SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 1889.

CONTENTS.

...

MOTLEY'S LETTERS

OLD JAPAN

...

...

The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley. Edited by George William Curtis. 2 vols. (Murray.)

THE admirable memoir of Motley written by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, while it whetted the reader's appetite for more matter of the autobiographical sort than it contained, also anticipated some of the interest proper to this no less admirable revelation of the historian's character, in another way, by another of his friends. The two books overlap one another, and our only complaint-a small one-against Mr. Curtis is that he has been too anxious to lessen the inevitable overlapping. Two or three dozen pages added to each volume in the way of notes or prefaces to his chapters would have enabled him, without superseding or at all interfering with Dr. Holmes's work, to round off his own, and to supply readers who have not had access to the earlier publication with a more complete view of a career well worth understanding in its entirety. As it is, some passages in the letters he has printed are barely intelligible or lose their full significance for readers fresh to the subject, and there is no attempt at bridging over several wide gaps in the correspondence. These are delightful volumes, however, edited with rare modesty and good taste, and full of welcome illustrations both of Motley's character and of his surroundings.

The earliest letters here printed confirm the trite adage about the child being father to the man. Motley was a schoolboy of eleven when in a letter to his mother, after speaking of his gardening and swimming, and asking for "some nankeen pantaloons, as my woolenet ones are so tight that they are uncomfortable," he added: "I am reading Hume's 'History of England,'......and think it very interesting. I have commenced Spanish, which I like very much." Two years later he wrote to his father: "I wish I had some books up here to read......I do not want you to send me up anything to eat or drink, but I wish you would send me some books by the stage with the paint brushes." The book he particularly hankered after was Fenimore Cooper's latest novel. He was also a great newspaper reader, and found plenty of time for literary diversion when his studies in Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and mathematics were over. He

graduated at Harvard at the age of seventeen, and being sent to Germany to finish his education was in a mood to use his opportunities. He seems to have been much more than a book-worm, fond of bodily exercise, and with a keen eye for the beauties of nature; but he was always old for his years. Few youths of nineteen would write thus :

"When I see here in Europe such sums of money spent by the Government upon every branch of the fine arts, I cannot help asking why we at home have no picture galleries or statue galleries or libraries. I cannot see at all that such things are only fit for monarchies, and I cannot give myself any reason why our Government should not spend some of its surplus money upon them...... Why cannot the 'good and senseless' men (as Dogberry tells them) in Congress vote a sum for a library or a gallery or anything of the kind, instead of going to loggerheads about surplus dollars which are lying so comfortably in the treasury?"

Motley spent his holidays in visiting various parts of Europe, and took a special interest in the great pictures, many of which he described to his mother in eloquent terms, often more stilted than one looks for in a chatty letter, but usually sound in their criticism. His first visit to England was when he was twenty-one, and it is amusing to note his surprise at the contrast between Salisbury Cathedral and the foreign churches with which he was familiar: "I thought the whole scene at first too tidy, too notable, too housewifish, but......this was only my own dulness; on second thoughts I acknowledged to myself that filth and poverty and ugliness were not necessary concomitants of a cathedral, and I confessed that I had rarely seen a more lovely picture than this same church

presents. presents;, The scene is so softly and sweetly English."

For Stonehenge he could not work up any enthusiasm :

"Stonehenge is merely a rude and rather awkward grouping together of about a score of huge and shapeless stones. It may have been a Druid's temple or Queen Boadicea's drawing-room for aught that I (or I believe any one else) know to the contrary, and I can't find enough interest in the grotesque monuments of a parcel of barbarians to detain me from the continuation of my tour."

As in 1841, four years after his marriage and when he was twenty-seven, Motley entered on the diplomatic career which, though affording ample leisure and special opportunities for his literary work, occupied him at intervals during the next quarter of a century, his youthful experiences of Europe were largely supplemented. To his wife and friends, and in later days to his daughters, he wrote graphic letters about places and persons which are full of interest. Optimist as he was, he was a shrewd observer, and even somewhat of a cynic. The courtly society in which he was forced to move in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and elsewhere was rarely congenial to him. He was dazzled by the splendid appearance of the Czar Nicholas," "a regular-built Jupiter; his figure robust, erect, and stately; his features of great symmetry, his forehead and eye singularly fine"; and of several other great people whom he met he thought well. But he was not at ease in continental ballrooms, and he jeered at the state ceremonies in which he had to take part. Until he

ance with men and women in whom he saw kinship to the sixteenth century worthies whose exploits he recounted with dramatic force, almost the only family in which he felt himself at home was that of Prince Bismarck, his fellow student at Göttingen and Berlin, and his firm friend in later days. His accounts of the great statesman in some respects confirm the views of critics who have only seen him at a distance, and may correct them in other respects. Describing in 1855 their meeting after nearly twenty years' separation, Motley wrote to his wife :

Kin

"I find I like him even better than I thought I did, and you know how high an opinion I always expressed of his talents and disposition. He is a man of very noble character, and of very great powers of mind. The prominent place which he now occupies as a statesman sought him. He did not seek it, or any other office......In the summer of 1851, he told me that the Minister, Manteuffel, asked him one day abruptly, if he would accept the post of Ambassador at Frankfort, to which (although the proposition was as unexpected a one to him as if I should hear by the next mail that I had been chosen Governor of Massachusetts) he answered, after a moment's deliberation, yes, without another word. The King, the same day, sent for him, and asked him if he would accept the place, to which he made the same brief answer, 'Ja.' His Majesty expressed a little surprise that he made no inquiries or conditions, when Bismarck replied that anything which the King felt strong enough to propose to him, he felt strong enough to accept. I only write these details that you may have an idea of the man. Strict integrity and courage of character, a high sense of honour, a firm religious belief, united with remarkable talents, make up necessarily a combination which cannot be found any day in any Court; and I have no doubt that he is destined to be Prime Minister, unless his obstinate truthfulness, which is apt to be a stumbling-block for politicians, stands in his

way."

Motley's friendship with Prince Bismarck lasted as long as the former lived, and was quickened by pleasant intercourse whenever they were near enough to meet. The letters from the German statesman which Mr. Curtis prints-paragraphs of queer English being in some of them mixed up with his own language-are decidedly interesting.

Admiration of Prince Bismarck may have coloured Motley's opinions, but it did not blind him to the realities of the European situation, or render him less loyal to the Republican traditions in which he had been brought up; and his Republican principles caused him to prefer some English to some American institutions, and to quarrel with his own father on the slavery question. To his mother he wrote in 1855 :

"I have vastly more respect for the Government of England than for our own-the nation I can't help considering governed by higher principles of action, by loftier motives. They at least try to reform abuses and admit their existence. We love our diseases, and cling to

them as the only source of health and strength. When you look at America from a distance, you see that it is a great machine for constantly extending the growth of cotton and expanding the area of negro slavery. This is the real motive power of our whole political existence."

He was a zealous opponent of slavery from the first, and the Abolitionist cause was helped in several ways through his intimacy with many leading men in England. Among the few letters addressed to him which Mr. Curtis has printed are some from

settled in Holland, and there made acquaint- | John Stuart Mill. During the years in

which Motley was most in England, however, the society in which he generally moved was livelier than Mill cared for. Though he had some trouble in getting his Dutch Republic' published, and had, with much trembling, to take all the risk on himself,

it at once made him a social lion, and he found in English festivities an enjoyment that the stiffer gaieties of the Continent failed to afford him. "English society," he said, with pardonable vanity, "is very interesting, because anybody who has done anything noteworthy may be seen in it." It was his good fortune-or his misfortune, for his literary work was sadly interrupted, and not at all improved in quality, by the new influences brought to bear upon him to be at once taken up by all the ladies and gentlemen of quality who patronized literature, as well as to be heartily welcomed by fellow labourers in the field. The letters that he wrote home from London some thirty years ago abound in amusing details of the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, suppers, routs, and balls to which he was invited, and they include several charming silhouettes of Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, Macaulay, Hayward, Mrs. Norton, the Dufferins, the Russells, the Palmerstons, and others who patted him on the back; but the gossip is more valuable for its account of celebrated people of the last generation than for the light it throws on Motley's own character. Perhaps he was as little injured as any one could be by the flattery he received, and for that flatterywhich may have been no more than his due -he evidently made a fair return in the brilliant talk with which he entertained his hosts; but perhaps he would have done more and better work in literature, and he might have lived longer, had he had less of it. His lamentations over his trials in having to eat two or three breakfasts and as many dinners in a day, and yet to find time and appetite for some hours of hard work in the State Paper Office and the British Museum, are frequent. It must be remembered, however, that nearly all these confidences are made in gossiping letters to his wife, who when not able to share his pleasures seems to have expected full and familiar reports of them, and that therefore Motley while he was in London may have been less a victim of fashionable society than he represented. The letters are at any rate humorous and clever, and readers who have not already heard enough about the manners and mannerisms of the frequenters of literary drawing-rooms while Mrs. Norton, Macaulay, and the rest were alive will here find much to their taste. The lively picture of Thackeray at the Museum may be taken as a specimen :

"I had been immersed half-an-hour in my MSS., when happening to turn my head round I found seated next to me Thackeray with a file of old newspapers before him writing the ninth number of the 'Virginians.' He took off his spectacles to see who I was, then immediately invited me to dinner the next day (as he seems always to do everybody he meets), which invitation I could not accept, and he then showed me the page he had been writing, a small delicate legible manuscript. After this we continued our studies. I can conceive nothing more harassing in the literary way than his way of living from hand to mouth. I mean in regard to the way in which he furnishes food for the printer's

devil...... Of course, whether ill or well, stupid or fertile, he must produce the same amount of fun, pathos, or sentiment. His gun must be regularly loaded and discharged at command. I

should think it would wear his life out."

Or this smart saying of Mrs. Grote's :

"One of the best things she ever said was about Sydney Smith's daughter (who was married to Dr. Holland), in consequence of her husband being baroneted. Somebody hearing Lady Holland spoken of, asked if Lord Holland's wife was referred to. 'No,' said Mrs. Grote, 'this is New Holland, and the capital is Sydney.” Or the following sketch of Macaulay :

"It is always delightful to meet Macaulay,

and to see the reverence with which he is regarded by everybody; painful to observe the friendly anxiety which every one feels about his

health......He was obliged to leave the table for a few minutes on account of a spasm of coughing, which has been the case ever since I have met him. I think, unless he is much changed, that Sydney Smith's descriptions or rather flings at him are somewhat unjust. He is not in the least the 'colloquial oppressor' he has been represented. On the contrary, every one wishes to hear him talk, and very often people are disappointed because he does not talk enough...... His conversation is, however, rather learned and didactic than spirituelle. His 'brilliant flashes' are only those of silence, according to Sydney's memorable sarcasm. This is strange, for in his writings he is brilliant and flashing almost to painfulness, but I observe nothing pointed or epigrammatic or humorous in his talk."

Whatever place in literary history may ultimately be assigned to Motley, the generation that has profited by his work is bound to think well of him, and no one can deny that his best work was highly creditable to him. In the circumstances that helped him to write his chief books he was exceptionally fortunate. He made no mark as a novelist, and his essays, with all their cleverness, were not above the level of quarterly review-writing attained by a considerable school of cultivated Americans who followed in their own ways the example set for them by Macaulay and others. Had he not become an historian he would probably have done nothing particularly noteworthy; and he evidently became an historian because he found himself in Europe with leisure and opportunities for carrying on congenial studies in friendly rivalry with his friend and exemplar Prescott. Prescott had been fascinated by the great European movement in the fifteenth century, of which one result was the discovery and colonization of America, and of which one impulse arose in Spain. Motley was a sturdier Republican than Prescott, and he seems from a very early date to have been impressed with the superiority of Holland over Spain as a centre of civilization. "The Dutch have certainly done many great things," he wrote to his mother during his first visit to their country. "They have had to contend with two of the mightiest powers in the world, the ocean and Spanish tyranny, and they conquered both. Neither the Inquisition nor the Zuyder Zee was able to engulf them." He contented himself with merely admiring their engineering skill; but he resolved to be the chronicler of their fight for political and religious liberty, and both his diplomatic connexions, when he was officially employed in Europe, and his leisure, when he was out of public work, enabled him to apply himself zealously and successfully to the

task. With no more trouble than is inevitable to what he called "the digging out of raw material out of subterranean depths of black-letter folios in half a dozen different languages," he quarried mines that would have been beyond his reach had he lived in America, and he had a happy knack of making the best of all the treasure he found. He was perhaps a more diligent

student than some other historians who have won fame for original research, but he was more of an artist than a student, and his end was gained when he had constructed a brilliant and, in its broad outlines, a truthful picture of the times he dealt with, and especially of their chief hero. "I flatter myself," he said in a letter to his father, "that I have found one great, virtuous and heroic character, William the First of Orange, founder of the Dutch Republic. This man, who did the work of a thousand men every year of his life, who was never inspired by any personal ambition, but who performed good and lofty actions because he was born to do them, just as other men have been born to do nasty ones, deserves to be better understood than I believe him to have been by the world at large."

He is not to be blamed for having allowed his hero worship to dominate in the 'Dutch Republic,' and consequently for giving that work the shape of an authentic historical romance rather than of a prosaic history. The Dutch Republic' was his best book, at any rate from an artistic point of view. As he himself acknowledged, his canvas was more than he could manage in the United Netherlands'; and broken health, if no other cause, damaged the workmanship of John of Barneveld.'

The chapter in which Mr. Curtis prints some of the letters written by and to his friend during the last four years of his life is pathetic reading. The bursting of a blood-vessel in 1872 made him a permanent invalid, and in 1875 his wife died. In a letter to Dr. Holmes he said :

"I cannot believe that the simple and unwavering religious faith with whose aid she confronted death with such unaffected courage and simplicity, and bore with such gentle patience the the prol prolonged tortures of a most painful malady, during which her chief thoughts, as they had been all her life, were for others rather than herself, was all delusion and mockery. And yet I am compelled to struggle daily with doubt which often turns to despair, and to cling to hopes which vanish almost as soon as they form themselves."

His later years were cheered, however, by the new interests that arose with the growth of his family. The most charming of all the letters in this book are some of those addressed to his daughters, full of fun and wisdom, and furnishing graceful and manifestly trustworthy evidence of the amiability that won for him the love of those with whom he came in contact.

Japan in Days of Yore. By Walter Dening. 4 vols. (Griffith, Farran & Co.)

It was a happy thought that led Mr. Dening to undertake this curiously interesting series of tales in order to illustrate the life of old Japan. It would, perhaps, have been better to have translated parts of the many novels and biographies of the last century than to have adapted selections from the Momtusho (Education Department) series of school readers. The charm of a Japanese story lies as much, to say the least, in the way it is told as in its substance, which, in truth, is often somewhat meagre, and it is just this charm, difficult to preserve in a translation, that disappears altogether when the tale is manipulated in Western fashion. But we are not the less thankful to Mr. Dening, long known as a zealous missionary and diligent student of the literature and civilization of Japan, for the work he has done simply because he has not chosen the best method of doing it. Though here and there exception may be taken to the style, and especially to the metrical versions of Japanese poetry scattered through these volumes, the native flavour of the narratives is fairly well preserved, despite some colloquialisms which are much more vulgar in English than their equivalents are in Japanese. The use of the word "august" for o or on is traditional, but absurd. Where these honorifics occur the sentence can always be easily turned so as to give their significance, which, indeed, is often of a merely pronominal character, the honorific indicating a reference to the person addressed or forming the subject of the thought.

Of the three narratives contained in these four volumes, which all profess to be, and in some degree probably really are, founded on fact, one is the life of Miyamoto Musashi, the famous champion fencer of the sixteenth century. The son of a fencer whose skill had won him the title of Munisai, or the unparalleled, the boy exhibited a precocious talent for the art, and soon became renowned almost as much for his love of actual fighting as for his strength and science. His biography, indeed, is nothing more than the record of his endless encounters with all sorts of persons, including his own father, and especially with other fencers, not a few of whom lost their lives through one or other of the many riu or methods he employed, or through some of the various yawara or gymnastic tricks that formed the stock-in-trade of professional swordsmen, by one of which Musashi himself almost perished in his last encounter with his great rival Ganryn, who, turning a somersault in the air, aimed a terrible blow at his antagonist as he descended, and nearly amputated his legs. This Ganryn was an even more truculent fellow than Musashi. He was worsted on an occasion he had himself sought by Musashi's father, Munisai, and in revenge lay in wait for the victor and shot him dead. The kataki-uchi, or vendetta, that ensued forms the subject of the rest of the tale, and is related with considerable spirit; still there is a wearisome amount of fighting, ambushing, and killing. After perusing it one is fairly surprised at the Momtusho view of Musashi's history as displaying " so many of the nobler aspects of human nature," and as "calculated to inspire confidence in humanity."

The other stories afford a less bloody, but much more attractive and faithful picture of Japanese society under the Tokugawa Shôguns. Human Nature in a Variety of Aspects' the titles, by-the-by, do not appear to be of Japanese invention is the story of a peasant's son who devotes his life to befriending others, and suffers many hardships, and affronts many dangers, in consequence. The latter portion of the story is far the best, exemplifying the cross

examining faculty of the just judge Tadasuke, the Solomon of Japan, some of whose most notable judgments-extracted from a Japanese collection of them known as 'O-oka Menjo Seidon,' 'The Famous Decrees of O-oka' (Tadasuke) - will be found in Mr. Chamberlain's 'Romanized Reader.' The falsity of a charge of theft brought against an honourable, but poverty-stricken friend of the hero's is shown by an acute interrogatory suggested by and starting from a single improbable statement made by the principal witness, and immediately seized upon by the judge. The third story relates how Iyemitsu, the most celebrated of the successors of Iyeyasu, lost the aversion he conceived for a fencer who had vanquished him in the ring, on witnessing that fencer's bravery in swimming his horse across the Sumida river during a great flood. The tale is, on the whole, the most attractive of the three, and well exemplifies the curious outspokenness and quasi-tyranny which Oriental despots have always had to endure at the hands of their immediate advisers a tyranny which in Japan ended by making the kard, or councillors of the Daimios, the real depositaries of power.

All four volumes, which are printed on Japanese paper and bound in the Japanese style, are admirably and fully illustrated in colours in a manner which, if not exactly that of old Japan, is a sufficiently close imitation of it, as is proved by the picture of the wonderful fight between Musashi and Ganryn above mentioned, and by the last woodcut in 'Human Nature,' where the heads of the chief figures appear to overtop the roof-ridge on the opposite side of the street. In all three stories, too, are to be found numerous incidental touches, often highly quaint, sometimes repulsive, illustrative of the life of the time. Thus the hero of Human Nature' on one occasion offers up his thanksgivings to Kwan-on because "good breeding demanded a certain amount of devotion." Knights, as Mr. Dening translates samurai (lit. servers or esquires), on going to the wars took care to have on their persons money enough to pay for a doctor if wounded, and for a proper funeral if killed. To raise money in aid of a benefactor the chief personage of one of the stories sells his daughter to a house of ill fame, and the trans

evotion."

the civilization of the Tokugawa period, and Mr. Dening's volumes are welcome helps to a better understanding of that age of isolation. It was a most strange society, developed in almost complete seclusion from the rest of the world, and exhibits a curious mixture of good and evil, feebleness and strength, gentleness and ferocity; a certain softness of nature, however, always showing somewhere through the crust of military class - ruffianism that overlay and hid the innate sweetness of the Japanese character.

Essays in Criticism. Second Series. By Matthew Arnold. (Macmillan & Co.) ALWAYS in reading a posthumous volume by a distinguished writer newly dead there is a pathos that is like none other. The voice that from the printed lines is speaking to us-the voice that only yesterday we had welcomed as it came across the "phalanxes of the fight"-comes now with a tone that is half strange and half familiar-a tone, indeed, which at one moment seems that of the living speech of the living soldiers in the fray, and at the next seems the accent of those who dwell in the unknown country beyond Orion whence Homer and Sophocles and Shakespeare speak. And especially is this

so in the case of the illustrious writer and

delightful man of whose delicate genius these essays (or some of them) are the very latest fruit. How is it that it is so peculiarly difficult to realize the world of contemporary English letters without a Matthew Arnold alive and in the flesh? In order to answer this question we should have to touch upon a subject of the deepest interest, which is yet almost too subtle a one to deal with. There are some men of genius with whom it is in no way difficult to associate the idea of death. In the expression of their eyes, perhaps, or in the tone of their voices there is a dreamy and indefinable suggestion of other worldliness which makes ask ourselves :

us

"How will it be with us when

these also are gone home?" But not of

these was Matthew Arnold. In that

presence of his, burly and yet fine-in that hearty, honest voice of his, so entirely English, so deep and clear and manly-the suggestion was that of solid strengthearthly, death-resisting strength-a suggestion that drove away all such thoughts as these. Yet his close kinship with those others was seen in this, that we could not think of him as growing old. In one of the essays in this volume he speaks of himself as having passed into the season of old age; but this was only the playfulness of a man whose vigour allowed him to play prettily with the idea. Did any of those who, knowing him, must needs honour and admire him, ever think of Matthew Arnold as being old? If it is the peculiar characteristic of poetic genius that it never does grow old-if it is true that

The great are ever young

was it not especially so in the case of him, the writer of this book, who at sixty-five is said to have brought on his death by taking a boyish leap over a fence? To die like this, swiftly, at an age when ordinary men have begun to feel themselves passing into "the sere, the yellow leaf," is surely the happiest fate that can befall a man like Matthew Arnold. After a man has lived to bury the

friends of his poetic youth-the friends who knew the earth fresh and beautiful as once he himself knew it-it is not the "Angel of Life" who shines crowned with the halo of poetry and romance: it is the rich "Angel of Death"; and yet-such children are wethere is a fear of the manner of his approach -a fear lest he come upon us too suddenly. It is very strange. Arnold died as Dickens and Thackeray and Shakspeare and so many great men have died-suddenly, full of work-and yet we were all shocked at his death. It is true that of late years he had not been voluble; avocations outside literature had effectually prevented that; but though in recent years it was not much that he said and it was still less that he sang, whatsoever he did say and whatsoever he did sing was never wasted on deaf ears, as he well knew and fully appreciated. "The reading world has been very kind to me; the critics have been especially kind," were among the first words that the writer of this review ever heard fall from his lips. And fortunate is he who can say this! A time like this of ours is hardly worth writing for. The reign of pure literature is passed. What time the country has to spare from angry party politics it gives to what it calls its religion or else to practical science. Not to publish at all is therefore best for the bard who would "possess his soul" in patience to enjoy the riches of Nature's giving, and the pathetic harlequinade of social life; but next to this to publish what people will read and continue to read is pleasant. Grievous to poetic eyes must be the spectacle on the library shelves of the backs of one's own books, epics after Homer or Milton belike, or tragedies after Shakspeare-immortal works the sale of which has stopped long ago. But this kind of vexation Arnold knew not, and hence he was content. He knew that every word was listened to, every note was eagerly caught up from that voice whose tones were to all

winning, whose manner SO

of speech

was to all so irresistible. With regard to the general public this was so no less than with regard to those who move in the world of letters. But how much more was it the case with regard to those young souls, aspiring and proud, whose ambition it is to be not of "the general public" and not of the mere "men of letters," but to be of the elect Arnoldian children of sweetness and lightthose to whom the typical Oxford lectures on poetry are a revelation, a Delphic utterance not to be criticized! In the place where those lectures were delivered, so entirely had become associated with

Arnold's

name

culture that it would have required a courage of fifty undergraduate power to challenge anything he said, either in prose or in verse. Arnoldism there had grown into a cult; each brilliant paradox of his had become a shibboleth, whether it dealt with the famous Celtic Titan, or the stream of tendency, or the still more famous criticism of life. And if the undergraduate mind showed itself ready even to scorn the fantastic style of Shakspeare, to accept Sainte Beuve as the nineteenth century Aristotle, and Prof. Shairp as the natural guardian of the cultured soul against the wicked wiles of Shelley, what matter? The universe is large, and has many "hubs."

In literary history is there a chapter more

pathetic is there a chapter more humorous than that which deals with the great struggle of Arnold and Oxford against Shelley? None, unless it be the struggle of Cambridge against Shakspeare as depicted in 'The Returne from Parnassus.' Mr. Swinburne, with his usual uncompromising emphasis, speaks of "the struggle of the universities against the universe." It makes one almost sorry to think that in the end the universe will surely win. For Shelley's Oxford doings were (as we once said when speaking of Prof. Shairp's famous secondhand attack upon the author of 'Prometheus Unbound') so appalling to the academic soul that it is impossible not to sympathize with a university so maltreated. When the professor depicts the greatest prophet-poet of the modern world as a sort of Tom o' Bedlam "riding a cock-horse" over the Oxford flats, and shouting:

With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander,-

it is impossible not to feel towards Tom's

It is not only Matthew Arnold and Mr. Burnand, of 'Black-eyed Susan' fame, who find Shakspeare an over-rated writer. To the great critic of the Journal des Débats, M. Lemaître, "the jokes of Beatrice and Benedick seem to be the jests of savages."

In the volume before us Arnold, returning to those Voltairean strictures on the English savage which formed such an amusing feature of the preface to his first volume of poems, writes in the same strain :

"I have heard a politician express wonder at the treasures of political wisdom in a certain celebrated scene of 'Troilus and Cressida'; for my part I am at least equally moved to wonder at the fantastic and false diction in which Shak

speare has in that scene clothed them."

Such a piece of criticism as this must not be hastily passed by, for it springs from the very root of all the false criticism of the world. There can be only two scenes to which these strictures can apply the third scene of the first act of 'Troilus and Cressida,' or else the third scene of the third act. In the first of these scenes Nestor says:

In the reproof of chance

Lies the true proof of men: the sea being smooth,
How many shallow bauble boats dare sail
Upon her patient breast, making their way

those nobler bulk !

foster-mother that tenderness which we
accord to the goose who hatched the eaglet,
and to the worthy mother duck who
hatched the swan. To Oxford's attack upon
Shelley, Matthew Arnold in this volume
returns with the gusto of Prof. Shairp, and
with an Olympian good temper all his own.
He is courteous enough to dub the delinquent Bounding between the two moist elements,
"a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating
in the void his luminous wings in vain ";
but this is only the elegant Arnoldian and

But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage
The gentle Thetis, and, anon, behold
The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains

cut,

Like Perseus' horse: where 's then the saucy boat,
Whose weak untimber'd sides but even now

Co-rivall'd greatness? Either to harbour fled,
Or made a toast for Neptune. Even so

well-bred way of characterizing a recognized Doth valour's show and valour's worth divide

maniac. For there is a great deal of very
superior good breeding in the true child
of sweetness and light. To him, how-
ever, it has always been idle to talk about
the poet as vates-it has always been idle to
say to him: "If such poetry as that of the
'Prometheus Unbound' - the motive of
which is the final emancipation of man by
force
of human courage and human love and

self-abnegation-is the work of 'a beauti-
ful and ineffectual angel,' when will the
dark riddle of human life ever be ex-
pounded?" For the answer comes at once:
"We, the elect of culture, making for
righteousness on a stream of tendency, what
time have we to waste on conundrums?"

That this depreciation of Shelley should arouse the anger of the Shelleyites, especially of so strong and fervid a one as Mr. Swinburne, was, of course, inevitable. To do him justice, indeed, there is no man living with a finer capacity of anger than Mr. Swinburne; and are we not told on the highest authority that every healthy creature feels a restless inner sentiment for exercising his function? Yet Mr. Swinburne should bear in mind, as we have before told him, that if the cultured soul despises the 'Prometheus Unbound,' the place it accords to Shelley as a polite letter-writer is quite unusually high. In his own country it is something for a prophet to win even such mild appreciation as this.

For our own part, although not Shelley only, but Shakspeare also, has come under the lash of culture, we find it impossible to get angry with so good-tempered a writer as Matthew Arnold. Man may, it seems, be much too cultured to enjoy Shakespeare.

In storms of fortune: for in her ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the breeze
Than by the tiger; but when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,

An. flies fled under shade, why, then the thing of

courage,

As rous'd with rage, with rage doth sympathize,
And with an accent tun'd in selfsame key
Retorts to chiding fortune.

If there is in imaginative literature anything richer in wisdom and beauty than the scene where these lines occur, it is perhaps to be found in the second scene we have indicated, the scene where Ulysses says:Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his baek,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-siz'd monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are de--

vour'd

As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As they are done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright; to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mockery. Take th' instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep, then, the path
For emulation hath a thousand sons,

That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by,
And leave you hindmost;
Or, like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,

Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in

present,

Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps-in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue

seek

Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted.

The present eye praises the present object.

It would be extremely interesting to know which of the two superb scenes in which occur lines such as these shocks by its style the soul of Culture.

For the shortcomings of most people, however, there is a good deal to be pleaded; there is, we believe, a good deal to be pleaded in favour both of Shelley and of Shakspeare. With regard to Shelley, our defence of his greatest work has already been advanced by inference. It is this: all speculation as to what literature will be adequate (to use Arnold's own excellent word) to future ages must be for the most part idle. Rash indeed would be the critic who should venture to prophesy what poetry will in a few years be adequate adequate to such a cosmogony as that which has lately dawned upon the world - adequate to that theory of the universe so fundamentally new and grand that all previous theories seem as irrational as the fetish worships of Africa. Yet it seems hardly too much to assume that never can there be a scheme and system of civilization so scientifically true and at the same time so morally exalted that Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound' will be inadequate to express its noblest aspirations-never will man get beyond such a scheme of human emancipation by aid of the two great human forces, heroic

suffering and heroic love, as that evolved by the "beautiful and ineffectual angel" admired as a master of the epistolary style, but despised as one of the poets of eccentricity.

To one side of poetry, and that (as some think) the most important of all, the prophetic, a fine poet may, it seems, be both deaf and blind. Despising Shelley and Hugo as he did, what did Arnold in his heart of hearts really think of Æschylus? An interesting and a curious question for those who, confronted by such work as the 'Prometheus' and the 'Agamemnon,' do not believe that to the Greeks a wise moderation of self was the be-all and end-all of art-do not believe that the inscription over the porch of the Delphic temple, "Measure in all things," covered entirely the artistic idea of a people that gave birth not only to Sophocles, but also to Æschylus and Pindar. But this being Arnold's attitude towards the poet as prophet, the remarkable thing

connected with him is that he showed an

equally defective appreciation of Shakspeare, the least prophetic of all great writers. The critie who is out of touch with both Shakspeare and Shelley shows at least a catholicity of imperfect sympathies. With regard to Shakspeare, the scenes in 'Troilus and Cressida whose literary style the student is taught to avoid are perhaps fuller than any scenes in any other of Shakspeare's plays of that quality which is more specially and technically Shakspearean than all others-richness. On this head we have often spoken much, and the gist of what has been said is this: Whenever we, the readers of Shakspeare, think of him, it is this very quality condemned by Matthew Arnold-it is his richness more

than even his higher qualities-that we think of first. In reading Shakspeare we feel at every turn that we have come upon the richest mind in all literature-a mind as rich as Marlowe's Moor, who

a

Without control can pick his riches up And in his house heap pearls like pebble stones. Indeed, he is richer still; he can, as has been before said in these columns, "by merely looking at the pebble stones turn them into pearls for himself, like the changeling child recovered from the gnomes in certain Rosicrucian story." His riches burden him. And no wonder! "It is stiff flying with the Ruby Hills of Badakhshan on your back." Nevertheless, so strong are the wings of Shakspeare's imagination, so lordly is his intellect, that he can carry them all; he could carry, it would seem, every gem in Golconda-every gem in every planet from here to Neptune, and yet win his goal. And in the matter of richness the great difference between him and the richest of his followers is the difference of this carrying power. With these the wings of the imagination, aërial at starting and only iridescent like the sails of a dragon-fly, seem to change as they go-become overcharged with beauty, in fact, and bright "with splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings." Or rather (as we have before said) "the other rich poets such as Keats seem to start sometimes with Shakspeare's own eagle pinions, which as they mount catch and retain colour after colour from the beautiful earth below, till, heavy with beauty as the drooping wings of a golden pheasant, they fly low and level at last over the earth they cannot leave for its loveliness, not even for the loveliness of the skies." But in criticizing this quality of richness in a play like 'Troilus and Cressida' the question to ask is not, "Does the poet carry more gems than Sophocles carried?" but "What is the measure of his carrying power? Does he in spite of the Ruby Hills on his back reach his goal as an imaginative 'maker'?"

The special charm of Arnold's character is, however, peculiarly exemplified in the strictures we are discussing the charm of frankness. To confess that they had but small sympathy with Shakspeare "the maker" on the one side, and with Shelley "the prophet" on the other, would have sorely taxed the candour and the courage of most men; but Arnold did not shrink from making the confession-nay, he gloried in his eccentricities, and reiterated them during the entire course of his life.

That he who quarrelled with the richness of Shakspeare should be such an appreciative and warm admirer of Keats, whose right of existence is that he had a measure of this very richness, is strange. It is, however, in the essay on Keats that some of the best things in this volume are said. High as he sets Keats's best work, it is not, we think, too high.

Finer, however, than even the essay on Keats is the address on Milton delivered in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, at the unveiling of a memorial window presented by Mr. Childs, of Philadelphia. It is full of true and noble things. To say anything that is at once new and true of Milton is not

easy, yet Arnold in the following noble passage has said it :

"Continually he lived in companionship with high and rare excellence, with the great Hebrew poets and prophets, with the great poets of Greece and Rome. The Hebrew compositions were not in verse, and can be not inadequately represented by the grand measured prose of our English Bible. The verse of the poets of Greece and Rome no translation can adequately reproduce. Prose cannot have the power of verse; verse-translation may give whatever of charm is in the soul and talent of the translator himself, but never the specific charm of the verse and poet translated. In our race are thousands of readers, presently there will be millions, who know not a word of Greek and Latin, and will never learn those languages. If this host of readers are ever to gain any sense of the power and charm of the great poets of anti

quity, their way to gain it is not through translations of the ancients, but through original poetry of Milton, who has the like power and charm, because he has the like great style. Through Milton they may gain it, for, in conclusion, Milton is English; this master in the great style of the ancients is English. Virgil, whom Milton loved and honoured, has at the end of the Æneid a noble passage, where Juno,

seeing the defeat of Turnus and the Italians imminent, the victory of the Trojan invaders assured, entreats Jupiter that Italy may nevertheless survive and be herself still, may retain her own mind, manners, and language, and not adopt those of the conqueror.

Sit Latium, sint Albani per secula reges!

Jupiter grants the prayer; he promises perpetuity and the future to Italy-Italy reinforced by whatever virtue the Trojan race has, but para Italy, not Troy. This we may take as a sort of parable suiting ourselves. All the Anglo-Saxon contagion, all the flood of Anglo-Saxon commonness, beats vainly against the great style but cannot shake it, and has to accept its triumph. But it triumphs in Milton, in one of our own race, tongue, faith, and morals. Milton has made the great style no longer an exotic here; he has made it an inmate amongst us, leaven,

and a power. Nevertheless he, and his hearers

on both sides of the Atlantic, are English, and will remain English

Sermonem Ausonii patrium moresque tenebunt.

The English race overspreads the world, and at the same time the ideal of an excellence the most high and the most rare abides a possession with it for ever."

Next to this eloquent address the essay upon Amiel is perhaps the most interesting: it shows Arnold at his best as a critic, and also, perhaps, at his worst. It is full of interesting quotations from Amiel. Among others, he gives with approval Amiel's remarks upon the critic's function-upon the years of labour, the study, and the comparison needed to bring the critical judgment to maturity :

"Like Plato's sage, it is only at fifty that the critic is risen to the true height of his literary priesthood, or, to put it less pompously, of his social function. Not till then has he compassed all modes of being, and made every shade of appreciation his own."

This passage from Amiel has a special significance if we apply it to Arnold's own case. That his power and genius did not wax with his growing years -that his later utterances were not more fully charged with wisdom than those of his early manhood-is pretty generally admitted even by his most ardent disciples. And though this is doubtless a characteristic which he shared with many another writer whose brilliant dawn had startled and delighted the world, it is none the less