My study windows

and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that “when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole.” We could readily part with some of his affectations. It was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all, “When I was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy”; not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into “When I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria.” A naive thing said over again is anything but naive. But with every exception, there is no writing comparable with Thoreau’s in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best; where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds.

George Sand says neatly, that “Art is not a study of positive reality,” (actuality were the fitter word,) “but a seeking after ideal truth.” It would be doing very inadequate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize somewhat wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an illimitable ether, where the breathing is not difficult for those who have any true touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau’s experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful one, in the direction of “plain living and high thinking.” It was a practical sermon on Emerson’s text that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” an attempt to solve Carlyle’s problem (condensed from Johnson) of “lessening your denominator.” His whole life was a rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry upholstery. He had “fine translunary things” in him. His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore: there are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil; he had watched Nature like a detective who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass; compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s “Selborne,” seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological journal in an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns.

SWINBURNE’S TRAGEDIES.

ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers for once, and to doff our critical nightcaps, in which we have comfortably overslept many similar rumors and false alarms, to welcome the advent of a new poet? New poets, to our thinking, are not very common, and the soft columns of the press often make dangerous concessions, for which the marble ones of Horace’s day were too stony-hearted. Indeed, we have some well-grounded doubts whether England is precisely the country from which we have a right to expect that most precious of gifts just now. There is hardly enough fervor of political life there at present to ripen anything but the fruits of the literary forcing-house, so fair outwardly and so flavorless compared with those which grow in the hardier open air of a vigorous popular sentiment. Mere wealth of natural endowment is not enough; there must be also the co-operation of the time, of the public genius roused to a consciousness of itself by the necessity of asserting or defending the vital principle on which that consciousness rests, in order that a poet may rise to the highest level of his vocation. The great names of the last generation—Scott, Wordsworth, Byron—represent moods of national thought and feeling, and are therefore more or less truly British poets; just as Goethe, in whose capacious nature, open to every influence of earth and sky, the spiritual fermentation of the eighteenth century settled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic might say, we think, with some justice, that poetry in England was passing now, if it have not already passed, into one of those periods of mere art without any intense convictions to back it, which lead inevitably, and by no long gradation, to the mannered and artificial. Browning, by far the richest nature of the time, becomes more difficult, draws nearer to the all-for-point fashion of the concettisti, with every poem he writes; the dainty trick of Tennyson cloys when caught by a whole generation of versifiers, as the style of a great poet never can be; and we have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his art, will be thought a hundred years hence to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled convictions, of the period in which he lived. To make beautiful conceptions immortal by exquisiteness of phrase, is to be a poet, no doubt; but to be a new poet is to feel and to utter that immanent life of things without which the utmost perfection of mere form is at best only wax or marble. He who can do both is the great poet.

Over “Chastelard, a Tragedy,” we need not spend much time. It is at best but the school exercise of a young poet learning to write, and who reproduces in his copy-book, more or less travestied, the copy that has been set for him at the page’s head by the authors he most admires. Grace and even force of expression are not wanting, but there is the obscurity which springs from want of definite intention; the characters are vaguely outlined from memory, not drawn firmly from the living and the nude in actual experience of life; the working of passion is an a priori abstraction from a scheme in the author’s mind; and there is no thought, but only a vehement grasping after thought. The hand is the hand of Swinburne, but the voice is the voice of Browning. With here and there a pure strain of sentiment, a genuine touch of nature, the effect of the whole is unpleasant with the faults of the worst school of modern poetry,—the physically intense school, as we should be inclined to call it, of which Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” is the worst example, whose muse is a fast young woman with the lavish ornament and somewhat overpowering perfume of the demi-monde, and which pushes expression to the last gasp of sensuous exhaustion. They forget that convulsion is not energy, and that words, to hold fire, must first catch it from vehement heat of thought, while no artificial fervors of phrase can make the charm work backward to kindle the mind of writer or reader. An overmastering passion no longer entangles the spiritual being of its victim in the burning toils of a retribution foredoomed in its own nature, purifying us with the terror and pity of a soul in its extremity, as the great masters were wont to set it before us; no, it must be fleshly, corporeal, must “bite with small white teeth” and draw blood, to satisfy the craving of our modern inquisitors, who torture language instead of wooing it to confess the secret of its witchcraft. That books written on this theory should be popular, is one of the worst signs of the times; that they should be praised by the censors of literature shows how seldom criticism goes back to first principles, or is even aware of them,—how utterly it has forgotten its most earnest function of demolishing the high places where the unclean rites of Baal and Ashtaroth usurp on the worship of the one only True and Pure.

“Atalanta in Calydon” is in every respect better than its forerunner. It is a true poem, and seldom breaks from the maidenly reserve which should characterize the higher forms of poetry, even in the keenest energy of expression. If the blank verse be a little mannered and stiff, reminding one of Landor in his attempts to reproduce the antique, the lyrical parts are lyrical in the highest sense, graceful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase. There are some touches of nature in the mother’s memories of Althea, so sweetly pathetic that they go as right to the heart as they came from it, and are neither Greek nor English, but broadly human. And yet, when we had read the book through, we felt as if we were leaving a world of shadows, inhabited by less substantial things than that nether realm of Homer where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its longings and regrets. These are not characters, but outlines after the Elgin marbles in the thinnest manner of Flaxman. There is not so much blood in the whole of them as would warm the little finger of one of Shakespeare’s living and breathing conceptions. We could not help thinking of those exquisite verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, in which, while he expresses a half-truth so eloquently as almost to make it seem a whole one, he touches unconsciously the weak point of their common striving after a Grecian instead of a purely human ideal.

The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the motives which actuate them alien to our modern modes of thought and conceptions of character. To a Greek, the element of Fate, with which his imagination was familiar, while it heightened the terror of the catastrophe, would have supplied the place of that impulse in mere human nature which our habit of mind demands for its satisfaction. The fulfilment of an oracle, the anger of a deity, the arbitrary doom of some blind and purposeless power superior to man, the avenging of blood to appease an injured ghost, any one of these might make that seem simply natural to a contemporary of Sophocles which is intelligible to us only by study and reflection. It is not a little curious that Shakespeare should have made the last of the motives we have just mentioned, and which was conclusive for Orestes, insufficient for Hamlet, who so perfectly typifies the introversion and complexity of modern thought as compared with ancient, in dealing with the problems of life and action. It was not perhaps without intention (for who may venture to assume a want of intention in the world’s highest poetic genius at its full maturity?) that Shakespeare brings in his hero fresh from the University of Wittenberg, where Luther, who entailed upon us the responsibility of private judgment, had been Professor. The dramatic motive in the “Electra” and “Hamlet” is essentially the same, but what a difference between the straightforward bloody-mindedness of Orestes and the metaphysical punctiliousness of the Dane! Yet each was natural in his several way, and each would have been unintelligible to the audience for which the other was intended. That Fate which the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize at work within in some vice of character or hereditary predisposition. Hawthorne, the most profoundly ideal genius of these latter days, was continually returning, more or less directly, to this theme; and his “Marble Faun,” whether consciously or not, illustrates that invasion of the æsthetic by the moral which has confused art by dividing its allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty without as yet firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged legitimacy.

“Atalanta in Calydon” shows that poverty of thought and profusion of imagery which are at once the defect and the compensation of all youthful poetry, even of Shakespeare’s. It seems a paradox to say that there can be too much poetry in a poem, and yet this is a fault with which all poets begin, and which some never get over. But “Atalanta” is hopefully distinguished, in a rather remarkable way, from most early attempts, by a sense of form and proportion, which, if seconded by a seasonable ripening of other faculties, as we may fairly expect, gives promise of rare achievement hereafter. Mr. Swinburne’s power of assimilating style, which is, perhaps, not so auspicious a symptom, strikes us as something marvellous. The argument of his poem, in its quaint archaism, would not need the change of a word or in the order of a period to have been foisted on Sir Thomas Malory as his own composition. The choosing a theme which Æschylus had handled in one of his lost tragedies is justified by a certain Æschylean flavor in the treatment. The opening, without deserving to be called a mere imitation, recalls that of the “Agamemnon,” and the chorus has often an imaginative lift in it, an ethereal charm of phrase, of which it is the highest praise to say that it reminds us of him who soars over the other Greek tragedians like an eagle.

But in spite of many merits, we cannot help asking ourselves, as we close the book, whether “Atalanta” can be called a success, and if so, whether it be a success in the right direction. The poem reopens a question which in some sort touches the very life of modern literature. We do not mean to renew the old quarrel of Fontenelle’s day as to the comparative merits of ancients and moderns. That is an affair of taste, which does not admit of any authoritative settlement. Our concern is about a principle which certainly demands a fuller discussion, and which is important enough to deserve it. Do we show our appreciation of the Greeks most wisely in attempting the mechanical reproduction of their forms, or by endeavoring to comprehend the thoughtful spirit of full-grown manhood in which they wrought, to kindle ourselves by the emulation of it, and to bring it to bear with all its plastic force upon our wholly new conditions of life and thought? It seems to us that the question is answered by the fact, patent in the history of all the fine arts, that every attempt at reproducing a bygone excellence by external imitation of it, or even by applying the rules which analytic criticism has formulated from the study of it, has resulted in producing the artificial, and not the artistic. That most subtile of all essences in physical organization, which eludes chemist, anatomist, and microscopist, the life, is in æsthetics not less shy of the critic, and will not come forth in obedience to his most learned spells, for the very good reason that it cannot, because in all works of art it is the joint product of the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is gazing on “the face that launched a thousand ships,” but Mephistopheles knows very well that it is only shadows that he has the skill to conjure. He is not merely the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit also of discontent with the present, that material in which every man shall work who will achieve realities and not their hollow semblance. The true anachronism, in our opinion, is not in Shakespeare’s making Ulysses talk as Lord Bacon might, but in attempting to make him speak in a dialect of thought utterly dead to all present comprehension. Ulysses was the type of long-headedness; and the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran would have seemed as childish to the age of Elizabeth and Burleigh as it was naturally sufficing to the first hearers of Homer. Ulysses, living in Florence during the fifteenth century, might have been Macchiavelli; in France, during the seventeenth, Cardinal Richelieu; in America, during the nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. Truth to nature can be reached ideally, never historically; it must be a study from the life, and not from the scholiasts. Theocritus lets us into the secret of his good poetry, when he makes Daphnis tell us that he preferred his rock with a view of the Siculian Sea to the kingdom of Pelops.

It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this sorcery which the fiend of technical imitation weaves about his victims, giving a phantasmal Helen to their arms, and making an image of the brain seem substance. Men still pain themselves to write Latin verses, matching their wooden bits of phrase together as children do dissected maps, and measuring the value of what they have done, not by any standard of intrinsic merit, but by the difficulty of doing it. Petrarch expected to be known to posterity by his Africa. Gray hoped to make a Latin poem his monument. Goethe, who was classic in the only way it is now possible to be classic, in his “Hermann and Dorothea,” and at least Propertian in his “Roman Idyls,” wasted his time and thwarted his creative energy on the mechanical mock-antique of an unreadable “Achilleis.” Landor prized his waxen “Gebirus Rex” above all the natural fruits of his mind; and we have no doubt that, if some philosopher should succeed in accomplishing Paracelsus’s problem of an artificial homunculus, he would dote on this misbegotten babe of his science, and think him the only genius of the family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of the ancient classics, but a certain amount of superstition about Greek and Latin has come down to us from the revival of learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the intellects of whoever has, at some time, got a smattering of them. Men quote a platitude in either of those tongues with a relish of conviction as droll to the uninitiated as the knighthood of free-masonry. Horace Walpole’s nephew, the Earl of Orford, when he was in his cups, used to have Statius read aloud to him every night for two hours by a tipsy tradesman, whose hiccupings threw in here and there a kind of cæsural pause, and found some strange mystery of sweetness in the disqualified syllables. So powerful is this hallucination that we can conceive of festina lente as the favorite maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, and ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ cited as conclusive by a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular.

Something of this singular superstition has infected the minds of those who confound the laws of conventional limitation which governed the practice of Greek authors in dramatic composition—laws adapted to the habits and traditions and preconceptions of their audience—with that sense of ideal form which made the Greeks masters in art to all succeeding generations. Aristophanes is beyond question the highest type of pure comedy, etherealizing his humor by the infusion, or intensifying it by the contrast of poetry, and deodorizing the personality of his sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest springs of fancy. His satire, aimed as it was at typical characteristics, is as fresh as ever; but we doubt whether an Aristophanic drama, retaining its exact form, but adapted to present events and personages, would keep the stage as it is kept by “The Rivals,” for example, immeasurably inferior as that is in every element of genius except the prime one of liveliness. Something similar in purpose to the parabasis was essayed in one, at least, of the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck; but it took, of necessity, a different form of expression, and does not seem to have been successful. Indeed, the fact that what is called the legitimate drama of modern times in England, Spain, and France has been strictly a growth, and not a manufacture, that in each country it took a different form, and that, in all, the period of its culminating and beginning to decline might be measured by a generation, seems to point us toward some natural and inevitable law of human nature, and to show that, while the principles of art are immutable, their application must accommodate itself to the material supplied them by the time and by the national character and traditions. The Spanish tragedy inclines more toward the lyrical, the French toward the epical, the English toward the historical, in the representation of real life; the Spanish and English agree in the Teutonic peculiarity of admitting the humorous offset of the clown, though in the one case he parodies the leading motive of the drama, and represents the self-consciousness of the dramatist, while in the other he heightens the tragic effect by contrast, (as in the grave-digging scene of Hamlet,) and suggests that stolid but wholesome indifference of the general life—of what, for want of a better term, we call Nature—to the sin and suffering, the weakness and misfortunes of the individual man. All these nations had the same ancient examples before them, had the same reverence for antiquity, yet they involuntarily deviated, more or less happily, into originality, success, and the freedom of a living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, the only kinds that live on because they had life at the start, are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholarship, of criticism, diligently studying and as diligently copying the best models, but are much rather born of some genetic principle in the character of the people and the age which produce them. One drop of ruddy human blood puts more life into the veins of a poem, than all the delusive aurum potabile that can be distilled out of the choicest library.

The opera is the closest approach we have to the ancient drama in the essentials of structure and presentation; and could we have a libretto founded on a national legend and written by one man of genius to be filled out and accompanied by the music of another, we might hope for something of the same effect upon the stage. But themes of universal familiarity and interest are rare,—Don Giovanni and Faust, perhaps, most nearly, though not entirely, fulfilling the required conditions,—and men of genius rarer. The oratorio seeks to evade the difficulty by choosing Scriptural subjects, and it may certainly be questioned whether the day of popular mythology, in the sense in which it subserves the purposes of epic or dramatic poetry, be not gone by forever. Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the red men, and Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton cyclus of Arthur; but it is impossible that such themes should come so intimately home to us as the semi-fabulous stories of their own ancestors did to the Greeks. The most successful attempt at reproducing the Greek tragedy, both in theme and treatment, is the “Samson Agonistes,” as it is also the most masterly piece of English versification. Goethe admits that it alone, among modern works, has caught life from the breath of the antique spirit. But he failed to see, or at least to give, the reason of it; probably failed to see it, or he would never have attempted the “Iphigenia.” Milton not only subjected himself to the structural requirements of the Attic tragedy, but with a true poetic instinct availed himself of the striking advantage it had in the choice of a subject. No popular tradition lay near enough to him for his purpose; none united in itself the essential requisites of human interest and universal belief. He accordingly chose a Jewish mythus, very near to his own heart as a blind prisoner, betrayed by his wife, among the Philistines of the Restoration, and familiar to the earliest associations of his hearers. This subject, and this alone, met all the demands both of living poetic production and of antique form,—the action grandly simple, the personages few, the protagonist at once a victim of divine judgment and an executor of divine retribution, an intense personal sympathy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be overcome before he could touch their hearts or be sure of aid from their imaginations. To compose such a drama on such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit it; for Samson was to Milton traditionally just what Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more. The “Agonistes” is still fresh and strong as morning, but where are “Caractacus” and “Elfrida”? Nay, where is the far better work of a far abler man,—where is “Merope”? If the frame of mind which performs a deliberate experiment were the same as that which produces poetry vitalized through and through by the conspiring ardors of every nobler passion and power of the soul, then “Merope” might have had some little space of life. But without color, without harmonious rhythm of movement, with less passion than survived in an average Grecian ghost, and all this from the very theory of her creation, she has gone back, a shadow, to join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in that limbo of things that would be and cannot be. Mr. Arnold but retraces, in his Preface to “Merope,” the arguments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his classical experiments. What finds defenders, but not readers, may be correct, classic, right in principle, but it is not poetry of that absolute kind which may and does help men, but needs no help of theirs; and such surely we have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. We should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a high value on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But “Merope” has that one fault against which the very gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the seed of this dulness lay in the system on which it was written.

Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as Mr. Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to ancient scenery and manners, which may be attained either by hard reading and good memory, or at a cheaper rate from such authors as Becker. The “Moretum,” once attributed to Virgil, and the idyl of Theocritus lately chosen as a text by Mr. Arnold, are interesting, because they describe real things; but the mock-antique, if not true, is nothing, and how true such poems are likely to be we can judge by “Punch’s” success at Yankeeisms, by all England’s accurate appreciation of the manners and minds of a contemporary people one with herself in language, laws, religion, and literature. The eye is the only note-book of the true poet; but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futility, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists. Alexander’s bushel of peas was a criticism worthy of Aristotle’s pupil. We should reward such writing with the gift of a classical dictionary. In this idyllic kind of poetry also we have a classic, because Goldsmith went to nature for his “Deserted Village,” and borrowed of tradition nothing but the poetic diction in which he described it. This is the only method by which a poet may surely reckon on ever becoming an ancient himself. When we heard it said once that a certain poem might have been written by Simonides, we could not help thinking that, if it were so, then it was precisely what Simonides could never have written, since he looked at the world through his own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod, and thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we should never have had him to imitate.

Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie against a servile copying of the form and style of the Greek tragic drama, and yet more against the selection of a Greek theme. As we said before, the life we lead, and the views we take of it, are more complex than those of men who lived five centuries before Christ. They may be better or worse, but, at any rate, they are different, and irremediably so. The idea and the form in which it naturally embodies itself, mutually sustaining and invigorating each other, cannot be divided without endangering the lives of both. For in all real poetry the form is not a garment, but a body. Our very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates upon itself. Their simple and downright way of thinking loses all its savor when we assume it to ourselves by an effort of thought. Human nature, it is true, remains always the same, but the displays of it change; the habits which are a second nature modify it inwardly as well as outwardly, and what moves it to passionate action in one age may leave it indifferent in the next. Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their murdered paganism, making our minds and theirs irreconcilable. Christianity as steadily intensifies the self-consciousness of man as the religion of the Greeks must have turned their thoughts away from themselves to the events of this life and the phenomena of nature. We cannot even conceive of their conception of Phoibos with any plausible assurance of coming near the truth. To take lesser matters, since the invention of printing and the cheapening of books have made the thought of all ages and nations the common property of educated men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds of it as to be keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with those commonplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus and secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the original they may interest us as being natural and characteristic. In the German-silver of the modern we get something of this kind, which does not please us the more by being cut up into single lines that recall the outward semblance of some pages in Sophocles. We find it cheaper to make a specimen than to borrow one.

We protest that we have read something very like this, we will not say where, and we might call it the battle-door and shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the players do not seem to have any manifest relation to each other, but each is intent on keeping his own bit of feathered cork continually in the air.

The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the first germ of Schiller’s “Götter Griechenland’s” is to be found in the old poem of Tanhäuser, very nearly coincident with the beginnings of the Reformation. And if we might allegorize it, we should say that it typified precisely that longing after Venus, under her other name of Charis, which represents the relation in which modern should stand to ancient art. It is the grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion, their distaste for the exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of phrase, which steadies imagination without cramping it,—it is these that we should endeavor to assimilate without the loss of our own individuality. We should quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile surrender of what is genuine in us to what was genuine in them. “A pure form,” says Schiller, “helps and sustains, an impure one hinders and shatters.” But we should remember that the spirit of the age must enter as a modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into the best manner of their expression. The old bottles will not always serve for the new wine. A principle of life is the first requirement of all art, and it can only be communicated by the touch of the time and a simple faith in it; all else is circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy passed through the three natural stages of poetry,—the imaginative in Æschylus, the thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in Euripides,—and then died. If people could only learn the general applicability to periods and schools of what young Mozart says of Gellert, that “he had written no poetry since his death”! No effort to raise a defunct past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life. The romantic movement of the school of German poets which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extravagant unreality, and Goethe himself with his enerring common-sense, has given us, in the second part of Faust, the result of his own and Schiller’s common striving after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helen, falls dead at their feet; and Helen herself soon follows him to the shades, leaving only her mantle in the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift him above the earth. We fancy we can interpret the symbol. Whether we can or not, it is certainly suggestive of thought that the only immortal production of the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried out in that Gothic spirit and form from which he was all his life struggling to break loose.

CHAUCER.[7]

WILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope to say anything, not new, but even fresh, on a topic so well worn? It may well be doubted; and yet one is always the better for a walk in the morning air,—a medicine which may be taken over and over again without any sense of sameness, or any failure of its invigorating quality. There is a pervading wholesomeness in the writings of this man,—a vernal property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no other has ever found the secret. I repeat to myself a thousand times,—

and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontaminate springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. If here be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless atmosphere of classical antiquity, we find at least the seclusum nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance, as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our more purely human, one might almost say domestic, sympathies. We may say of Chaucer’s muse, as Overbury of his milkmaid, “her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June like a new-made haycock.” The most hardened roué of literature can scarce confront these simple and winning graces without feeling somewhat of the unworn sentiment of his youth revive in him. Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be “the world’s sweet inn,” whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, where one’s own private touch of the liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. It is good to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspective confidences of modern literature, and to lose ourselves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not ask whether he were genuine or no, so sincere as quite to forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make, so humane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not waste time in considering whether his age were good or bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that ever was or could be for him, has left us such a picture of contemporary life as no man ever painted. “A perpetual fountain of good-sense,” Dryden calls him, yes, and of good-humor, too, and wholesome thought. He was one of those rare authors whom, if we had met him under a porch in a shower, we should have preferred to the rain. He could be happy with a crust and spring-water, and could see the shadow of his benign face in a flagon of Gascon wine without fancying Death sitting opposite to cry Supernaculum! when he had drained it. He could look to God without abjectness, and on man without contempt. The pupil of manifold experience,—scholar, courtier, soldier, ambassador, who had known poverty as a housemate and been the companion of princes,—his was one of those happy temperaments that could equally enjoy both halves of culture,—the world of books and the world of men.

The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving regret of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of him which we make from his works. It is, I think, more engaging than that of any other poet. The downcast eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the broad brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet with an inexpugnable youth shining out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all noticeable, and not less so their harmony of placid tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smoothness of the face as of one who thought easily, whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse.

Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer’s life since Sir Harris Nicholas, with the help of original records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered on a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was “fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street,” if it were only for the alliteration; but we refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the probabilities are in its favor. That Chaucer, being at Milan, should not have found occasion to ride across so far as Padua, for the sake of seeing the most famous literary man of the day, is incredible. If Froissart could journey on horseback through Scotland and Wales, surely Chaucer, whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have ventured what would have been a mere pleasure-trip in comparison. I cannot easily bring myself to believe that he is not giving some touches of his own character in that of the Clerk of Oxford:—

That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to Sir Harris Nicholas is for having disproved the story that Chaucer, imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of John of Northampton, had set himself free by betraying his accomplices. That a poet, one of whose leading qualities is his good sense and moderation, and who should seem to have practised his own rule, to

should have been concerned in any such political excesses, was improbable enough; but that he should add to this the baseness of broken faith was incredible except to such as in a doubtful story

Sir Harris Nicholas has proved by the records that the fabric is baseless, and we may now read the poet’s fine verse,

without a pang. We are thankful that Chaucer’s shoulders are finally discharged of that weary load, “The Testament of Love.”[8] The later biographers seem inclined to make Chaucer a younger man at his death in 1400 than has hitherto been supposed. Herr Hertzberg even puts his birth so late as 1340. But, till more conclusive evidence is produced, we shall adhere to the received dates as on the whole more consonant with the probabilities of the case. The monument is clearly right as to the year of his death, and the chances are at least even that both this and the date of birth were copied from an older inscription. The only counter-argument that has much force is the manifestly unfinished condition of the “Canterbury Tales.” That a man of seventy odd could have put such a spirit of youth into those matchless prologues will not, however, surprise those who remember Dryden’s second spring-time. It is plain that the notion of giving unity to a number of disconnected stories by the device which Chaucer adopted was an afterthought. These stories had been written, and some of them even published, at periods far asunder, and without any reference to connection among themselves. The prologues, and those parts which internal evidence justifies us in taking them to have been written after the thread of plan to string them on was conceived, are in every way more mature,—in knowledge of the world, in easy mastery of verse and language, and in the overpoise of sentiment by judgment. They may with as much probability be referred to a green old age as to the middle-life of a man who, upon any theory of the dates, was certainly slow in ripening.

The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four centuries and a half after the poet’s death, gives suitable occasion for taking a new observation of him, as of a fixed star, not only in our own, but in the European literary heavens, “whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.” The admirable work now doing by this Society, whose establishment was mainly due to the pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, deserves recognition from all who know how to value the too rare union of accurate scholarship with minute exactness in reproducing the text. The six-text edition of the “Canterbury Tales,” giving what is practically equivalent to six manuscript copies, is particularly deserving of gratitude from this side the water, as it for the first time affords to Americans the opportunity of independent critical study and comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover of Chaucer, “so proved by his wordës and his werke,” who has done more for the great poet’s memory than any man since Tyrwhitt. We earnestly hope that the Society may find enough support to print all the remaining manuscript texts of importance, for there can hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a valuable hint. The works of Mr. Sandras and Herr Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not merely or even primarily to English scholars. The introduction to the latter is one of the best essays on Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an investigation of the French and Italian sources of the poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth having as respects the training of the poet, and the obstacles of fashion and taste through which he had to force his way before he could find free play for his native genius or even so much as arrive at a consciousness thereof. M. Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of the accomplished M. Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays perhaps a little too much stress on the indebtedness of Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly intelligent and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his claim to greatness and originality. It is these grounds which I propose chiefly to examine here.

The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any so-called national literature, is that which Farinata addressed to Dante, Chi fur li maggior tui? Here is no question of plagiarism, for poems are not made of words and thoughts and images, but of that something in the poet himself which can compel them to obey him and move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that the new poet, however late he come, can never be forestalled, and the ship-builder who built the pinnace of Columbus has as much claim to the discovery of America as he who suggests a thought by which some other man opens new worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by him unconceived and inconceivable. Chaucer undoubtedly began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator, serving the needful apprenticeship in the use of his tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and catching the words of those who know how already, and poets learn in the same way from their elders. They import their raw material from any and everywhere, and the question at last comes down to this,—whether an author have original force enough to assimilate all he has acquired, or that be so overmastering as to assimilate him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we allow him to help himself from other people with wonderful equanimity. Should a man discover the art of transmuting metals and present us with a lump of gold as large as an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead?

Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be greater, will its roots strike deeper into the past and grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must sustain it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach anything, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Accordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was the new thing. Cela m’appartient de droit, Molière is reported to have said when accused of plagiarism. Chaucer pays that “usurious interest which genius,” as Coleridge says, “always pays in borrowing.” The characteristic touch is his own. In the famous passage about the caged bird, copied from the “Romaunt of the Rose,” the “gon eten wormes” was added by him. We must let him, if he will, eat the heart out of the literature that had preceded him, as we sacrifice the mulberry-leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to convert them into something richer and more lasting. The question of originality is not one of form, but of substance, not of cleverness, but of imaginative power. Given your material, in other words the life in which you live, how much can you see in it? For on that depends how much you can make of it. Is it merely an arrangement of man’s contrivance, a patchwork of expediencies for temporary comfort and convenience, good enough if it last your time, or is it so much of the surface of that ever-flowing deity which we call Time, wherein we catch such fleeting reflection as is possible for us, of our relation to perdurable things? This is what makes the difference between Æschylus and Euripides, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Goethe and Heine, between literature and rhetoric. Something of this depth of insight, if not in the fullest, yet in no inconsiderable measure, characterizes Chaucer. We must not let his playfulness, his delight in the world as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that he was incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the deeper meanings of life.

There are four principal sources from which Chaucer may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion or literary culture,—the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trouvères, and the Italians. It is only the two latter who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the direction of his thought or the formation of his style. The only Latin poet who can be supposed to have influenced the spirit of mediæeval literature is Ovid. In his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the picturesque, he is its natural precursor. The analogy between his Fasti and the versified legends of saints is more than a fanciful one. He was certainly popular with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The chief merit of the Provençal poets is in having been the first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal sentiment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Beatrice. Shakespeare’s hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substitute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we read Provençal poetry:—