The Poems of Sidney Lanier

The series of lectures which I last had the pleasure of delivering in this hall was devoted to the exposition of what is beyond doubt the most remarkable, the most persistent, the most wide-spread, and the most noble of all those methods of arranging words and ideas in definite relations, which have acquired currency among men-namely, the methods of verse, or Formal Poetry.

That exposition began by reducing all possible phenomena of verse to terms of vibration; and having thus secured at once a solid physical basis for this science, and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk intelligibly upon this century-befogged subject, we advanced gradually from the most minute to the largest possible considerations upon the matter in hand.

Now, wishing that such courses as I might give here should preserve a certain coherence with each other, I have hoped that I could secure that end by successively treating The Great Forms of Modern Literature; and, wishing further to gain whatever advantage of entertainment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have thought that inasmuch as we have already studied the Verse-Form in General, we might now profitably study some great Prose-Forms in Particular, and in still further contrast; that we might study that form not so much analytically-as when we developed the Science of Formal Poetry from a single physical principle-but this time synthetically, from the point of view of literary art rather than of literary science.

I am further led to this general plan by the consideration that so far as I know-but my reading in this direction is not wide, and I may be in error-there is no book extant in any language which gives a conspectus of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary forms which have differentiated themselves in the course of time, and of the curious and subtle needs of the modern civilized man which, under the stress of that imperious demand for expression which all men's emotions make, have respectively determined the modes of such expression to be in one case The Novel, in another The Sermon, in another The Newspaper Leader, in another The Scientific Essay, in another The Popular Magazine Article, in another The Semi-Scientific Lecture, and so on: each of these prose-forms, you observe, having its own limitations and fitnesses quite as well-defined as the Sonnet-Form, the Ballad-Form, the Drama-Form, and the like in verse.

And, with this general plan, a great number of considerations which I hope will satisfactorily emerge as we go on, lead me irresistibly to select the Novel as the particular prose-form for our study.

It happens, indeed, that over and above the purely literary interest which would easily give this form the first place in such a series as the present, the question of the Novel has just at this time become one of the most pressing and vital of all the practical problems which beset our moral and social economy.

The novel,-what we call the novel-is a new invention. It is customary to date the first English novel with Richardson in 1740; and just as it has been impossible to confine other great inventions to the service of virtue-for the thief can send a telegram to his pal as easily as the sick man to his doctor, and the locomotive spins along no less merrily because ten car-loads of rascals may be profiting by its speed-so vice as well as virtue has availed itself of the novel-form, and we have such spectacles as Scott, and Dickens, and Eliot, and Macdonald, using this means to purify the air in one place, while Zola, in another, applies the very same means to defiling the whole earth and slandering all humanity under the sacred names of "naturalism," of "science," of "physiology." Now I need not waste time in descanting before this audience upon the spread of the novel among all classes of modern readers: while I have been writing this, a well-considered paper on "Fiction in our Public Libraries," has appeared in the current International Review, which, among many suggestive statements, declares that out of pretty nearly five millions (4,872,595) of volumes circulated in five years by the Boston Public Library, nearly four millions (3,824,938), that is about four-fifths, were classed as "Juveniles and Fiction;" and merely mentioning the strength which these figures gain when considered along with the fact that they represent the reading of a people supposed to be more "solid" in literary matter than any other in the country-if we inquire into the proportion at Baltimore, I fancy I have only to hold up this copy of James's The American, which I borrowed the other day from the Mercantile Library, and which I think I may say, after considerable rummaging about the books of that institution, certainly bears more marks of "circulation" than any solid book in it. In short, as a people, the novel is educating us. Thus we cannot take any final or secure solace in the discipline and system of our schools and universities until we have also learned to regulate this fascinating universal teacher which has taken such hold upon all minds, from the gravest scholar down to the boot-black shivering on the windy street corner over his dime-novel,-this educator whose principles are fastening themselves upon your boy's mind, so that long after he has forgotten his amo and his tupto, they will be controlling his relations to his fellow-man, and determining his happiness for life.

But we can take no really effective action upon this matter until we understand precisely what the novel is and means; and it is, therefore, with the additional pleasure of stimulating you to systematize and extend your views upon a living issue which demands your opinion, that I now invite you to enter with me, without further preliminary, upon a series of studies in which it is proposed, first, to inquire what is that special relation of the novel to the modern man, by virtue of which it has become a paramount literary form; and, secondly, to illustrate this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some concrete readings in the greatest of modern English novelists.

In the course of this inquiry I shall be called on to bring before you some of the very largest conceptions of which the mind is capable; and inasmuch as several of the minor demonstrations will begin somewhat remotely from the Novel, it will save me many details which would be otherwise necessary, if I indicate in a dozen words the four special lines of development along one or other of which I shall be always travelling.

My first line will concern itself with the enormous growth in the personality of man which our time reveals when compared, for instance, with the time of ?schylus.

I shall insist with the utmost reverence that between every human being and every other human being exists a radical, unaccountable, inevitable difference from birth; this sacred Difference between man and man, by virtue of which I am I, and you are you; this marvellous separation which we express by the terms "personal identity," "self-hood," "me,"-it is the unfolding of this, I shall insist, which since the time of ?schylus (say) has wrought all those stupendous changes in the relation of man to God, to physical nature, and to his fellow, which have culminated in the modern cultus. I can best bring upon you the length and breadth of this idea of modern personality as I conceive it, by stating it in terms which have recently been made prominent and familiar by the discussion as to the evolution of genius; a phase of which appears in a very agreeable paper by Mr. John Fiske in a recent Atlantic Monthly on "Sociology and Hero Worship." Says Mr. Fiske, in a certain part of this article, "Every species of animals or plants consists of a great number of individuals which are nearly, but not exactly alike. Each individual varies slightly in one characteristic or another from a certain type which expresses the average among all the individuals of the species.... Now the moth with his proboscis twice as long as the average ... is what we call a spontaneous variation; and the Darwin or the Helmholtz is what we call a 'genius'; and the analogy between the two kinds of variation is obvious enough." He proceeds in another place: "We cannot tell why a given moth has a proboscis exactly an inch and a quarter in length, any more than we can tell why Shakspeare was a great dramatist," there being absolutely no precedent conditions by which the most ardent evolutionist could evolve William Shakspeare, for example, from old John Shakspeare and his wife. "The social philosopher must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous variations."

But now if we reflect upon this prodigious series of spontaneous variations which I have called the sacred difference between man and man,-this personality which every father and mother are astonished at anew every day, when out of six children they perceive that each one of the six, from the very earliest moment of activity, has shown his own distinct individuality, differing wholly from either parent; the child who most resembles the parent physically, often having a personality which crosses that of the parent at the sharpest angles; this radical, indestructible, universal personality which entitles every "me" to its privacy, which has in course of time made the Englishman's house his castle, which has developed the Rights of Man, the American Republic, the supreme prerogative of the woman to say whom she will love, what man she shall marry; this personality, so precious that not even the miserablest wretch with no other possession but his personality has ever been brought to say he would be willing to exchange it entire for that of the happiest being; this personality which has brought about that, whereas in the time of ?schylus the common man was simply a creation of the State, like a modern corporation with rights and powers strictly limited by the State's charter, now he is a genuine sovereign who makes the State, a king as to every minutest particle of his individuality so long as that kinghood does not cross the kinghood of his fellow,-when we reflect upon this awful spontaneous variation of personality, this "mystery in us which calls itself I" (as Thomas Carlyle has somewhere called it), which makes every man scientifically a human atom, yet an atom endowed above all other atoms with the power to choose its own mode of motion, its own combining equivalent,-when farther we reflect upon the relation of each human atom to each other human atom, and to the great Giver of personalities to these atoms,-how each is indissolubly bound to each, and to Him, and yet how each is discretely parted and impassably separated from each and from Him by a gulf which is simply no less deep than the width between the finite and the infinite,-when we reflect, finally, that it is this simple, indivisible, radical, indestructible, new force which each child brings into the world under the name of its self; which controls the whole life of that child, so that its path is always a resultant of its own individual force on the one hand, and of the force of its surrounding circumstances on the other,-we are bound to confess, it seems to me, that such spontaneous variations carry us upon a plane of mystery very far above those merely unessential variations of the offspring from the parental type in physique, and even above those rare abnormal variations which we call genius.

In meditating upon this matter, I found a short time ago a poem of Tennyson's floating about the newspapers, which so beautifully and reverently chants this very sense of personality, that I must read you a line or two from it. I have since observed that much fun has been made of this piece, and I have seen elaborate burlesques upon it. But I think such an attitude could be possible only to one who had not passed along this line of thought. At any rate the poem seemed to me a very noble and rapturous hymn to the great Personality above us, acknowledging the mystery of our own personalities as finitely dependent upon, and yet so infinitely divided from His Personality.

This poem is called De Profundis-Two Greetings, and is addressed to a new-born child. I have time to read only a line or two here and there; you will find the whole poem much more satisfactory. Please observe, however, the ample, comforting phrases and summaries with which Tennyson expresses the poetic idea of that personality which I have just tried to express from the point of view of science, of the evolutionist:

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

When all that was to be in all that was

Whirl'd for a million ?ons thro' the vast

Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light-

* * *

Thro' all this changing world of changeless law.

And every phase of ever-heightening life,

Thou comest.

* * *

O, dear Spirit, half-lost In thine own shadows and this fleshly sign

That thou art thou-who wailest, being born

And banish'd into mystery and the pain

Of this divisible-indivisible world.

* * *

Our mortal veil And shatter'd phantom of that infinite One

Who made thee inconceivably thyself

Out of his whole world-self and all in all-

Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape

And ivy berry choose; and still depart

From death to death thro' life and life, and find-

* * *

This main miracle, that thou art thou,

With power on thy own act and on the world.

We feel we are nothing-for all is Thou and in Thee;

We feel we are something-that also has come from Thee;

We are nothing, O Thou-but Thou wilt help us to be;

Hallowed be Thy name-Hallelujah!

I find some expressions here which give me great satisfaction: The Infinite One who made thee inconceivably thyself; this divisible, indivisible world, this main miracle that thou art thou, etc.

Now it is with this "main miracle," that I am I, and you, you-with this personality, that my first train of thought will busy itself; and I shall try to show by several concrete illustrations from the lines and between the lines of ?schylus and Plato and the like writers, compared with several modern writers, how feeble the sense and influence of it is in their time as contrasted with ours.

In my second line of development, I shall call your attention to what seems to me a very remarkable and suggestive fact: to-wit, that Physical Science, Music, and the Novel, all take their rise at the same time; of course, I mean what we moderns call science, music, and the novel. For example, if we select, for the sake of well-known representative names, Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Sebastian Bach (1685), and Samuel Richardson (1689), the first standing for the rise of modern science, the second for the rise of modern music, the third for the rise of the modern novel, and observe that these three men are born within fifty years of each other, we cannot fail to find ourselves in the midst of a thousand surprising suggestions and inferences. For in our sweeping arc from ?schylus to the present time, fifty years subtend scarcely any space; we may say then these men are born together. And here the word accident has no meaning. Time, progress, then, have no accident.

Now in this second train of thought I shall endeavor to connect these phenomena with the principle of personality developed in the first train, and shall try to show that this science, music, and the novel, are flowerings-out of that principle in various directions; for instance, each man in this growth of personality feeling himself in direct and personal relations with physical nature (not in relations obscured by the vague intermediary, hamadryads and forms of the Greek system), a general desire to know the exact truth about nature arises; and this desire carried to a certain enthusiasm in the nature of given men-behold the man of science; a similar feeling of direct personal relation to the Unknown, acting similarly upon particular men,-behold the musician, and the ever-increasing tendency of the modern to worship God in terms of music; likewise, a similar feeling of direct personal relation to each individual member of humanity, high or low, rich or poor, acting similarly, gives us such a novel as the Mill on the Floss, for instance, when for a long time we find ourselves interested in two mere children-Tom and Maggie Tulliver-or such novels as those of Dickens and his fellow-host who have called upon our human relation to poor, unheroic people.

In my third train of thought, I shall attempt to show that the increase of personalities thus going on has brought about such complexities of relation that the older forms of expression were inadequate to them; and that the resulting necessity has developed the wonderfully free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the more rigid Greek drama, through the transition form of the Elizabethan drama.

And, fourthly, I shall offer copious readings from some of the most characteristic modern novels, in illustration of the general principles thus brought forward.

Here,-as the old preacher Hugh Latimer grimly said in closing one of his powerful descriptions of future punishment,-you see your fare.

Permit me, then, to begin the execution of this plan by bringing before you two matters which will be conveniently disposed of in the outset, because they affect all these four lines of thought in general, and because I find the very vaguest ideas prevailing about them among those whose special attention happens not to have been called this way.

As to the first point; permit me to remind you how lately these prose forms have been developed in our literature as compared with the forms of verse. Indeed, abandoning the thought of any particular forms of prose, consider for how long a time good English poetry was written before any good English prose appears. It is historical that as far back as the seventh century C?dmon is writing a strong English poem in an elaborate form of verse. Well-founded conjecture carries us back much farther than this; but without relying upon that, we have clear knowledge that all along the time when Beowulf and The Wanderer-to me one of the most artistic and affecting of English poems-and The Battle of Maldon are being written, all along the time when C?dmon and Aldhelm and the somewhat mythical Cynewulf are singing, formal poetry or verse has reached a high stage of artistic development. But not only so; after the Norman change is consummated, and our language has fairly assimilated that tributary stock of words and ideas and influences; the poetic advance, the development of verse, goes steadily on.

If you examine the remains of our lyric poetry written along in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries-short and unstudied little songs as many of them are, songs which come upon us out of that obscure period like brief little bird-calls from a thick-leaved wood-if, I say, we examine these songs, written as many of them are by nobody in particular, it is impossible not to believe that a great mass of poetry, some of which must have been very beautiful, was written in the two hundred years just before Chaucer, and that an extremely small proportion of it can have come down to us.

But, in all this period, where is the piece of English prose that corresponds with The Wanderer, or with the daintier Cuckoo-Song of the early twelfth century? In point of fact, we cannot say that even the conception of an artistic prose has occurred to English literary endeavor until long after Chaucer. King Alfred's Translations, the English Chronicle, the Homilies of ?lfric, are simple and clear enough; and, coming down later, the English Bible set forth by Wyclif and his contemporaries. Wyclif's sermons and tracts, and Mandeville's account of his travels are effective enough, each to its own end. But in all these the form is so far overridden by the direct pressing purpose, either didactic or educational, that-with exceptions I cannot now specify in favor of the Wyclif Bible-I can find none of them in which the prose seems controlled by considerations of beauty. Perhaps the most curious and interesting proof I could adduce of the obliviousness of even the most artistic Englishman in this time to the possibility of a melodious and uncloying English prose, is the prose work of Chaucer. While, so far as concerns the mere music of verse, I cannot call Chaucer a great artist, yet he was the greatest of his time; from him, therefore, we have the right to expect the best craftsmanship in words; for all fine prose depends as much upon its rhythms and correlated proportions as fine verse; and, now, since we have an art of prose, it is a perfect test of the real excellence of a poet in verse to try his corresponding excellence in prose. But in Chaucer's time there is no art of English prose. Listen, for example, to the first lines of that one of Chaucer's Canterbury series which he calls The Parson's Tale, and which is in prose throughout. It happens very pertinently to my present discussion that in the prologue to this tale some conversation occurs which reveals to us quite clearly a current idea of Chaucer's time as to the proper distinction between prose and verse-or "rym"-and as to the functions and subject-matter peculiarly belonging to each of these forms; and, for that reason, let me preface my quotation from the Parson's Tale with a bit of it. As the Canterbury Pilgrims are jogging merrily along, presently it appears that but one more tale is needed to carry out the original proposition, and so the ever-important Host calls on the Parson for it, as follows:

As we were entryng at a thropes ende,

For while our Hoost, as he was wont to gye,

As in this caas, our joly compaignye,

Seyde in this wise: "Lordyngs, everichoon,

Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," etc.,

and turning to the Parson,

"Sir Prest," quod he, "artow a vicary?

Or arte a persoun? Say soth, by thy fey,

Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure pley;

For every man, save thou, hath told his tale.

Unbokele and schew us what is in thy male.

Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones!"

Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave and reverend prose.

This Persoun him answerede al at oones:

Thou getest fable noon i-told for me.

(And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mind means very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the whole business of fiction-that same fiction which has now come to occupy such a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to study with such reverence under its form of the novel-implies downright lying and wickedness.)

Thou getist fable noon i-told for me;

For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe,

Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse.

And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc.,

For which I say, if that yow list to heere

Moralite and virtuous mateere,

(That is-as we shall presently see-prose).

And thanne that ye will geve me audience,

I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence,

Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can;

But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man,

I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter,

Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better;

And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose,

I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose.

Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully tempted to go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling description of him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction with the one contemptuous word "glose"-by which he seems to mean a sort of shame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse-and sets up prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere."

With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised to find, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-called tale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement of the whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course, presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parson begins:

"Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to our Lord Ihesu Crist, and to the regne of glorie; of whiche weyes ther is a ful noble wey, which may not faile to no man ne to womman, that thurgh synne hath mysgon fro the right wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey is cleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken and enquere with al here herte, to wyte, what is penitence, and whens is cleped penitence? And in what maner and in how many maneres been the acciones or workynge of penitence, and how many speces ben of penitence, and which thinges apperteynen and byhoven to penitence and whiche thinges destourben penitence."

In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one has to remember strenuously all the moral beauty of the Parson's character in order to forgive the droning ugliness of his prose. Nothing could better realize the description which Tennyson's Northern Farmer gives of his parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof:

An' I hallus comed to t' choorch afoor my Sally wur de?d,

An' 'eerd un a bummin' awa?y loike a buzzard-clock ower my ye?d;

An' I niver knaw'd what a me?ned, but I thowt a 'ad summut to sa?y,

An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awa?y.

It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that he writes better prose than this when he really sets about telling a tale. What the Parson calls his "tale" turns out, to the huge disgust, I suspect, of several other pilgrims besides the host, to be nothing more than a homily or sermon, in which the propositions about penitence, with many minor heads and sub-divisions, are unsparingly developed to the bitter end. But in the Tale of Melib?us his inimitable faculty of story-telling comes to his aid, and determines his sentences to a little more variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious still predominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between Melib?us and his wife, which I selected because, over and above its application here as early prose, we will find it particularly suggestive presently when we come to compare it with some dialogue in George Eliot's Adam Bede, where the conversation is very much upon the same topic.

It seems that Melib?us, being still a young man, goes away into the fields, leaving his wife Prudence and his daughter-whose name some of the texts give in its Greek form as Sophia, while others, quaintly enough, call her Sapience, translating the Greek into Latin-in the house. Thereupon "three of his olde foos" (says Chaucer) "have it espyed, and setten laddres to the walles of his hous, and by the wyndowes ben entred, and beetyn his wyf, and wounded his daughter with fyve mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in here feet, in her handes, in here eres, in her nose, and in here mouth; and lafte her for deed, and went away." Melib?us assembles a great counsel of his friends, and these advise him to make war, with an interminable dull succession of sententious maxims and quotations which would merely have maddened a modern person to such a degree that he would have incontinently levied war upon his friends as well as his enemies. But after awhile Dame Prudence modestly advises against the war. "This Melib?us answerde unto his wyf Prudence: 'I purpose not,' quod he, 'to werke by this counseil, for many causes and resouns; for certes every wight wolde holde me thanne a fool, this is to sayn, if I for thy counseil wolde chaunge things that affirmed ben by somany wise.

Secondly, I say that alle wommen be wikked, and noon good of hem alle. For of a thousand men, saith Solomon, I find oon good man; but certes of alle wommen good womman find I never noon. And also certes, if I governede am by thy counseil, it schulde seme that I hadde given to the over me the maistry; and God forbid er it so were. For Ihesus Syrac saith,'" etc., etc. You observe here, although this is dialogue between man and wife, the prose nevertheless tends to the sententious, and every remark must be supported with some dry old maxim or epigrammatic saw. Observe too, by the way,-and we shall find this point most suggestive in studying the modern dialogue in George Eliot's novels, etc.,-that there is absolutely no individuality or personality in the talk; Melib?us drones along exactly as his friends do, and his wife quotes old authoritative saws, just as he does. But Dame Prudence replies,-and all those who are acquainted with the pungent Mrs. Poyser in George Eliot's Adam Bede will congratulate Melib?us that his foregoing sentiments concerning woman were uttered five hundred years before that lady's tongue began to wag,-"When Dame Prudence, ful debonerly and with gret pacience, hadde herd al that her housbande liked for to saye, thanne axede sche of him license for to speke, and sayde in this wise: 'My Lord,' quod sche, 'as to your firste resoun, certes it may lightly be answered; for I say it is no foly to chaunge counsel when the thing is chaungid, or elles when the thing semeth otherwise than it was bifoore.'" This very wise position she supports with argument and authority, and then goes on boldly to attack not exactly Solomon's wisdom, but the number of data from which he drew it. "'And though that Solomon say he fond never good womman, it folwith nought therfore that alle wommen ben wicked; for though that he fonde noone goode wommen, certes many another man hath founden many a womman ful goode and trewe.'" (Insinuating, what is doubtless true, that the finding of a good woman depends largely on the kind of man who is looking for her.)

After many other quite logical replies to all of Melib?us' positions, Dame Prudence closes with the following argument: "And moreover, whan oure Lord hadde creat Adam oure forme fader, he sayde in this wise, Hit is not goode to be a man alone; makes we to him an help semblable to himself. Here may ye se that, if that a womman were not good, and hir counseil good and profytable, oure Lord God of heven would neither have wrought hem, ne called hem help of man, but rather confusion of man. And ther sayde oones a clerk in two versus, What is better than gold? Jasper. And what is better than jasper? Wisdom. And what is better than wisdom? Womman. And what is better than a good womman? No thing."

When we presently come to contrast this little scene between man and wife in what may fairly be called the nearest approach to the modern novel that can be found before the fifteenth century, we shall find a surprising number of particulars, besides the unmusical tendency to run into the sententious or proverbial form, in which the modern mode of thought differs from that of the old writers from whom Chaucer got his Melib?us.

This sententious monotune (if I may coin a word) of the prose, when falling upon a modern ear, gives almost a comical tang, even to the gravest utterances of the period. For example, here are the opening lines of a fragment of prose from a MS. in the Cambridge University Library, reprinted by the early English Text Society in the issue for 1870. It is good, pithy reading, too. It is called "The Six Wise Masters' Speech of Tribulation."

Observe that the first sentence, though purely in the way of narrative, is just as sententious in form as the graver proverbs of each master that follow.

It begins:

Here begynyth A shorte extracte, and tellyth how tar ware sex masterys assemblede, ande eche one askede oter quhat thing tai sholde spek of gode, and all tei war acordet to spek of tribulacoun.

The fyrste master seyde, tat if ony thing hade bene mor better to ony man lewynge in this werlde tan tribulacoun, god wald haue gewyne it to his sone. But he sey wyell that thar was no better, and tharfor he gawe it hum, and mayde hume to soffer moste in this wrechede worlde than euer dyde ony man, or euermore shall.

The secunde master seyde, tat if tar wer ony man tat mycht be wyth-out spote of sine, as god was, and mycht levyn bodely tirty yheris wyth-out mete, ande also were dewote in preyinge tat he mycht speke wyth angele in te erth, as dyde mary magdalene, yit mycht he not deserve in tat lyffe so gret meyde as A man deservith in suffring of A lytyll tribulacoun.

The threde master seyde, tat if the moder of gode and all the halowys of hewyn preyd for a man, tei should not get so gret meyde as he should hymselfe be meknes and suffryng of tribulacoun.

Now asking you, as I pass, to remember that I have selected this extract, like the others, with the further purpose of presently contrasting the substance of it with modern utterances, as well as the form which we are now mainly concerned-if we cut short this search after artistic prose in our earlier literature, and come down at once to the very earliest sign of a true feeling for the musical movement of prose sentences, we are met by the fact, which I hope to show is full of fruitful suggestions upon our present studies, that the art of English prose is at least eight hundred years younger than the art of English verse. For, in coming down our literature from C?dmon-whom, in some conflict of dates, we can safely place at 670-the very first writer I find who shows a sense of the rhythmical flow and gracious music of which our prose is so richly capable, is Sir Thomas Malory; and his one work, The History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, dates 1469-70, exactly eight hundred years after C?dmon's poetic outburst.

Recalling our extracts just read, and remembering how ungainly and awkward was the sport of their sentences, listen for a moment to a few lines from Sir Thomas Malory. I think the most unmusical ear, the most cursory attention, cannot fail to discern immediately how much more flowing and smooth is the movement of this. I read from the fifth chapter of King Arthur.

"And King Arthur was passing wrath for the hurt of Sir Griflet. And by and by he commanded a man of his chamber that his best horse and armor be without the city on to-morrow-day. Right so in the morning he met with his man and his horse, and so mounted up and dressed his shield, and took his spear, and bade his chamberlain tarry there till he came again." Presently he meets Merlin and they go on together.

"So as they went thus talking, they came to the fountain and the rich pavilion by it. Then King Arthur was ware where a knight sat all armed in a chair. 'Sir Knight,' said King Arthur, 'for what cause abidest thou here? that there may no knight ride this way but if he do joust with thee?' said the King. 'I rede thee leave that custom,' said King Arthur.

'This custom,' said the knight, 'have I used and will use, maugre who saith nay; and who is grieved with my custom, let him amend it that will.'

'I will amend it,' said King Arthur, 'And I shall defend it,' said the knight." (Observe will and shall here).

Here, you observe not only is there musical flow of single sentences, but one sentence remembers another and proportions itself thereto-if the last was long, this, is shorter or longer, and if one calls for a certain tune, the most calls for a different tune-and we have not only grace but variety. In this variety may be found an easy test of artistic prose. If you try to read two hundred lines of Chaucer's Melib?us or his Parson's Tale aloud, you are presently oppressed with a sense of bagpipishness in your own voice which becomes intolerable; but you can read Malory's King Arthur aloud from beginning to end with a never-cloying sense of proportion and rhythmic flow.

I wish I had time to demonstrate minutely how much of the relish of all fine prose is due to the arrangement of the sentences in such a way that consecutive sentences do not call for the same tune; for example, if one sentence is sharp antithesis-you know the well-marked speech tune of an antithesis, "do you mean this book, or do you mean that book?" you must be careful in the next sentence to vary the tune from that of the antithesis.

In the prose I read you from Chaucer and from the old manuscript, a large part of the intolerableness is due to the fact that nearly every sentence involves the tune of an aphorism or proverb, and the iteration of the same pitch-successions in the voice presently becomes wearisome. This fault-of the succession of antithetic ideas so that the voice becomes weary of repeating the same contrariety of accents-I can illustrate very strikingly in a letter which I happen to remember of Queen Elizabeth, whom I have found to be a great sinner against good prose in this particular.

Here is part of a letter from her to King Edward VI. concerning a portrait of herself which it seems the king had desired. (Italicised words represent antithetic accents.)

"Like as the rich man that daily gathereth riches to riches, and to one bag of money layeth a great sort till it come to infinite; so methinks your majesty, not being sufficed with so many benefits and gentleness shewed to me afore this time, doth now increase them in asking and desiring where you may bid and command, requiring a thing not worthy the desiring for itself, but made worthy for your highness' request. My picture I mean; in which, if the inward good mind toward your grace might as well be declared, as the outward face and countenance shall be seen, I would not have tarried the commandment but prevented it, nor have been the last to grant, but the first to offer it."

And so on. You observe here into what a sing-song the voice must fall; if you abstract the words, and say over the tune, it is continually; tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty, tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty.

I wish also that it lay within my province to pass on and show the gradual development of English prose, through Sir Thomas More, Lord Berners, and Roger Ascham, whom we may assign to the earlier half of the 16th Century, until it reaches a great and beautiful artistic stage in the prose of Fuller, of Hooker, and of Jeremy Taylor.

But the fact which I propose to use as throwing light on the novel, is simply the lateness of English prose as compared with English verse; and we have already sufficiently seen that the rise of our prose must be dated at least eight centuries after that of our formal poetry.

But having established the fact that English prose is so much later in development than English verse, the point that I wish to make in this connection now requires me to go and ask the question why is this so.

Without the time to adduce supporting facts from other literature, and indeed wholly unable to go into elaborate proof, let me say at once that upon examining the matter it seems probable that the whole earlier speech of man must have been rhythmical, and that in point of fact we began with verse which is much simpler in rhythm than any prose; and that we departed from this regular rhythmic utterance into more and more complex utterance just according as the advance of complexity in language and feeling required the freer forms of prose.

To adduce a single consideration leading toward this view: reflect for a moment that the very breath of every man necessarily divides off his words into rhythmic periods; the average rate of a man's breath being 17 to 20 respirations in a minute. Taking the faster rate as the more probable one in speaking, the man would, from the periodic necessity of refilling the lungs, divide his words into twenty groups, equal in time, every minute, and if these syllables were equally pronounced at, say, about the rate of 200 a minute, we should have ten syllables in each group, each ten syllables occupying (in the aggregate at least) the same time with any other ten syllables, that is, the time of our breath.

But this is just the rhythm of our English blank verse, in essential type; ten syllables to the line or group; and our primitive talker is speaking in the true English heroic rhythm. Thus it may be that our dear friend M. Jourdain was not so far wrong after all in his astonishment at finding that he had been speaking prose all his life.

* * *

Perhaps I ought here carefully to state that in propounding the idea that the whole common speech of early man may have been rhythmical through the operation of uniformity of syllables and periodicity of breath, and that for this reason prose, which is practically verse of a very complex rhythm, was naturally a later development; in propounding this idea, I say, I do not mean to declare that the prehistoric man, after a hard day's work on a flint arrow-head at his stone-quarry would dance back to his dwelling in the most beautiful rhythmic figures, would lay down his pal?olithic axe to a slow

song, and, striking an operatic attitude, would call out to his wife to leave off fishing in the stream and bring him a stone mug of water, all in a most sublime and impassioned flight of poetry. What I do mean to say is that if the prehistoric man's syllables were uniform, and his breath periodic, then the rhythmical results described would follow. Here let me at once illustrate this, and advance a step towards my final point in this connection, by reminding you how easily the most commonplace utterances in modern English, particularly when couched mainly in words of one syllable, fall into quite respectable verse rhythms. I might illustrate this, but Dr. Samuel Johnson has already done it for me:-"I put my hat upon my head and walked into the Strand, and there I met another man whose hat was in his hand." We have only to arrange this in proper form in order to see that it is a stanza of verse quite perfect as to all technical requirement:-

"I put my hat upon my head,

And walked into the Strand,

And there I met another man,

Whose hat was in his hand."

Now let me ask you to observe precisely what happens, when by adding words here and there in this verse we more and more obscure its verse form and bring out its prose form. Suppose, for example, we here write "hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here "encountered," and here "hanging," so as to make it read:

"I hastily put my hat upon my head,

And rushed forth into the Strand,

And there I encountered another man,

Whose hat was hanging in his hand."

Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? Remembering that original verse was in iambic 4's and 3's,

-by putting in the word "hastily" in the first line, we have not destroyed the rhythm; we still have the rhythmic sequence, "my hat upon my head," unchanged; but we have merely added brief rhythms, namely that of the word "hastily," which we may call a modern or loga?dic dactyl ; that is to say, instead now of leaving our first line all iambic, we have varied that rhythmus with another; and in so doing have converted our verse into prose. Similarly, in the second line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here deliver as a spondee-rūshed fōrth-varies the rhythm by this spondaic intervention, but still leaves us the original rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So, of the other introduced words, "encountered" and "hanging," each has its own rhythm-for an English tongue always gives these words with definite time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms, we have added to them. We have not made it formless, we have made it contain more forms.

Now, in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of prose; and have set up a distinction, which, though it may appear abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning literature. That distinction is, that the relation of prose to verse is not the relation of the formless to the formal: it is the relation of more forms to fewer forms. It is this relation which makes prose a freer form than verse.

When we are writing in verse, if we have the line with an iambus (say) then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible rhythmic forms; thus, while in verse we must use one form, in prose we may use many forms; and just to the extent of these possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, not because prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given sequence of prose has more forms in it than a sequence of verse.

Here, reserving to a later place the special application of all this to the novel, I have brought my first general point to a stage where it constitutes the basis of the second one. You have already heard much of "forms"-of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in art, and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable experience in what Shakspeare sadly calls "public means," I have found no matter upon which wider or more harmful misconceptions exist among people of culture, and particularly among us Americans, than this matter of the true functions of forms in art, of the true relation of science-which we may call the knowledge of forms-to art, and most especially of these functions and relations in literary art. These misconceptions have flowered out into widely different shapes.

In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they singularly fancy, will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works of the imagination; the idea seeming to be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic séance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out.

Another form of the same misconception goes precisely to the opposite extreme, and declares that the advance of science with its incidents is going to give a great new revolutionized democratic literature, which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and generally riot in a complete independence of form.

And finally-to mention no more than a third phase-we may consider the original misconception to have reached a climax which is at once absurd and infernal, in a professedly philosophical work called Le Roman Expérimentale, recently published by M. Emile Zola, gravely defending his peculiar novels as the records of scientific experiments, and declaring that the whole field of imaginative effort must follow his lead.

Now, if any of these beliefs are true, we are wickedly wasting our time here in studying the novel-at least any other novels except M. Zola's, and we ought to look to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe I could render you a greater service than by here arraying such contribution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, before briefly considering these three concrete errors I have enumerated-to wit, the belief (1) that science will destroy all poetry, all novel-writing and all imaginative work generally; (2) that science will simply destroy the old imaginative products and build up a new formless sort of imaginative product in its stead; and (3) that science will absorb into itself all imaginative effort, so that every novel will be merely the plain, unvarnished record of a scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit two or three principles whose steady light will leave, it seems to me, but little space for perplexity as to these diverse claims.

Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling to yourself of the province of form throughout our whole daily life. Here we find a striking consensus, at least in spirit, between the deliverances of the sternest science and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter, on the one hand, tells us that in the beginning the earth was without form and void; and it is only after the earth is formulated-after the various forms of the lights, of land and water, bird, fish and man appear-it is only then that life and use and art and relation and religion become possible. What we call the creation, therefore, is not the making something out of nothing, but it is the giving of form to a something which, though existing, existed to no purpose because it had no form.

On the other hand, the widest generalizations of science bring us practically to the same view. Science would seem fairly to have reduced all this host of phenomena which we call the world into a congeries of motions in many forms. What we know by our senses is simply such forms of these motions as our senses have a correlated capacity for. The atoms of this substance, moving in orbits too narrow for human vision, impress my sense with a certain property which I call hardness or resistance, this "hardness" being simply our name for one form of atom-motion when impressing itself on the human sense. So color, shape, &c.; these are our names representing a correlation between certain other forms of motion and our senses. Regarding the whole universe thus as a great congeries of forms of motion, we may now go farther and make for ourselves a scientific and useful generalization, reducing a great number of facts to a convenient common denominator, by considering that Science is the knowledge of these forms; that Art is the creation of beautiful forms; that Religion is the faith in the infinite Form-giver and in that infinity of forms which many things lead us to believe as existing, but existing beyond any present correlative capacities of our senses; and finally that Life is the control of all these forms to the satisfaction of our human needs.

And now advancing a step: when we remember how all accounts, the scientific, the religious, the historical, agree that the progress of things is from chaos or formlessness to form, and, as we saw in the case of verse and prose, afterwards from the one-formed to the many-formed, we are not disturbed by any shouts, however stentorian, of a progress that professes to be winning freedom by substituting formlessness for form; we know that the ages are rolling the other way,-who shall stop those wheels? We know that what they really do who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to substitute a bad form for a good one, or an ugly form for a beautiful one. Do not dream of getting rid of form; your most cutting stroke at it but gives us two forms for one. For, in a sense which adds additional reverence to the original meaning of those words, we may devoutly say that in form we live and move and have our being. How strange, then, the furtive apprehension of danger lying behind too much knowledge of form, too much technic, which one is amazed to find prevailing so greatly in our own country.

But, advancing a further step from the particular consideration of science as the knowledge of forms, let us come to the fact that as all art is a congeries of forms, each art must have its own peculiar science; and always we have, in a true sense, the art of an art and the science of that art. For example, correlative to the art of music, we have the general science of music, which indeed consists of several quite separate sciences. If a man desire to become a musical composer, he is absolutely obliged to learn (1) the science of Musical Form, (2) the science of Harmony, and (3) the science of Orchestration or Instrumentation.

The science of musical form, concerns this sort of matter, for instance. A symphony has generally four great divisions, called movements, separated usually from each other by a considerable pause. Each of these movements has a law of formation: it consists of two main subjects, or melodies, and a modulation-part. The sequence of these subjects, the method of varying them by causing now one and now another of the instruments to come forward and play the subject in hand while subordinate parts are assigned to the others, the interplay of the two subjects in the modulation-part,-all this is the subject-matter of a science which every composer must laboriously learn.

But again: he must learn the great science of harmony, and of that wonderful tonality which has caused our music to be practically a different art from what preceding ages called music; this science of harmony having its own body of classifications and formulated laws just as the science of Geology has, and a voluminous literature of its own. Again, he must painfully learn the range and capacities of each orchestral instrument, lest he write passages for the violin which no violin can play, &c., and further, the particular ideas which seem to associate themselves with the tone-color of each instrument, as the idea of women's voices with the clarionet, the idea of tenderness and childlikeness with the oboe, &c. This is not all; the musical composer may indeed write a symphony if he has these three sciences of music well in hand; but a fourth science of music, namely, the physics of music, or musical acoustics, has now grown to such an extent that every composer will find himself lame without a knowledge of it.

And so the art of painting has its correlative science of painting, involving laws of optics, and of form; the art of sculpture, its correlative science of sculpture, involving the science of human anatomy, &c.; and each one of the literary arts has its correlative science-the art of verse its science of verse, the art of prose its science of prose. Lastly, we all know that no amount of genius will supply the lack of science in art. Phidias may be all afire with the conception of Jove, but unless he is a scientific man to the extent of a knowledge of anatomy, he is no better artist than Strephon who cannot mould the handle of a goblet. What is Beethoven's genius until Beethoven has become a scientific man to the extent of knowing the sciences of Musical Form, of Orchestration, and of Harmony?

But now if I go on and ask what would be the worth of Shakspeare's genius unless he were a scientific man to the extent of knowing the science of English verse, or what would be George Eliot's genius unless she knew the science of English prose or the science of novel-writing, a sort of doubtful stir arises, and it would seem as if a suspicion of some vague esoteric difference between the relation of the literary arts to their correlative sciences and the relation of other arts to their correlative sciences influenced the general mind.

I am so unwilling you should think me here fighting a mere man of straw who has been arranged with a view to the convenience of knocking him down, and I find such mournful evidences of the complete misconception of form, of literary science in our literature, that, with a reluctance which every one will understand, I am going to draw upon a personal experience, to show the extent of that misconception.

Some of you may remember that a part of the course of lectures which your present lecturer delivered here last year were afterwards published in book-form, under the title of The Science of English Verse. Happening in the publisher's office some time afterwards, I was asked if I would care to see the newspaper notices and criticisms of the book, whereof the publishers had collected a great bundle. Most curious to see if some previous ideas I had formed as to the general relation between literary art and science would be confirmed, I read these notices with great interest. Not only were my suspicions confirmed: but it is perfectly fair to say that nine out of ten, even of those which most generously treated the book in hand, treated it upon the general theory that a work on the science of verse must necessarily be a collection of rules for making verses. Now, not one of these writers would have treated a work on the science of geology as a collection of rules for making rocks; or a work on the science of anatomy as a collection of rules for making bones or for procuring cadavers. In point of fact, a book of rules for making verses might very well be written; but then it would be a hand-book of the art of verse, and would take the whole science of verse for granted,-like an instruction-book for the piano, or the like.

If we should find the whole critical body of a continent treating (say) Prof. Huxley's late work on the crayfish as really a cookery-book, intended to spread intelligent ideas upon the best methods of preparing shell-fish for the table, we should certainly suspect something wrong; but this is precisely parallel with the mistake already mentioned.

But even when the functions of form, of science, in literary art have been comprehended, one is amazed to find among literary artists themselves a certain apprehension of danger in knowing too much of the forms of art. A valued friend who has won a considerable place in contemporary authorship in writing me not long ago said, after much abstract and impersonal admission of a possible science of verse-in the way that one admits there may be griffins, but feels no great concern about it-"as for me I would rather continue to write verse from pure instinct."

This fallacy-of supposing that we do a thing by instinct simply because we learned to do it unsystematically and without formal teaching-seems a curious enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. You have only to reflect a moment in order to see that not a single line of verse was ever written by instinct alone since the world began. For-to go no farther-the most poetically instinctive child is obliged at least to learn the science of language-the practical relation of noun and verb and connective-before the crudest line of verse can be written; and since no child talks by instinct, since every child has to learn from others every word it uses,-with an amount of diligence and of study which is really stupendous when we think of it-what wild absurdity to forget these years passed by the child in learning even the rudiments of the science of language which must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudiments of the science of verse can be learned-what wild absurdity to fancy that one is writing verse by instinct when even the language of verse, far from being instinctive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as a science.

Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it, remembering the relations of Science as the knowledge of forms, of Art as the creator of beautiful forms, of Religion as the aspiration towards unknown forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards technic, in literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor.

The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, of having too much technic; he dreads it will interfere with his spontaneity.

No more decisive confession of weakness can be made. It is only cleverness and small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the genius, the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you will enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him a fresh form. For indeed genius, the great artist, never works in the frantic vein vulgarly supposed; a large part of the work of the poet, for example, is reflective; a dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at once; he must choose the best; even in the extremest heat and sublimity of his raptus, he must preserve a god-like calm, and order thus and so, and keep the rule so that he shall to the end be master of his art and not be mastered by his art.

Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when she was, as the phrase is, carried out of herself, she never acted well: she must have her inspiration, she must be in a true raptus, but the raptus must be well in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once sublime and practical, of every act.

There is an old aphorism-it is twelve hundred years old-which covers all this ground of the importance of technic, of science, in the literary art, with such completeness and compactness that it always affects one like a poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet-and a rare one he must have been-an old Armorican named Hervé, of whom all manner of beautiful stories have survived. This aphorism is, "He who will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of you have read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these same Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography of Millet, the painter, and which was recently quoted in a number of Scribner's Magazine, you can realize that one who lived in that old Armorica-the modern Brittany from which Millet comes-knew full well what it meant to answer to the rocks.

Now, it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, which is the rudder of the literary artist, whether he work at verse or novels. I wish it were everywhere written, even in the souls of all our young American writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest literary artist our language has ever produced.

We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an Elizabethan eulogy:

Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,

(Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science),

My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part;

For though the poet's matter Nature be,

His art doth give the fashion; and that he

Who casts to write a living line must sweat,

(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat

Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same

(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;

Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,

For a good poet's made as well as born,

And such wert thou. Look how the father's face

Lives in his issue, even so the race.

Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines

In his well-turned and true-filed lines,

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.

No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.

With these views of the progress of forms in general, of the relations of Science-or the knowledge of all forms-to Art, or the creation of beautiful forms, we are prepared, I think, to maintain much equilibrium in the midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned, (1) of those who believe that Science will destroy all literary art; (2) of those who believe that art is to advance by becoming democratic and formless; (3) and lastly, of those who think that the future novelist is to enter the service of science as a police-reporter in ordinary for the information of current sociology.

Let us, therefore, inquire if it is really true-as I am told is much believed in Germany, and as I have seen not unfrequently hinted in the way of timorous apprehension in our own country-that science is to abolish the poet and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature. It is surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. But surely life is too short for the folly of arguing from prophecy when we can argue from history; and it seems to me this question is determined. As matter of fact, science (to confine our view to English science) has been already advancing with prodigious strides for two hundred and fifty years, and side by side with it English poetry has been advancing for the same period. Surely, whatever effect science has upon poetry can be traced during this long companionship. While Hooke and Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and Franklin and Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and Dalton and Huxley and many more have been penetrating into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, have been singing; while gravitation, oxygen, electro-magnetism, the atomic theory, the spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the Ode to St. Cecilia, the Essay on Man, Manfred, A man's a man for a' that, the Ode on Immortality, In Memoriam, the Ode to a Nightingale, The Psalm of Life, are being written. If indeed we go over into Germany, there is Goethe, at once pursuing science and poetry.

Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to me that we find-as to the substance of poetry-a steadily increasing confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in the sovereign fact of man's personality; while as to the form of the poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer reserves and richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible, in the space of these lectures, to illustrate this by any detailed view of all the poets mentioned, let us confine ourselves to one, Alfred Tennyson, and let us inquire how it fares with him. Certainly no more favorable selection could be made for those who believe in the destructiveness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of scientific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest thinkers of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer of botany, and saturated by his reading with all the scientific conceptions of his age. If science is to sweep away the silliness of faith and love, to destroy the whole field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it is a miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own words, this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our eyes. Suppose we inquire, Has science cooled this poet's love? We are answered in No. 60 of In Memoriam:

If in thy second state sublime,

Thy ransomed reason change replies

With all the circle of the wise,

The perfect flower of human time;

And if thou cast thine eyes below,

How dimly character'd and slight,

How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night,

How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!

Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,

Where thy first form was made a man,

I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can

The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.

Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspeare himself used to preach, in that series of Sonnets which we may call his In Memoriam to his friend; the same loving tenacity, unchanged by three hundred years of science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspeare's series, and note how both preach the supremacy of love over style or fashion.

If thou survive my well-contented day,

When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,

And shalt by fortune once more re-survey

These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,

Compare them with the bettering of the time;

And though they be outstripped by every pen,

Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,

Exceeded by the height of happier men.

O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:

"Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,

A dearer birth than this his love had bought,

To march in ranks of better equipage;

But since he died, and poets better prove,

Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."

Returning to Tennyson: has science cooled his yearning for human friendship? We are answered in No. 90 of In Memoriam. Where was ever such an invocation to a dead friend to return!

When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,

And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;

Or underneath the barren bush

Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;

Come, wear the form by which I know

Thy spirit in time among thy peers;

The hope of unaccomplish'd years

Be large and lucid round thy brow.

When summer's hourly mellowing change

May breathe, with many roses sweet,

Upon the thousand waves of wheat,

That ripple round the lonely grange;

Come; not in watches of the night,

But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,

Come, beauteous in thine after-form,

And like a finer light in light.

Or still more touchingly, in No. 49, for here he writes from the depths of a sick despondency, from all the darkness of a bad quarter of an hour.

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is racked with pains that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a fury, slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,

And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,

And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife,

And on the low dark verge of life

The twilight of eternal day.

Has it diminished his tender care for the weakness of others? We are wonderfully answered in No. 33.

O thou that after toil and storm

Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air,

Whose faith has centre everywhere,

Nor cares to fix itself to form.

Leave thou thy sister when she prays,

Her early Heaven, her happy views;

Nor then with shadow'd hint confuse

A life that leads melodious days.

Her faith thro' form is pure as thine,

Her hands are quicker unto good.

Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood

To which she links a truth divine!

See thou, that countest reason ripe

In holding by the law within,

Thou fail not in a world of sin,

And ev'n for want of such a type.

Has it crushed out his pure sense of poetic beauty? Here in No. 84 we have a poem which, for what I can only call absolute beauty, is simply perfect.

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

Of evening over brake and bloom

And meadow, slowly breathing bare

The round of space, and rapt below

Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,

And shadowing down the horned flood

In ripples, fan my brows, and blow

The fever from my cheek, and sigh

The full new life that feeds thy breath

Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death

Ill brethren, let the fancy fly

From belt to belt of crimson seas

On leagues of odor streaming far

To where in yonder orient star

A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'

And finally we are able to see from his own words that he is not ignorantly resisting the influences of science, but that he knows science, reveres it and understands its precise place and function. What he terms in the following poem (113 of In Memoriam) Knowledge and Wisdom are what we have been speaking of as Science and Poetry.

Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail

Against her beauty? May she mix

With men and prosper! Who shall fix

Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

* * *

Let her know her place;

She is the second, not the first.

A higher hand must make her mild,

If all be not in vain; and guide

Her footsteps, moving side by side

With wisdom, like the younger child:

For she is earthly of the mind,

But Wisdom heavenly of the Soul.

O friend, who camest to thy goal

So early, leaving me behind,

I would the great world grew like thee

Who grewest not alone in power

And knowledge, but by year and hour

In reverence and in charity.

If then, regarding Tennyson as fairly a representative victim of Science, we find him still preaching the poet's gospel of beauty, as comprehending the evangel of faith, hope and charity, only preaching it in those newer and finer forms with which science itself has endowed him; if we find his poetry just so much stronger and richer and riper by as much as he has been trained and beaten and disciplined with the stern questions which scientific speculation has put-questions which you will find presented in their most sombre terribleness in Tennyson's Two Voices; if finally we find him steadily regarding science as knowledge which only the true poet can vivify into wisdom:-then I say, life is too short to waste any of it in listening to those who, in the face of this history, still prophesy that Science is to destroy Poetry.

Nothing, indeed, would be easier than to answer all this argument upon a priori grounds: this argument is, in brief, that wonder and mystery are the imagination's material, and that science is to explain away all mystery. But what a crude view is this of explanation! The moment you examine the process, you find that at bottom explanation is simply the reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries. For simplest example: here is a mass of conglomerate: science explains that it is composed of a great number of pebbles which have become fastened together by a natural cement. But after all, is not one pebble as great a mystery as a mountain of conglomerate? though we are familiar with the pebble, and unfamiliar with the other. Now to the wise man, the poet, familiarity with a mystery brings no contempt; to explanation of science, supremely fascinating as it is, but opens up a new world of wonders, but adds to old mysteries. Indeed, the wise searcher into nature always finds, as a poet has declared, that

... "In seeking to undo

One riddle, and to find the true

I knit a hundred others new."

And so, away with this folly. Science, instead of being the enemy of poetry, is its quartermaster and commissary-it forever purveys for poetry, and just so much more as it shall bring man into contact with nature, just so much more large and intense and rich will be the poetry of the future and more abundant in its forms.

And here we may advance to our second class, who believe that the poetry of the future is to be democratic and formless.

I need quote but a few scraps from characteristic sentences here and there in a recent paper of Whitman's, in order to present a perfectly fair view of his whole doctrine. When, for instance, he declares that Tennyson's poetry is not the poetry of the future because, although it is "the highest order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure and almost always perfumed like the tuberose to an extreme of sweetness," yet it has "never one democratic page," and is "never free, na?ve poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated;" when we find him bragging of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic" (the United States of course) "with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied, long and continued storm-and-stress stages (so offensive to the well-regulated, college-bred mind), wherewith nature, history and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past;" and when finally we hear him tenderly declaring that "meanwhile democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight-but 'tis the twilight of dawn;"-we are in sufficient possession of the distinctive catch-words which summarize his doctrine.

In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the outset which throws a strange but effective light upon the whole argument. It seems curious to reflect that the two poets who have most avowedly written for the people, who have professed most distinctively to represent and embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the people's bone, and flesh of the people's flesh, are precisely the two who have most signally failed of all popular acceptance and who have most exclusively found audience at the other extreme of culture. These are Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenuously and faithfully Wordsworth believed that in using the simplest words and treating the lowliest themes, he was bringing poetry back near to the popular heart; yet Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, the apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything that could be called popular; and in point of fact it is probable that many a peasant who would feel his blood stir in hearing A man's a man for a' that, would grin and guffaw if you should read him Wordsworth's Lambs and Peter Grays.

And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Professing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt-sleeves and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the English illuminated.

The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be impossible except in a highly civilized society.

* * *

At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some solid basis for our ideas of form in general, and to develop thereupon some conceptions of form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to see our way clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail. We there addressed ourselves towards considering particularly three of these misconceptions.

The first we examined was that which predicts the total death of imaginative literature-poetry, novels and all-in consequence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by virtue of which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it cannot live in the light; so that the destructive explanations of advancing science, it was apprehended, would gradually force all our imaginative energies back into the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance, until finally, penetrating these also, it would exterminate the species. We first tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this abstract conclusion by a concrete examination of Tennyson-as a poet most likely to show the influence of science, because himself most exposed to it, indeed most saturated with it-we found from several readings in In Memoriam that whether as to love or friendship, or the sacredness of marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true relation of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, the effect of science had been on the whole to broaden the conceptions and to clarify the forms in which they were expressed by this great poet.

And having thus appealed to facts, we found further that in the nature of things no such destruction could follow; that what we call explanation in science is at bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true imaginative mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of this world grow all the greater as they grow more familiar, the necessary effect of scientific explanations is at last the indefinite increase of food for the imagination. The modern imagination, indeed, shall still love mystery; but it is not the shallow mystery of those small darks which are enclosed by caves and crumbling dungeons, it is the unfathomable mystery of the sunlight and the sun; it is this inexplicable contradictory shadow of the infinite which is projected upon the finite; it is this multitudinous flickering of all the other ego's upon the tissue of my ego: these are the lights and shades and vaguenesses of mystery in which the modern imaginative effort delights. And here I cannot help adding to what was said on this subject in the last lecture, by declaring to every young man who may entertain the hope of poethood, that at this stage of the world you need not dream of winning the attention of sober people with your poetry unless that poetry, and your soul behind it, are informed and saturated at least with the largest final conceptions of current science. I do not mean that you are to write "Loves of the Plants;" I do not mean that you are to versify Biology; but I mean that you must be so far instinct with the scientific thought of the time that your poetic conceptions will rush as it were from under these pure, cold facts of science like those Alpine torrents which flow out of glaciers. Or,-to change the figure for the better-just as the chemist, in causing chlorine and hydrogen to form hydrochloric acid, finds that he must not only put the chlorine and hydrogen together, but he must put them together in the presence of light in order to make them combine; so the poet of our time will find that his poetic combinations, his grandest syntheses of wisdom, own this law; and they, too, must be effected in the presence of the awful light of science.

Returning to our outline of the last lecture: After we had discussed this matter, we advanced to the second of the great misconceptions of the function of form in art-that which holds that the imaginative effort of the future will be better than that of the present, and that this improvement will come through a progress towards formlessness. After quoting several sentences from Whitman which seemed to contain the substantial argument-to-wit, that the poetry of the future is to be signalized by independence of form, and is, by virtue of this independence, to gain strength, and become a democratic poetry, as contrasted with the supposed weak and aristocratic poetry of the present-I called your attention to a notable circumstance which seems to throw a curious light along this inquiry: that circumstance being that the two English poets who have most exclusively laid claim to represent the people in poetry, to express nothing but the people's heart in the people's words, namely Wordsworth and Whitman, are precisely the two whose audience has been most exclusively confined to the other extreme of culture. Wordsworth, instead of appealing to Hodge, Nokes, and Stiles; instead of being found in penny editions on the collier's shelves; is most cherished by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the high-priest of culture. And so with Whitman: we may say with safety that no preacher was ever so decisively rejected by his own: continually crying democracy in the market-place, and crying it in forms or no-forms professing to be nothing but products of the democratic spirit; nevertheless the democracy everywhere have turned a deaf ear, and it is only with a few of the most retired thinkers of our time that Whitman has found even a partial acceptance.

And finally, by way of showing a reason for this state of things in Whitman's case, the last lecture closed with the assertion that Whitman's poetry, in spite of his belief that it is democratic, is really aristocratic to the last degree; and instead of belonging, as he asserts to an early and fresh-thoughted stage of a republic, is really poetry which would be impossible except in a highly civilized state of society.

Here, then, let us take up the thread of that argument. In the quotations which were given from Whitman's paper, we have really the ideal democracy and democrat of this school. It is curious to reflect in the first place that in point of fact no such democracy, no such democrat, has ever existed in this country. For example: when Whitman tells us of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud ill-pitched voice; its fights, errors, eructations, dishonesties, audacities;" et cetera: when he tells us this, with a sort of caressing touch upon all the bad adjectives, rolling the "errors" and the "audacities" and the "viciousness" under his tongue and faithfully believing that the strength which recommends his future poetry is to come out of viciousness and ruffianly elections and the like; let us inquire, to what representative facts in our history does this picture correspond; what great democrat who has helped to "block out" this present republic, sat for this portrait? Is it George Washington, that beautiful, broad tranquil spirit whom, I sometimes think, even we Americans have never yet held quite at his true value,-is it Washington who was vicious, dishonest, audacious, combative? But Washington had some hand in blocking out this republic. Or what would our courtly and philosophic Thomas Jefferson look like, if you should put this slouch hat on him, and open his shirt-front at the bosom, and set him to presiding over a ruffianly nomination? Yet he had some hand in blocking out this republic. In one of Whitman's poems I find him crying out to Americans, in this same strain: "O lands! would you be freer than all that has ever been before? If you would be freer than all that has been before, come listen to me." And this is the deliverance:

"Fear grace-fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse,

Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice;

Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature,

Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of States and men."

And in another line, he rejoices in America because-"Here are the roughs, beards, ... combativeness, and the like".

But where are these roughs, these beards, and this combativeness? Were the Adamses and Benjamin Franklin roughs? was it these who taught us to make ruffianly nominations? But they had some hand in blocking out this republic. In short, leaving each one to extend this list of names for himself, it may be fairly said that nowhere in history can one find less of that ruggedness which Whitman regards as the essential of democracy; nowhere more of that grace which he considers fatal to it, than among the very representative democrats who blocked out this republic. In truth, when Whitman cries "fear the mellow sweet," and "beware the mortal ripening of nature", we have an instructive instance of the extreme folly into which a man may be led by mistaking a metaphor for an argument. The argument here is, you observe, that because an apple in the course of nature rots soon after it mellows, argal a man cannot mellow his spirit with culture without decaying soon afterwards. Of course it is sufficient only to reflect non sequitur; for it is precisely the difference between the man and the apple, that, whereas every apple must rot after ripeness, no man is bound to.

If therefore after an inquiry ranging from Washington and Jefferson down to William Cullen Bryant (that surely unrugged and graceful figure who was so often called the finest American gentleman) and Lowell, and Longfellow, and the rest who are really the men that are blocking out our republic, if we find not a single representative American democrat to whom any of these pet adjectives apply,-not one who is measurelessly vicious, or ruffianly, or audacious, or purposely rugged, or contemptuous towards the graces of life,-then we are obliged to affirm that the whole ideal drawn by Whitman is a fancy picture with no counterpart in nature. It is perfectly true that we have ruffianly nominations; but we have them because the real democrats who govern our republic, who represent our democracy, stay away from nominating conventions and leave them to the ruffians. Surely no one can look with the most cursory eye upon our everyday American life without seeing that the real advance of our society goes on not only without, but largely in spite of that ostensible apparatus, legislative, executive, judicial which we call the Government, &c.; that really the most effective legislation in our country is that which is enacted in the breasts of the individual democrats who compose it. And this is true democratic growth, every day; more and more, each man perceives that the shortest and most effectual method of securing his own rights is to respect the rights of others; and so every day do we less and less need outside interference in our individual relations; so that every day we approach nearer and nearer towards that ideal government in which each man is, mainly, his own legislator, his own governor or president, and his own judge, and in which the public government is mainly a concert of measures for the common sanitation and police.

But again: it is true as Whitman says that we have dishonesties; but we punish them, they are not representative, they have no more relation to democracy than the English thief has to English aristocracy.

From what spirit of blindness is it alleged that these things are peculiar to our democracy? Whitman here explicitly declares that the over-dainty Englishman "can not stomach the high-life below stairs of our social status so far;" this high-life consisting of the measureless viciousness, the dishonesty, and the like. Cannot stomach it, no; who could? But how absurd to come down to this republic, to American society for these things! Alas, I know an Englishman, who, three hundred years ago, found these same things in that aristocracy there; and he too, thank heaven, could not stomach them, for he has condemned them in a sonnet which is the solace of all sober-thoughted ages. I mean Shakspeare, and his sonnet