Sir,—Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems and romances than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the indefatigable hatred which pursues your memory.  You, who knew the men, will not marvel that certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your own generation, still harass your name with their malevolence, while old women twitter out their incredible and unheeded slanders in the literary papers of New York.  But their persistent animosity does not quite suffice to explain the dislike with which many American critics regard the greatest poet, perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their country.  With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native merit too low; and you, I think, are the only example of an American prophet almost without honour in his own country.

The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects admirable study of your career (“Edgar Allan Poe,” by George Woodberry: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have forgotten it, and teaches those who never knew it, that you were, unfortunately, a Reviewer.  How unhappy were the necessities, how deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary criticism!  About the writers of his own generation a leader of that generation should hold his peace.  He should neither praise nor blame nor defend his equals; he should not strike one blow at the buzzing ephemeræ of letters.  The breath of their life is in the columns of “Literary Gossip;” and they should be allowed to perish with the weekly advertisements on which they pasture.  Reviewing, of course, there must needs be; but great minds should only criticise the great who have passed beyond the reach of eulogy or fault-finding.

Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven.  What “irritation of a sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,” drove you (in Mr. Longfellow’s own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse we may never ascertain.  But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for pardon comes easily to the great.  It was the smaller men, the Daweses, Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget.  “The New Yorkers never forgave him,” says your latest biographer; and one scarcely marvels at the inveteracy of their malice.  It was not individual vanity alone, but the whole literary class that you assailed.  “As a literary people,” you wrote, “we are one vast perambulating humbug.”  After that declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities yet writhing beneath your scorn.  They are writhing and writing still.  He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in settling above your tomb.

For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your pen, and that in an age when the author of “To Helen” and “The Cask of Amontillado” was paid at the rate of a dollar a column.  When such poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton’s, were inevitable and assured.  No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his birth—infelix opportunitate vitæ.  Had you lived a generation later, honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have been yours.  Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the profession of letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the contemporary of Mark Twain and of “Called Back.”  It may be that your criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of the reach of quite unlettered scribblers.  Though not a scholar, at least you had a respect for scholarship.  You might still marvel over such words as “objectional” in the new biography of yourself, and might ask what is meant by such a sentence as “his connection with it had inured to his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself,” and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of short tales that you must live.  But to discuss your few and elaborate poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition of poetry, “the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,” exhaust your theory, and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems.  Natural bent, and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined to make you too intolerant of what you call the “didactic” element in verse.  Even if morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact proportion as at present estimated), there was a place even on the Hellenic Parnassus for gnomic bards, and theirs in the nature of the case must always be the largest public.

“Music is the perfection of the soul or the idea of poetry,” so you wrote; “the vagueness of exaltation aroused by a sweet air (which should be indefinite and never too strongly suggestive) is precisely what we should aim at in poetry.”  You aimed at that mark, and struck it again and again, notably in “Helen, thy beauty is to me,” in “The Haunted Palace,” “The Valley of Unrest,” and “The City in the Sea.”  But by some Nemesis which might, perhaps, have been foreseen, you are, to the world, the poet of one poem—“The Raven:” a piece in which the music is highly artificial, and the “exaltation” (what there is of it) by no means particularly “vague.”  So a portion of the public know little of Shelley but the “Skylark,” and those two incongruous birds, the lark and the raven, bear each of them a poet’s name, vivu’ per ora virum.  Your theory of poetry, if accepted, would make you (after the author of “Kubla Khan”) the foremost of the poets of the world; at no long distance would come Mr. William Morris as he was when he wrote “Golden Wings,” “The Blue Closet,” and “The Sailing of the Sword;” and, close up, Mr. Lear, the author of “The Yongi Bongi Bo,” an the lay of the “Jumblies.”

On the other hand Homer would sink into the limbo to which you consigned Molière.  If we may judge a theory by its results, when compared with the deliberate verdict of the world, your æsthetic does not seem to hold water.  The “Odyssey” is not really inferior to “Ulalume,” as it ought to be if your doctrine of poetry were correct, nor “Le Festin de Pierre” to “Undine.”  Yet you deserve the praise of having been constant, in your poetic practice, to your poetic principles—principles commonly deserted by poets who, like Wordsworth, have published their æsthetic system.  Your pieces are few; and Dr. Johnson would have called you, like Fielding, “a barren rascal.”  But how can a writer’s verses be numerous if with him, as with you, “poetry is not a pursuit but a passion . . . which cannot at will be excited with an eye to the paltry compensations or the more paltry commendations of mankind!”  Of you it may be said, more truly than Shelley said it of himself, that “to ask you for anything human, is like asking at a gin-shop for a leg of mutton.”

Humanity must always be, to the majority of men, the true stuff of poetry; and only a minority will thank you for that rare music which (like the strains of the fiddler in the story) is touched on a single string, and on an instrument fashioned from the spoils of the grave.  You chose, or you were destined

To vary from the kindly race of men;

and the consequences, which wasted your life, pursue your reputation.

For your stories has been reserved a boundless popularity, and that highest success—the success of a perfectly sympathetic translation.  By this time, of course, you have made the acquaintance of your translator, M. Charles Baudelaire, who so strenuously shared your views about Mr. Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and who so energetically resisted all those ideas of “progress” which “came from Hell or Boston.”  On this point, however, the world continues to differ from you and M. Baudelaire, and perhaps there is only the choice between our optimism and universal suicide or universal opium-eating.  But to discuss your ultimate ideas is perhaps a profitless digression from the topic of your prose romances.

An English critic (probably a Northerner at heart) has described them as “Hawthorne and delirium tremens.”  I am not aware that extreme orderliness, masterly elaboration, and unchecked progress towards a predetermined effect are characteristics of the visions of delirium.  If they be, then there is a deal of truth in the criticism, and a good deal of delirium tremens in your style.  But your ingenuity, your completeness, your occasional luxuriance of fancy and wealth of jewel-like words, are not, perhaps, gifts which Mr. Hawthorne had at his command.  He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced.  But you and he have not much in common, except a certain mortuary turn of mind and a taste for gloomy allegories about the workings of conscience.

I forbear to anticipate your verdict about the latest essays of American fiction.  These by no means follow in the lines which you laid down about brevity and the steady working to one single effect.  Probably you would not be very tolerant (tolerance was not your leading virtue) of Mr. Roe, now your countrymen’s favourite novelist.  He is long, he is didactic, he is eminently uninspired.  In the works of one who is, what you were called yourself, a Bostonian, you would admire, at least, the acute observation, the subtlety, and the unfailing distinction.  But, destitute of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear, the charm of “Daisy Miller.”  You would admit the unity of effect secured in “Washington Square,” though that effect is as remote as possible from the terror of “The House of Usher” or the vindictive triumph of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among canaille, a poet among poetasters, dowered with a scholar’s taste without a scholar’s training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his consolations.

Rodono, St. Mary’s Loch:
Sept. 8, 1885.

Sir,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your company.  If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted!  You, almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all the rest, demand some hours of your society?  Who that ever meddled with letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?

Were the word “genial” not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old term might be applied, above all men, to “the Shirra.”  But perhaps we scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott.  Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour’s shape), it is of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently brought in mind.  All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your song.  It is through you that we remember them; and in recalling them, as in treading each hillside in this land, we again remember you and bless you.

It is not, “Sixty Years Since” the echo of Tweed among his pebbles fell for the last time on your ear; not sixty years since, and how much is altered!  But two generations have passed; the lad who used to ride from Edinburgh to Abbotsford, carrying new books for you, and old, is still vending, in George Street, old books and new.  Of politics I have not the heart to speak.  Little joy would you have had in most that has befallen since the Reform Bill was passed, to the chivalrous cry of “burke Sir Walter.”  We are still very Radical in the Forest, and you were taken away from many evils to come.  How would the cheek of Walter Scott, or of Leyden, have blushed at the names of Majuba, The Soudan, Maiwand, and many others that recall political cowardice or military incapacity!  On the other hand, who but you could have sung the dirge of Gordon, or wedded with immortal verse the names of Hamilton (who fell with Cavagnari), of the two Stewarts, of many another clansman, brave among the bravest!  Only he who told how

The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood

could have fitly rhymed a score of feats of arms in which, as at M’Neill’s Zareba and at Abu Klea,

Groom fought like noble, squire like knight,
   As fearlessly and well.

Ah, Sir, the hearts of the rulers may wax faint, and the voting classes may forget that they are Britons; but when it comes to blows our fighting men might cry, with Leyden,

My name is little Jock Elliot,
And wha daur meddle wi’ me!

Much is changed, in the countryside as well as in the country; but much remains.  The little towns of your time are populous and excessively black with the smoke of factories—not, I fear, at present very flourishing.  In Galashiels you still see the little change-house and the cluster of cottages round the Laird’s lodge, like the clachan of Tully Veolan.  But these plain remnants of the old Scotch towns are almost buried in a multitude of “smoky dwarf houses”—a living poet, Mr. Matthew Arnold, has found the fitting phrase for these dwellings, once for all.  All over the Forest the waters are dirty and poisoned: I think they are filthiest below Hawick; but this may be mere local prejudice in a Selkirk man.  To keep them clean costs money; and, though improvements are often promised, I cannot see much change—for the better.  Abbotsford, luckily, is above Galashiels, and only receives the dirt and dyes of Selkirk, Peebles, Walkerburn, and Innerleithen.  On the other hand, your ill-omened later dwelling, “the unhappy palace of your race,” is overlooked by villas that prick a cockney ear among their larches, hotels of the future.  Ah, Sir, Scotland is a strange place.  Whisky is exiled from some of our caravanserais, and they have banished Sir John Barleycorn.  It seems as if the views of the excellent critic (who wrote your life lately, and said you had left no descendants, le pauvre homme!) were beginning to prevail.  This pious biographer was greatly shocked by that capital story about the keg of whisky that arrived at the Liddesdale farmer’s during family prayers.  Your Toryism also was an offence to him.

Among these vicissitudes of things and the overthrow of customs, let us be thankful that, beyond the reach of the manufacturers, the Border country remains as kind and homely as ever.  I looked at Ashiestiel some days ago: the house seemed just as it may have been when you left it for Abbotsford, only there was a lawn-tennis net on the lawn, the hill on the opposite bank of the Tweed was covered to the crest with turnips, and the burn did not sing below the little bridge, for in this arid summer the burn was dry.  But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank.  This may not interest you, who styled yourself

No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game!

Still, as when you were thinking over Marmion, a man might have “grand gallops among the hills”—those grave wastes of heather and bent that sever all the watercourses and roll their sheep-covered pastures from Dollar Law to White Combe, and from White Combe to the Three Brethren Cairn and the Windburg and Skelf-hill Pen.  Yes, Teviotdale is pleasant still, and there is not a drop of dye in the water, purior electro, of Yarrow.  St. Mary’s Loch lies beneath me, smitten with wind and rain—the St. Mary’s of North and of the Shepherd.  Only the trout, that see a myriad of artificial flies, are shyer than of yore.  The Shepherd could no longer fill a cart up Meggat with trout so much of a size that the country people took them for herrings.

The grave of Piers Cockburn is still not desecrated: hard by it lies, within a little wood; and beneath that slab of old sandstone, and the graven letters, and the sword and shield, sleep “Piers Cockburn and Marjory his wife.”  Not a hundred yards off was the castle-door where they hanged him; this is the tomb of the ballad, and the lady that buried him rests now with her wild lord.

Touching the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there is great dissension.  That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat meat offered to idols.  Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the sweet-voiced water is silent.”  The fane is ruinous, and the images of men’s idolatry are dust.

Nevertheless, most worshipful, men do still dispute about the beginnings of those sinful Gods: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.  Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit, there are two main kinds of opinion.  One sect of philosophers believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who, long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained, fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the likeness of the very beasts that perish.  To this judgment, as it is set forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am, do give my consent.  But on the other side are many and learned men, chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the whole inhabited world.  These, being unwilling to suppose that the Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of utter darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of thy wit.

Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the gods of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled into fashioning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.

Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men argue, even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound.  For they declare the gods to have been natural elements, sun and sky and storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, “they are nowise at one with each other in their explanations.”  For of old some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth, the men who first worshipped Hera had understanding of these things!  And when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant (said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.

To all which, most worshipful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of sexes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned.  And why—thou saidst—even if the Gods were pure natural creatures, are such foul things told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare.  “These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and seductions, that would be shameful in men, why,” thou saidst, “were they attributed to the natural elements; and wherefore did the Gods constantly show themselves, like the sorcerers called werewolves, in the shape of the perishable beasts?”  But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.

To all this and more, most worshipful Father, I know not what the heathen answered thee.  But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that the heathen Gods were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the pure Gods—these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves.  Nay, they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn.  Bear with me, Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call “Science”!

Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even as—among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never knewest—goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of their fathers.  Thou must know that what Plato, in the “Cratylus,” made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest.  For, when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their turn.  How saith Socrates?  “I bethink me of a very new and ingenious idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I should be by to-morrow’s dawn.  My notion is that we may put in and pull out letters at pleasure and alter the accents.”

Sir,—In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as to what was said by “the herd of mankind,” if I may quote your own phrase.  It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their discretion.  Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where, as you say, we “pursue our serious folly as of old,” you are, one may guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your reputation.  As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be “Guilty,” and the sentence “Death.”  Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier flame to the last.  The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and a merciful.  The verdict is “Well done,” and the sentence Immortality of Fame.  There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be less and less heard as the years go on.

One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true province, and that your letters will out-live your lays.  I know not whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats) as “a gallery of your failures.”  But the general voice does not echo these utterances of a too subtle intellect.  At a famous University (not your own) once existed a band of men known as “The Trinity Sniffers.”  Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors who from time to time make themselves heard in your case.  The “Quarterly Review,” I fear, is still unreconciled.  It regards your attempts as tainted by the spirit of “The Liberal Movement in English Literature;” and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a Throne and Altar Tory.  At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once guilty of similar negligence?) are now shown to pious pilgrims.

But Conservatives, ’tis rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and, indeed, of the clergy in general.  But, in spite of all this, your poems, like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are yet “in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young.”  It is in your lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pass an examination in the plot of “Prometheus Unbound.”  Talking of this piece, by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering after life in a cave—doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from cave-man.  Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral, intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.

Fortunately you gave us “Adonais” and “Hellas” instead of this treatise, and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for ourselves.  Science tells us that before becoming a cave-dweller he was a Brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his original condition.  L’homme est un méchant animal, in spite of your boyish efforts to add pretty girls “to the list of the good, the disinterested, and the free.”

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics, were “the haunts meet for thee.”  Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was the task of Shelley!  “To ask you for anything human,” you said, “was like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.”  Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar.  Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all the multitudes of singers, one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled?  One, like Anchises, has been beloved of the Goddess, and his eyes, when he looks on the common world of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind with excess of light.  Let Shelley sing of what he saw, what none saw but Shelley!

Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew.  This will disappoint you, who had “a passion for reforming it.”  Kings and priests are very much where you left them.  True, we have a poet who assails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never, like “kind Hunt,” been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of treason.  Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious ways of destroying principalities and powers.  You would be interested in the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical force, would regret their application.

Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and described.  We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase.  Alas! he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern and pass a peaceful millennium in twining buds and beams.

In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been carried.  Ireland has received Emancipation, and almost everything else she can ask for.  I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven.  At home we have enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most happy results.  Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are “our own flesh and blood,” and, as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote.  Is it a dream that Mr. Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!) has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums?  This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political happiness which we have long sought in vain.  Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for Mr. Bradlaugh.  You should have known our Charles while you were in the “Queen Mab” stage.  I fear you wandered, later, from his robust condition of intellectual development.

As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much of it as possible.  Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of ducdame to bring people of no very great sense into your circle.  This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe.  They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun.  Men of sense and taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral pyre.  These biographers fight terribly among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of “old unhappy far-off things, and sorrows long ago.”  Let us leave them and their squabbles over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.

The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has produced two heavy volumes, styled by him “The Real Shelley.”  The real Shelley, it appears, was Shelley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology.  He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you “a damned Atheist” in the post-office at Pisa.  He finds that you had “a little turned-up nose,” a feature no less important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history of the world.  To be in harmony with your nose, you were a “phenomenal” liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of self-approbation—in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.  Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, “a bad old man.”  But enough of this inopportune brawler.

For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of Frost.  The sun will grow cold, slowly—as slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your “Prometheus,” but as surely.  If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read, by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Shelley.  So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring.  In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.  He will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens.  In Shelley’s poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for your “voice is as the voice of winds and tides,” and perhaps more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the perishing of the human spirit.

Monsieur,—With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the great Molière!  As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his comb!) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your dwelling among the Immortals.  You, like the king who, among all his titles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Molière—you found your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for French comedy; and the baton of Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim.  For the King the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame the Channel.  If England vanquished your country’s arms, it was through you that France ferum victorem cepit, and restored the dynasty of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven.  Ever since Dryden borrowed “L’Etourdi,” our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.

In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered.  While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Molière.  Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain.  But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your successes—still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our bien, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it.  We are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has not first been “cut out” from the countrymen of Molière.  Why this should be, and what “tenebriferous star” (as Paracelsus, your companion in the “Dialogues des Morts,” would have believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you.  Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor “a wilderness of monkeys” like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to Europe.

While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that we must turn when of comedies we desire the best.  If you studied with daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you “let no musty bouquin escape you” (so your enemies declared), it was to some purpose that you laboured.  Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations.  “Creations” one may well say, for you anticipated Nature herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a lacquey; in a mot of Don Juan’s, the secret of the new Religion and the watchword of Comte, l’amour de l’humanité.

Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour; and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular civilisation?  With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope, or warning from Religion.  Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you found invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise of help.  When the Jesuits and Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking every credulous excess of Faith.  In the sermons preached to Agnès we surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal self-defence of superstition.  Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent element of life—precisely where Pascal recognised all that was most fleeting and unsubstantial—in divertissement; in the pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies of mankind.  Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note comes in!  What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain in the wind!  No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.  Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest—our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures.

Though triumphant Youth and malicious Love in your plays may batter and defeat Jealousy and Old Age, yet they have not all the victory, or you did not mean that they should win it.  They go off with laughter, and their victim with a grimace; but in him we, that are past our youth, behold an actor in an unending tragedy, the defeat of a generation.  Your sympathy is not wholly with the dogs that are having their day; you can throw a bone or a crust to the dog that has had his, and has been taught that it is over and ended.  Yourself not unlearned in shame, in jealousy, in endurance of the wanton pride of men (how could the poor player and the husband of Célimène be untaught in that experience?), you never sided quite heartily, as other comedians have done, with young prosperity and rank and power.

I am not the first who has dared to approach you in the Shades; for just after your own death the author of “Les Dialogues des Morts” gave you Paracelsus as a companion, and the author of “Le Jugement de Pluton” made the “mighty warder” decide that “Molière should not talk philosophy.”  These writers, like most of us, feel that, after all, the comedies of the Contemplateur, of the translator of Lucretius, are a philosophy of life in themselves, and that in them we read the lessons of human experience writ small and clear.

What comedian but Molière has combined with such depths—with the indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of Don Juan—such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit!  Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles of contemporary mirth (cetera fluminis ritu feruntur), even now we never laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the boards in the Maison de Molière.  Since those mobile dark brows of yours ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the “demoniac” manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comédie Française.  In him you have a successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of your date might cry, could they see him, that Molière had come again.  But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle. Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Célimène, Armande.  Yet had you ever so merry a soubrette as Mdme. Samary, so exquisite a Nicole?

Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago, you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve.  Are not the Molièristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism?  Any scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians.  Concerning your private life, these men often speak more like malicious enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers.  It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsène Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur.  Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Molière among the sweepings of attorneys’ offices.  As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Molière’s works to gossip about Molière’s great-grand-mother’s second-best bed—I sometimes wish that Molière were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, “Les Molièristes.”  How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked with you, who saw you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the most open-handed in friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy!  Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in the study, rehearsing on the stage, musing in the lace-seller’s shop, strolling through the Palais, turning over the new books at Billaine’s, dusting your ruffles among the old volumes on the sunny stalls.  Would that, through the ages, we could hear you after supper, merry with Boileau, and with Racine,—not yet a traitor,—laughing over Chapelain, combining to gird at him in an epigram, or mocking at Cotin, or talking your favourite philosophy, mindful of Descartes.  Surely of all the wits none was ever so good a man, none ever made life so rich with humour and friendship.

Sir,—Among men of Genius, and especially among Poets, there are some to whom we turn with a peculiar and unfeigned affection; there are others whom we admire rather than love.  By some we are won with our will, by others conquered against our desire.  It has been your peculiar fortune to capture the hearts of a whole people—a people not usually prone to praise, but devoted with a personal and patriotic loyalty to you and to your reputation.  In you every Scot who is a Scot sees, admires, and compliments Himself, his ideal self—independent, fond of whisky, fonder of the lassies; you are the true representative of him and of his nation.  Next year will be the hundredth since the press of Kilmarnock brought to light its solitary masterpiece, your Poems; and next year, therefore, methinks, the revenue will receive a welcome accession from the abundance of whisky drunk in your honour.  It is a cruel thing for any of your countrymen to feel that, where all the rest love, he can only admire; where all the rest are idolators, he may not bend the knee; but stands apart and beats upon his breast, observing, not adoring—a critic.  Yet to some of us—petty souls, perhaps, and envious—that loud indiscriminating praise of “Robbie Burns” (for so they style you in their Change-house familiarity) has long been ungrateful; and, among the treasures of your songs, we venture to select and even to reject.  So it must be!  We cannot all love Haggis, nor “painch, tripe, and thairm,” and all those rural dainties which you celebrate as “warm-reekin, rich!”  “Rather too rich,” as the Young Lady said on an occasion recorded by Sam Weller.

Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
      That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
      Gie her a Haggis!

You have given her a Haggis, with a vengeance, and her “gratefu’ prayer” is yours for ever.  But if even an eternity of partridge may pall on the epicure, so of Haggis too, as of all earthly delights, cometh satiety at last.  And yet what a glorious Haggis it is—the more emphatically rustic and even Fescennine part of your verse!  We have had many a rural bard since Theocritus “watched the visionary flocks,” but you are the only one of them all who has spoken the sincere Doric.  Yours is the talk of the byre and the plough-tail; yours is that large utterance of the early hinds.  Even Theocritus minces matters, save where Lacon and Comatas quite out-do the swains of Ayrshire.  “But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?” you ask, and yourself out-match him in this wide rude region, trodden only by the rural Muse.  “Thy rural loves are nature’s sel’;” and the wooer of Jean Armour speaks more like a true shepherd than the elegant Daphnis of the “Oaristys.”

Indeed it is with this that moral critics of your life reproach you, forgetting, perhaps, that in your amours you were but as other Scotch ploughmen and shepherds of the past and present.  Ettrick may still, with Afghanistan, offer matter for idylls, as Mr. Carlyle (your antithesis, and the complement of the Scotch character) supposed; but the morals of Ettrick are those of rural Sicily in old days, or of Mossgiel in your days.  Over these matters the Kirk, with all her power, and the Free Kirk too, have had absolutely no influence whatever.  To leave so delicate a topic, you were but as other swains, or, as “that Birkie ca’d a lord,” Lord Byron; only you combined (in certain of your letters) a libertine theory with your practice; you poured out in song your audacious raptures, your half-hearted repentance, your shame and your scorn.  You spoke the truth about rural lives and loves.  We may like it or dislike it but we cannot deny the verity.

Was it not as unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages and of two worlds—precisely in the moment when bookish literature was beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries?  Before you how many singers not less truly poets than yourself—though less versatile not less passionate, though less sensuous not less simple—had been born and had died in poor men’s cottages!  There abides not even the shadow of a name of the old Scotch song-smiths, of the old ballad-makers.  The authors of “Clerk Saunders,” of “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” of “Fair Annie,” and “Sir Patrick Spens,” and “The Bonny Hind,” are as unknown to us as Homer, whom in their directness and force they resemble.  They never, perhaps, gave their poems to writing; certainly they never gave them to the press.  On the lips and in the hearts of the people they have their lives; and the singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame, are forgotten.  “The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his Poppy.”

Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as these unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan—verses retained only by Memory.  You would have been but the minstrel of your native valley: the wider world would not have known you, nor you the world.  Great thoughts of independence and revolt would never have burned in you; indignation would not have vexed you.  Society would not have given and denied her caresses.  You would have been happy.  Your songs would have lingered in all “the circle of the summer hills;” and your scorn, your satire, your narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown.  To the world what a loss! and what a gain to you!  We should have possessed but a few of your lyrics, as

When o’er the hill the eastern star
   Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
And owsen frae the furrowed field,
   Return sae dowf and wearie O!

How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek!  You found, oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
      Even Sappho’s flame!

But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in these strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day μετενίσσετο βουλυτόνδε?  Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that in your songs reminds us of the Poet’s Corner in the “Kirkcudbright Advertiser.”  We should not have read how

Phœbus, gilding the brow o’ morning,
      Banishes ilk darksome shade!

Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush would have been untaught in “the style of the Bird of Paradise.”

A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vitæ, was not to be yours.  Fate otherwise decreed it.  The touch of a lettered society, the strife with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the world with “Tam o’ Shanter,” the “Jolly Beggars,” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”  Who can praise them too highly—who admire in them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the unsurpassed energy and courage?  So powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that Beggars’ Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet when he conceived the “Vision of Sin.”  You shall judge for yourself.  Recall:

Here’s to budgets, bags, and wallets!
   Here’s to all the wandering train!
Here’s our ragged bairns and callets!
   One and all cry out, Amen!

A fig for those by law protected!
   Liberty’s a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected!
   Churches built to please the priest!

Then read this:

Drink to lofty hopes that cool—
   Visions of a perfect state:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
   Frantic love and frantic hate.

* * * * *

Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
   While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance,
   Hob and nob with brother Death!

Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder recklessness?

So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of so much company, good and bad.  No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a life more strenuous, engaged in an eternal conflict of the passions, and by them overcome—“mighty and mightily fallen.”  When we think of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree from actual truth, and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.

My Lord,

   (Do you remember how Leigh Hunt
Enraged you once by writing My dear Byron?)
   Books have their fates,—as mortals have who punt,
And yours have entered on an age of iron.
   Critics there be who think your satire blunt,
Your pathos, fudge; such perils must environ
Poets who in their time were quite the rage,
Though now there’s not a soul to turn their page.
Yes, there is much dispute about your worth,
And much is said which you might like to know
By modern poets here upon the earth,
Where poets live, and love each other so;
And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth
To hear of bards that pitch your praises low,
Though there be some that for your credit stickle,
   As—Glorious Mat,—and not inglorious Nichol.

(This kind of writing is my pet aversion,
I hate the slang, I hate the personalities,
I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion,
   Of every rhyme that in the singer’s wallet is,
I hate it as you hated the Excursion,
But, while no man a hero to his valet is,
The hero’s still the model; I indite
The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would write.)

There’s a Swiss critic whom I cannot rhyme to,
   One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim.
Of him there’s much to say, if I had time to
Concern myself in any wise with him.
He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to,
   He thinks your poetry a coxcomb’s whim,
A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on
Shakespeare, and Molière, and you, and Milton.

Ay, much his temper is like Vivien’s mood,
   Which found not Galahad pure, nor Lancelot brave;
Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood,
He buries poets in an icy grave,
His Essays—he of the Genevan hood!
   Nothing so fine, but better doth he crave.
So stupid and so solemn in his spite
He dares to print that Molière could not write!

Enough of these excursions; I was saying
   That half our English Bards are turned Reviewers,
And Arnold was discussing and assaying
   The weight and value of that work of yours,
Examining and testing it and weighing,
   And proved, the gems are pure, the gold endures.
While Swinburne cries with an exceeding joy,
The stones are paste, and half the gold, alloy.

In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest force,
   Poetic, in this later age of ours;
His song, a torrent from a mountain source,
   Clear as the crystal, singing with the showers,
Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course
   Through banks o’erhung with rocks and sweet with flowers;
None of your brooks that modestly meander,
But swift as Awe along the Pass of Brander.

And when our century has clomb its crest,
   And backward gazes o’er the plains of Time,
And counts its harvest, yours is still the best,
   The richest garner in the field of rhyme
(The metaphoric mixture, ’tis comfest,
   Is all my own, and is not quite sublime).
But fame’s not yours alone; you must divide all
The plums and pudding with the Bard of Rydal!

Wordsworth and Byron, these the lordly names
   And these the gods to whom most incense burns.
“Absurd!” cries Swinburne, and in anger flames,
   And in an Æschylean fury spurns
With impious foot your altar, and exclaims
And wreathes his laurels on the golden urns
Where Coleridge’s and Shelley’s ashes lie,
Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry.

For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never woven
   One honest thread of life within his song;
As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven
   So Byron is to Shelley (This is strong!),
And on Parnassus’ peak, divinely cloven,
   He may not stand, or stands by cruel wrong;
For Byron’s rank (the examiner has reckoned)
Is in the third class or a feeble second.

“A Bernesque poet” at the very most,
   And “never earnest save in politics,”
The Pegasus that he was wont to boast
   A blundering, floundering hackney, full of tricks,
A beast that must be driven to the post
   By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and sticks,
A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute,
That any judge of Pegasi would shoot;

In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone
   In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes.
And Byron’s style is “jolter-headed jargon;”
   His verse is “only bearable in prose.”
So living poets write of those that are gone,
   And o’er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows;
And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began,
By owning you “a very clever man.”

Or rather does not end: he still must utter
   A quantity of the unkindest things.
Ah! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter
   O’er such a foe the tempest of your wings?
’Tis “rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter”
   That rend the modest air when Byron sings.
There Swinburne stops: a critic rather fiery.
Animis cælestibus tantæne iræ?

But whether he or Arnold in the right is,
   Long is the argument, the quarrel long;
Non nobis est to settle tantas lites;
   No poet I, to judge of right or wrong:
But of all things I always think a fight is
   The most unpleasant in the lists of song;
When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo
Set an example which we need not follow.

The fashion changes!  Maidens do not wear,
   As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets
A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron’s hair;
   “Don Juan” is not always in our pockets—
Nay, a New Writer’s readers do not care
   Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock its
Manners and morals.  Ay, and most young ladies
To yours prefer the “Epic” called “of Hades”!

I do not blame them; I’m inclined to think
   That with the reigning taste ’tis vain to quarrel,
And Burns might teach his votaries to drink,
   And Byron never meant to make them moral.
You yet have lovers true, who will not shrink
   From lauding you and giving you the laurel;
The Germans too, those men of blood and iron,
Of all our poets chiefly swear by Byron.