same sort of work to do which they would have to do were all the
work of their ancestors to be blotted out, and leave no vestige of itself or
its effects. The objective creed is not placed by him ever in any secure
independence of our subjective hold upon it. 2ndly, though from this
mental aloneness comes the chief glory of his work as truthseeker,—his
way of getting face to face with his beliefs, and seeing whatever he sees,
directly and through no medium of languidly accepted traditions,—-yet
from the same source there comes one characteristic, which limits the
range of his helpfulness, and makes his teaching incapable of influencing
more than one class of minds. His own view of the immeasurable ex
panse of truth makes him, indeed, profoundly tolerant of the views of
other men whose standpoints are not his : but is he wholly free from
exclusiveness in his notions as to what should be accounted the lawful
organ in human nature for truth-discerning 1 Does he not seem to make
his very peculiar self the measure of other men, and become sometimes
intolerant of varieties of ways in which variously constituted men arrive
at and hold their beliefs ? In himself two natures are met in rare com
bination ; each of these natures being of heroic size and vigour. There
is the union of intellectual strength and subtlety, with a vividly imagin
ative and emotional temperament. He is at once a hard thinker and a
passionate feeler—a logician and a poet; and is, for his own part, able
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
30 9
to work in whatever engages him, with the faculties that belong to this
two-fold nature, and choose to which set of faculties he will entrust the
work he cares most about. His poems portray or suggest mental pro
cesses in ■which progress into scepticism and out of it takes place usually
thus:—the keen dialectic intellect first takes up the question in hand,
and works at it until it has made visible all the difficulties that are to
be found in it;—then, at the point where all objections have been fairly
brought into notice, the ego does not set the part of its nature—the in
tellect—which began operations with them, to the further task of at
tempting either to find explanation and answer to them, or to relegate
them beyond the province of things explicable ; but with a sudden
change of mood, the consciousness (leaving all these as and where they
are) flings itself with a passionate leap away from them, into the emo
tional part of human nature, and seeks its faith in a refuge from, rather
than in an encounter with, intellectual difficulty.
Whatever imperfections there are in Mr. Browning’s power of sym
pathy, are to be found on the side that is turned towards the class of
thinkers incapable, from mental constitution, of reaching faith by such
methods. His Christianity seems to exclude men born to belong to
what Mr. R. H. Hutton (in a somewhat ‘hard’-mooded essay—out of tune
with the others in his two recently-published volumes,) styles the ‘ Hard
Church.’ From these,—the men feebler in imagination and emotion,
than in intellectual power,—men whose feelings flow only as after-conse
quences from beliefs which they in no way helped to form—men who
for doubts of reason must find either satisfaction by reason, or find by it
good cause for the impossibility of such satisfaction—from such men
Browning holds aloof. His preaching rejects with somewhat of contempt
the evidences which are their faith’s all. He casts impatiently aside the
evidence, e.g., of the 1 greater probability ’—which to many a man must
be the sole ground of his belief in Christianity, and a ground which
would seem to melt from under him, if emotion or desire intruded upon
a mood dispassionately judicial. Browning’s mind, itself able instinc
tively to feel out the ‘ mightiness of love inextricably curled about ’ all
‘power and beauty in the world;’ and able to transcend, in the strength
of these intuitive perceptions, the chasm intervening between Nature
and the Christian Tale ; refuses to recognise the existence of any logical
footway of historical evidence, whereby alone a mind such as, <?.</., Arch
bishop Whately’s could arrive at belief in the truth of the story.
The failing to behold ‘lover’ written ‘on the foreheads’of the men who
must lovelessly know before they can love, is the imperfection discernible
in the great fraternal-hearted poet-thinker.
It happens often that men far more rigidly exclusive as to the ‘ what ’
of other people’s beliefs, are less so than Mr. Browning with regard to the
�310
BROWNING ÀS A PREACHER.
‘ how.’ This sort of tolerance results from their accepting the creed of
a church as handed down, ¿Ind not making religious truth a matter of
individual investigation. The creed of a church represents the aggre
gate action of varieties of minds it is the centre of agreement where
Opinions meet, irrespective of how they have travelled. Whoever, there
fore, takes this already-arrived-at creed as his own starting-point of
thought or feeling, acquiesces thereby in the lawfulness of roads (be these
what they may) which have brought other men to it. Keble, for in
stance, though a man immeasurably narrower in inherent sympathies
than Browning, has in some ways a larger toleration for minds of a dif
ferent order from his own, and holds in honour modes of thought such
as Bishop Butler’s. This is made possible to him (though for his own
part his faith would rest upon feeling only), by his having at the outset
abstained from individual truth-seeking, and merged his own life in the
catholic life of a church.
In Browning’s teaching there is in many respects a repetition alike of
the perfections and imperfections of Coleridge’s. In both of these men
the same intense inwardness and vivid self-concentrated thought which
fits them to accomplish—as their own peculiar work—the maintaining of
the subjective evidences for religious truth, inclines them to the same
sort of impatience towards all others, who, not able to trust the instinc
tive voices from within, have to seek faith through investigation and
comparison of what is without.
‘ Easter Day ’ is all throughout illustrative of Browning’s tendency
to exclusive reliance upon the subjective evidence of the human instincts.
The problem of the poem is the how
‘To joint
This flexile, finite life once tight
Into the fixed and infinite.’
•—the how to find, first, a ‘ fixed and infinite.’ And for the problem’s
solution, his mind refuses to avail itself of all aids which the intellect,
judging from things external, can offer. Meeting each answer of the
interlocutor with freshly occurring objections, he gets down deeper into
the difficulty, seeing ever more and more ‘ how very hard it is to be a
Christian.’ Then there comes to him, out of his great poet-heart, a
means of escape from the throng of surrounding perplexities, in that
strange, terribly vivid vision-dream, which brings in succession all earthly
things accounted good—earth’s exquisite treasures of wonder and delight
■—the waving of her woods, and flowing of her rivers, and all her vast
exhaustless beauty, and endless change—art in its most perfect ancient
and modern forms—knowledge, and the power to range Faust-like
‘through all circling sciences, philosophies, and histories’—brings all
these to the test of the human soul’s hunger for satisfaction; until it
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
311
feels that none of them is sufficient to stay its cravings; and that its one
final desire (to attain which it would let all else go in exchange) is for
love. And then there comes the mighty leap up of the human instincts,
regardless of intervening intellectual obstacles, towards the love of God
as told of in the Christian story,
£ "What doubt in thee, could countervail
Belief in it— ?’
and in ‘ it ’ he feels that he has found the substance of the gleams
that, blending with all the displays of power and beauty on the earth,
have been the essence of the brightness and good in her, which men have
rejoiced in. The scene which the dream tells of is placed in the after
judgment state; the whole poem, however, is in its scope not illustra
tive of a belief in a spiritual world, and of man’s probation for it, but
tentative of the grounds for such belief; and taking the judgment sen
tences of condemnation, merely as hypotheses in order to have in them,
the most searching tests to apply to human instincts.
Characteristically, too, in his £ Saul,’ Browning makes the Messianic
prophecy evolve itself to David from his instincts introspectively per
ceived. The £ Caliban upon Setebos’ gives us his views (strikingly unPaleyan) of the utmost that natural theology would amount to, argued
out without the aid of the intuitions of human love. These he illus
trates in this (which is one of his most powerfully executed poems), by
showing how Caliban, the loveless creature, who is either devoid of human
affections, or in whom they have not been called into activity by fellow
ship with men, can bring no key from within to unlock the meanings of
the universe; and therefore all that he can find in it, everywhere, all
around, by those shrewd bitterly ironical reasonings which his intellect
alone gathers from external things, is only merciless power, and capri
ciously used strength. And the horrible loathsomeness of this idea is
drawn out with a minute perfection curiously fascinating.
Preference for internal evidence is shown, too, in the whole tenor of
Pope Innocent’s monologue in the £ Ring and the Book.’ Here, though
truth is sought not through the mere instincts of the heart, but with
long patient reasonings of the head, it is still the introspective glance
into the human mind which supplies the starting point of the whole
.argument by which the old Pope, finding therein ideas' of strength, inrtelligence and goodness, larger in conception than in human fulfilment,
;and finding in the natural order of the world, actual fulfilment corre
sponding to two only of these ideas, arrives (by the necessity of finding
some instance of the third) at belief in the Christian story of limitless
Jove and sacrifice.
Brom -within, too, Innocent gets his very beautiful answer to the doubt
�312
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
that inevitably suggested itself to a man living in days when the earth
had become very evil, and lust and cruelty such as Guido’s ‘ had their
way i’ the world where God should rule,’ lest haply Christianity’s visible
failure should disprove its truth. The query,
‘ And is this little all that was to be;
Where is the glorious decisive change ?
The immeasurable metamorphosis
Of human clay to divine gold, we looked
Should in some poor sort justify the price ?
.*
«
*
*
*
*
Well, is the thing we see salvation ? ’
is answered by the guess which is supplied by his own heart instincts,,
that this very weakness and failure may be, after all,
‘ But repetition of the miracle,
The Divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends, and aye begins for man.’
and are characteristics necessary in a religion corresponding to the re
quirements of our truest humanity.
‘ How can man love but what he yearns to help ?
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports ? ’
Thoroughly Browning-like is the Pope’s mood, when in his forecast of
the age succeeding his own, his hopes of world-regeneration are placed
in his expectation that it will ‘ shake the torpor of assurance from men’s
creed,’ and compel them, when they shall have grown to disbelieve re
port, to look inwards for truth, and
‘ Correct the portrait by the living face ;
Man’s God, by God’s God in the mind of man.’
A noticeable exception to Browning’s usual attitude of thought occurs,
in the closing pages of the ‘Paracelsus.’ The speech of the dying
knowledge-seeker contains a passage (too long to quote, and whose im
measurable poetic beauty must not here be spoken of), where the argu
ment extends over the whole known aspect of our world, viewing man
objectively in his chronological place in Nature, as an appearance illus
trative by its ‘ supplementary reflux of light’ of all foregoing appearances:
as the counterpai-t of anterior creations, a mirror consciously reflectant
of the whole.
Mr. Browning is an optimist: and all throughout his poetry his opti
mism is as the life-blood, circulating through and giving colour to every
part of it. Some notion of this element in his creed must be defined in
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
all criticism of him, either as teachei’ or artist. The features distinguish
ing his optimistic theory, are, I think, first, his never at any time ceas
ing to behold evil as evil, and to hate it as such : and secondly, his seeming
not to feel the oppression of its mystery that has lain as a burden so
heavily on the minds of generations of thinkers.
Moral evil he beholds as a thing in no way resolvable into mere imper
fection. Where he finds it in the human world it retains for him its old
meaning of sin, and is viewed as something wholly distinct from a stunting
of the beautiful development of men’s natures: by unfavourable outward
circumstances, such as the absence of knowledge and culture. His own
favourite theory of the position of human impulse, and the homage due
to it, never leads him into letting that homage be of a blind indiscrimina
ting sort. He recognises that there is a principle working internally,
and sending forth impulses which must not be mistaken for those which
are men’s lawful guides. With him holiness and healthiness are not
quite convertible terms. Caponsacchi and Guido have both acted
according to the promptings of impulse, obeying laws which were part of
the nature of each : yet between them a difference is set. Rejoicing
praise is bestowed by the Pope, in the 1 Ring and the Book,’ on the
obedience yielded to instincts by one of these men ;
‘ Well done !
Be glad thou hast let light into the world
Through that irregular breach in the boundary,—see
The same upon thy path, and march assured,
Learning anew the use of soldiership,
Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear ;
Loyalty to the life’s end.’
And on the other—Guido—whom he images to himself as pleading in
self-justification that his course of action has been only the same as that
commended, inasmuch as he too has guided his steps according to the
tune of impulse, the old man’s righteous anger smites the blow of the
sentence of temporal death. Wherein does Pope Innocent account this
difference just ? In this—that there has been a probation for both ;
each of them having within him a something to follow, and a some
thing to resist. Count Guido he beholds as
‘ Furnished forth for his career,
On starting for his life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help.
Body and mind in balance—a sound frame,
A solid intellect; the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man—make life succeed.’
�314
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
■and fortified in his surroundings with 1 great birth, good breeding, and
the Church for guide.’ He accounts that such a man’s trial lies in the
having within, evil impulses balanced more evenly against the good than
they are in the man less favourably circumstanced for resistance to evil.
He condemns (justly, he feels) him who, if he had so willed, might have
made the good outweigh the evil,—might have used stumbling-block as
stepping-stone; but -who has chosen rather to love and believe in—
‘ Just the vile of life,
Low instinct—base pretension.’
Caponsacchi, too, Innocent views as having undergone trial by urgings
of two kinds of impulse ; and as having followed the noble and resisted
the base,—as having, while yielding to instincts of ‘healthy rage’
against cruelty and oppression, retained self-government, and kept
himself pure in thought, and word, and deed. In his praise there is
involved the idea that evil has been present as—
‘ Temptation . . . for man to meet
And master, and make crouch beneath his feet,
And so be pedestailed in triumph.’
.So, too, in the 1 Easter Day’ (as elsewhere) we find the same doctrine of
.a probation for all human life by instincts good and evil. To each
¿human soul has been shown—
‘ The earthly mixed
With heavenly, it must choose betwixt.
The earthly joys lay palpable,—
A taint in each, distinct as well
The heavenly flitted faint and rare
Above them.’
Far on, indeed, in the hereafter, Browning looks on to there being no
longer this two-fold and contrary working of impulse. His expectation
is that human nature will take its perfection in a grand one-ness. When
it shall—
‘ reach the ultimate, angel’s law
Indulging every instinct of the soul,
There where law, Hfe, joy, impulse are one thing.’
-—‘ A Death in the Desert.’
But he does not confound his hope for the future with his teaching for
.the needs of the present.
An optimist Browning is not in the sense of rejecting or explaining
•away the dogma that humanity has inherent tendencies to moral evil
dark and foul; or proclaiming a freedom to all impulses from any bar
save that of physical or social inexpediency; yet an optimist he is—and
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
315
that not falteringly, but with the conviction of his whole heart—in the
¡sense of being able, all the while he sees the evil which he will not dis
guise by any other name, to look steadily into its dark hateful face, assured
that its ultimate significance is good. He does not conceive that it has
come as some unlucky accident to spoil a harmony of order in a world
which but for it had been perfect; he holds, rather, that it is through
it that a higher perfection is attainable. Feeling this, he does not need
that shuffle into a real though unacknowledged Manichceism, which is
the refuge of so many men from the perplexities and contradictions of a
creed of mingled pessimism and optimism. He believes that the antagon
ism between principles does not extend beyond the world of finite being;
and ventures to refer to the same source the placing in this world of ours
the two contrary principles which we call good and evil. Here is some
of his doctrine, spoken by the Pope in the ‘ Ring and the Book.’
He says (having reached the point of acknowledgment that the
Christian story is true, and that therein ‘ God shows complete’):—
‘ I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else
Devised,-—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve
By new machinery in counterpart
The moral qualities of man—how else ?
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creating and self-sacrificing too—
And thus eventually, God-like (ay
■“I have said ye are Gods”—shall it be said for nought ?)
Enable man to wring from out all pain
All pleasure for a common heritage.
******
The moral sense grows but by exercise,
’Tis even as man grew, probatively
Initiated in Godship, set to make
A fairer moral world than this he finds.
******
Life is probation, and this earth no goal,
But starting-point for man, compel him strive,
Which means in man as good as reach the goal.’
Evil he beholds as the immediate bringer to humanity of our chief and
peculiar glory—progress, as a messenger sent to institute a race for men,
from less to more, from lower to higher. The one thing of which he
feels a shrinking horror is ‘ ghastly smooth life ’ in which man should be
left ‘dead at heart;’ and his whole spirit leaps up to behold purposes of
goodness in the appearance of anything as a deliverer from that.
Browning’s is a creed including within it the hope that where during
�316
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
the earthly probation, men’s moral wills have been too feeble to enable
them to use temptations by evil as ‘ points that prove advantage for who
vaults from low to high;’ the work neglected or failed in here, may yet
elsewhere, though under harder conditions, be ultimately done. Even
Guido Franceschini, the abominable, he will not allow to depart from
our sight unfollowed by words of hope. In the forgivingness of Pompilia,
the victim of the murderer in her life and death, there is a gospel of a
far-off healing and restoration for him even, albeit by God’s shadow instead
of the light of His face. And the Pope, Guido’s judge, thinks of the
criminal on whom he pronounces sentence of temporal death, as going,
forth—
‘ Into that sad, obscui’e, sequestered state,
Where God unmakes but to remake a soul
He else had made in vain ; which must not be.’
And the same hope comes out, in vaguer expression, in that last phrase-,
of ‘Easter Day’ (without adding which, the human heart of the poet will
not suffer him to let go his vision of the close of the earthly probation):—
‘ Mercy, every way,
Is infinite—and who can say 1 ’
Very faint, by comparison with Browning’s, is Tennyson’s trust in the
‘larger hope;’ though lie, too, seeks to hold the creed that ‘somehow
good will be the final goal of ill.’ All that Tennyson attains to is an
infant’s blind crying after it—a groping for it, with ‘lame hands of faith.’
He looks for his theory of optimism in a direction whither Browning, an
idealist in his metaphysics, does not turn in his quests of objective
realities. And looking for it all throughout the material world and her
analogies, he finds nothing to be a reliable guide to it; and can only fall
in the darkness upon that ‘great world’s altar-stairs;’ not feeling assured
as to what ultimate law and purpose he should find above them, could he
see up their heights.
However, in speaking of the Tennyson and Browning optimisms, it is
not fail’ to make the quality of vigour the point of comparison—nor,
indeed, any other quality either. The aim of the two poets, in their
search, is essentially different. Tennyson’s colder and more symmetrical
mind looks to find truth as harmony and proportion; and is alwayssuspicious of the parts unless it can see the whole. What Browning;
seeks is truth absolute, not relative ; and if he thinks he has got hold of
the minutest particle of that, it is to him as a thing indestructible by
any mass of contradictions; and it suffices to him as a sure earnest of
the rest. His own heart’s instinctive conviction of a law of Lave is out
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
317
of the reach of whatever ‘evil dreams ’ Nature may lend, and does not
need to concern itself with analogies of her waste and destruction—with
appearances such as that ‘of fifty seeds, she often brings but one to bear?
The optimistic creed of Tennyson is the result of an effort, very noble, to
comprehend: that of Browning is an effort to apprehend. The one seeks
a superhuman solution to the problem, and fails : the other, grasping
with a human passion, succeeds in finding satisfaction.
At this part of Browning’s creed there is one of the many doors of
entrance, from the question of his work as a truth-seeker, into the question
of his Art. Into this we may not now’ trespass, further than to observe
that the character of his work, as poet of external Nature, seems to be
determined by the negative influence of his optimism, and his method of
.attaining thereto. His seeking and finding his satisfaction as to the
world’s purport, in another quarter than in the material world, leaves
him free to derive from that world, art of a peculiar and very valuable
kind. Browning’s poetry of external Nature has some characteristics so
rare, that (though in quantity it is much less than what most other great
poets have produced) its loss would leave a gap in our literature. It is
nowhere mystical, like Wordsworth’s, nor eesthetico-scientific, like Tenny
son’s Nature-poetry ; but it is simply full of a noble sensuousness. It is
not the product of moods of intellectual and moral tension. It is glad
acceptance of the physical influences of external Nature—not truth.seeking in and through her mysteries. The contact of the phenomena
which we term material, in ourselves, with the so-called material phe
nomena outside us, is rested in, for the time being, without endeavour to
pursue a further significance. Beautiful art, as well as teaching not a
little wholesome, is given to us in Mr. Browning’s poems of Nature; of
which the speciality is theii’ being sensuous, yet restrained by a manly
■dignity from ever becoming a voluptuous self-abandoning to enslavement
by her beauty. We have the same sort of thing only from one other
modern English poet—A. H. Clough. (See ‘The Bothie.’) There is a cer
tain amount of positivism in both Clough’s and Browning’s acceptance of
the material -world, which results, in both cases, in a similar sort of purely
physical enjoyment of it (the latter’s poetical expression of this being,
however, by far the superior in varied richness). Their positivisms are,
of course, alike in their effects only, and are essentially different. Clough’s
is the positivism of a strong mind, sternly setting aside truth-seeking in
this direction as bootless, and -with a resolute temperate cheerfulness,
accepting whatever certain good it can find. Browning’s is the positivism
of childlike trust—so confident in the truth which it has found elsewhere,
that it can afford to pause here from restless searching, and take the
-earth’s beauty as beauty—joys of sense as joy. For illustration of Mr.
JBrowning’s poetical feeling for external Nature, we might refer to his
�318
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
‘ Pippa Passes,’ to his ‘ Saul ’ (specially to the passage in it beginning1 Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour’), to parts of the ‘Paracelsus,’ and to
other passages, which cannot here be enumerated. Though none otherof our poets is so perpetually on the watch to discern transcendental
significance, translucent through the facts of mind, yet he, more than,
most others, is content to behold the facts of matter as (so to speak)‘ opaque] and to describe his impressions from them, directly and unsymbolically. To Wordsworth it would be impossible to tell simply of.
‘the sense of the yellow mountain flowers.’
This paper must hasten to conclude, leaving with only a passing
mention, one of the aspects of Mr. Browning’s preaching—its stern moral
lessons, and its peculiar downrightness of enforcing them. As poet of
the Will, he has words of unsparing condemnation to bestow on such sins
as failure ‘ through weak endeavour.’ There is an earnest severity in
‘The Statue and the Bust,’ and in his ‘Sordello’—terriblest of tragedies,
inasmuch as it depicts the deterioration of a soul. The miserable life
failure, of which this latter is the history, is looked on by him as resulting
from the man’s irresoluteness to overcome and banish his probation
spectre (Do not many of us know something akin to it ?); of his hauntingdouble consciousness—fourfold consciousness, rather; of, at the same
time, an ego divided by impulses diverging towards two ways of utterance
—Art and action; and of another two-fold spectral ego—reflexion of the
actual ego—contemplating, as if from some view-point in nowhere, it and.
its work, in their place in the All-of-things. The real self and its re
flexion keep on, like opposite mirrors, reflecting each other backwards
and forwards, ad infinitum; each becoming alternately subject and
object, until there is produced in Sordello, as the result, a wretched
paralysis of all working-power, either artistic or practical. And all for
lack of the vigorous effort of whole-hearted obedience to either impulse, ,
by which his will could have freed him from the thing that wrought the
ruin of his life. Sternest of sermons this I on the text, difip Si^vyos,.
aKaTaoraTos,’ &c., &c. (St. James i., 8.)
Need one say anything with reference to one charge which we some
times heai* brought against Mr. Browning—of being, in ‘ The Ring and.
the Book,’ too open—offensively coarse, even, of speech 1 I—a woman—
feel that he needs no apology in this matter. Those of his readers who
are capable of, and willing to take the trouble of entering into the spirit
of his poetry, do not fail to find in it, moral saltness enough to keep its
purity untainted by the ugly words which his grave truthfulness some
times uses in indicating ugly things : and to mere criticism from without
—from those who neither learn from or sympathise with him—I imagine
that Mr. Browning does not greatly care to commend himself and his.
poems.
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
319'
Wholly unsatisfied by what these two papers have been able to say as
to some of the characteristics noticeable on one side of the most manysided of contemporary poets, I gladly cease from the attempt to write
little definitions of the poetry which I would rather feel indefinitely, and
grow into increasingly.
E. Dickinson West.
Mr. Browning’s latest work, ‘ Balanstione Adventure,’ lets us see, in its whole tenorand purport, the same characteristics of his preaching. There is no slight significance
in his choosing for his theme, a Greek play not ranked by critics amongst the finest;
but having peculiar attractions for the poet of the will, on account of its being the
story of the victory of a will—a half-7iw?iara will—over death and fate.
For nothing human or divine, does Browning recognise an iron law of necesssity.
He cares not for the grand Greek lifeless virtue of endurance of the inevitable ; and
would find his own poetical feeling wholly unsuited- to reproduce utterances such as
the hEschylean :
Tijv 7re7rpwp,ev7jv 8e ypiy
aT<rav (f>epeLV ws pacna, yiyva><TK.ov3’ on
’Avay/<7js ecrr’ aBrjpLTOV cr^evos
to ttjs
of Prometheus in his majestic passiveness.
There seems to be a curiously personal sympathy in Mr. Browning for Herakles, the
labour and effort God, whose strength is a thoroughly human strength of conscious
toil. Browning’s enlargement of Euripides’ portraiture of the hero, has been criti
cized as exaggerating the idea of joyous helpful strength ; and making him too much
of a ‘muscular Christian.’ I think that this objection to it fades out of sight, when
we view the poem as tinged and explained by the luminous Browning conscious
ness that indefinitely appears all throughout it. Struggle—and joy and hope in
struggle, and all things that he holds to be the portion best suited for the spiritual
part of our human life, are connected by him in a deep dim suggestiveness, with his
representation of Herakles. It is a spiritual truth—and not mere admiration of
thews and muscles, and good use of them, that he preaches to us.
In Browning’s suggested new version of the story, ‘ New Admetos new Alkestis,’
we may notice his characteristic way of penetrating through all surface appearances.
Deep underneath these, he finds a connection between human and infinite truths, and
sees there a beautiful ‘ how,’ by which Admetos might worthily let his wife die that
he might live. In harmony with all his other teaching, too, is Browning’s idea of
making the undyingness of Alkestis come to her, not as a mere salvation given from
without, but as worked out from wii7wn. The principle of life which cannot be holden
of death, is viewed by him always as a thing given to be in humanity.
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Browning as a preacher. Part 2
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West, Elizabeth Dickinson
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 305-319 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (November, 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
Robert Browning
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241
TUDY
OF
jVALT
J/VHIT/VlANj
THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
By the Hon. Roden Hoel.
PART I.
I had just been reading Whitman for the first time, when I took up a
weekly review, which always speaks, if not as one having, yet as one
assuming to have, authority; and there I found it stated that Walt
Whitman was an obscure impostor, and that his poetry was no better
than Miss Codger’s prose. I had thought otherwise; but upon a
diffident person this unhesitating deliverance from our weekly oracle
of critical revelation might well have a staggering effect. Kot very
long after, however, I read in the same literary arbiter, which so
thoroughly fills among us the functions of any possible Academy (what
could Mr. Arnold and Mr. Proude have been thinking about when they
sighed for one ?), that Charles Dickens was a rather inferior writer, a
sort of Bavius or Msevius of his day, at least if compared with Mr.
Tennyson. Upon this, I felt that the critic was speaking out of a
sphere so entirely away from and elevated above mine, that, until he
should have communicated his own superior nature to me, I must
remain totally incapable of profiting by his revelations. Kot without
many a qualm, therefore, I betook myself again to my own feeble lights,
having really for the nonce nothing better that I could look to.
To me, then, I will begin by owning at the outset, Walt Whitman
appears as one of the largest and most important figures of the time,
Of those who have publicly expressed a somewhat similar conviction,
may be mentioned Mr. Rossetti, Mr. Conway, Mr. Robert Buchanan,
and (I believe) Mr. Swinburne.
I think that what delights and arrests one most is the general im
pression he gives of nature, strength, health, individuality—his relish
of all life is so keen, intense, catholic—the grasp of his faith is so
nervous and tremendous—as he says, ‘ My feet are tenon’d and mortis’d
in granite.’ One of the notes of a man of genius is, that through life
he remains a child; and there is something eminently childlike in
Whitman. He is full of naif wonder and delight—each thing, every
�242
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
time lie looks upon it, flashes upon him with a sense of eternal freshness
and surprise ; nor is anything to him common or unclean ; but an aerial
glory, as of morning, utterly insensible to vulgar eyes, bathes and
suffuses all. He is tall, colossal, luxuriant, unpruned, like some
giant tree in a primeval forest, whose feet root profoundly in a virgin
soil. He springs out of that vast American continent full-charged
with all that is special and national in it, in a supercmincnt degrees
representative of all that is richest and most fresh in that American
life which, more fully than any other, embodies the present age’s own
individual life. He is very far from being hopeless and disdainful of
his time ; he does not, as many really great writers of his country have
done, prefer distant lands, enriched with long and eventful histories, for
his theme ; he takes his own country and his own time, however ignoble
they may seem to some fastidious tastes ; he is by no means himself
uninfluenced by the special errors and special weaknesses of these;
but he is withal magnificently pregnant with all a seer’s half-articulate
previsions, with all a prophet’s triumphant anticipations of that larger
and more generous human future which is surely about to issue out
of these travailing loins and from these most ominous birthpangs of
the present. He is American democracy incarnate ; and however much
that leaves to be desired, yet it is great. As Mr. Buchanan has already
remarked, he is more prophet than artist. He very seldom retires to
create deliberate imaginative wholes, in whose many diverse forms may
be deposited the truths he sees and must utter, the mastering emotions
which dominate his soul. You never cease to see this man Walt
Whitman. But then it is a very noble, and I contend a very poetic,
personality you see—one in which, as in a magic crystal, all these men
and women of the wrorld, all the sights of city and of landscape, find
themselves mirrored with most astonishing distinctness. He is too
eager, too excited, to linger and to weave artistic poems out of his
materials ; yet in the flash of the dark-lantern he turns upon them for
a moment as he passes, though they too often appear isolated and
disjunct, they dart out upon you with all the marvellous solidity and
reality which their images have in nature. It is certainly a poet’s
glance which has been poured upon them—piercing, remaking them;
not the glance of an analyst, a practical man, or one apathetic and
indifferent. It is always one of intense enjoyment, from complete vision
of the essence and heart of a thing. And this atmosphere of keen
buoyant personal sympathy and pleasure is more marked in Whitman
than in anyone else, and is wonderfully bracing and refreshing to
breathe. All the stale heaps of common, familiar things seem to leap
up into their proper vitality as he passes : they glow like dingy metal
filings in some electric light. And if he were otherwise, more of an
ordinary artist, we should lose this refreshing novel sense of intense
yet catholic and impersonal personality which is so eminently charac
teristic of Walt Whitman. He seems to revel in his own life, and
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
243
equally in that of every man, woman, and child he meets or can
imagine. And now that so many people say and sing that they are
weary and tired and despairing, that the world is worn out, and that
yon must go back to the classics or mediaeval themes for any objects
of warm poetic interest, that life now is ‘ a suck and a sell, and its end
a bit of threadbare crape,’ this spectacle of a poet and a man like a
very child rejoicing in all the teeming forces and energies of this vulgar
world of ours—this surely is something at least novel and ‘ sensational.’
True it is,- however, that Whitman comes of the people; his past
life has been active, adventurous, healthy, varied, and broadly human
in experience. Tic dare nob set himself above them, above the meanest
of them, and look down from a height serenely benevolent upon them ;
he claims to be one with them; and what he sees more vividly than
they, glories in more supremely, is—that he is, not an elect, a very
intellectual or refined man, but a man, and has men and women
for brothers and sisters. This honest and unfeigned use of great
ness in rendering service rather than in exacting it—in pouring self
out for the enrichment of mankind rather than jn cunningly playing
upon the weaknesses of mankind for one’s own glory—this is after the
ancient type of heroism, after Christ, ‘ friend of publicans and sinners,’
the Divinest Son of Man, who ‘ drew all men to Himself; ’ and one can
well understand the personal fascination and influence which we are
informed Whitman is exercising upon so many of the youth of
America. The life familiar to him is the picturesque, free, unconven
tional life of the people—not the pale monotonous artificial life of literary
student, aristocrat, or plutocrat. He enters profoundly into all their
difficulties, enjoyments, sorrows, and eager aspirations. Then, too, he
has been in the great civil war, and been keenly penetrated with
the noblest (as well as the less noble, but still powerfully human) of
its principles and ideas. And in that war he was present personally
in the sublimes! and most heroic of capacities—he ministered constantly
to the wounded on both sides, on the field and in the hospital. Such
a man, therefore, has had exceptional advantages as man—and the
raw material being heroic, such is the result. We who stay at home in
the old country, with old traditions and prejudices rank in our blood,
nurtured under the grand yet somewhat chilling shadow of ‘ timehonoured institutions ’—we cannot pretend to call ourselves men of
the age as that man can call himself man of the age. But of book
learning, of refined inherited culture-inculcated accents, words, and
ways, this man has probably little—so far, he has not, perhaps, had all
advantages, though, whether they would not have cramped and injured
him, is to me very questionable.
There are those, I know, who affirm that a poet can never (except
quite indirectly) be a teacher or a prophet. This is again a critical
dictum so removed from me that I do not pretend to understand it. I
should have thought it depended on how he taught and prophesied—
�244
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
whether in doing so his whole nature was a-fire or not, his imagination
and his heart all a-glow about the chariot way of his reason ; for other
wise Isaiah and Jeremiah, Lucretius and Shelley, would be no poets,
which on the whole I rather take leave to doubt. But it resolves itself
of course into a dispute about words.
If, again, a poet must necessarily mean a metrist after our established
English models, certainly Whitman is none. His expression indeed
must be admitted to be often slovenly, inadequate, clumsy, and harsh ;
sometimes even stilted, bombastic, and inflated. But it is very far
from uniformly or generally this. I read indeed in the same review of
which I have before so reverently spoken, how it was now an axiom
unquestioned by any judicious person that subject-matter in poetry was
nothing, and style, expression, was everything. I felt terribly discon
certed at always having to believe exactly the opposite of all that is so
categorically and without argument laid down by this our supreme
authority in matters critical; hut really that did seem startling to the
uninitiated mind. Whether a poet has anything to say, to bring out,
to express, is of no consequence whatsoever. Whether it be nothing or
something, whether it be nonsense or wisdom, whether it be empty
wind or inspired revelations, gibberings of an idiot, pulings of a senti
mentalist, or utterances of sublime imagination and divine passion—all
this is of absolutely no account; if only there be sibilants and labials
and rotundities of sound in the slipping of any or of either of these
things off the tongue, he who gives vent to them is a poet, in either
case equally a poet; but if there be not quite enough of these sounds,
whatever else there be, by no means and on no account a poet. Well,
then, must not musical glasses be a poet ? And since it would certainly
be possible to weave intricacies of sound more exquisite and more varied
by discarding altogether that old-fashioned hampering obligation of
conceiving, imagining, and feeling with strength sustained enough to
keep coherence, harmony, and distinctness among the ideal links we
weave, would it not on these principles be well to lay down ex cathedra
the grand, if novel axiom, that true poetry can only and shall only
consist of nonsense verses ? On the contrary, I venture to believe that
expression implies meanings to be expressed, and that the most perfect
expression is that which most transparently and impressively fits and
shows off the meaning.
The charm of ‘ Don Juan ’ is surely in that wonderful adaptation of
the metre to all clear, luscious beauty of the pictures, all free, in
commoded movements of the story, all sparkling turns of the satire,
the humour, and the wit; there is here no deliberate concoction of
‘ blessed words like Mesopotamia,’ no triumphant exultation in the
invention of novel tricks for saying ordinary things that must be said
in a roundabout, coxcombical, and unintelligible manner, which now
(as in the days of Euphues and Darwin) appears to be considered the
one essential of great poetry. Wordsworth hoped vainly that he had
�THS POET 0> MODERN DEMOCRACY.
245
refuted that. I refuse to call him a great master of expression with
whom words, whether in prose or verse, are not before all a medium of
meaning ; if they are employed with all manner of tricks and artifice,
primarily for their own sakes, and the meaning has very much to take
its chance of sanity and wholeness among them (the effect being that
of a kaleidoscope, where bright broken fragments of ideas keep shifting
their combinations in an endless and bewildering fashion), whatever the
music of the sound be, it is not good expression, but the very worst.
Poetry in this case usurps the place of music, for words can never bo
mere sound, but always must remain symbolic sound with a determined
meaning. Just so precisely the latest fashion in music usurps the place
of language and stultifies the very idea and specific difference of music,
which implies sound for its own sake, spiritual suggestion only indirect
and indefinite : a similar remark applies to the last fashion in painting.
Shelley himself, for example, wonderful poet as he is, was often carried
into totally inadequate expression by his exquisite ear for melodious
sound. His melody and harmony are glorious when they rise spon
taneously into heaven, immediately responsive to the soaring and ex
panding impulse within, wholly obedient to the burst of impetuous ima
gination., to the divine stress and swell of immense human sympathies.
But of a poet—a maker, a seer, a singer—must first of all be demanded
if he can make and feel and see ; then afterwards, if he can sing. Yet
the chances are that if he answer ‘ yes ’ to the first question, you are
almost safe in leaving the other unasked. It is the very meaning and
essence of poetry that a man who can make in the region of the ideal,
who can feel and imagine (unless he be by nature impelled to some
other than verbal form of plastic expression), will necessarily be driven
to
form of rhythmical utterance. I do not depreciate the most
gifted in the region of melodious metrical expression. I glorify them.
If they have other things yet more essential, they are by far the most
perfect of our poets ; only Byron and Wordsworth, whose melody was
less perfect than that of Shelley or Coleridge, cannot on that account be
placed below the latter as poets; for they have abundantly filled for us
vast spaces in the area of poetry which could not have been filled without
them. They have ideal treasures not to be found in their contemporaries.
What were the early rhapsodists, the story-tellers, ballad-intoners,
bards, of an infant people ? It is generally conceded that poetry
among these is of the purest and freshest. Yet what do they know of
our elaborate involutions of phrase-mongering ? Therefore, especially
do I welcome Whitman. In spite of all his faults, he brings us back
to the matrix, to common sense and common nature, and makes us feel
what poetry originally, what at the root of the matter poetry even now,
really means and ought to mean. He is not himself indeed always an
artist a poet; but he is often a very great poet; and when he is,
he shows himself to be one, because he must be, not because he would
like to be, and can mimic those who are. He chants, declaims; when
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
his soul and subject hid him, he sings, quite in his own fashion, as the
poets of a primitive people do.
After all, it is rarely that you find all poetic gifts perfectly balancing
one another in any poet whatever. Nor can I concede for a moment
that deficiency in the region of large vivid insight, affluent imagination,
broad human sympathy, or rush and fire of passion, can be more
perfectly atoned for by verbal daintiness and skill, or by a fine ear for
verbal music, than some defect in these last gifts can be by possession
on the part of a poet of those ideal gifts in ampler measure. Indeed, I
distinctly believe that the contrary rather is true. There is more hope
that a poet may be cured of hesitating utterance than that a mere
voluble versifier may sober and strengthen into a poet.
We did want some infusion of robuster and healthier blood among
the pallid civilised brotherhood of our poets. If admirers arise who
strive to imitate Whitman’s gait and form, they will probably make
themselves ridiculous, puff themselves out and collapse ; yet will he
certainly give our jaded literature the prick and fillip that it needed.
He at any rate is no closet-warbler, trilling delicately after the music
of other singers, having merely a few thin thoughts and emotions only
a quarter his own and a clever aptitude for catching the tricks of
another man’s manner.
He bears, however, a marvellous resemblance (I often think) to
Oriental prophets. He is in manner of life, as well as manner of
thought, feeling, temperament, marvellously like a reincarnation over
there in the West of that special principle of personality which has
been so much more frequently manifested in the East—in Derwishes,
for instance, and Sufis. He has so thoroughly assimilated Bible
poetry on account of his profound personal identity with the writers
of it. Yet is he very un-Hebrew after all. He is more Egyptian,
Persian, Indian. Pantheist is he to the back bone; a nature worshipper,
seeing God everywhere—God in all, even the meanest thing ; bowing
before good and evil as integral and correlative elements in the universal
scheme of things, all going (as Hegel demonstrates) by the principle
of identity in contraries. He is a desperate and shameless assertor of
the sacredness of the flesh, the body, beauty of form and colour, and
the fleshly instincts. This he is (let us freely admit and regret)
wantonly, inartistically coarse in asserting; unutterably shocking
of course to those who are unutterably shocked with nature for
making us of flesh at all, and who hold that the only way to remedy
her immodest mistake is to hush the fact up altogether.
The passages most capable of giving deep and permanent delight to
lovers of poetry in all ages are certainly those in which a profound
soul-moving spiritual signification rises without let or hindrance into
that perfect rhythmic cadence which is propel’ to it. Here doubtless a
careful training of the organ of expression has its place, as well as a
fine original instinct for expression, and a genius for grandeur and
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
247
melody of sound. In proportion to the completeness, magic sug
gestiveness, and special beauty of sound concordant with idea and
feeling, will be the penetration and lingeringly-inherent power of the
poem. But the condition implied is that the sound be verily an echo,
a reduplication of the sense. In that wonderful music of Coleridge’s
1 Ode to France ’ there is all the still floating of cloud, the long
roll of wave, the solemn music of wind and swinging pine by
night. In ‘Lewti,’ the delicious, how the mellow ripple of verse in
its own ‘meandering mazes’ reflects and multiplies for ever that
gleam of river-swans and the river 1 A marvellous and mysterious
fellowship among sights and sounds makes such a marrying of them
attainable. Not only is the word thunder next of kin to the very roll
of sound in heaven, but very twins also are blitz and the flash that
blinds. The name gleaming gently soothes the ear, even as soft tender
light does the eye. And when the whole subject has a pervading tone,
a characteristic movement, be it rapid tumultuous rush, solemn im
perial march, pathetic pause, or tripping buoyancy of the dance, then
must the true poet’s measure breathe antiphonal response in the
music. Take Shelley’s marvellously lovely prophetic chorus in
‘ Hellas,’ or the splendid music of his eagle-chorus in the same ; out of
Byron take the stern, sad warrior-lilt of his ‘ Isles of Greece ;’ out of
Burns the abrupt exulting tramp, the clarion and the battle-shout of
‘ Scots, wha hae.’
But in no case can I find that any great poets made poetry to con
sist in mere ingenious allurements for the ear, busied themselves first
of all about this, and let the spiritual fire fall into the midst of their
word-altar if it would, or if it could. Alas ! how often it will not, though
the priests of Ashtaroth cry aloud, and leap, and cut themselves with
knives! '
Coleridge’s 1 Kubla Khan,’ exquisite for music, even in spite of the
line which brings in that ‘ blessed word ’ Mount Abora, is far too shadowy
a vision from opium-land to be permanently remembered, as 1 Christabel ’
or the 1 Mariner ’ may be. To my mind, that sweetest little bit, called
the ‘ Knight’s Grave,’ is, for atmosphere of tender sentiment, undefined
yet far-reaching and profound, suffusing picture, thought, and melody
alike (surely the melody is magical to a degree), worth many ‘Kubla
Khans ’ and similar pieces, arresting only or almost only from the music
of the syllables.
So much I thought it well to premise, because in a day which
has seen really beautiful artificial melodies in poetry brought to a
pitch of rare perfection, the rough untutored guise of Walt Whit
man’s muse is likely to prove the most serious obstacle of all to
toy cardinal justice being done to his high poetic genius.
Yet in Whitman we shall often recognise that nobler kind of music
which is bound up with a poet’s language as a more thorough and
effectual expression of thought, image, and feeling.
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
Turn, first, to his beautiful lament for the death of Lincoln, 1 When
lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed ’ :
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest received me,
The gray-browll bird I know received us comrades three,
And he sang what seemed the song of Death, and a verse for him I love
Come, lovely and soothing Death !
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day in the night, to all to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death!
Praised be the fathomless universe
Por life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love. But praise ' 0 praise and praise
Por the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death !
Yet each I keep and all,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo aroused in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woo,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odour.
For the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands . . .
And this for his dear sake.
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
Note here, too, the creation of a simple beautiful whole—a few
ordinary sights, scents, and sounds, flowing quietly as by accident
into his soul, and there taking a solemn tinge from the sublime
atmosphere of a manly grief ready to kindle into the gladness of a
triumphant faith—but nothing forced, nothing strained, nothing made
up; these messengers from without just taking on an aspect of
hallowed sympathy with the tone and temper of the soul they visit.
I note this particularly as one instance out of many in Whitman,
because what is most noticeable on the surface of him is a certain
fragmentariness, a certain tendency to rush rapidly through a whole
world of isolated details with an intensity of exhilaration, indeed,
which is itself poetic, but which yet fails of creating high art, because
there is no obvious wholeness, no sufficiently pervading idea or
purpose to impart unity. It is not with him a question of painting a
particular scene or even object with extraordinary lovingness and
minuteness of touch, the whole being poetical because every touch
helps to create, or indeed more strictly develop, a spiritual ideal of
scene or thing by flashing upon the bare matter, as it appears to the
cold unloving sense, a thousand tints and tones from kindred things
�The
poet
Of
modern democracy.
249
With which it has latent fellowship and sympathy. With Whitman
rather, in snch passages as offend many readers, it is a kind of rapid
excited stride through brilliant but heterogeneous stalls of a great
exhibition or bazaar, cataloguing objects with bare names as he goes.
And this is the notion he gives you always and everywhere. How
ever barren, or even stammering and inadequate his naming and
picturing, still he contrives to flash upon all a wonderful light of
freshness, and glory, and triumph in the bare existence of all things, as
he shoulders along, the great sane man, enjoying, praising, filled to
the very brim, in an age of nervous hesitation, and question, and
lamentation, with a faith as tremendous and unquenchable in the
ultimate excellence and right of things as ever burned in prophet or
saint of old. A faith not received by inheritance as an heirloom, and
conventionally valued as a property, a propriety, a matter of course—■
but a faith grown out of the very roots and breadths of his own per
sonality, and that the personality of a man who, with all reverence for
the past, yet lives in, and assimilates the fresh results yielded by the
present, sharing, according to the fuller measure of genius and un
wonted human sympathy, the hopes and aspirations of his fellows for
the future. His bright and large views of life may indeed be fairly
attributed in some measure to his splendid health and physique, as Mr.
Rosset ti remarks. And I think this rapid, often unsatisfactory, nakedly
prosaic cataloguing of innumerable isolated details, may be attributed
largely also to the poet’s exhilaration in the open air; he can hardly
stop to meditate and get the precise character of the object opened out
to him, he enjoys it so, and then so many other things everywhere
press themselves on him to be noticed and enjoyed. In this respect,
Ms fellowship with ordinary out-door, healthy men, his habit of loafing
»bout and basking, does a serious injury to his artistic expression.
For it should be well understood that accuracy of detail may be either
naked, cold, and mechanical, or intensely poetic because thoroughly
spiritualised. It is unjust to apply the phrase ‘ photographic ’ to this
Zasi kind of work. Coleridge and Keats always saw nature thus;
Wordsworth’s harder nature not perhaps always, though usually: and
what I mean by the poetic vision is a more real and intense, by no
means a less true, sight.
But generally Whitman’s description appears to me thoroughly
masterful. His epithets are few, yet precise and characteristic of the
broad general image which a thing, a scene, casts upon a quick,
passing, but piercing and sympathetic, observer. Thus :
In lower latitudes, in warmer air in the Carolinas, the large black buzzard floating
slowly, high beyond the tree-tops ;
°
below the red cedar festooned with tylandia j the pines ajid cypresses
Growing out of the white sand, that spreads far and flat ;
Ihe waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the
wind.’
VOL. II.—NO. VIII.
N
�250
A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
But if Whitman be sometimes remarkable for incisive luminous
distinctness of vision and keenness of all sensation, at other times he
is no less remarkable for a certain magical, mysterious, half-Oriental,
half-German mood that anon possesses him, vague and dim, tender,
mournful, mystical.
‘ The Song of the Broad-axe ’ and ‘ Drum-taps ’ are poems that
are almost all wholes—exquisite pictures drawn writh a few broad
telling touches, and exhaling the profoundest pathos, yet seldom
morbid—a wind, as of bracing faith, blowing through all the sorrow
and the horror; a bracing atmosphere of personal unselfish heroic
endeavours, and most sterling human sympathy pervades them.
On the ‘ Drum-taps ’ Whitman might be content to rest his fame
with future generations. There is little philosophy or mysticism ;
there are few of those peculiarities in form or boldnesses of speech
which shock people most—the art is certainly more perfect. There
is here a definite theme through all the poems—the subject is large,
grand, full of energy and strife, one for which Whitman’s genius as
well as personal experience eminently fits him. Have there ever
been such a series of war poems written ? I do not know of any.
Here, however, not only the tender, loving, pathetic, as well as real
istic and idyllic power of Whitman appears, but also his own ardent
personal convictions, tastes, and aspirations, so that ever and anon
he breaks into passages of tremendous lyric fire. And, except in that
other great poetic figure of the day, Victor Hugo, I hardly know
where we shall look in Europe for the like ; for our verse does not excel
row-a-days in verve, and fire, and rapid rush.1 In that line is not the
following magnificent ?—
Beat! beat! drums. Blow ! bugles ! blow !
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid, mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump, 0 terrible drums ; so loud you bugles blow!
And in ‘ The Uprising,’ you can hear the surge, and whirl, and
shriek of the wind; the tremendous upheaval and welter of the
sea; the deep gathering overwhelming roar of a roused and mad
dening multitude. Then ‘ The Song of the Banner ’ is all alive with
spirit of battle. In the few lines 1 The Flag ’ there is a wild fierce
delight, electrically communicated, from the mere upheaval of a people
en masse to fight, it scarcely matters why or for what.
‘What we believe in invites no man, promises nothing, sits in
1 I wish to state that this essay was written more than a year and a half ago, and
has been lying by. I have since seen Mr. Swinburne’s ‘ Songs before Sunrise,’ many
of which are all alive with resonant lyric fervour inspired by great human emotions.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
251
Calmness and light, is positive and composed, knows no discourage
ment, waiting patiently, waiting its time ! ’ That to me is grand ;
he cannot define, will not pretend to explain precisely, the in
evitable and Divine issue of all our strife, and hallowed endeavour
and success, and failure—but It is there, in the Future, in the For
ever ; patient, silent, grand, adorable, inevitably To be.
The short, "so perfect, pathetic pictures I spoke of in ‘ Drum-taps ’
are well worthy of study. ‘ A Letter from Camp,’ is the simple relation
of an affecting incident, without over-elaborate phrase, or prim
precision of ornament, after the manner of idyls which become a
little wearisome, but has the rare merit, for all its plain speech, of
dropping directly into our hearts and remaining there.
‘Vigil on the Field’ is exquisite for tenderness, sadness, and
large clear delineation of incident and scene. There is a rare fresh
ness of personal feeling about that: the charm of it seems to me un
utterable. He watches by a dying comrade whom he loved—a boy
-—on the field of battle, returns to find him dead, buries him in a
blanket in a rude dug grave there. ‘ The Wounded ’ is another graphic
picture. ‘ 0 tan-faced prairie-boy ’ and ‘ A Grave ’ are exquisite little
sketches. ‘ Camps of Green,’ too, is beautiful—the camps of the dead.
So is the ‘ Dirge for Two Veterans ’ and the ‘ Hymn of Dead Soldiers : ’
Sweet, are the blooming cheeks of the living, sweet ere the musical voices sounding;
But sweet, ah ! sweet are the dead, with their silent eyes.
And what shall we say of this, called ‘ Reconciliation ’ ?—
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war ancl all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever
again this soiled world ;
For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead.
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin ; I draw near,
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Or of this ?—He walks out in the dim gray daybreak, and sees three
forms on stretchers, covered with’ gray heavy blankets. ‘ Curious I
halt, and silent stand ’—then he lifts one blanket:
Who are you, elderly man, so gaunt and grim, with well-grayed hair, and flesh all
sunken about the eyes? Who are you, my dear comrade ?
Then to the second I step—and who are you, my child and darling ? Who are you,
sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming ?
Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white
ivory,
Young man, I think I know you. I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ
himself;
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.
I
We would now, before passing to consider shortly the general
character of Whitman’s philosophy and teaching, draw closer attentio n
N2
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A STUDY OF WALT WHITMAN,
to the nature of his music. We take another instance from the poem,
1 When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed ’:
0 how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved ?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone ?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love ?
Seawinds blown from east and west,
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till tlierff on the prail'iea
meeting:
These, and with these and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.
0 what shall I hang on the chamber Walls ?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love ?
But of all our author’s poems, surely the loveliest is ‘ A Song
out of the Sea.’ I only wish I could quote it whole, but it is too
long. I hesitate not to say that to me there is no lyric in the language
like it—out of Shelley.
There is a wonderful natural music running through this and
similar poems of Whitman’s : an outbreathing as in primitive times,
and among a primitive people, that can come from nowhere but from
the very depths of a poet’s, a singer’s soul. It is all his own—creation
of spirit, body, vesture. He is intensely original; has not been imbued
with the world’s rich inheritance of treasured poetry: works under no
strong (however flexible) traditions of art, speaks because he must, sings
because he must; yet, with all his rare personal mass and intensity, sings
only sometimes—would certainly sing more constantly did he condescend
to condense and concentrate more; in which some respect for established
forms would largely assist him. And yet in the links of poems where
there is confessedly no intensity of fire possible, if at least we require
that it shall be germane to the subjects, it is more than doubtful
whether the poetic barrenness should be scattered over with sham
flowers instead of real ones ; as the established forms, or at least the
standard poetry by which this English generation judges, appears to
require. So you get either fine sound with no meaning whatever, or
epithets ingeniously constructed in cold blood, which in either case
seriously interferes with the natural and lifelike development of the
poem. Pure honest prose, where prose is really proper, would be
infinitely better.
However all this be, here, in the ‘ Song of the Sea,’ and in similar
passages from Whitman, you do assuredly find, if you are sensitive
and competent, a certain artless harmony of sound that flows like a
spell upon jaded ears, somewhat sated with cloying artificial harmonies
from the study. One is reminded of some dreary nocturne, some
slumbrous mystic voluntary breathed in twilight within a vast
cathedral, or weird natural sounds we know not whence, wandering
phantasmal over lowland wildernesses by night.
�THE POET OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.
253
It is like the very voice of the sea himself, entangled in strings of
the harper ; into the strain has passed the very plaint and murmur of
winds over barren sand and briny briar; rising alternately and fall
ing ; harsh, interrupted, disturbed ; caught up unaware smooth and
soothing; stealing upon us forlorn and melodious, from unfooted
wastes, and shadowy realms of some spirit land that is very far.
Just two personification-pictures, eminently rich in colour, firm
in outline, distinct and pregnant with symbol, yet small in compass
and condensed. One is from ‘ Old Ireland ’ :
Far hence amid an isle of wondrous beauty,
Crouching over a grave, an ancient sorrowful mother,
Once a queen, now lean and tattered, seated on the ground ;
Her old white hair drooping dishevelled round her shoulders;
At her feet an unused royal harp,
Long silent—she too long silent—mourning her shrouded hope and heir :
Of all the earth her heart most full of sorrow, because most full of love.
The other is from ‘A Broadway Pageant,’ written on occasion of
the reception of a Japanese embassy:
The Originatress comes,
The. land of Paradise—land of the Caucasus—the nest of birth,
The nest of languages, the bequeather of poems, the race of Eld,
Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with passion,
Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments,
With sunburnt visage, with intense soul and glittering eyes,
The race of Brahma comes !
[To &e continued.']
’
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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A study of Walt Whitman, the poet of modern democracy. Part 1
Creator
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Noel, Roden
Description
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 241-253 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (October 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1871]
Identifier
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G5323
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A study of Walt Whitman, the poet of modern democracy. Part 1), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
American Poetry
Conway Tracts
Poetry in English
Walt Whitman