Letters to Dead Authors

Master,—In the Boreal and Septentrional lands, turned aside from the noonday and the sun, there dwelt of old (as thou knowest, and as Olaus voucheth) a race of men, brave, strong, nimble, and adventurous, who had no other care but to fight and drink.  There, by reason of the cold (as Virgil witnesseth), men break wine with axes.  To their minds, when once they were dead and gotten to Valhalla, or the place of their Gods, there would be no other pleasure but to swig, tipple, drink, and boose till the coming of that last darkness and Twilight, wherein they, with their deities, should do battle against the enemies of all mankind; which day they rather desired than dreaded.

So chanced it also with Pantagruel and Brother John and their company, after they had once partaken of the secret of the Dive Bouteille.  Thereafter they searched no longer; but, abiding at their ease, were merry, frolic, jolly, gay, glad, and wise; only that they always and ever did expect the awful Coming of the Coqcigrues.  Now concerning the day of that coming, and the nature of them that should come, they knew nothing; and for his part Panurge was all the more adread, as Aristotle testifieth that men (and Panurge above others) most fear that which they know least.  Now it chanced one day, as they sat at meat, with viands rare, dainty, and precious as ever Apicius dreamed of, that there fluttered on the air a faint sound as of sermons, speeches, orations, addresses, discourses, lectures, and the like; whereat Panurge, pricking up his ears, cried, “Methinks this wind bloweth from Midlothian,” and so fell a trembling.

Next, to their aural orifices, and the avenues audient of the brain, was borne a very melancholy sound as of harmoniums, hymns, organ-pianos, psalteries, and the like, all playing different airs, in a kind most hateful to the Muses.  Then said Panurge, as well as he might for the chattering of his teeth: “May I never drink if here come not the Coqcigrues!” and this saying and prophecy of his was true and inspired.  But thereon the others began to mock, flout, and gird at Panurge for his cowardice.  “Here am I!” cried Brother John, “well-armed and ready to stand a siege; being entrenched, fortified, hemmed-in and surrounded with great pasties, huge pieces of salted beef, salads, fricassees, hams, tongues, pies, and a wilderness of pleasant little tarts, jellies, pastries, trifles, and fruits of all kinds, and I shall not thirst while I have good wells, founts, springs, and sources of Bordeaux wine, Burgundy, wine of the Champagne country, sack and Canary.  A fig for thy Coqcigrues!”

But even as he spoke there ran up suddenly a whole legion, or rather army, of physicians, each armed with laryngoscopes, stethoscopes, horoscopes, microscopes, weighing machines, and such other tools, engines, and arms as they had who, after thy time, persecuted Monsieur de Pourceaugnac!  And they all, rushing on Brother John, cried out to him, “Abstain!  Abstain!”  And one said, “I have well diagnosed thee, and thou art in a fair way to have the gout.”  “I never did better in my days,” said Brother John.  “Away with thy meats and drinks!” they cried.  And one said, “He must to Royat;” and another, “Hence with him to Aix;” and a third, “Banish him to Wiesbaden;” and a fourth, “Hale him to Gastein;” and yet another, “To Barbouille with him in chains!”

And while others felt his pulse and looked at his tongue, they all wrote prescriptions for him like men mad.  “For thy eating,” cried he that seemed to be their leader, “No soup!”  “No soup!” quoth Brother John; and those cheeks of his, whereat you might have warmed your two hands in the winter solstice, grew white as lilies.  “Nay! and no salmon, nor any beef nor mutton!  A little chicken by times, pericolo tuo!  Nor any game, such as grouse, partridge, pheasant, capercailzie, wild duck; nor any cheese, nor fruit, nor pastry, nor coffee, nor eau de vie; and avoid all sweets.  No veal, pork, nor made dishes of any kind.”  “Then what may I eat?” quoth the good Brother, whose valour had oozed out of the soles of his sandals.  “A little cold bacon at breakfast—no eggs,” quoth the leader of the strange folk, “and a slice of toast without butter.”  “And for thy drink”—(“What?” gasped Brother John)—“one dessert-spoonful of whisky, with a pint of the water of Apollinaris at luncheon and dinner.  No more!”  At this Brother John fainted, falling like a great buttress of a hill, such as Taygetus or Erymanthus.

While they were busy with him, others of the frantic folk had built great platforms of wood, whereon they all stood and spoke at once, both men and women.  And of these some wore red crosses on their garments, which meaneth “Salvation;” and others wore white crosses, with a little black button of crape, to signify “Purity;” and others bits of blue to mean “Abstinence.”  While some of these pursued Panurge others did beset Pantagruel; asking him very long questions, whereunto he gave but short answers.  Thus they asked:—

Have ye Local Option here?—Pan.: What?

May one man drink if his neighbour be not athirst?—Pan.: Yea!

Have ye Free Education?—Pan.: What?

Must they that have, pay to school them that have not?—Pan.: Nay!

Have ye free land?—Pan.: What?

Have ye taken the land from the farmer, and given it to the tailor out of work and the candlemaker masterless?—Pan.: Nay!

Have your women folk votes?—Pan.: Bosh!

Have ye got religion?—Pan.: How?

Do you go about the streets at night, brawling, blowing a trumpet before you, and making long prayers?—Pan.: Nay!

Have you manhood suffrage?—Pan.: Eh?

Is Jack as good as his master?—Pan.: Nay!

Have you joined the Arbitration Society?—Pan.: Quoy?

Will you let another kick you, and will you ask his neighbour if you deserve the same?—Pan.: Nay!

Do you eat what you list?—Pan.: Ay!

Do you drink when you are athirst?—Pan.: Ay!

Are you governed by the free expression of the popular will?—Pan.: How?

Are you servants of priests, pulpits, and penny papers?—Pan.: NO!

Now, when they heard these answers of Pantagruel they all fell, some a weeping, some a praying, some a swearing, some an arbitrating, some a lecturing, some a caucussing, some a preaching, some a faith-healing, some a miracle-working, some a hypnotising, some a writing to the daily press; and while they were thus busy, like folk distraught, “reforming the island,” Pantagruel burst out a laughing; whereat they were greatly dismayed; for laughter killeth the whole race of Coqcigrues, and they may not endure it.

Then Pantagruel and his company stole aboard a barque that Panurge had ready in the harbour.  And having provisioned her well with store of meat and good drink, they set sail for the kingdom of Entelechy, where, having landed, they were kindly entreated; and there abide to this day; drinking of the sweet and eating of the fat, under the protection of that intellectual sphere which hath in all places its centre and nowhere its circumference.

Such was their destiny; there was their end appointed, and thither the Coqcigrues can never come.  For all the air of that land is full of laughter, which killeth Coqcigrues; and there aboundeth the herb Pantagruelion.  But for thee, Master Françoys, thou art not well liked in this island of ours, where the Coqcigrues are abundant, very fierce, cruel, and tyrannical.  Yet thou hast thy friends, that meet and drink to thee, and wish thee well wheresoever thou hast found thy grand peut-être.

Madam,—If to the enjoyments of your present state be lacking a view of the minor infirmities or foibles of men, I cannot but think (were the thought permitted) that your pleasures are yet incomplete.  Moreover, it is certain that a woman of parts who has once meddled with literature will never wholly lose her love for the discussion of that delicious topic, nor cease to relish what (in the cant of our new age) is styled “literary shop.”  For these reasons I attempt to convey to you some inkling of the present state of that agreeable art which you, madam, raised to its highest pitch of perfection.

As to your own works (immortal, as I believe), I have but little that is wholly cheering to tell one who, among women of letters, was almost alone in her freedom from a lettered vanity.  You are not a very popular author: your volumes are not found in gaudy covers on every bookstall; or, if found, are not perused with avidity by the Emmas and Catherines of our generation.  ’Tis not long since a blow was dealt (in the estimation of the unreasoning) at your character as an author by the publication of your familiar letters.  The editor of these epistles, unfortunately, did not always take your witticisms, and he added others which were too unmistakably his own.  While the injudicious were disappointed by the absence of your exquisite style and humour, the wiser sort were the more convinced of your wisdom.  In your letters (knowing your correspondents) you gave but the small personal talk of the hour, for them sufficient; for your books you reserved matter and expression which are imperishable.  Your admirers, if not very numerous, include all persons of taste, who, in your favour, are apt somewhat to abate the rule, or shake off the habit, which commonly confines them to but temperate laudation.

’Tis the fault of all art to seem antiquated and faded in the eyes of the succeeding generation.  The manners of your age were not the manners of to-day, and young gentlemen and ladies who think Scott “slow,” think Miss Austen “prim” and “dreary.”  Yet, even could you return among us, I scarcely believe that, speaking the language of the hour, as you might, and versed in its habits, you would win the general admiration.  For how tame, madam, are your characters, especially your favourite heroines! how limited the life which you knew and described! how narrow the range of your incidents! how correct your grammar!

As heroines, for example, you chose ladies like Emma, and Elizabeth, and Catherine: women remarkable neither for the brilliance nor for the degradation of their birth; women wrapped up in their own and the parish’s concerns, ignorant of evil, as it seems, and unacquainted with vain yearnings and interesting doubts.  Who can engage his fancy with their match-makings and the conduct of their affections, when so many daring and dazzling heroines approach and solicit his regard?

Here are princesses dressed in white velvet stamped with golden fleurs-de-lys—ladies with hearts of ice and lips of fire, who count their roubles by the million, their lovers by the score, and even their husbands, very often, in figures of some arithmetical importance.  With these are the immaculate daughters of itinerant Italian musicians—maids whose souls are unsoiled amidst the contaminations of our streets, and whose acquaintance with the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Dædalus and Scopas, is the more admirable, because entirely derived from loving study of the inexpensive collections vended by the plaster-of-Paris man round the corner.  When such heroines are wooed by the nephews of Dukes, where are your Emmas and Elizabeths?  Your volumes neither excite nor satisfy the curiosities provoked by that modern and scientific fiction, which is greatly admired, I learn, in the United States, as well as in France and at home.

You erred, it cannot be denied, with your eyes open.  Knowing Lydia and Kitty so intimately as you did, why did you make of them almost insignificant characters?  With Lydia for a heroine you might have gone far; and, had you devoted three volumes, and the chief of your time, to the passions of Kitty, you might have held your own, even now, in the circulating library.  How Lyddy, perched on a corner of the roof, first beheld her Wickham; how, on her challenge, he climbed up by a ladder to her side; how they kissed, caressed, swung on gates together, met at odd seasons, in strange places, and finally eloped: all this might have been put in the mouth of a jealous elder sister, say Elizabeth, and you would not have been less popular than several favourites of our time.  Had you cast the whole narrative into the present tense, and lingered lovingly over the thickness of Mary’s legs and the softness of Kitty’s cheeks, and the blonde fluffiness of Wickham’s whiskers, you would have left a romance still dear to young ladies.

Or, again, you might entrance fair students still, had you concentrated your attention on Mrs. Rushworth, who eloped with Henry Crawford.  These should have been the chief figures of “Mansfield Park.”  But you timidly decline to tackle Passion.  “Let other pens,” you write, “dwell on guilt and misery.  I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.”  Ah, there is the secret of your failure!  Need I add that the vulgarity and narrowness of the social circles you describe impair your popularity?  I scarce remember more than one lady of title, and but very few lords (and these unessential) in all your tales.  Now, when we all wish to be in society, we demand plenty of titles in our novels, at any rate, and we get lords (and very queer lords) even from Republican authors, born in a country which in your time was not renowned for its literature.  I have heard a critic remark, with a decided air of fashion, on the brevity of the notice which your characters give each other when they offer invitations to dinner.  “An invitation to dinner next day was despatched,” and this demonstrates that your acquaintance “went out” very little, and had but few engagements.  How vulgar, too, is one of your heroines, who bids Mr. Darcy “keep his breath to cool his porridge.”  I blush for Elizabeth!  It were superfluous to add that your characters are debased by being invariably mere members of the Church of England as by law established.  The Dissenting enthusiast, the open soul that glides from Esoteric Buddhism to the Salvation Army, and from the Higher Pantheism to the Higher Paganism, we look for in vain among your studies of character.  Nay, the very words I employ are of unknown sound to you; so how can you help us in the stress of the soul’s travailings?

You may say that the soul’s travailings are no affair of yours; proving thereby that you have indeed but a lowly conception of the duty of the novelist.  I only remember one reference, in all your works, to that controversy which occupies the chief of our attention—the great controversy on Creation or Evolution.  Your Jane Bennet cries: “I have no idea of there being so much Design in the world as some persons imagine.”  Nor do you touch on our mighty social question, the Land Laws, save when Mrs. Bennet appears as a Land Reformer, and rails bitterly against the cruelty “of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.”  There, madam, in that cruelly unjust performance, what a text you had for a tendenz-romanz.  Nay, you can allow Kitty to report that a Private had been flogged, without introducing a chapter on Flogging in the Army.  But you formally declined to stretch your matter out, here and there, “with solemn specious nonsense about something unconnected with the story.”  No “padding” for Miss Austen! in fact, madam, as you were born before Analysis came in, or Passion, or Realism, or Naturalism, or Irreverence, or Religious Open-mindedness, you really cannot hope to rival your literary sisters in the minds of a perplexed generation.  Your heroines are not passionate, we do not see their red wet cheeks, and tresses dishevelled in the manner of our frank young Mænads.  What says your best successor, a lady who adds fresh lustre to a name that in fiction equals yours?  She says of Miss Austen: “Her heroines have a stamp of their own.  They have a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart . . . Love with them does not mean a passion as much as an interest, deep and silent.”  I think one prefers them so, and that Englishwomen should be more like Anne Elliot than Maggie Tulliver.  “All the privilege I claim for my own sex is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone,” said Anne; perhaps she insisted on a monopoly that neither sex has all to itself.  Ah, madam, what a relief it is to come back to your witty volumes, and forget the follies of to-day in those of Mr. Collins and of Mrs. Bennet!  How fine, nay, how noble is your art in its delicate reserve, never insisting, never forcing the note, never pushing the sketch into the caricature!  You worked, without thinking of it, in the spirit of Greece, on a labour happily limited, and exquisitely organised.  “Dear books,” we say, with Miss Thackeray—“dear books, bright, sparkling with wit and animation, in which the homely heroines charm, the dull hours fly, and the very bores are enchanting.”

Father Isaak,—When I would be quiet and go angling it is my custom to carry in my wallet thy pretty book, “The Compleat Angler.”  Here, methinks, if I find not trout I shall find content, and good company, and sweet songs, fair milkmaids, and country mirth.  For you are to know that trout be now scarce and whereas he was ever a fearful fish, he hath of late become so wary that none but the cunningest anglers may be even with him.

It is not as it was in your time, Father, when a man might leave his shop in Fleet Street, of a holiday, and, when he had stretched his legs up Tottenham Hill, come lightly to meadows chequered with waterlilies and lady-smocks, and so fall to his sport.  Nay, now have the houses so much increased, like a spreading sore (through the breaking of that excellent law of the Conscientious King and blessed Martyr, whereby building beyond the walls was forbidden), that the meadows are all swallowed up in streets.  And as to the River Lea, wherein you took many a good trout, I read in the news sheets that “its bed is many inches thick in horrible filth, and the air for more than half a mile on each side of it is polluted with a horrible, sickening stench,” so that we stand in dread of a new Plague, called the Cholera.  And so it is all about London for many miles, and if a man, at heavy charges, betake himself to the fields, lo you, folk are grown so greedy that none will suffer a stranger to fish in his water.

So poor anglers are in sore straits.  Unless a man be rich and can pay great rents, he may not fish in England, and hence spring the discontents of the times, for the angler is full of content, if he do but take trout, but if he be driven from the waterside, he falls, perchance, into evil company, and cries out to divide the property of the gentle folk.  As many now do, even among Parliament-men, whom you loved not, Father Isaak, neither do I love them more than Reason and Scripture bid each of us be kindly to his neighbour.  But, behold, the causes of the ill content are not yet all expressed, for even where a man hath licence to fish, he will hardly take trout in our age, unless he be all the more cunning.  For the fish, harried this way and that by so many of your disciples, is exceeding shy and artful, nor will he bite at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just above his mouth, and floateth dry over him, for all the world like the natural ephemeris.  And we may no longer angle with worm for him, nor with penk or minnow, nor with the natural fly, as was your manner, but only with the artificial, for the more difficulty the more diversion.  For my part I may cry, like Viator in your book, “Master, I can neither catch with the first nor second Angle: I have no fortune.”

So we fare in England, but somewhat better north of the Tweed, where trout are less wary, but for the most part small, except in the extreme rough north, among horrid hills and lakes.  Thither, Master, as methinks you may remember, went Richard Franck, that called himself Philanthropus, and was, as it were, the Columbus of anglers, discovering for them a new Hyperborean world.  But Franck, doubtless, is now an angler in the Lake of Darkness, with Nero and other tyrants, for he followed after Cromwell, the man of blood, in the old riding days.  How wickedly doth Franck boast of that leader of the giddy multitude, “when they raged, and became restless to find out misery for themselves and others, and the rabble would herd themselves together,” as you said, “and endeavour to govern and act in spite of authority.”  So you wrote; and what said Franck, that recreant angler?  Doth he not praise “Ireton, Vane, Nevill, and Martin, and the most renowned, valorous, and victorious conqueror, Oliver Cromwell”?  Natheless, with all his sins on his head, this Franck discovered Scotland for anglers, and my heart turns to him when he praises “the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed.”

In those wilds of Assynt and Loch Rannoch, Father, we, thy followers, may yet take trout, and forget the evils of the times.  But, to be done with Franck, how harshly he speaks of thee and thy book.  “For you may dedicate your opinion to what scribbling putationer you please; the Compleat Angler if you will, who tells you of a tedious fly story, extravagantly collected from antiquated authors, such as Gesner and Dubravius.”  Again he speaks of “Isaac Walton, whose authority to me seems alike authentick, as is the general opinion of the vulgar prophet,” &c.

Certain I am that Franck, if a better angler than thou, was a worse man, who, writing his “Dialogues Piscatorial” or “Northern Memoirs” five years after the world welcomed thy “Compleat Angler,” was jealous of thy favour with the people, and, may be, hated thee for thy loyalty and sound faith.  But, Master, like a peaceful man avoiding contention, thou didst never answer this blustering Franck, but wentest quietly about thy quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora and windy Assynt.  How could this noisy man know thee—and know thee he did, having argued with thee in Stafford—and not love Isaak Walton?  A pedant angler, I call him, a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy sweet charm in fishing for men.

How often, studying in thy book, have I hummed to myself that of Horace—

Laudis amore tumes?  Sunt certa piacula quæ te
Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.

So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on meadows, and pure streams, and the country life.  How peaceful, men say, and blessed must have been the life of this old man, how lapped in content, and hedged about by his own humility from the world!  They forget, who speak thus, that thy years, which were many, were also evil, or would have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes.  Thou wert poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for greed of money was thy detestation.  Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age when gentle blood was alone held in regard; yet thy virtues made thee hosts of friends, and chiefly among religious men, bishops, and doctors of the Church.  Thy private life was not unacquainted with sorrow; thy first wife and all her fair children were taken from thee like flowers in spring, though, in thine age, new love and new offspring comforted thee like “the primrose of the later year.”  Thy private griefs might have made thee bitter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows of the State and of the Church, which were deprived of their heads by cruel men, despoiled of their wealth, the pious driven, like thee, from their homes; fear everywhere, everywhere robbery and confusion: all this ruin might have angered another temper.  But thou, Father, didst bear all with so much sweetness as perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a firm faith, nor the love of angling could alone have displayed.  For we see many anglers (as witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, and myself, when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree, have come nigh to swear prophane.

Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical, no rare thing in the party that professes godliness.  But neither private sorrow nor public grief could abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a religion which was not untried, but had, indeed, passed through the furnace like fine gold.  For if we find not Faith at all times easy, because of the oppositions of Science, and the searching curiosity of men’s minds, neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day.  For the learned and pious were greatly tossed about, like worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the Reformed Church of England.  The humbler folk, also, were invited, now here, now there, by the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists, who gave themselves out to be somebody, while Atheism itself was not without many to witness to it.  Therefore, such a religion as thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence of evil in the things of our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded faith, strong in despite of oppositions.  Happy was the man in whom temper, and religion, and the love of the sweet country and an angler’s pastime so conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its hand that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes!  Around thee Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, and thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.

Thus, by God’s blessing, it befell thee

Nec turpem senectam
Degere, nec cithara carentem.

I would, Father, that I could get at the verity about thy poems.  Those recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of Dr. Donne and others of thy friends, redound more to the praise of thy kind heart than thy fancy.  But what or whose was the pastoral poem of “Thealma and Clearchus,” which thou didst set about printing in 1678, and gavest to the world in 1683?  Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author’s name, and a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester, being eighty years of his age, in 1679.  Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as “a friend of Edmund Spenser’s,” and how could this be?

Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill was but a name of a friend, borrowed by thee out of modesty, and used as a cloak to cover poetry of thine own inditing?  When Mr. Flatman writes of Chalkhill, ’tis in words well fitted to thine own merit:

Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows
Except himself, who charitably shows
The ready road to virtue and to praise,
The road to many long and happy days.

However it be, in that road, by quiet streams and through green pastures, thou didst walk all thine almost century of years, and we, who stray into thy path out of the highway of life, we seem to hold thy hand, and listen to thy cheerful voice.  If our sport be worse, may our content be equal, and our praise, therefore, none the less.  Father, if Master Stoddard, the great fisher of Tweedside, be with thee, greet him for me, and thank him for those songs of his, and perchance he will troll thee a catch of our dear River.

Tweed! winding and wild! where the heart is unbound,
They know not, they dream not, who linger around,
How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin
From thee—the bliss withered within.

Or perhaps thou wilt better love,

The lanesome Tala and the Lyne,
   And Manor wi’ its mountain rills,
An’ Etterick, whose waters twine
   Wi’ Yarrow frae the forest hills;
An’ Gala, too, and Teviot bright,
   An’ mony a stream o’ playfu’ speed,
Their kindred valleys a’ unite
   Amang the braes o’ bonnie Tweed!

So, Master, may you sing against each other, you two good old anglers, like Peter and Corydon, that sang in your golden age.

Monsieur,—You were a popular poet, and an honourable, over-educated, upright gentleman.  Of the latter character you can never be deprived, and I doubt not it stands you in better stead where you are, than the laurels which flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.

Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day,
But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but your laurel certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus and where Homer are.  Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot doubt it, awaited un si bon homme.  But the moral excellence that even Boileau admitted, la foi, l’honneur, la probité, do not in Parnassus avail the popular poet, and some luckless Glatigny or Théophile, Regnier or Gilbert, attains a kind of immortality denied to the man of many contemporary editions, and of a great commercial success.

If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should have been that fortunately manufactured article.  You were, in matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers.  Never, since Adam’s day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child.  Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbière his wife with the future author of “La Pucelle.”  Oh futile hopes of men, O pectora cæca!  All was done that education could do for a genius which, among other qualities, “especially lacked fire and imagination,” and an ear for verse—sad defects these in a child of the Muses.  Your training in all the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like Rasselas, “Enough!  Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a Poet.”  Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of the Cardinal’s Minstrels, as M. de Tréville was Captain of the King’s Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in Prehistoric English, among us niggard moderns!  How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or even, as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise and pension me; but envy be still!  Your existence was made happy indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Hôtel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic.  “Who, indeed,” says a sympathetic author, M. Théophile Gautier, “who could expect less than a miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art—a perfect Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the great?”  Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good faith to advertise your merits.  Hard must have been the heart that could resist the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and M. Colbert, who had such a genius for finance.

If bishops and politicians and Prime Ministers skilled in finance, and some critics (Ménage and Sarrazin and Vaugelas), if ladies of birth and taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and appraising yourself at the public estimate?

It was not in human nature to resist the evidence of the bishops especially, and when every minor poet believes in himself on the testimony of his own conceit, you may be acquitted of vanity if you listened to the plaudits of your friends.  Nay, you ventured to pronounce judgment on contemporaries—whom Posterity has preferred to your perfections.  “Molière,” said you, “understands the genius of comedy, and presents it in a natural style.  The plot of his best pieces is borrowed, but not without judgment; his morale is fair, and he has only to avoid scurrility.”

Excellent, unconscious, popular Chapelain!

Of yourself you observed, in a Report on contemporary literature, that your “courage and sincerity never allowed you to tolerate work not absolutely good.”  And yet you regarded “La Pucelle” with some complacency.

On the “Pucelle” you were occupied during a generation of mortal men.  I marvel not at the length of your labours, as you received a yearly pension till the Epic was finished, but your Muse was no Alcmena, and no Hercules was the result of that prolonged night of creation.  First you gravely wrote out all the composition in prose: the task occupied you for five whole years.  Ah, why did you not leave it in that commonplace but appropriate medium?  What says the Précieuse about you in Boileau’s satire?

In Chapelain, for all his foes have said,
She finds but one defect, he can’t be read;
Yet thinks the world might taste his Maiden’s woes,
If only he would turn his verse to prose!

The verse had been prose, and prose, perhaps, it should have remained.  Yet for this precious “Pucelle,” in the age when “Paradise Lost” was sold for five pounds, you are believed to have received about four thousand.  Horace was wrong, mediocre poets may exist (now and then), and he was a wise man who first spoke of aurea mediocritas.  At length the great work was achieved, a work thrice blessed in its theme, that divine Maiden to whom France owes all, and whom you and Voltaire have recompensed so strangely.  In folio, in italics, with a score of portraits and engravings, and culs de lampe, the great work was given to the world, and had a success.  Six editions in eighteen months are figures which fill the poetic heart with envy and admiration.  And then, alas! the bubble burst.  A great lady, Madame de Longueville, hearing the “Pucelle” read aloud, murmured that it was “perfect indeed, but perfectly wearisome.”  Then the satires began, and the satirists never left you till your poetic reputation was a rag, till the mildest Abbé at Ménage’s had his cheap sneer for Chapelain.

I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the onslaught on your “Pucelle.”  These qualities, alas! are not strange to literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us that “potter hates potter, and poet hates poet”?  But contemporary spites do not harm true genius.  Who suffered more than Molière from cabals?  Yet neither the court nor the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world.  I admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours.  What were Boursault and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Visé, what were they all compared to your enemy, Boileau?  Brossette tells a story which really makes a man pity you.  You remember M. de Puimorin, who, to be in the fashion, laughed at your once popular Epic.  “It is all very well,” said you, “for a man to laugh who cannot even read.”  Whereon M. de Puimorin replied: “Qu’il n’avoit que trop sû lire, depuis que Chapelain s’étoit avisé de faire imprimer.”  A new horror had been added to the accomplishment of reading since Chapelain had published.  This repartee was applauded, and M. de Puimorin tried to turn it into an epigram.  He did complete the last couplet,

Hélas! pour mes péchés, je n’ai sû que trop lire
Depuis que tu fais imprimer.

But by no labour would M. de Puimorin achieve the first two lines of his epigram.  Then you remember what great allies came to his assistance.  I almost blush to think that M. Despréaux, M. Racine, and M. de Molière, the three most renowned wits of the time, conspired to complete the poor jest, and assail you.  Well, bubble as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these sharpest of pens to prick the bubble.  Other poets, as popular as you, have been annihilated by an article.  Macaulay put forth his hand, and “Satan Montgomery” was no more.  It did not need a Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow him into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of contemporary failures or successes I do not speak.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made you doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false child of Apollo?  Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency of true poets has occasionally been, by doubts?  Did you expect posterity to reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do you justice?  You answered your earliest assailant, Linière, and, by a few changes of words, turned his epigrams into flattery.  But I fancy, on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, wrapped up in admiration of yourself.  According to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed, as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you “conceived, on the strength of your reputation, a great and serious veneration for yourself and your genius.”  Probably you were protected by the invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that mere jealousy dictated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain’s real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success,

Qu’il soit le mieux renté de tous les beaux-esprits.

This, you would avow, was your offence, and perhaps you were not altogether mistaken.  Yet posterity declines to read a line of yours, and, as we think of you, we are again set face to face with that eternal problem, how far is popularity a test of poetry?  Burns was a poet: and popular.  Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict of their own generations.  But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality.  Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy left Chimène as fair as ever, and as adorable.  It is only pinchbeck that perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them.  Yet I sometimes ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who takes?  Are poisoned arrows fair against a bad poet?  I doubt it, Sir, holding that, even unpricked, a poetic bubble must soon burst by its own nature.  Yet satire will assuredly be written so long as bad poets are successful, and bad poets will assuredly reflect that their assailants are merely envious, and (while their vogue lasts) that the purchasing public is the only judge.  After all, the bad poet who is popular and “sells” is not a whit worse than the bad poets who are unpopular, and who deride his songs.

Monsieur,

Votre très-humble serviteur, &c.

Sir John,—Wit you well that men holden you but light, and some clepen you a Liar.  And they say that you never were born in Englond, in the town of Seynt Albones, nor have seen and gone through manye diverse Londes.  And there goeth an old knight at arms, and one that connes Latyn, and hath been beyond the sea, and hath seen Prester John’s country.  And he hath been in an Yle that men clepen Burmah, and there bin women bearded.  Now men call him Colonel Henry Yule, and he hath writ of thee in his great booke, Sir John, and he holds thee but lightly.  For he saith that ye did pill your tales out of Odoric his book, and that ye never saw snails with shells as big as houses, nor never met no Devyls, but part of that ye say, ye took it out of William of Boldensele his book, yet ye took not his wisdom, withal, but put in thine own foolishness.  Nevertheless, Sir John, for the frailty of Mankynde, ye are held a good fellow, and a merry; so now, come, let me tell you of the new ways into Ynde.

In that Lond they have a Queen that governeth all the Lond, and all they ben obeyssant to her.  And she is the Queen of Englond; for Englishmen have taken all the Lond of Ynde.  For they were right good werryoures of old, and wyse, noble, and worthy.  But of late hath risen a new sort of Englishman very puny and fearful, and these men clepen Radicals.  And they go ever in fear, and they scream on high for dread in the streets and the houses, and they fain would flee away from all that their fathers gat them with the sword.  And this sort men call Scuttleres, but the mean folk and certain of the baser sort hear them gladly, and they say ever that Englishmen should flee out of Ynde.

Fro Englond men gon to Ynde by many dyverse Contreyes.  For Englishmen ben very stirring and nymble.  For they ben in the seventh climate, that is of the Moon.  And the Moon (ye have said it yourself, Sir John, natheless, is it true) is of lightly moving, for to go diverse ways, and see strange things, and other diversities of the Worlde.  Wherefore Englishmen be lightly moving, and far wandering.  And they gon to Ynde by the great Sea Ocean.  First come they to Gibraltar, that was the point of Spain, and builded upon a rock; and there ben apes, and it is so strong that no man may take it.  Natheless did Englishmen take it fro the Spanyard, and all to hold the way to Ynde.  For ye may sail all about Africa, and past the Cape men clepen of Good Hope, but that way unto Ynde is long and the sea is weary.  Wherefore men rather go by the Midland sea, and Englishmen have taken many Yles in that sea.

For first they have taken an Yle that is clept Malta; and therein built they great castles, to hold it against them of Fraunce, and Italy, and of Spain.  And from this Ile of Malta Men gon to Cipre.  And Cipre is right a good Yle, and a fair, and a great, and it hath 4 principal Cytees within him.  And at Famagost is one of the principal Havens of the sea that is in the world, and Englishmen have but a lytel while gone won that Yle from the Sarazynes.  Yet say that sort of Englishmen where of I told you, that is puny and sore adread, that the Lond is poisonous and barren and of no avail, for that Lond is much more hotter than it is here.  Yet the Englishmen that ben werryoures dwell there in tents, and the skill is that they may ben the more fresh.

From Cypre, Men gon to the Lond of Egypte, and in a Day and a Night he that hath a good wind may come to the Haven of Alessandrie.  Now the Lond of Egypt longeth to the Soudan, yet the Soudan longeth not to the Lond of Egypt.  And when I say this, I do jape with words, and may hap ye understond me not.  Now Englishmen went in shippes to Alessandrie, and brent it, and over ran the Lond, and their soudyours warred agen the Bedoynes, and all to hold the way to Ynde.  For it is not long past since Frenchmen let dig a dyke, through the narrow spit of lond, from the Midland sea to the Red sea, wherein was Pharaoh drowned.  So this is the shortest way to Ynde there may be, to sail through that dyke, if men gon by sea.

But all the Lond of Egypt is clepen the Vale enchaunted; for no man may do his business well that goes thither, but always fares he evil, and therefore clepen they Egypt the Vale perilous, and the sepulchre of reputations.  And men say there that is one of the entrees of Helle.  In that Vale is plentiful lack of Gold and Silver, for many misbelieving men, and many Christian men also, have gone often time for to take of the Thresoure that there was of old, and have pilled the Thresoure, wherefore there is none left.  And Englishmen have let carry thither great store of our Thresoure, 9,000,000 of Pounds sterling, and whether they will see it agen I misdoubt me.  For that Vale is alle fulle of Develes and Fiendes that men clepen Bondholderes, for that Egypt from of olde is the Lond of Bondage.  And whatsoever Thresoure cometh into the Lond, these Devyls of Bondholders grabben the same.  Natheless by that Vale do Englishmen go unto Ynde, and they gon by Aden, even to Kurrachee, at the mouth of the Flood of Ynde.  Thereby they send their souldyours, when they are adread of them of Muscovy.

For, look you, there is another way into Ynde, and thereby the men of Muscovy are fain to come, if the Englishmen let them not.  That way cometh by Desert and Wildernesse, from the sea that is clept Caspian, even to Khiva, and so to Merv; and then come ye to Zulfikar and Penjdeh, and anon to Herat, that is called the Key of the Gates of Ynde.  Then ye win the lond of the Emir of the Afghauns, a great prince and a rich, and he hath in his Thresoure more crosses, and stars, and coats that captains wearen, than any other man on earth.

For all they of Muscovy, and all Englishmen maken him gifts, and he keepeth the gifts, and he keepeth his own counsel.  For his lond lieth between Ynde and the folk of Muscovy, wherefore both Englishmen and men of Muscovy would fain have him friendly, yea, and independent.  Wherefore they of both parties give him clocks, and watches, and stars, and crosses, and culverins, and now and again they let cut the throats of his men some deal, and pill his country.  Thereby they both set up their rest that the Emir will be independent, yea, and friendly.  But his men love him not, neither love they the English, nor the Muscovy folk, for they are worshippers of Mahound, and endure not Christian men.  And they love not them that cut their throats, and burn their country.

Now they of Muscovy ben Devyls, and they ben subtle for to make a thing seme otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind.  Wherefore Englishmen putten no trust in them of Muscovy, save only the Englishmen clept Radicals, for they make as if they loved these Develes, out of the fear and dread of war wherein they go, and would be slaves sooner than fight.  But the folk of Ynde know not what shall befall, nor whether they of Muscovy will take the Lond, or Englishmen shall keep it, so that their hearts may not enduren for drede.  And methinks that soon shall Englishmen and Muscovy folk put their bodies in adventure, and war one with another, and all for the way to Ynde.

But St. George for Englond, I say, and so enough; and may the Seyntes hele thee, Sir John, of thy Gowtes Artetykes, that thee tormenten.  But to thy Boke I list not to give no credence.

Sir,—There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most intrepid disposition.  In such a moment, towards the ending of your days, you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, “I seem to see myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the sands.”  These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock.  As well might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the “Arabian Nights,” or the first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the creator of “Les Trois Mousquetaires” alarm himself with the thought that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.

Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force in modern letters.  To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish?  Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a super-human burden; but your imaginative strength never found a task too great for it.  What an extraordinary vigour, what health, what an overflow of force was yours!  It is good, in a day of small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas’s men—so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen.  Like M. de Rochefort in “Vingt Ans Après,” like that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius “n’est que d’un parti, c’est du parti du grand air.”

There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment; in that current of strength not only your characters live, frolic, kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the virtue which went out of you.  How else can we explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and envious tongues have brought against you, in England and at home?  They say you employed in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of the studio, the “sculptor’s ghost” is fabled to afford.

Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and impotent as “the strengthless tribes of the dead” in Homer’s Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary valour.  It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness.  Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength?  They are forgotten with last year’s snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world.  You say of D’Artagnan, when severed from his three friends—from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis—“he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition that each of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of that electric fluid which was his gift from heaven.”

No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none gave of it more freely to all who came—to the chance associate of the hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked from your brain.  Thus it was that you failed when you approached the supernatural.  Your ghosts had too much flesh and blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies.  A writer so fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked, could not escape the reproaches of barren envy.  Because you overflowed with wit, you could not be “serious;” because you created with a word, you were said to scamp your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic, incapable of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental and physical anæmia—a generation devoted to the “chiselled phrase,” to accumulated “documents,” to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human—may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations.  Like one of the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain.  To you, who can amuse the world—to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battlefield, and the sea—the world must always return: escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the wearisome De Goncourt.

With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances!  You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense.  The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human.  Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures!  Your greatest books, I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois (“La Reine Margot,” “La Dame de Montsoreau,” “Les Quarante-cinq”), and the Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze (“Les Trois Mousquetaires,” “Vingt Ans Après,” “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne”); and, beside these two trilogies—a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three pyramids—“Monte Cristo.”

In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people worship.  You had Brantôme, you had Tallemant, you had Rétif, and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present naturalistes.  From these alcoves of “Les Dames Galantes,” and from the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses.  You had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and tragical true love of La Mole’s, that devotion—how tender and how pure!—of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau.  You gave us the valour of D’Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of Athos: Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship.  I declare your characters are real people to me and old friends.  I cannot bear to read the end of “Bragelonne,” and to part with them for ever.  “Suppose Porthos, Athos, and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger, curling their moustaches.”  How we would welcome them, forgiving D’Artagnan even his hateful fourberie in the case of Milady.  The brilliance of your dialogue has never been approached: there is wit everywhere; repartees glitter and ring like the flash and clink of small-swords.  Then what duels are yours! and what inimitable battle-pieces!  I know four good fights of one against a multitude, in literature.  These are the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the Wake, the Death of Bussy d’Amboise.  We can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting-times with those described in later days; and, upon my word, I do not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin, or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of your Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley’s Hereward.

They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you knew it.  La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas “after deceiving circle;” for the parry was not invented except by your immortal Chicot, a genius in advance of his time.  Even so Hamlet and Laertes would have fought with shields and axes, not with small swords.  But what matters this pedantry?  In your works we hear the Homeric Muse again, rejoicing in the clash of steel; and even, at times, your very phrases are unconsciously Homeric.

Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee in terror from the Queen’s chamber, and “find the door too narrow for their flight:” the very words were anticipated in a line of the “Odyssey” concerning the massacre of the Wooers.  And the picture of Catherine de Médicis, prowling “like a wolf among the bodies and the blood,” in a passage of the Louvre—the picture is taken unwittingly from the “Iliad.”  There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction.  This is the force that animates “Monte Cristo,” the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape.  In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing.  Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak.  “Antony,” they tell me, was “the greatest literary event of its time,” was a restoration of the stage.  “While Victor Hugo needs the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the last degree of terror and of pity.”

The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame—for a moment.  The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when “La Curée” and “Pot-Bouille” are more forgotten than “Le Grand Cyrus,” men and women—and, above all, boys—will laugh and weep over the page of Alexandre Dumas.  Like Scott himself, you take us captive in our childhood.  I remember a very idle little boy who was busy with the “Three Musketeers” when he should have been occupied with “Wilkins’s Latin Prose.”  “Twenty years after” (alas! and more) he is still constant to that gallant company; and, at this very moment, is breathlessly wondering whether Grimaud will steal M. de Beaufort out of the Cardinal’s prison.

“Sweet, methinks, is the whispering sound of yonder pine-tree,” so, Theocritus, with that sweet word ἁδύ, didst thou begin and strike the keynote of thy songs.  “Sweet,” and didst thou find aught of sweet, when thou, like thy Daphnis, didst “go down the stream, when the whirling wave closed over the man the Muses loved, the man not hated of the Nymphs”?  Perchance below those waters of death thou didst find, like thine own Hylas, the lovely Nereids waiting thee, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia with her April eyes.  In the House of Hades, Theocritus, doth there dwell aught that is fair, and can the low light on the fields of asphodel make thee forget thy Sicily?  Nay, methinks thou hast not forgotten, and perchance for poets dead there is prepared a place more beautiful than their dreams.  It was well for the later minstrels of another day, it was well for Ronsard and Du Bellay to desire a dim Elysium of their own, where the sunlight comes faintly through the shadow of the earth, where the poplars are duskier, and the waters more pale than in the meadows of Anjou.

There, in that restful twilight, far remote from war and plot, from sword and fire, and from religions that sharpened the steel and lit the torch, there these learned singers would fain have wandered with their learned ladies, satiated with life and in love with an unearthly quiet.  But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow Land was dear, but the high suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country maidens were happiness enough.  For thee, therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium beneath the summer of a far-off system, with stars not ours and alien seasons.  There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be with thee the whole year through, where there is neither frost, nor is the heat so heavy on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and dawn.  Space is wide, and there be many worlds, and suns enow, and the Sun-god surely has had a care of his own.  Little didst thou need, in thy native land, the isle of the three capes, little didst thou need but sunlight on land and sea.  Death can have shown thee naught dearer than the fragrant shadow of the pines, where the dry needles of the fir are strewn, or glades where feathered ferns make “a couch more soft than Sleep.”  The short grass of the cliffs, too, thou didst love, where thou wouldst lie, and watch, with the tunny watcher till the deep blue sea was broken by the burnished sides of the tunny shoal, and afoam with their gambols in the brine.  There the Muses met thee, and the Nymphs, and there Apollo, remembering his old thraldom with Admetus, would lead once more a mortal’s flocks, and listen and learn, Theocritus, while thou, like thine own Comatas, “didst sweetly sing.”

There, methinks, I see thee as in thy happy days, “reclined on deep beds of fragrant lentisk, lowly strewn, and rejoicing in new stript leaves of the vine, while far above thy head waved many a poplar, many an elm-tree, and close at hand the sacred waters sang from the mouth of the cavern of the nymphs.”  And when night came, methinks thou wouldst flee from the merry company and the dancing girls, from the fading crowns of roses or white violets, from the cottabos, and the minstrelsy, and the Bibline wine, from these thou wouldst slip away into the summer night.  Then the beauty of life and of the summer would keep thee from thy couch, and wandering away from Syracuse by the sandhills and the sea, thou wouldst watch the low cabin, roofed with grass, where the fishing-rods of reed were leaning against the door, while the Mediterranean floated up her waves, and filled the waste with sound.  There didst thou see thine ancient fishermen rising ere the dawn from their bed of dry seaweed, and heardst them stirring, drowsy, among their fishing gear, and heardst them tell their dreams.

Or again thou wouldst wander with dusty feet through the ways that the dust makes silent, while the breath of the kine, as they were driven forth with the morning, came fresh to thee, and the trailing dewy branch of honeysuckle struck sudden on thy cheek.  Thou wouldst see the Dawn awake in rose and saffron across the waters, and Etna, grey and pale against the sky, and the setting crescent would dip strangely in the glow, on her way to the sea.  Then, methinks, thou wouldst murmur, like thine own Simaetha, the love-lorn witch, “Farewell, Selene, bright and fair; farewell, ye other stars, that follow the wheels of the quiet Night.”  Nay, surely it was in such an hour that thou didst behold the girl as she burned the laurel leaves and the barley grain, and melted the waxen image, and called on Selene to bring her lover home.  Even so, even now, in the islands of Greece, the setting Moon may listen to the prayers of maidens.  ‘Bright golden Moon, that now art near the waters, go thou and salute my lover, he that stole my love, and that kissed me, saying “Never will I leave thee.”  And lo, he hath left me as men leave a field reaped and gleaned, like a church where none cometh to pray, like a city desolate.’

So the girls still sing in Greece, for though the Temples have fallen, and the wandering shepherds sleep beneath the broken columns of the god’s house in Selinus, yet these ancient fires burn still to the old divinities in the shrines of the hearths of the peasants.  It is none of the new creeds that cry, in the dirge of the Sicilian shepherds of our time, “Ah, light of mine eyes, what gift shall I send thee, what offering to the other world?  The apple fadeth, the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish, the petals of the rose.  I will send thee my tears shed on a napkin, and what though it burneth in the flame, if my tears reach thee at the last.”

Yes, little is altered, Theocritus, on these shores beneath the sun, where thou didst wear a tawny skin stripped from the roughest of he-goats, and about thy breast an old cloak buckled with a plaited belt.  Thou wert happier there, in Sicily, methinks, and among vines and shadowy lime-trees of Cos, than in the dust, and heat, and noise of Alexandria.  What love of fame, what lust of gold tempted thee away from the red cliffs, and grey olives, and wells of black water wreathed with maidenhair?

      The music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy country tone;
   Lost it too soon, and learned a stormy note
Of men contention tost, of men who groan,
   Which tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat—
      It failed, and thou wast mute!

What hadst thou to make in cities, and what could Ptolemies and Princes give thee better than the goat-milk cheese and the Ptelean wine?  Thy Muses were meant to be the delight of peaceful men, not of tyrants and wealthy merchants, to whom they vainly went on a begging errand.  “Who will open his door and gladly receive our Muses within his house, who is there that will not send them back again without a gift?  And they with naked feet and looks askance come homewards, and sorely they upbraid me when they have gone on a vain journey, and listless again in the bottom of their empty coffer they dwell with heads bowed over their chilly knees, where is their drear abode, when portionless they return.”  How far happier was the prisoned goat-herd, Comatas, in the fragrant cedar chest where the blunt-faced bees from the meadow fed him with food of tender flowers, because still the Muse dropped sweet nectar on his lips!

Thou didst leave the neat-herds and the kine, and the oaks of Himera, the galingale hummed over by the bees, and the pine that dropped her cones, and Amaryllis in her cave, and Bombyca with her feet of carven ivory.  Thou soughtest the City, and strife with other singers, and the learned write still on thy quarrels with Apollonius and Callimachus, and Antagoras of Rhodes.  So ancient are the hatreds of poets, envy, jealousy, and all unkindness.

Not to the wits of Courts couldst thou teach thy rural song, though all these centuries, more than two thousand years, they have laboured to vie with thee.  There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup time; and all the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the sow challenged Athene.  They never knew the shepherd’s life, the long winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when over the parched grass all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the shrunken burn whispers a silver tune.  Swains in high-heeled shoon, and lace, shepherdesses in rouge and diamonds, the world is weary of all concerning them, save their images in porcelain, effigies how unlike thy golden figures, dedicate to Aphrodite, of Bombyca and Battus!  Somewhat, Theocritus, thou hast to answer for, thou that first of men brought the shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the shepherds.