Part II.--Abstraction

Section I.--Agreement of this Philosophy with the English Mind

An abyss of chance and an abyss of ignorance. The prospect is gloomy: no matter, if it be true. At all events, this theory of science is a theory of English science. Rarely, I grant you, has a thinker better summed up in his teaching the practice of his country; seldom has a man better represented, by his negations and his discoveries, the limits and scope of his race. The operations, of which he constructs science, are those in which the English excel all others, and those which he excludes from science are precisely those in which the English are deficient, more than any other nation. He has described the English mind, whilst he thought to describe the human mind. That is his glory, but it is also his weakness. There is in your idea of knowledge a flaw, of which the incessant repetition ends by creating the gulf of chance, from which, according to him, all things arise, and the gulf of ignorance, at whose brink, according to him, our knowledge ends. And see what comes of it. By cutting away from science the knowledge of first causes, that is, of divine things, you reduce men to become sceptical, positive, utilitarian, if they are cool-headed; or mystical, enthusiastic, methodistical, if they have lively imaginations. In this huge unknown void, which you place beyond our little world, passionate men and uneasy consciences find room for all their dreams; and men of cold judgment, despairing of arriving at any certain knowledge, have nothing left but to sink down to the search for practical means which may serve for the amelioration of our condition. It seems to me that these two dispositions are most frequently met with in an English mind. The religious and the positive spirit dwell there side by side, but separate. This produces an odd medley, and I confess that I prefer the way in which the Germans have reconciled science with faith.--But their philosophy is but badly written poetry.--Perhaps so.--But what they call reason, or intuition of principles, is only the faculty of building up hypotheses.--Perhaps so.--But the systems which they have constructed have not held their ground before experience.--I do not defend what they have done.--But their absolute, their subject, their object, and the rest, are but big words.--I do not defend their style.--What, then, do you defend?--Their idea of Causation.--You believe with them that causes are discovered by a revelation of the reason?--By no means.--You believe with us that our knowledge of causes is based on simple experience?--Still less.--You think, then, that there is a faculty, other than experience and reason, capable of discovering causes?--Yes.--You think there is an intermediate course between intuition and observation, capable of arriving at principles, as it is affirmed that the first is, capable of arriving at truths, as we find that the second is?--Yes.--What is it? Abstraction. Let us return to your original idea; I will endeavor to show in what I think it incomplete, and how you seem to me to mutilate the human mind. But my argument will be the formal one of an advocate, and requires to be stated at length.

Section II.--The Nature of Abstraction

Your starting-point is good: man, in fact, does not know anything of substances; he knows neither minds nor bodies; he perceives only transient, isolated, internal conditions; he makes use of these to affirm and name exterior states, positions, movements, changes, and avails himself of them for nothing else. He can only attain to facts, whether within or without, sometimes transient, when his impression is not repeated; sometimes permanent, when his impression, many times repeated, makes him suppose that it will be repeated as often as he wishes to experience it. He only grasps colors, sounds, resistances, movements: sometimes momentary and variable, sometimes like one another, and renewed. To group these facts more advantageously, he supposes, by an artifice of language, qualities and properties. We go even further than you: we think that there are neither minds nor bodies, but simply groups of present or possible movements or thoughts. We believe that there are no substances, but only systems of facts. We regard the idea of substance as a psychological illusion. We consider substance, force, and all the modern metaphysical existences, as the remains of scholastic entities. We think that there exists nothing but facts and laws, that is, events and the relations between them; and we recognize, with you, that all knowledge consists, first of all, in connecting or adding fact to fact. But when this is done, a new operation begins, the most fertile of all, which consists in reducing these complex into simple facts. A splendid faculty appears, the source of language, the interpreter of nature, the parent of religions and philosophies, the only genuine distinction, which according to its degree, separates man from the brute, and great from little men. I mean Abstraction, which is the power of isolating the elements of facts, and of considering them one by one. My eyes follow the outline of a square, and abstraction isolates its two constituent properties, the equality of its sides and angles. My fingers touch the surface of a cylinder, and abstraction isolates its two generative elements, the idea of a rectangle, and of the revolution of this rectangle about one of its sides as an axis. A hundred thousand experiments develop for me, by an infinite number of details, the series of physiological operations which constitute life; and abstraction isolates the law of this series, which is a round of constant loss and continual reparation. Twelve hundred pages teach me Mill's opinion on the various facts of science, and abstraction isolates his fundamental idea, namely, that the only fertile propositions are those which connect a fact with another not contained in the first. Everywhere the case is the same. A fact, or a series of facts, can always be resolved into its components. It is this resolution which forms our problem, when we ask what is the nature of an object. It is these components we look for when we wish to penetrate into the inner nature of a being. These we designate under the names of forces, causes, laws, essences, primitive properties. They are not new facts added to the first, but an essence or extract from them; they are contained in the first, they have no existence apart from the facts themselves. When we discover them, we do not pass from one fact to another, but from one to another aspect of the same fact; from the whole to a part, from the compound to the components. We only see the same thing under two forms; first, as a whole, then as divided: we only translate the same idea from one language into another, from the language of the senses into abstract language, just as we express a curve by an equation, or a cube as a function of its side. It signifies little whether this translation be difficult or not; or that we generally need the accumulation or comparison of a vast number of facts to arrive at it, and whether our mind may not often succumb before accomplishing it. However this may be, in this operation, which is evidently fertile, instead of proceeding from one fact to another, we go from the same to the same; instead of adding experiment to experiment, we set aside some portion of the first; instead of advancing, we pause to examine the ground we stand on. There are, thus, fruitful judgments, which, however, are not the results of experience: there are essential propositions, which, however, are not merely verbal: there is, thus, an operation, differing from experience, which acts by cutting down, instead of by addition; which, instead of acquiring, devotes itself to acquired data; and which, going further than observation, opening a new field to the sciences, defines their nature, determines their progress, completes their resources, and marks out their end.

This is the great omission of your system. Abstraction is left in the background, barely mentioned, concealed by the other operations of the mind, treated as an appendage of Experience; we have but to re-establish it in the general theory, in order to reform the particular theories in which it is absent.

Section III.--Definitions Explain the Abstract Generating Elements of Things

To begin with Definitions. Mill teaches that there is no definition of things, and that when you define a sphere as the solid generated by the revolution of a semicircle about its diameter, you only define a name. Doubtless you tell me by this the meaning of a name, but you also teach me a good deal more. You state that all the properties of every sphere are derived from this generating formula; you reduce an infinitely complex system of facts to two elements; you transform sensible into abstract data; you express the essence of the sphere, that is to say, the inner and primordial cause of all its properties. Such is the nature of every true definition; it is not content with explaining a name, it is not a mere description; it does not simply indicate a distinctive property; it does not limit itself to that ticketing of an object which will cause it to be distinguished from all others. There are, besides its definition, several other ways of causing the object to be recognized; there are other properties belonging to it exclusively: we might describe a sphere by saying that, of all bodies having an equal surface, it occupies the most space; or in many other ways. But such descriptions are not definitions; they lay down a characteristic and derived property, not a generating and primitive one; they do not reduce the thing to its factors, and reconstruct it before our eyes; they do not show its inner nature and its irreducible elements. A definition is a proposition which marks in an object that quality from which its others are derived, but which is not derived from others. Such a proposition is not verbal, for it teaches the quality of a thing. It is not the affirmation of an ordinary quality, for it reveals to us the quality which is the source of the rest. It is an assertion of an extraordinary kind, the most fertile and valuable of all, which sums up a whole science, and in which it is the aim of every science to be summed up. There is a definition in every science, and one for each object. We do not, in every case, possess it, but we search for it everywhere. We have arrived at defining the planetary motion by the tangential force and attraction which compose it; we can already partially define a chemical body by the notion of equivalent, and a living body by the notion of type. We are striving to transform every group of phenomena into certain laws, forces, or abstract notions. We endeavor to attain in every object the generating elements, as we do attain them in the sphere, the cylinder, the circle, the cone, and in all mathematical loci. We reduce natural bodies to two or three kinds of movement--attraction, vibration, polarization--as we reduce geometrical bodies to two or three kinds of elements--the point, the movement, the line; and we consider our science partial or complete, provisional or definite, according as this reduction is approximate or absolute, imperfect or complete.

Section IV.--The Basis of Proof in Syllogism is an Abstract Law

The same alteration is required in the Theory of Proof. According to Mill, we do not prove that Prince Albert will die by premising that all men are mortal, for that would be asserting the same thing twice over; but from the facts that John, Peter, and others, in short, all men of whom we have ever heard, have died.--I reply that the real source of our inference lies neither in the mortality of John, Peter, and company, nor in the mortality of all men, but elsewhere. We prove a fact, says Aristotle,[431] by showing its cause. We shall therefore prove the mortality of Prince Albert, by showing the cause which produces his death. And why will he die? Because the human body, being an unstable chemical compound, must in time be resolved; in other words, because mortality is added to the quality of man. Here is the cause and the proof. It is this abstract law which, present in nature, will cause the death of the prince, and which, being present to my mind, shows me that he will die. It is this abstract proposition which is demonstrative; it is neither the particular nor the general propositions. In fact the abstract proposition proves the others. If John, Peter, and others, are dead, it is because mortality is added to the quality of man. If all men are dead, or will die, it is still because mortality is added to the quality, of man. Here, again, the part played by Abstraction has been overlooked. Mill has confounded it with Experience: he has not distinguished the proof from the materials of the proof, the abstract law from the finite or indefinite number of its applications. The applications contain the law and the proof, but are themselves neither law nor proof. The examples of Peter, John, and others, contain the cause, but they are not the cause. It is not sufficient to add up the cases, we must extract from them the law. It is not enough to experimentalize, we must abstract. This is the great scientific operation. Syllogism does not proceed from the particular to the particular, as Mill says, nor from the general to the particular, as the ordinary logicians teach, but from the abstract to the concrete; that is to say, from cause to effect. It is on this ground that it forms part of science, the links of which it makes and marks out; it connects principles with effects; it brings together definitions and phenomena. It diffuses through the whole range of science that Abstraction which definition has carried to its summit.

Section V.--Axioms are Relations between Abstract Truths

Abstraction explains also axioms. According to Mill, if we know that when equal magnitudes are added to equal magnitudes the wholes are equal, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, it is by external ocular experiment, or by an internal experiment, by the aid of imagination. Doubtless we may thus arrive at the conclusion that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, but we might recognize it also in another manner. We might represent a straight line in imagination, and we may also form a conception of it by reason. We may either study its form or its definition. We can observe it in itself, or in its generating elements. I can represent to myself a line ready drawn, but I can also resolve it into its elements. I can go back to its formation, and discover the abstract elements which produce it, as I have watched the formation of the cylinder and discover the revolution of the rectangle which generated it. It will not do to say that a straight line is the shortest from one point to another, for that is a derived property; but I may say that it is the line described by a point, tending to approach towards another point, and towards that point only: which amounts to saying that two points suffice to determine a straight line; in other words, that two straight lines, having two points in common, coincide in their entire length; from which we see that if two straight lines approach to enclose a space, they would form but one straight line, and enclose nothing at all. Here is a second method of arriving at a knowledge of the axiom, and it is clear that it differs much from the first. In the first we verify; in the second we deduce it. In the first we find by experience that it is true; in the second we prove it to be true. In the first we admit the truth; in the second we explain it. In the first we merely remark that the contrary of the axiom is inconceivable; in the second we discover, in addition, that the contrary of the axiom is contradictory. Having given the definition of the straight line, we find that the axiom that two straight lines cannot enclose a space is comprised in it, and may be derived from it, as a consequent from a principle. In fact, it is nothing more than an identical proposition, which means that the subject contains its attribute; it does not connect two separate terms, irreducible one to the other; it unites two terms, of which the second is a part of the first. It is a simple analysis, and so are all axioms. We have only to decompose them, in order to see that they do not proceed from one object to a different one, but are concerned with one object only. We have but to resolve the notions of equality, cause, substance, time, and space into their abstracts, in order to demonstrate the axioms of equality, substance, cause, time, and space. There is but one axiom, that of identity. The others are only its applications or its consequences. When this is admitted, we at once see that the range of our mind is altered. We are no longer merely capable of relative and limited knowledge, but also of absolute and infinite knowledge; we possess in axioms facts which not only accompany one another, but one of which includes the other. If, as Mill says, they merely accompanied one another, we should be obliged to conclude with him, that perhaps this might not always be the case. We should not see the inner necessity for their connection, and should only admit it as far as our experience went; we should say that, the two facts being isolated in their nature, circumstances might arise in which they would be separate; we should affirm the truth of axioms only in reference to our world and mind. If, on the contrary, the two facts are such that the first contains the second, we should establish on this very ground the necessity of their connection; wheresoever the first may be found, it will carry the second with it, since the second is a part of it, and cannot be separated from it. Nothing can exist between them and divide them, for they are but one thing under different aspects. Their connection is therefore absolute and universal; and we possess truths which admit neither doubt nor limitation, nor condition, nor restriction. Abstraction restores to axioms their value, whilst it shows their origin; and we restore to science her dispossessed dominion, by restoring to the mind the faculty of which it had been deprived.

Section VI.--The Methods of Induction

Induction remains to be considered: which seems to be the triumph of pure experience, while it is in reality, the triumph of abstraction. When I discover, by induction, that cold produces dew, or that the passage from the liquid to the solid state produces crystallization, I establish a connection between two abstract facts. Neither cold, nor dew, nor the passage from the liquid to the solid state, nor crystallization, exist in themselves. They are parts of phenomena, extracts from complex cases, simple elements included in compound aggregates. I withdraw and isolate them; I isolate dew in general from all local, temporary, special dews which I observe; I isolate cold in general from all special, various distinct colds, which may be produced by all varieties of texture, all diversities of substance, all inequalities of temperature, all complications of circumstances. I join an abstract antecedent to an abstract consequent, and I connect them, as Mill himself shows, by subtractions, suppressions, eliminations; I expel from the two groups, containing them, all the proximate circumstances; I discover the couple under the surroundings which obscure it; I detach, by a series of comparisons and experiments, all the subsidiary accidental circumstances which have clung to it, and thus I end by laying it bare. I seem to be considering twenty different cases, and in reality I only consider one; I appear to proceed by addition, and in fact I am performing subtraction. All the methods of Induction, therefore, are methods of Abstraction, and all the work of Induction is the connection of abstract facts.

Section VII.--Experience and Abstraction

We see now the two great moving powers of science, and the two great manifestations of nature. There are two operations, experience and abstraction; there are two kingdoms, that of complex facts, and that of simple elements. The first is the effect, the second the cause. The first is contained in the second, and is deduced from it, as a consequent from its principle. The two are equivalent: they are one and the same thing considered under two aspects. This magnificent moving universe, this tumultuous chaos of mutually dependent events, this incessant life, infinitely varied and multiplied, may be all reduced to a few elements and their relations. Our whole efforts result in passing from one to the other, from the complex to the simple, from facts to laws, from experiences to formulas. And the reason of this is evident; for this fact, which I perceive by the senses or the consciousness, is but a fragment, arbitrarily severed by my senses or my consciousness, from the infinite and continuous woof of existence. If they were differently constituted, they would intercept other fragments; it is the chance of their structure which determines what is actually perceived. They are like open compasses, which might be more or less extended; and the area of the circle which they describe is not natural, but artificial. It is so in two ways, both externally and internally. For, when I consider an event, I isolate it artificially from its natural surroundings, and I compose it artificially of elements which do not form a natural group. When I see a falling stone, I separate the fall from the anterior circumstances which are really connected with it; and I put together the fall, the form, the structure, the color, the sound, and twenty other circumstances which are really not connected with it. A fact, then, is an arbitrary aggregate, and at the same time an arbitrary severing;[432] that is to say, a factitious group, which separates things connected, and connects things that are separate. Thus, so long as we only regard nature by observation, we do not see it as it is: we have only a provisional and illusory idea of it. Nature is, in reality, a tapestry, of which we only see the reverse; this is why we try to turn it. We strive to discover laws; that is, the natural groups which are really distinct from their surroundings, and composed of elements really connected. We discover couples; that is to say, real compounds and real connections. We pass from the accidental to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute, from the appearance to the reality; and having found these first couples, we practice upon them the same operation as we did upon facts, for, though in a less degree, they are of the same nature. Though more abstract, they are still complex. They may be decomposed and explained. There is some ulterior reason for their existence. There is some cause or other which constructs and unites them. In their case, as well as for facts, we can search for generating elements into which they may be resolved, and from which they may be deduced. And this operation may be continued until we have arrived at elements wholly simple; that is to say, such that their decomposition would involve a contradiction. Whether we can find them or not, they exist; the axiom of causation would be falsified if they were absent. There are, then, indecomposable elements, from which are derived more general laws; and from these, again, more special laws; and from these the facts which we observe; just as in geometry there are two or three primitive notions, from which are deduced the properties of lines, and from these the properties of surfaces, solids, and the numberless forms which nature can produce, or the mind imagine. We can now comprehend the value and meaning of that axiom of causation which governs all things, and which Mill has mutilated. There is an inner constraining force which gives rise to every event, which unites every compound, which engenders every actual fact. This signifies, on the one hand, that there is a reason for everything; that every fact has its law; that every compound can be reduced to simple elements; that every product implies factors; that every quality and every being must be reducible from some superior and anterior term. And it signifies, on the other hand, that the product is equivalent to the factors, that both are but the same thing under different aspects; that the cause does not differ in nature from the effect; that the generating powers are but elementary properties; that the active force, by which we represent Nature to our minds, is but the logical necessity which mutually transforms the compound and the simple, the fact and the law. Thus we determine beforehand the limits of every science; and we possess the potent formula, which, establishing the invincible connection and the spontaneous production of existences, places in Nature the moving spring of Nature, whilst it drives home and fixes in the heart of every living thing the iron fangs of necessity.

Section VIII.--Idea and Limits of Metaphysics

Can we arrive at a knowledge of these primary elements? For my part, I think we can; and the reason is, that, being abstractions, they are not beyond the region of facts, but are comprised in them, so that we have only to extract them from the facts. Besides, being the most abstract, that is, the most general of all things, there are no facts which do not comprise them, and from which we cannot extract them. However limited our experience may be, we can arrive at these primary notions; and it is from this observation that the modern German metaphysicians have started, in attempting their vast constructions. They understood that there are simple notions, that is to say, indecomposable abstract facts, that the combinations of these engender all others, and that the laws for their mutual union or contrarieties, are the primary laws of the universe. They tried to attain to these ideas, and to evolve, by pure reason, the world as observation shows it to us. They have partly failed; and their gigantic edifice, factitious and fragile, hangs in ruins, reminding one of those temporary scaffoldings which only serve to mark out the plan of a future building. The reason is, that with a high notion of our powers, they had no exact view of their limits. For we are outflanked on all sides by the infinity of time and space; we find ourselves thrown in the midst of this monstrous universe like a shell on the beach, or an ant at the foot of a steep slope. Here Mill is right. Chance is at the end of all our knowledge, as on the threshold of all our postulates: we vainly try to rise, and that by conjecture, to an initial state; but this state depends on the preceding one, which depends on another, and so on; and thus we are forced to accept it as a pure postulate, and to give up the hope of deducing it, though we know that it ought to be deduced. It is so in all sciences, in geology, natural history, physics, chemistry, psychology, history, and the primitive accidental fact extends its effects into all parts of the sphere in which it is comprised. If it had been otherwise, we should have neither the same planets, nor the same chemical compounds, nor the same vegetables, nor the same animals, nor the same races of men, nor, perhaps, any of these kinds of beings. If an ant were taken into another country, it would see neither the same trees, nor insects, nor dispositions of the soil, nor changes of the atmosphere, nor, perhaps, any of these forms of existence. There is, then, in every fact and in every object, an accidental and local part, a vast portion, which, like the rest, depends on primitive laws, but not directly, only through an infinite circuit of consequences in such a way that between it and the primitive laws there is an infinite hiatus, which can only be bridged over by an infinite series of deductions.

Such is the inexplicable part of phenomena, and this is what the German metaphysicians tried to explain. They wished to deduce from their elementary theorems the form of the planetary system, the various laws of physics and chemistry, the main types of life, the progress of human civilizations and thought. They contorted their universal formulae with the view of deriving from them particular cases; they took indirect and remote consequences as direct and proximate ones; they omitted or suppressed the great work which is interposed between the first laws and the final consequences; they discarded Chance from their construction, as a basis unworthy of science; and the void so left, badly filled up by deceptive materials, caused the whole edifice to fall to ruins.

Does this amount to saying, that in the facts with which this little corner of the universe furnishes us, everything is local? By no means. If an ant were capable of making experiments, it might attain to the idea of a physical law, a living form, a representative sensation, an abstract thought; for a foot of ground, on which there is a thinking brain, includes all these. Therefore, however limited be the field of the mind, it contains general facts; that is, facts spread over very vast external territories, into which its limitation prevents it from penetrating. If the ant were capable of reasoning, it might construct arithmetic, algebra, geometry, mechanics; for a movement of half an inch contains in the abstract, time, space, number, and force: all the materials of mathematics: therefore, however limited the field of a mind's researches be, it includes universal data; that is, facts spread over the whole region of time and space. Again, if the ant were a philosopher, it might evolve the ideas of existence, of nothingness, and all the materials of metaphysics; for any phenomenon, interior or exterior, suffices to present these materials: therefore, however limited the field of a mind be, it contains absolute truths; that is, such that there is no object from which they could be absent. And this must necessarily be so; for the more general a fact is, the fewer objects need we examine to meet with it. If it is universal, we meet with it everywhere; if it is absolute, we cannot escape meeting it. This is why, in spite of the narrowness of our experience, metaphysics, I mean the search for first causes, is possible, but on condition that we remain at a great height, that we do not descend into details, that we consider only the most simple elements of existence, and the most general tendencies of nature. If anyone were to collect the three or four great ideas in which our sciences result, and the three or four kinds of existence which make up our universe; if he were to compare those two strange quantities which we call duration and extension, those principal forms or determinations of quantity which we call physical laws, chemical types, and living species, and that marvellous representative power, the Mind, which, without falling into quantity, reproduces the other two and itself; if he discovered among these three terms--the pure quantity, the determined quantity, and the suppressed quantity[433]--such an order that the first must require the second, and the second the third; if he thus established that the pure quantity is the necessary commencement of Nature, and that Thought is the extreme term at which Nature is wholly suspended; if, again, isolating the elements of these data, he showed that they must be combined just as they are combined, and not otherwise: if he proved, moreover, that there are no other elements, and that there can be no other, he would have sketched out a system of metaphysics without encroaching on the positive sciences, and have attained the source, without being obliged to descend to trace the various streams.

In my opinion, these two great operations, Experience as you have described it, and Abstraction, as I have tried to define it, comprise in themselves all the resources of the human mind, the one in its practical, the other in its speculative direction. The first leads us to consider nature as an assemblage of facts, the second as a system of laws: the exclusive employment of the first is English; that of the second, German. If there is a place between these two nations, it is ours. We have extended the English ideas in the eighteenth century; and now we can, in the nineteenth, add precision to German ideas. Our business is to restrain, to correct, to complete the two types of mind, one by the other, to combine them together, to express their ideas in a style generally understood, and thus to produce from them the universal mind.

Section IX.--A Morning in Oxford

We went out. As it ever happens in similar circumstances, each had caused the other to reflect, and neither had convinced the other. But our reflections were short: in the presence of a lovely August morning, all arguments fall to the ground. The old walls, the rain-worn stones, smiled in the rising sun. A fresh light rested on their embrasures, on the keystones of the cloisters, on the glossy ivy leaves. Roses and honeysuckles climbed the walls, and their flowers quivered and sparkled in the light breeze. The fountains murmured in the vast lonely courts. The beautiful town stood out from the morning's mist, as adorned and tranquil as a fairy palace, and its robe of soft rosy vapor was indented, as an embroidery of the Renaissance, by a border of towers, cloisters, and palaces, each enclosed in verdure and decked with flowers. The architecture of all ages had mingled their arches, trefoils, statues, and columns; time had softened their tints; the sun united them in its light, and the old city seemed a shrine to which every age and every genius had successively added a jewel. Beyond this, the river rolled its broad sheets of silver: the mowers stood up to the knee in the high grass of the meadows. Myriads of buttercups and meadow-sweets; grasses, bending under the weight of their gray heads, plants sated with the dew of the night, swarmed in the rich soil. Words cannot express this freshness of tints, this luxuriance of vegetation. The more the long line of shape receded, the more brilliant and full of life the flowers appeared. On seeing them, virgin and timid in their gilded veil, I thought of the blushing cheeks and fine modest eyes of a young girl who puts on for the first time her necklace of jewels. Around, as though to guard them, enormous trees, four centuries old, extended in regular lines; and I found in them a new trace of that practical good sense which has effected revolutions without committing ravages; which, while reforming in all directions, has destroyed nothing; which has preserved both its trees and its constitution, which has lopped off the dead branches without levelling the trunk; which alone, in our days, among all nations, is in the enjoyment not only of the present, but of the past.

[Footnote 396: M. Taine has published this "Study on Mill" separately, and preceded it by the following note, as a preface:--"When this Study first appeared, Mr. Mill did me the honor to write to me that it would not be possible to give in a few pages a more exact and complete notion of the contents of his work, considered as a body of philosophical teaching. 'But,' he added, 'I think you are wrong in regarding the views I adopt as especially English. They were so in the first half of the eighteenth century, from the time of Locke to that of the reaction against Hume. This reaction, beginning in Scotland, assumed long ago the German form, find ended by prevailing universally. When I wrote my book, I stood almost alone in my opinions; and though they have met with a degree of sympathy which I by no means expected, we may still count in England twenty à priori and spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience.'

"This remark is very true. I myself could have made it, having been brought up in the doctrines of Scottish philosophy and the writings of Reid. I simply answer, that there are philosophers whom we do not count, and that all such, whether English or not, spiritualist or not, may be neglected without much harm. Once in a half-century, or perhaps in a century, or two centuries, some thinker appears; Bacon and Hume in England, Descartes and Condillac in France, Kant and Hegel in Germany. At other times the stage is unoccupied, or ordinary men come forward, and offer the public that which the public likes--Sensualists or Idealists, according to the tendency of the day, with sufficient instruction and skill to play leading parts, and enough capacity to reset old airs, well drilled in the works of their predecessors, but destitute of real invention--simple executant musicians, who stand in the place of composers. In Europe, at present, the stage is a blank. The Germans adapt and alter effete French materialism. The French listen from habit, but somewhat wearily and distractedly, to the scraps of melody and eloquent commonplace which their instructors have repeated to them for the last thirty years. In this deep silence, and from among these dull mediocrities, a master comes forward to speak. Nothing of the sort has been seen since Hegel."]

[Footnote 397: This law has been abrogated by an Act of Parliament.--Tr.]

[Footnote 398: "It is certain, then, that a part of our notion of a body consists of the notion of a number of sensations of our own, or of other sentient beings, habitually occurring simultaneously. My conception of the table at which I am writing is compounded of its visible form and size, which are complex sensations of sight; its tangible form and size, which are complex sensations of our organs of touch and of our muscles; its weight, which is also a sensation of touch and of the muscles; its colour, which is a sensation of sight; its hardness, which is a sensation of the muscles; its composition, which is another word for all the varieties of sensation which we receive, under various circumstances, from the wood of which it is made, and so forth. All, or most of these various sensations, frequently arc, and, as we learn by experience, always might be, experienced simultaneously, or in many different orders of succession, at our own choice: and hence the thought of any one of them makes us think of the others, and the whole becomes mentally amalgamated into one mixed state of consciousness, which, in the language of Locke and Hartley, is termed a Complex Idea."--Mill's "System of Logic," 4th ed. 2 vols. I. 62.]

[Footnote 399: Mill's "Logic," I. 68.]

[Footnote 400: "Every attribute of a mind consists either in being itself affected in a certain way, or affecting other minds in a certain way. Considered in itself, we can predicate nothing of it but the series of its own feelings. When we say of any mind, that it is devout, or superstitious, or meditative, or cheerful, we mean that the ideas, emotions, or volitions implied in those words, form a frequently recurring part of the series of feelings, or states of consciousness, which fill up the sentient existence of that mind.

"In addition, however, to those attributes of a mind which are grounded on its own states of feeling, attributes may also be ascribed to it, in the same manner as to a body, grounded on the feelings which it excites in other minds. A mind does not, indeed, like a body, excite sensations, but it may excite thoughts or emotions. The most important example of attributes ascribed on this ground, is the employment of terms expressive of approbation or blame. When, for example, we say of any character, or (in other words) of any mind, that it is admirable, we mean that the contemplation of it excites the sentiment of admiration; and, indeed, somewhat more, for the word implies that we not only feel admiration, but approve that sentiment in ourselves. In some cases, under the semblance of a single attribute, two are really predicated: one of them, a state of the mind itself; the other, a state with which other minds are affected by thinking of it. As when we say of anyone that he is generous. The word generosity expresses a certain state of mind, but being a term of praise, it also expresses that this state of mind excites in us another mental state, called approbation. The assertion made, therefore, is twofold, and of the following purport: Certain feelings form habitually a part of this person's sentient existence; and the idea of those feelings of his, excites the sentiment of approbation in ourselves or others."--Mill's "Logic," 80.]

[Footnote 401: Mill's "Logic," 110.]

[Footnote 402: "According to idealist logicians, this being is arrived at by examining our notion of it; and the idea, on analysis, reveals the essence. According to the classifying school, we arrive at the being by placing the object in its group, and the notion is defined by stating the genus and the difference. Both agree in believing that we are capable of grasping the essence."--Mill's "Logic," I. 127.]

[Footnote 403: "An essential proposition, then, is one which is purely verbal; which asserts of a thing under a particular name, only what is asserted of it in the fact of calling it by that name; and which, therefore, either gives no information, or gives it respecting the name, not the thing. Non-essential or accidental propositions, on the contrary, may be called Real Propositions, in opposition to Verbal. They predicate of a thing, some fact not involved in the signification of the name by which the proposition speaks of it; some attribute not connoted by that name."--Mill's "Logic," I. 127.]

[Footnote 404: Mill's "Logic," I. 162.]

[Footnote 405: "The definition above given of a triangle obviously comprises not one, but two propositions, perfectly distinguishable. The one is, 'There may exist a figure bounded by three straight lines the other. 'And this figure may be termed a triangle.' The former of these propositions is not a definition at all; the latter is a mere nominal definition, or explanation of the use and application of a term. The first is susceptible of truth or falsehoods, and may therefore be made the foundation of a train of reasoning. The latter can neither be true nor false; the only character it is susceptible of is that of conformity to the ordinary usage of language."--Mill's "Logic," I. 162.]

[Footnote 406: Mill's "Logic," I. 211.]

[Footnote 407: Mill's "Logic," I. 218.]

[Footnote 408: Ibid. I. 240.]

[Footnote 409: "For though, in order actually to see that two given lines never meet, it would be necessary to follow them to infinity; yet, without doing so, we may know that if they ever do meet, or if, after diverging from one another, they begin again to approach, this must take place not at an infinite, but at a finite distance. Supposing, therefore, such to be the case, we can transport ourselves thither in imagination, and can frame a mental image of the appearance which one or both of the lines must present at that point, which we may rely on as being precisely similar to the reality. Now, whether we fix our contemplation upon this imaginary picture, or call to mind the generalizations we have had occasion to make from former ocular observation, we learn by the evidence of experience, that a line which, after diverging from another straight line, begins to approach to it, produces the impression on our senses which we describe by the expression 'a bent line,' not by the expression 'a straight line.'"--Mill's "Logic," I. 364.]

[Footnote 410: Mill's "Logic," I. 315.]

[Footnote 411: "We must first observe, that there is a principle implied in the very statement of what Induction is; an assumption with regard to the course of nature and the order of the universe; namely, that there are such things in nature as parallel cases; that what happens once, will, under a sufficient degree of similarity of circumstances, happen again, and not only again, but as often as the same circumstances recur. This, I say, is an assumption, involved in every case of induction. And, if we consult the actual course of nature, we find that the assumption is warranted. The universe, so far as known to us, is so constituted, that whatever is true in any one case, is true in all cases of a certain description; the only difficulty is, to find what description."--Mill's "Logic," I. 337.]

[Footnote 412: Mill's "Logic," I. 351.]

[Footnote 413: Mill's "Logic," I. 359.]

[Footnote 414: Ibid. I. 360.]

[Footnote 415: Ibid. I. 365.]

[Footnote 416: Mill's "Logic." I. 372.]

[Footnote 417: "If we take fifty crucibles of molten matter and let them cool, and fifty solutions and let them evaporate, all will crystallize. Sulphur, sugar, alum, salt--substances, temperatures, circumstances--all are as different as they can be. We find one, and only one, common fact--the change from the liquid to the solid state--and conclude, therefore, that this change is the invariable antecedent of crystallization. Here we have an example of the Method of Agreement. Its canon is:--

"'I. If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.'"--Ibid. I. 422.]

[Footnote 418: "A bird in the air breathes; plunged into carbonic acid gas, it ceases to breathe. In other words, in the second case, suffocation ensues. In other respects the two cases are as similar as possible, since we have the same bird in both, and they take place in immediate succession. They differ only in the circumstance of immersion in carbonic acid gas being substituted for immersion in the atmosphere, and we conclude that this circumstance is invariably followed by suffocation. The Method of Difference is here employed. Its canon is:--

"'II. If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance in common save one, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or a necessary part of the cause, of the phenomenon.'"--Ibid. I. 423.]

[Footnote 419: ("A combination of these methods is sometimes employed, and is termed the Indirect Method of Difference, or the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference. It is, in fact, a double employment of the Method of Agreement, first applying that method to instances in which the phenomenon in question occurs, and then to instances in which it does not occur. The following is its canon:--

"'III. If two or more instances in which the phenomenon occurs have only one circumstance in common, while two or more instances in which it does not occur have nothing in common, save the absence of that circumstance; the circumstance in which alone the two sets of instances differ, is the effect, or the cause, or a necessary part of the cause, of the phenomenon.'")--Mill's "Logic," I. 429.

"If we take two groups--one of antecedents and one of consequents--and can succeed in connecting by previous investigations all the antecedents but one to their respective consequents, and all the consequents but one to their respective antecedents, we conclude that the remaining antecedent is connected to the remaining consequent. For example, scientific men had calculated what ought to be the velocity of sound according to the laws of the propagation of sonorous waves, but found that a sound actually travelled quicker than their calculations had indicated. This surplus, or residue of speed, was a consequent for which an antecedent had to be found. Laplace discovered the antecedent in the heat developed by the condensation of each sonorous wave, and this new element, when introduced into the calculation, rendered it perfectly accurate. This is an example of the Method of Residues, the canon of which is as follows:--

"'IV. Subduct from any phenomenon such part as is known by previous inductions to be the effect of certain antecedents, and the residue of the phenomenon is the effect of the remaining antecedents.'"--Mill's "Logic," I. 431.]

[Footnote 420: "Let us take two facts--as the presence of the earth and the oscillation of the pendulum; or, again, the presence of the moon and the flow of the tide. To connect these phenomena directly, we should have to suppress the first of them, and see if this suppression would occasion the stoppage of the second. Now, in both instances, such suppression is impossible. So we employ an indirect means of connecting the phenomena. We observe that all the variations of the one correspond to certain variations of the other; that all the oscillations of the pendulum correspond to certain different positions of the earth; that all states of the tide correspond to positions of the moon. From this we conclude that the second fact is the antecedent of the first. These are examples of the Method of Concomitant Variations. Its canon is:--

"'V. Whatever phenomenon varies in any manner whenever another phenomenon varies in some particular manner, is either a cause or an effect of that phenomenon, or is connected with it through some fact of causation.'"--Mill's "Logic," I. 435.]

[Footnote 421: "The Method of Agreement," says Mill ("Logic," I. 4-14), "stands on the ground that whatever can be eliminated, is not connected with the phenomenon by any law. The Method of Difference has for its foundation, that whatever cannot be eliminated, is connected with the phenomenon by a law." The Method of Residues is a case of the Method of Differences. The Method of Concomitant Variations is another case of the same method; with this distinction, that it is applied, not to the phenomena, but to their variations.]

[Footnote 422: This quotation, and all the others in this paragraph, are taken from Mill's "Logic," I. 451-9. Mr. Mill quotes from Sir John Herschel's "Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy."]

[Footnote 423: Mill's "Logic," I. 526.]

[Footnote 424: See chapter 9, book VI. V. 2, 478, on The Physical or Concrete Deductive Method as applied to Sociology; and chapter 13, book III, for explanations, after Liebig, of Decomposition, Respiration, the Action of Poisons, etc. A whole book is devoted to the logic of the moral sciences; I know no better treatise on the subject.]

[Footnote 425: Mill's "Logic," II. 4.]

[Footnote 426: "There exists in nature a number of Permanent Causes, which have subsisted ever since the human race has been in existence, and for an indefinite and probably an enormous length of time previous. The sun, the earth, and planets, with their various constituents, air, water, and the other distinguishable substances, whether simple or compound, of which nature is made up, are such Permanent Causes. They have existed, and the effects or consequences which they were fitted to produce have taken place (as often as the other conditions of the production met), from the very beginning of our experience. But we can give no account of the origin of the Permanent Causes themselves."--Mill's "Logic," I. 378.]

[Footnote 427: "The resolution of the laws of the heavenly motions established the previously unknown ultimate property of a mutual attraction between all bodies: the resolution, so far as it has yet proceeded, of the laws of crystallization, or chemical composition, electricity, magnetism, etc., points to various polarities, ultimately inherent in the particles of which bodies are composed; the comparative atomic weights of different kinds of bodies were ascertained by resolving, into more general laws, the uniformities observed in the proportions in which substances combine with one another; and so forth. Thus, although every resolution of a complex uniformity into simpler and more elementary laws has an apparent tendency to diminish the number of the ultimate properties, and really does remove many properties from the list; yet (since the result of this simplifying process is to trace up an ever greater variety of different effects to the same agents), the further we advance in this direction, the greater number of distinct properties we are forced to recognize in one and the same object; the coexistences of which properties must accordingly be ranked among the ultimate generalities of nature."--Mill's "Logic," II. 108.]

[Footnote 428: Ibid. I. 378.]

[Footnote 429: Mill's "Logic," II. 95.]

[Footnote 430: Mill's "Logic," II. 104.]

[Footnote 431: See the Posterior Analytics, which are much superior to the Prior--δί αίνίων κα ηρότέρων.]

[Footnote 432: An eminent student of Physical Science said to me: "A fact is a superposition of laws."]

[Footnote 433: Die aufgehobene Quantität.]

CHAPTER SIXTH

POETRY--TENNYSON

Section I.--His Talent and Work

When Tennyson published his first poems, the critics found fault with them. He held his peace; for ten years no one saw his name in a review, nor even in a publisher's catalogue. But when he appeared again before the public, his books had made their way alone and under the surface, and he passed at once for the greatest poet of his country and his time.

Men were surprised, and with a pleasing surprise. The potent generation of poets who had just died out, had passed like a whirlwind. Like their forerunners of the sixteenth century, they had carried away and hurried everything to its extreme. Some had culled gigantic legends, piled up dreams, ransacked the East, Greece, Arabia, the Middle Ages, and overloaded the human imagination with hues and fancies from every clime. Others had buried themselves in metaphysics and moral philosophy, had mused indefatigably on the condition of man, and spent their lives on the sublime and the monotonous. Others, making a medley of crime and heroism, had conducted, through darkness and flashes of lightning, a train of contorted and terrible figures, desperate with remorse, relieved by their grandeur. Men wanted to rest after so many efforts and so much excess. On the going out of the imaginative, sentimental and Satanic school, Tennyson appeared exquisite. All the forms and ideas which had pleased them were found in him, but purified, modulated, set in a splendid style. He completed an age; he enjoyed that which had agitated others; his poetry was like the lovely evenings in summer: the outlines of the landscape are then the same as in the daytime; but the splendor of the dazzling celestial arch is dulled; the reinvigorated flowers lift themselves up, and the calm sun, on the horizon, harmoniously casts a network of crimson rays over the woods and meadows which it just before burned by its brightness.

Section II.--Portraits of Women

What first attracted people were Tennyson's portraits of women: Adeline, Eleanore, Lilian, the May Queen, were keepsake characters, from the hand of a lover and an artist. The keepsake is gilt-edged, embossed with flowers and decorations, richly got up, soft, full of delicate faces, always elegant and always correct, which we might take to be sketched at random, and which are yet drawn carefully, on white vellum, slightly touched by their outline, all selected to rest and occupy the soft, white hands of a young bride or a girl. I have translated many ideas and many styles, but I shall not attempt to translate one of these portraits. Each word of them is like a tint, curiously deepened or shaded by the neighboring tint, with all the boldness and results of the happiest refinement. The least alteration would obscure all. And there an art so just, so consummate, is necessary to paint the charming prettinesses, the sudden hauteurs, the half blushes, the imperceptible and fleeting caprices of feminine beauty. He opposes, harmonizes them, makes of them, as it were, a gallery. Here is the frolicsome child, the little fluttering fairy, who clasps her tiny hands, who,

"So innocent-arch, so cunning-simple, From beneath her gather'd wimple Glancing with black-beaded eyes, Till the lightning laughters dimple The baby-roses in her cheeks; Then away she flies."[434]

Then the pensive fair, who dreams, with large open blue eyes:

"Whence that aery bloom of thine, Like a lily which the sun Looks thro' in his sad decline, And a rose-bush leans upon, Thou that faintly smilest still, As a Naiad in a well, Looking at the set of day."[435]

Anew "the ever-varying Madeline," now smiling, then frowning, then joyful again, then angry, then uncertain between the two:

"Frowns perfect-sweet along the brow Light-glooming over eyes divine, Like little clouds sun-fringed."[436]

The poet returned well pleased to all things, refined and exquisite. He caressed them so carefully that his verses appeared at times far-fetched, affected, almost euphuistic. He gave them too much adornment and polishing; he seemed like an epicurean in style, as well as in beauty. He looked for pretty rustic scenes, touching remembrances, curious or pure sentiments. He made them into elegies, pastorals, and idyls. He wrote in every accent, and delighted in entering into the feelings of all ages. He wrote of St. Agnes, St. Simeon Stylites, Ulysses, Œnone, Sir Galahad, Lady Clare, Fatima, the Sleeping Beauty. He imitated, alternately, Homer and Chaucer, Theocritus and Spenser, the old English poets and the old Arabian poets. He gave life successively to the little real events of English life, and the great fantastic adventures of extinguished chivalry. He was like those musicians who use their bow in the service of all masters. He strayed through nature and history, with no foregone conclusions, without fierce passion, bent on feeling, relishing, culling from all parts, in the flower-stand of the drawing-room and in the rustic hedgerows, the rare or wild flowers whose scent or beauty could charm or amuse him. Men entered into his pleasure; smelt the grateful bouquets which he knew so well how to put together; preferred those which he took from the country; found that his talent was nowhere more at ease. They admired the minute observation and refined sentiment which knew how to grasp and interpret the fleeting aspects of things. In the "Dying Swan" they forgot that the subject was almost threadbare, and the interest somewhat slight, that they might appreciate such verses as this:

"Some blue peaks in the distance rose, And white against the cold-white sky, Shone out their crowning snows. One willow over the river wept, And shook the wave as the wind did sigh; Above in the wind was the swallow, Chasing itself at its own wild will, And far thro' the marish green and still The tangled water-courses slept, Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow."[437]

But these melancholy pictures did not display him entirely; men accompanied him to the land of the sun, toward the soft voluptuousness of southern seas; they returned, with an involuntary fascination, to the verses in which he depicts the companions of Ulysses, who, slumbering in the land of the Lotos-eaters, happy dreamers like himself, forgot their country, and renounced action:

"A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sun-set flush'd: and, dew'd with showery drops, Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse....

"There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petal from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep, And thro' the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep....

"Lo! in the middle of the wood, The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud With winds upon the branch, and there Grows green and broad, and takes no care, Sun-steep'd at noon, and in the moon Nightly dew-fed; and turning yellow Falls, and floats adown the air. Lo! sweeten'd with the summer light, The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night. All its allotted length of days, The flower ripens in its place, Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil, Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil....

"But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly, How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly), With half-dropt eyelids still, Beneath a heaven dark and holy, To watch the long bright river drawing slowly His waters from the purple hill-- To hear the dewy echoes calling From cave to cave thro' the thick-twined vine-- To watch the emerald-colour'd water falling Thro' many a wov'n acanthus-wreath divine! Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, Only to hear were sweet, stretch'd out beneath the pine."[438]

Section III.--Wherein Tennyson is at One with Nature

Was this charming dreamer simply a dilettante? Men liked to consider him so; he seemed too happy to admit violent passions. Fame came to him easily and quickly, at the age of thirty. The Queen had justified the public favor by creating him Poet-Laureate. A great writer declared him a more genuine poet than Lord Byron, and maintained that nothing so perfect had been seen since Shakespeare. The student, at Oxford, put Tennyson's works between an annotated Euripides and a handbook of scholastic philosophy. Young ladies found him amongst their marriage presents. He was said to be rich, venerated by his family, admired by his friends, amiable, without affectation, even unsophisticated. He lived in the country, chiefly in the Isle of Wight, amongst books and flowers, free from the annoyances, rivalries, and burdens of society, and his life was easily imagined to be a beautiful dream, as sweet as those which he had pictured.

Yet the men who looked closer saw that there was a fire of passion under this smooth surface. A genuine poetic temperament never fails in this. It feels too acutely to be at peace. When we quiver at the least touch, we shake and tremble under great shocks. Already, here and there, in his pictures of country and love, a brilliant verse broke with its glowing color through the calm and correct outline. He had felt that strange growth of unknown powers which suddenly arrest a man with fixed gaze before revealed beauty. The specialty of the poet is to be ever young, forever virgin. For us, the vulgar things are threadbare; sixty centuries of civilization have worn out their primitive freshness; things have become commonplace; we perceive them only through a veil of ready-made phrases; we employ them, we no longer comprehend them; we see in them no longer magnificent flowers, but good vegetables; the luxuriant primeval forest is to us nothing but a well-planned, and too well-known, kitchen garden. On the other hand, the poet, in presence of this world, is as the first man, on the first day. In a moment our phrases, our reasonings, all the trappings of memory and prejudice, vanish from his mind; things seem new to him; he is astonished and ravished; a headlong stream of sensations oppresses him; it is the all-potent sap of human invention, which, checked in us, begins to flow in him. Fools call him mad, but in truth he is a seer: for we may indeed be sluggish, but nature is always full of life; the rising sun is as beautiful as on the first dawn; the streaming floods, the teeming flowers, the trembling passions, the forces which hurl onward the stormy whirlwind of existence, aspire and strive with the same energy as at their birth; the immortal heart of nature beats yet, heaving its coarse trappings, and its beatings work in the poet's heart when they no longer echo in our own. Tennyson felt this not indeed always; but twice: or thrice, at least, he has dared to make it heard. We have found anew the free action of full emotion, and recognized the voice of a man in these verses of "Locksley Hall":

"Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young, And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

And I said, 'My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me, Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee.'

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light, As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.

And she turn'd--her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs-- All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes--

Saying, 'I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong;' Saying, 'Dost thou love me, cousin?' weeping, 'I have loved thee long.'

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands; Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring, And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fulness of the Spring.

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more! O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!

Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung, Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!

Is it well to wish thee happy?--having known me--to decline On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

Yet it shall be: thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

What is this? his eyes are heavy: think not they are glazed with wine. Go to him: it is thy duty: kiss him: take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought: Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.

He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand-- Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand!"[439]

This is very frank and strong. "Maud" appeared, and was still more so. In it the rapture broke forth with all its inequalities, familiarities, freedom, violence. The correct, measured poet betrayed himself, for he seemed to think and weep aloud. This book is the diary of a gloomy young man, soured by great family misfortunes, by long solitary meditations, who gradually became enamoured, dared to speak, found himself loved. He does not sing, but speaks; they are the hazarded, reckless words of ordinary conversation; details of every-day life; the description of a toilet, a political dinner, a service and sermon in a village church. The prose of Dickens and Thackeray did not more firmly grasp real and actual manners. And by its side, most splendid poetry abounded and blossomed, as in fact it blossoms and abounds in the midst of our commonplaces. The smile of a richly dressed girl, a sunbeam on a stormy sea, or on a spray of roses, throws all at once these sudden illuminations into impassioned souls. What verses are these, in which he represents himself in his dark little garden:

"A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime In the little grove where I sit--ah, wherefore cannot I be Like things of the season gay, like the bountiful season bland, When the far-off sail is blown by the breeze of a softer clime, Half lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, The silent sapphire-spangled marriage ring of the land?"[440]

What a holiday in his heart when he is loved! What madness in these cries, that intoxication, that tenderness, which would pour itself on all, and summon all to the spectacle and the participation of his happiness! How all is transfigured in his eyes; and how constantly he is himself transfigured! Gayety, then ecstasy, then archness, then satire, then disclosures, all ready movements, all sudden changes, like a crackling and flaming fire, renewing every moment its shape and color: how rich is the soul, and how it can live a hundred years in a day! The hero of the poem, surprised and insulted by the brother of Maud, kills him in a duel, and loses her whom he loved. He flees; he is seen wandering in London. What a gloomy contrast is that of the great busy careless town, and a solitary man haunted by true grief! We follow him down the noisy thoroughfares, through the yellow fog, under the wan sun which rises above the river like a "dull red ball," and we hear the heart full of anguish, deep sobs, insensate agitation of a soul which would, but cannot, tear itself from its memories. Despair grows, and in the end the reverie becomes a vision:

"Dead, long dead, Long dead! And my heart is a handful of dust, And the wheels go over my head, And my bones are shaken with pain, For into a shallow grave they are thrust, Only a yard beneath the street, And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat, The hoofs of the horses beat, Beat into my scalp and my brain, With never an end to the stream of passing feet, Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter....[441] O me! why have they not buried me deep enough? Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough, Me, that was never a quiet sleeper? Maybe still I am but half-dead; Then I cannot be wholly dumb; I will cry to the steps above my head, And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come To bury me, bury me Deeper, ever so little deeper."[442]

However, he revives, and gradually rises again. War breaks out, a liberal and generous war, the war against Russia; and the big, manly heart, wounded by deep love, is healed by action and courage:

"And I stood on a giant deck and mix'd my breath With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry.... Yet God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar; And many a darkness into the light shall leap, And shine in the sudden making of splendid names, And noble thought be freer under the sun, And the heart of a people beat with one desire; For the peace, that I deem'd no peace, is over and done, And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep, And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire."[443]

This explosion of feeling was the only one; Tennyson has not again encountered it. In spite of the moral close, men said of "Maud" that he was imitating Byron; they cried out against these bitter declamations; they thought that they perceived the rebellious accent of the Satanic school; they blamed this uneven, obscure, excessive style; they were shocked at these crudities and incongruities; they called on the poet to return to his first well-proportioned style. He was discouraged, left the storm-clouds, and returned to the azure sky. He was right; he is better there than anywhere else. A fine soul may be transported, attain at times to the fire of the most violent and the strongest beings: personal memories, they say, had furnished the matter of "Maud" and of "Locksley Hall"; with a woman's delicacy, he had the nerves of a woman. The fit over, he fell again into his "golden languors," into his calm reverie. After "Locksley Hall" he wrote the "Princess"; after "Maud" the "Idylls of the King."

Section IV.--In Memoriam.--The Princess

The great task of an artist is to find subjects which suit his talent. Tennyson has not always succeeded in this. His long poem, "In Memoriam," written in praise and memory of a friend who died young, is cold, monotonous, and too prettily arranged. He goes into mourning; but, like a correct gentleman, with brand new gloves, wipes away his tears with a cambric handkerchief, and displays throughout the religious service, which ends the ceremony, all the compunction of a respectful and well-trained layman. He was to find his subjects elsewhere. To be poetically happy is the object of a dilettante-artist. For this, many things are necessary. First of all, that the place, the events, and the characters shall not exist. Realities are coarse, and always, in some sense, ugly; at least they are heavy; we do not treat them as we should like, they oppress the fancy; at bottom there is nothing truly sweet and beautiful in our life but our dreams. We are ill at ease whilst we remain glued to earth, hobbling along on our two feet, which drag us wretchedly here and there in the place which impounds us. We need to live in another world, to hover in the wide-air kingdom, to build palaces in the clouds, to see them rise and crumble, to follow in a hazy distance the whims of their moving architecture, and the turns of their golden volutes. In this fantastic world, again, all must be pleasant and beautiful, the heart and senses must enjoy it, objects must be smiling or picturesque, sentiments delicate or lofty; no crudity, incongruity, brutality, savageness, must come to sully with its excess the modulated harmony of this ideal perfection. This leads the poet to the legends of chivalry. Here is the fantastic world, splendid to the sight, noble and specially pure, in which love, war, adventures, generosity, courtesy, all spectacles and all virtues which suit the instincts of our European races, are assembled, to furnish them with the epic which they love, and the model which suits them.

The "Princess" is a fairy tale, as sentimental as those of Shakespeare. Tennyson here thought and felt like a young knight of the Renaissance. The mark of this kind of mind is a superabundance, as it were, a superfluity of sap. In the characters of the "Princess," as in those of "As You Like It," there is an over-fulness of fancy and emotion. They have recourse, to express their thought, to all ages and lands; they carry speech to the most reckless rashness; they clothe and burden every idea with a sparkling image, which drags and glitters around it, like a brocade clustered with jewels. Their nature is over-rich; at every shock there is in them a sort of rustle of joy, anger, desire; they live more than we, more warmly and more quickly. They are ever in excess, refined, ready to weep, laugh, adore, jest, inclined to mingle adoration and jests, urged by a nervous rapture to opposite extremes. They sally in the poetic field with impetuous and ever-changing caprice and joy. To satisfy the subtlety and superabundance of their invention, they need fairy-tales and masquerades. In fact, the "Princess" is both. The beautiful Ida, daughter of King Gama, who is monarch of the South (this country is not to be found on the map), was affianced in her childhood to a beautiful prince of the North. When the time appointed has arrived, she is claimed. She, proud and bred on learned arguments, has become irritated against the rule of men, and in order to liberate women has founded a university on the frontiers, which is to raise her sex, and to be the colony of future equality. The prince sets out with Cyril and Florian, two friends, obtains permission from good King Gama, and, disguised as a girl, gets admission to the maiden precincts, which no man may enter on pain of death. There is a charming and sportive grace in this picture of a university for girls. The poet gambols with beauty; no badinage could be more romantic or tender. We smile to hear long learned words come from these rosy lips:

"There sat along the forms, like morning doves That sun their milky bosoms on the thatch, A patient range of pupils."[444]

They listen to historic dissertations and promises of a social revolution, in "Academic silks, in hue the lilac, with a silken hood to each, and zoned with gold,... as rich as moth from dusk cocoons." Amongst these girls was Melissa, a child--

"A rosy blonde, and in a college gown That clad her like an April daffodilly (Her mother's colour), with her lips apart, And all her thoughts as fair within her eyes, As bottom agates seem to wave and float In crystal currents of clear morning seas."[445]

The site of this university for girls enhances the magic of the scene. The words "College" and "Faculty" bring before the mind of Frenchmen only wretched and dirty buildings, which we might mistake for barracks or boarding-houses. Here, as in an English university, flowers creep up the porches, vines cling round the bases of the monuments, roses strew the alleys with their petals; the laurel thickets grow around the gates, the courts pile up their marble architecture, bossed with sculptured friezes, varied with urns from which droop the green pendage of the plants. "The Muses and the Graces, group'd in threes, enring'd a billowing fountain in the midst." After the lecture, some girls, in the deep meadow grass, "smoothed a petted peacock down"; others,

"Leaning there on those balusters, high Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale That blown about the foliage underneath, And sated with the innumerable rose Beat balm upon our eyelids."[446]

At every gesture, every attitude, we recognize young English girls; it is their brightness, their freshness, their innocence.

And here and there, too, we perceive the deep expression of their large dreamy eyes:

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more....

"Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more."[447]

This is an exquisite and strange voluptuousness, a reverie full of delight, and full, too, of anguish, the shudder of delicate and melancholy passion which we have already found in "Winter's Tale" or in "Twelfth Night."

The three friends have gone forth with the princess and her train, all on horseback, and pause "near a coppice-feather'd chasm,"

"till the Sun Grew broader toward his death and fell, and all The rosy heights came out above the lawns."

Cyril, heated by wine, begins to troll a careless tavern catch, and betrays the secret. Ida, indignant, turns to leave; her foot slips, and she falls into the river; the prince saves her, and wishes to flee. But he is seized by the Proctors and brought before the throne, where the haughty maiden stands ready to pronounce sentence. At this moment

"... There rose A hubbub in the court of half the maids Gather'd together: from the illumined hall Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes, And rainbow robes, and gems and gemlike eyes, And gold and golden heads; they to and fro Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale, All open-mouth'd, all gazing to the light, Some crying there was an army in the land, And some that men were in the very walls, And some they cared not; till a clamour grew As of a new-world Babel, woman-built, And worse-confounded: high above them stood The placid marble Muses, looking peace."[448]

The father of the prince has come with his army to deliver him, and has seized King Gama as a hostage. The princess is obliged to release the young man. With distended nostrils, waving hair, a tempest raging in her heart, she thanks him with bitter irony. She trembles with wounded pride; she stammers, hesitates; she tries to constrain herself in order the better to insult him, and suddenly breaks out:

"'You have done well and like a gentleman, And like a prince: you have our thanks for all: And you look well too in your woman's dress: Well have you done and like a gentleman. You saved our life: we owe you bitter thanks: Better have died and spilt our bones in the flood-- Then men had said--but now--What hinders me To take such bloody vengeance on you both?-- Yet since our father--Wasps in our good hive, You would-be quenchers of the light to be, Barbarians, grosser than your native bears-- O would I had his sceptre for one hour! You that have dared to break our bound, and gull'd Our servants, wronged and lied and thwarted us-- _I_ wed with thee! _I_ bound by precontract Your bride, your bondslave! not tho' all the gold That veins the world were pack'd to make your crown, And every spoken tongue should lord you. Sir, Your falsehood and yourself are hateful to us: I trample on your offers and on you: Begone: we will not look upon you more. Here, push them out at gates.'"[449]

How is this fierce heart to be softened, fevered with feminine anger, embitterbed by disappointment and insult, excited by long dreams of power and ascendancy, and rendered more savage by its virginity! But how anger becomes her, and how lovely she is! And how this fire of sentiment, this lofty declaration of independence, this chimerical ambition for reforming the future, reveal the generosity and pride of a young heart, enamoured of the beautiful! It is agreed that the quarrel shall be settled by a combat of fifty men against fifty other men. The prince is conquered, and Ida sees him bleeding on the sand. Slowly, gradually, in spite of herself, she yields, receives the wounded in her palace, and comes to the bedside of the dying prince. Before his weakness and his wild delirium pity expands, then tenderness, then love:

"From all a closer interest flourish'd up Tenderness touch by touch, and last, to these, Love, like an Alpine harebell hung with tears By some cold morning glacier; frail at first And feeble, all unconscious of itself, But such as gather'd colour day by day."[450]

One evening he returns to consciousness, exhausted, his eyes still troubled by gloomy visions; he sees Ida before him, hovering like a dream, painfully opens his pale lips, and "utter'd whisperingly":

"'If you be, what I think you, some sweet dream, I would but ask you to fulfil yourself: But if you be that Ida whom I knew, I ask you nothing: only, if a dream, Sweet dream be perfect. I shall die to-night. Stoop down and seem to kiss me ere I die.' ... She turned; she paused;

She stoop'd; and out of languor leapt a cry; Leapt fiery Passion from the brinks of death; And I believe that in the living world My spirit closed with Ida's at the lips; Till back I fell, and from mine arms she rose Glowing all over noble shame; and all Her falser self slipt from her like a robe, And left her woman, lovelier in her mood Than in her mould that other, when she came From barren deeps to conquer all with love; And down the streaming crystal dropt; and she Far-fleeted by the purple island-sides, Naked, a double light in air and wave."[451]

This is the accent of the Renaissance, as it left the heart of Spenser and Shakespeare; they had this voluptuous adoration of form and soul, and this divine sentiment of beauty.

Section V.--The Idylls of the King

There is another chivalry, which inaugurates the Middle Ages, as this closes it; sung by children, as this by youths; and restored in the "Idylls of the King," as this in the "Princess." It is the legend of Arthur, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. With admirable heart, Tennyson has modernized the feelings and the language; this pliant soul takes all tones, in order to give itself all pleasures. This time he has become epic, antique and ingenuous, like Homer, and like the old _trouvères_ of the _chansons de Geste._ It is pleasant to quit our learned civilization, to rise again to the primitive age and manners, to listen to the peaceful discourse which flows copiously and slowly, as a river in a smooth channel. The distinguishing mark of the ancient epic is clearness and calm. The ideas were new-born; man was happy and in his infancy. He had not had time to refine, to cut down and adorn his thoughts; he showed them bare. He was not yet pricked by manifold lusts; he thought at leisure. Every idea interested him; he unfolded it curiously, and explained it. His speech never jerks; he goes step by step, from one object to another, and every object seems lovely to him: he pauses, observes, and takes pleasure in observing. This simplicity and peace are strange and charming; we abandon ourselves, it is well with us; we do not desire to go more quickly; we fancy we would gladly remain thus, and forever. For primitive thought is wholesome thought; we have but marred it by grafting and cultivation; we return to it as our familiar element, to find contentment and repose.

But of all epics, this of the Round Table is distinguished by purity. Arthur, the irreproachable king, has assembled

"A glorious company, the flower of men, To serve as model for the mighty world, And be the fair beginning of a time. I made them lay their hands in mine and swear To reverence the King, as if he were Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,... To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, To love one maiden only, cleave to her, And worship her by years of noble deeds."[452]

There is a sort of refined pleasure in having to do with such a world; for there is none in which purer or more touching fruits could grow. I will show one--"Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat"--who, having seen Lancelot once, loves him when he has departed, and for her whole life. She keeps the shield, which he has left in a tower, and every day goes up to look at it, counting "every dint a sword had beaten in it, and every scratch a lance had made upon it," and living on her dreams. He is wounded: she goes to tend and heal him:

"She murmur'd, 'vain, in vain: it cannot be. He will not love me: how then? must I die?' Then as a little helpless innocent bird, That has but one plain passage of few notes, Will sing the simple passage o'er and o'er For all an April morning, till the ear Wearies to hear it, so the simple maid Went half the night repeating, 'must I die?'"[453]

At last she confesses her secret; but with what modesty and spirit! He cannot marry her; he is tied to another. She droops and fades; her father and brothers try to console her, but she will pot be consoled. She is told that Lancelot has sinned with the queen; she does not believe it:

"At last she said, 'Sweet brothers, yester night I seem'd a curious little maid again, As happy as when we dwelt among the woods, And when you used to take me with the flood Up the great river in the boatman's boat. Only you would not pass beyond the cape That hast the poplar on it; there you fixt Your limit, oft returning with the tide. And yet I cried because you would not pass Beyond it, and far up the shining flood Until we found the palace of the King. ... Now shall I have my will.'"[454]

She dies, and her father and brothers did what she had asked them to do:

"But when the next sun brake from underground, Then, those two brethren slowly with bent brows Accompanying, the sad chariot-bier Past like a shadow thro' the field, that shone Full summer, to that stream whereon the barge, Pall'd all its length in blackest samite, lay. There sat the lifelong creature of the house, Loyal, the dumb old servitor, on deck, Winking his eyes, and twisted all his face. So those two brethren from the chariot took And on the black decks laid her in her bed, Set in her hand a lily, o'er her hung The silken case with braided blazonings And kiss'd her quiet brows, and saying to her: 'Sister, farewell for ever,' and again 'Farewell, sweet sister,' parted all in tears. Then rose the dumb old servitor, and the dead Steer'd by the dumb went upward with the flood-- In her right hand the lily, in her left The letter--all her bright hair streaming down-- And all the coverlid was cloth of gold Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white All but her face, and that clear-featured face Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead But fast asleep, and lay as tho' she smiled."[455]

Thus they arrive at Court in great silence, and King Arthur read the letter before all his knights and weeping ladies:

"Most noble lord, Sir Lancelot of the Lake, I, sometime call'd the maid of Astolat, Come, for you left me taking no farewell, Hither, to take my last farewell of you. I loved you, and my love had no return, And therefore my true love has been my death. And therefore to our lady Guinevere, And to all other ladies, I make moan. Pray for my soul, and yield me burial. Pray for my soul thou too, Sir Lancelot, As thou art a knight peerless."[456]

Nothing more: she ends with this word, full of so sad a regret and so tender an admiration: we could hardly find anything more simple or more delicate.

It seems as if an archaeologist might reproduce all styles except the grand, and Tennyson has reproduced all, even the grand. It is the night of the final battle; all day the tumult of the mighty fray "roll'd among the mountains by the winter sea"; Arthur's knights had fallen "man by man"; he himself had fallen, "deeply smitten through the helm," and Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, bore him to a place hard by,

"A chapel nigh the field, A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land. On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full."[457]

Arthur, feeling himself about to die, bids him to take his sword Excalibur "and fling him far into the middle meer"; for he had received it from the sea-nymphs, and after him no mortal must handle it. Twice Sir Bedivere went to obey the king: twice he paused, and came back pretending that he had flung away the sword; for his eyes were dazzled by the wondrous diamond setting which clustered and shone about the haft. The third time he throws it:

"The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea. So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur: But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, And caught him by the hilt, and brandish'd him Three times, and drew him under in the meer."[458]

Then Arthur, rising painfully and scarce able to breathe, bids Sir Bedivere take him on his shoulders and "bear me to the margin. Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." They arrive thus, through "icy caves and barren chasms," to the shores of a lake, where they saw "the long glories of the winter moon":

"They saw then how there hove a dusky barge Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern, Beneath them; and descending they were ware That all the decks were dense with stately forms Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream--by these Three Queens with crowns of gold--and from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind, that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes Or hath come, since the making of the world. Then murmur'd Arthur: 'Place me in the barge,' And to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept. But she, that rose the tallest of them all And fairest, laid his head upon her lap, And loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands And call'd him by his name, complaining loud...."[459]

Before the barge drifts away, King Arthur, raising his slow voice, consoles Sir Bedivere, standing in sorrow on the shore, and pronounces this heroic and solemn farewell:

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.... If thou shouldst never see my face again, Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of.... For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. But now farewell. I am going a long way With these thou seest--if indeed I go-- (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) To the island-valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, Where I will heal me of my grievous wound."[460]

Nothing, I think, calmer and more imposing, has been seen since Goethe.

How, in a few words, shall we assemble all the features of so manifold a talent? Tennyson is a born poet, that is, a builder of airy palaces and imaginary castles. But the individual passion and absorbing preoccupations which generally guide the hands of such men are wanting to him; he found in himself no plan of a new edifice; he lias built after all the rest; he has simply chosen amongst all forms the most elegant, ornate, exquisite. Of their beauties he has taken but the flower. At most, now and then, he has here and there amused himself by designing some genuinely English and modern cottage. If in this choice of architecture, adopted or restored, we look for a trace of him, we shall find it, here and there, in some more finely sculptured frieze, in some more delicate and graceful sculptured rose-work; but we only find it marked and sensible in the purity and elevation of the moral emotion which we carry away with us when we quit his gallery of art.

Section VI.--Comparison of English and French Society

The favorite poet of a nation, it seems, is he whose works a man, setting out on a journey, prefers to put into his pocket. Nowadays it would be Tennyson in England, and Alfred de Musset in France. The two publics differ: so do their modes of life, their reading, and their pleasures. Let us try to describe them; we shall better understand the flowers if we see them in the garden.

Here we are at Newhaven, or at Dover, and we glide over the rails looking on either side. On both sides fly past country houses; they exist everywhere in England, on the margin of lakes, on the edge of the bays, on the summit of the hills, in every picturesque point of view. They are the chosen abodes; London is but a business-place; men of the world live, amuse themselves, visit each other, in the country. How well-ordered and pretty is this house! If near it there was some old edifice, abbey, or castle, it has been preserved. The new building has been suited to the old; even if detached and modern, it does not lack style; gable-ends, mullions, broad-windows, turrets perched at every corner, have a Gothic air in spite of their newness. Even this cottage, though not very large, suited to people with a moderate income, is pleasant to see with its pointed roofs, its porch, its bright brown bricks, all covered with ivy. Doubtless grandeur is generally wanting; in these days the men who mould opinion are no longer great lords, but rich gentlemen, well brought up, and landholders; it is pleasantness which appeals to them. But how they understand the word! All round the house is turf, fresh and smooth as velvet, rolled every morning. In front, great rhododendrons form a bright thicket, in which murmur swarms of bees; festoons of exotics creep and curve over the short grass; honey-suckles clamber up the trees; hundreds of roses, drooping over the windows, shed their rain of petals on the paths. Fine elms, yew-trees, great oaks, jealously tended, everywhere combine their leafage or rear their heads. Trees have been brought from Australia and China to adorn the thickets with the elegance or the singularity of their foreign shapes; the copper-beech stretches over the delicate verdure of the meadows the shadow of its dark metallic-hued foliage. How delicious is the freshness of this verdure! How it glistens, and how it abounds in wild flowers brightened by the sun! What care, what cleanliness, how everything is arranged, kept up, refined, for the comfort of the senses and the pleasure of the eyes! If there is a slope, streamlets have been devised with little islets in the glen, peopled with tufts of roses; ducks of select breed swim in the pools, where the water-lilies display their satin stars. Fat oxen lie in the grass, sheep as white as if fresh from the washing, all kinds of happy and model animals, fit to delight the eyes of an amateur and a master. We return to the house, and before entering I look upon the view; decidedly the love of Englishmen for the country is innate; how pleasant it will be from that parlor window to look upon the setting sun, and the broad network of sunlight spread across the woods! And how cunningly they have disposed the house, so that the landscape may be seen at distance between the hills, and at hand between the trees! We enter. How nicely everything is got up, and how commodious. The smallest wants have been forestalled, and provided for; there is nothing which is not correct and perfect; we imagine that everything in the house has received a prize, or at least an honorable mention, at some industrial exhibition. And the attendance of the servants is as good as everything else; cleanliness is not more scrupulous in Holland; Englishmen have, in proportion, three times as many servants as Frenchmen; not too many for the minute details of the service. The domestic machine acts without interruption, without shock, without hinderance; every wheel has its movement and its place, and the comfort which it dispenses falls like honey in the mouth, as clear and as exquisite as the sugar of a model refinery when quite purified.

We converse with our host. We very soon find that his mind and soul have always been well balanced. When he left college he found his career shaped out for him; no need for him to revolt against the Church, which is half rational; nor against the Constitution, which is nobly liberal: the faith and law presented to him are good, useful, moral, liberal enough to maintain and employ all diversities of sincere minds. He became attached to them, he loves them, he has received from them the whole system of his practical and speculative ideas; he does not waver, he no longer doubts, he knows what he ought to believe and to do. He is not carried away by theories, dulled by sloth, checked by contradictions. Elsewhere youth is like water, stagnant or running to waste; here there is a fine old channel which receives and directs to a useful and sure end the whole stream of its activities and passions. He acts, works, rules. He is married, has tenants, is a magistrate, becomes a politician. He improves and rules his parish, his estate, and his family. He founds societies, speaks at meetings, superintends schools, dispenses justice, introduces improvements; he employs his reading, his travels, his connections, his fortune, and his rank, to lead his neighbors and dependents, amicably, to some work which profits themselves and the public. He is influential and respected. He has the pleasures of self-esteem and the satisfaction of conscience. He knows that he has authority, and that he uses it loyally, for the good of others. And this healthy state of mind is supported by a wholesome life. His mind is beyond doubt, cultivated and occupied; he is well informed, knows several languages, has travelled, is fond of all precise information; he is kept by his newspapers conversant with all new ideas and discoveries. But, at the same time, he loves and practises all bodily exercises. He rides, takes long walks, hunts, yachts, examines for himself all the details of breeding and agriculture; he lives in the open air, he withstands the encroachments of a sedentary life, which always elsewhere leads the modern man to agitation of the brain, weakness of the muscles, and excitement of the nerves. Such is this elegant and common-sense society, refined in comfort, regular in conduct, whose dilettante tastes and moral principles confine it within a sort of flowery border, and prevent it from having its attention diverted.

Does any poet suit such a society better than Tennyson? Without being a pedant, he is moral; he may be read in the family circle by night; he does not rebel against society and life; he speaks of God and the soul, nobly, tenderly, without ecclesiastical prejudice; there is no need to reproach him like Lord Byron; he has no violent and abrupt words, extravagant and scandalous sentiments; he will pervert nobody. We shall not be troubled when we close the book; we may listen when we quit him, without being shocked by the contrast, to the grave voice of the master of the house, who reads evening prayers before the kneeling servants. And yet, when we quit him, we keep a smile of pleasure on our lips. The traveller, the lover of archaeology, has been pleased by the imitations of foreign and antique sentiments. The sportsman, the lover of the country, has relished the little country scenes and the rich rural pictures. The ladies have been charmed by his portraits of women; they are so exquisite and pure! He has laid such delicate blushes on those lovely cheeks! He has depicted so well the changing expression of those proud or candid eyes! They like him because they feel that he likes them. He even honors them, and rises in his nobility to the height of their purity. Young girls weep in listening to him; certainly when, a little while ago, we heard the legend of Elaine or Enid read, we saw the fair heads drooping under the flowers which adorned them, and white shoulders heaving with furtive emotion. And how delicate was this emotion! He has not rudely trenched upon truth and passion. He has risen to the height of noble and tender sentiments. He has gleaned from all nature and all history what was most lofty and amiable. He has chosen his ideas, chiselled his words, equalled by his artifices, successes, and versatility of style, the pleasantness and perfection of social elegance in the midst of which we read him. His poetry is like one of those gilt and painted stands in which flowers of the country and exotics mingle in artful harmony their stalks and foliage, their clusters and cups, their scents and hues. It seems made expressly for these wealthy, cultivated, free business men, heirs of the ancient nobility, new leaders of a new England. It is part of their luxury as well as of their morality; it is an eloquent confirmation of their principles, and a precious article of their drawing-room furniture.

We return to Calais, and travel towards Paris, without pausing on the road. There are on the way plenty of noblemen's castles, and houses of rich men of business. But we do not find amongst them, as in England, the thinking elegant world, which, by the refinement of its taste and the superiority of its mind, becomes the guide of the nation and the arbiter of the beautiful. There are two peoples in France: the provinces and Paris; the one dining, sleeping, yawning, listening; the other thinking, daring, watching, and speaking: the first drawn by the second, as a snail by a butterfly, alternately amused and disturbed by the whims and the audacity of its guide. It is this guide we must look upon! Let us enter Paris! What a strange spectacle! It is evening, the streets are aflame, a luminous dust covers the busy noisy crowd, which jostles, elbows, crushes, and swarms near the theatres, behind the windows of the cafés. Have you remarked how all these faces are wrinkled, frowning or pale; how anxious are their looks, how nervous their gestures? A violent brightness falls on these shining heads; most are bald before thirty. To find pleasure here, they must have plenty of excitement: the dust of the boulevard settles on the ice which they are eating; the smell of the gas and the steam of the pavement, the perspiration left on the walls dried up by the fever of a Parisian day, "the human air full of impure rattle"--this is what they cheerfully breathe. They are crammed round their little marble tables, persecuted by the glaring light, the shouts of the waiters, the jumble of mixed talk, the monotonous motion of gloomy walkers, the flutter of loitering courtesans moving about anxiously in the dark. Doubtless their homes are not pleasant, or they would not change them for these bagmen's delights. We climb four flights of stairs, and find ourselves in a polished, gilded room, adorned with stuccoed ornaments, plaster statuettes, new furniture of old oak, with every kind of pretty knick-knack on the mantle-pieces and the whatnots. "It makes a good show;" you can give a good reception to envious friends and people of standing. It is an advertisement, nothing more; we pass half an hour there agreeably, and that is all. You will never make more than a house of call out of these rooms; they are low in the ceiling, close, inconvenient, rented by the year, dirty in six months, serving to display a fictitious luxury. All the enjoyments of these people are factitious, and, as it were, snatched hurriedly; they have in them something unhealthy and irritating. They are like the cookery of their restaurants, the splendor of their cafés, the gayety of their theatres. They want them too quick, too pungent, too manifold. They have not cultivated them patiently, and culled them moderately; they have forced them on an artificial and heating soil; they grasp them in haste. They are refined and greedy; they need every day a stock of word-paintings, broad anecdotes, biting railleries, new truths, varied ideas. They soon get bored, and cannot endure tedium. They amuse themselves with all their might, and find that they are hardly amused. They exaggerate their work and their expense, their wants and their efforts. The accumulation of sensations and fatigue stretches their nervous machine to excess, and their polish of social gayety chips off twenty times a day, displaying an inner ground of suffering and ardor.

But how quick-witted they are, and how unfettered is their mind! How this incessant rubbing has sharpened them! How ready they are to grasp and comprehend everything! How apt this studied and manifold culture has made them to feel and relish tendernesses and sadnesses unknown to their fathers, deep feelings, strange and sublime, which hitherto seemed foreign to their race! This great city is cosmopolitan; here all ideas may be born; no barrier checks the mind: the vast field of thought opens before them without a beaten or prescribed track. Use neither hinders nor guides them; an official Government and Church rid them of the care of leading the nation: the two powers are submitted to, as we submit to the beadle or the policeman, patiently and with chaff; they are looked upon as a play. In short, the world here seems but a melodrama, a subject of criticism and argument. And be sure that criticism and argument have full scope. An Englishman entering on life, finds to all great questions an answer ready made. A Frenchman entering on life, finds to all great questions simply suggested doubts. In this conflict of opinions he must create a faith for himself, and, being mostly unable to do it, he remains open to every uncertainty, and therefore to every curiosity and to every pain. In this gulf, which is like a vast sea, dreams, theories, fancies, intemperate, poetic and sickly desires, collect and chase each other like clouds. If in this tumult of moving forms we seek some solid work to prepare a foundation for future opinions, we find only the slowly-rising edifices of the sciences, which here and there obscurely, like submarine polypes, construct of imperceptible coral the basis on which the belief of the human race is to rest.

Such is the world for which Alfred de Musset wrote: in Paris he must be read. Read? We all know him by heart. He is dead, and it seems as if we daily hear him speak. A conversation among artists, as they jest in a studio, a beautiful young girl leaning over her box at the theatre, a street washed by the rain, making the black pavement shine, a fresh smiling morning in the woods of Fontainebleau, everything brings him before us, as if he were alive again. Was there ever a more vibrating and genuine accent? This man, at least, never lied. He only said what he felt, and he has said it as he felt it. He thought aloud. He made the confession of every man. He was not admired, but loved; he was more than a poet, he was a man. Everyone found in him his own feelings, the most transient, the most familiar; he did not restrict himself, he gave himself to all; he possessed the last virtues which remain to us, generosity and sincerity. And he had the most precious gift which can seduce an old civilization, youth. As he said, "that hot youth, a tree with a rough bark, which covers all with its shadow, prospect and path." With that fire did he hurl onward love, jealousy, the thirst of pleasure, all the impetuous passions which rise with virgin blood from the depths of a young heart, and how did he make them clash together! Has anyone felt them more deeply? He was too full of them, he gave himself up to them, was intoxicated with them. He rushed through life, like an eager racehorse in the country, whom the scent of plants and the splendid novelty of the vast heavens urge, headlong, in its mad career, which shatters all before him, and himself as well. He desired too much; he wished, strongly and greedily, to enjoy life in one draught, thoroughly; he did not glean or enjoy it; he tore it off like a bunch of grapes, pressed it, crushed it, twisted it, and he remains with stained hands as thirsty as before.[461] Then broke forth sobs which found an echo in all hearts. What! so young, and already so wearied! So many precious gifts, so fine a mind, so delicate a tact, so rich and varied a fancy, so precocious a glory, such a sudden blossom of beauty and genius, and yet anguish, disgust, tears, and cries! What a mixture! With the same attitude he adores and curses. Eternal illusion, invincible experience, keep side by side in him to fight and tear him. He became old, and remained young; he is a poet, and he is a sceptic. The Muse and her peaceful beauty, Nature and her immortal freshness, Love and his happy smile, all the swarm of divine visions barely passed before his eyes, when we see approaching with curses, and sarcasms, all the spectres of debauchery and death. He is as a man in a festive scene, who drinks from a chased cup, standing up, in front, amidst applause and triumphal music, his eyes laughing, his heart full of joy, heated and excited by the generous wine he quaffed, whom suddenly we see growing pale; there was poison in the cup; he falls, and the death-rattle is in his throat; his convulsed feet beat upon the silken carpet, and all the terrified guests look on. This is what we felt on the day when the most beloved, the most brilliant amongst us, suddenly quivered from an unseen attack, and was struck down, being hardly able to breathe, amid the lying splendors and gayeties of our banquet.

Well! such as he was, we love him forever: we cannot listen to another; beside him, all seem cold or false. We leave at midnight the theatre in which he had heard Malibran, and we enter the gloomy Rue des Moulins, where, on a hired bed, his Rolla came to sleep and die. The lamps cast flickering rays on the slippery pavement. Restless shadows march past the doors, and trail along their dress of draggled silk to meet the passers-by. The windows are fastened; here and there a light pierces through a half-closed shutter, and shows a dead dahlia on the edge of a window-sill. To-morrow an organ will grind before these panes, and the wan clouds will leave their droppings on these dirty walls. From this wretched place came the most impassioned of his poems! These vilenesses and vulgarities of the stews and the lodging-house caused this divine eloquence to flow! it was these which at such a moment gathered in this bruised heart all the splendors of nature and history, to make them spring up in sparkling jets, and shine under the most glowing poetic sun that ever rose! We feel pity; we think of that other poet, away there in the Isle of Wight, who amuses himself by dressing up lost epics. How happy he is amongst his fine books, his friends, his honeysuckles and roses! No matter. De Musset, in this wretched abode of filth and misery, rose higher. From the heights of his doubt and despair, he saw the infinite, as we see the sea from a storm-beaten promontory. Religions, their glory and their decay, the human race, its pangs and its destiny, all that is sublime in the world, appeared there to him in a flash of lightning. He felt, at least this once in his life, the inner tempest of deep sensations, giant-dreams, and intense voluptuousness, the desire of which enabled him to live, the lack of which forced him to die. He was no mere dilettante; he was not content to taste and enjoy; he left his mark on human thought; he told the world what was man, love, truth, happiness. He suffered, but he imagined: he fainted, but he created. He tore from his entrails with despair the idea which he had conceived, and showed it to the eyes of all, bloody but alive. That is harder and lovelier than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of others. There is in the world but one work worthy of a man: the production of a truth, to which we devote ourselves, and in which we believe. The people who have listened to Tennyson are better than our aristocracy of townsfolk and bohemians; but I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson.

[Footnote 434: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "Lilian," 5.]

[Footnote 435: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "Adeline," 33.]

[Footnote 436: Ibid. "Madeline," 15.]

[Footnote 437: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "The Dying Swan," 45.]

[Footnote 438: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "The Lotus-Eaters," 140.]

[Footnote 439: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "Locksley Hall," 266.]

[Footnote 440: Tennyson's "Maud," 1856, IV. 1, 15.]

[Footnote 441: Tennyson's "Maud," 1856, XXVII. 1.]

[Footnote 442: Ibid. XXVII. 11, 105.]

[Footnote 443: Ibid, XXVIII. 3 and 4, 108.]

[Footnote 444: "The Princess, a Medley," 12th ed. 1864, II. 34.]

[Footnote 445: Ibid. II. 46.]

[Footnote 446: Ibid. III. 60.]

[Footnote 447: "The Princess, a Medley," 12th ed. 1864, V. 76.]

[Footnote 448: "The Princess, a Medley," 12th ed. 1864, IV. 99.]

[Footnote 449: Ibid. IV. 102.]

[Footnote 450: "The Princess, a Medley," V. 163.]

[Footnote 451: Ibid. V. 165.]

[Footnote 452: "Idylls of the King," 1864; Guinevere, 249.]

[Footnote 453: Ibid.; Elaine, 193.]

[Footnote 454: Ibid.; Elaine, 201.]

[Footnote 455: "Idylls of the King," 1864, 206.]

[Footnote 456: Ibid. 213.]

[Footnote 457: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "Morte d'Arthur," 189.]

[Footnote 458: Ibid. 194.]

[Footnote 459: Poems by Alfred Tennyson, 7th ed. 1851; "Morte d'Arthur," 196.]

[Footnote 460: Ibid. 197.]

[Footnote 461: "O médiocrité! celui qui pour tout bien T'apporte à ce tripot dégoûtant de la vie Est bien poltron au jeu s'il ne dit: Tout ou rien."]

INDEX

The Roman Numerals Refer to the Volumes.--The Arabic Figures to the Pages of Each Volume.

Abelard, I. 158, 160 Addison, Joseph, II. 265, 292, 300, 311; his life and writings, 327-359; III. 83, 95, 259, 272, 280, 306 Adholm, I. 64, 69, 185 Agriculture, improvement in, in sixteenth century, I. 172; in the nineteenth, III. 43, 168 Akenside, Mark, III. 36 Alcuin, I. 64, 70 Alexander VI, Pope, II. 5 Alexandrian philosophy, I. 21, 22 Alfred the Great, I. 64, 69 Alison, Sir Archibald, III. 44 Amory, Thomas, II. 438 Angelo, Michael, I. 183, 366; III. 27 Anglo-Saxon poetry, I. 53 Ann of Cleaves, I. 186 Anselm, I. 76 Anthology the, I. 209, 240 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, II. 381 Architecture, Norman, I. 75, 127; the Tudor style, 174 Ariosto, I. 185, 222; II. 236 Aristocracy British, in the nineteenth century, III. 169 Arkwright, Sir Richard, II. 320 Armada, the I. 173, 279 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, III. 100, 178 Arthur and Merlin, romance of, I. 77 Ascham, Roger, I. 181, 246; II. 3 Athelstan, I. 36, 54 Augier, Emile, III. 208 Austen, Jane, III. 85

Bacon, Francis, Lord, I. 245, 255-263; II. 34, 39; III. 268, 284 Bacon, Roger, I. 161 Bain, Alexander, III. 185 Bakewell, Robert, II. 320 Bale, John, I. 186 Balzac, Honoré de, I. 3; III. 215, 254 Barclay, Alexander, I. 165 Barclay, John, II. 292 Barclay, Robert, I. 58 Barrow, Isaac, II. 292, 295 Baxter, Richard, I. 268; II. 56, 292 Bayly's (Lewis) Practice of Piety, II. 62 Beattie, Tames, II. 440; III. 36 Beauclerk, Henry, I. 76 Beaumont, Francis, I. 291, 307-317; II. 41, 45, 100 Becket, Thomas à, I. 97 Beckford, W., III. 77 Bede, the Venerable, I. 64 Bedford, Duke of (John Russell), II. 310 Beethovan, Lewis van, III. 87 Behn, Mrs. Aphra, II. 157, 254 Bell, Currer. See Brontë, Charlotte Bénoit de Sainte-Maure, I. 76 Bentham, Jeremy, II. 320 Bently, Richard, II. 303 Beowolf, an Anglo-Saxon epic poem, I. 49-53 Béranger, II. 11; III. 287 Berkeley, Bishop, II. 303 Berkley, Sir Charles, II. 141 Berners, Lord, I. 186 Best, Paul, II. 50 Bible, English. See Wiclif, Tyndale Blackmore, Sir Richard, II. 224 Blount, Edward, I. 192 Boccaccio, I. 126, 132; II. 266 Bodley, Sir Thomas, I. 246 Boethius, I. 64-67 Boileau, II. 144, 184, 224, 262, 284; III. 7, 4, 345 Boleyn, Ann, I. 276 Bolingbroke, Lord (Henry St. John), II. 275, 303; III. 8 Bonner, Edmund, II. 33 Borde, Andrew, I. 186 Borgia, Cæsar, II. 5, 6 Borgia, Lucretia, I. 182; II. 5 Bossu (or Lebossu), II. 224 Bossuet, I. 18; II. 233; III. 25, 306 Boswell, James, II. 444 Bourchier. See Berners Boyle, the Hon. Robert, II. 303 Bridaine, Father, II. 298 Britons, ancient, I. 38 Brontë, Charlotte (Currer Bell), III. 85, 100, 185 Browne, Sir Thomas, I. 245, 246, 252; II. 34, 39 Browning, Mrs., III. 100, 185 Brunanburh, Athelstan's victory at, celebrated in Saxon song, I. 54 Buckingham, Duke of (John Sheffield), II. 153, 180, 184 Buckle, Henry Thomas, III. 154, 176 Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton, III. 85, 185 Bunyan, John, II. 58-70, 133 Burke, Edmund, II. 303, 317-326, 444; III. 286, 306 Burleigh, Lord (William Cecil), I. 273; III. 286 Burnet, Bishop, II. 202 Burney, Francisca (Madame D'Arblay), II. 283, 320, 444; III. 275 Burns, Robert, II. 251; Sketch of his life and works, III. 48-65 Burton, Robert, I. 175, 248-252; II. 34, 100 Busby, Dr. Richard, II. 256 Bute, Lord, II. 273 seq., 310 Butler, Bishop, II. 320 Butler, Samuel, II. 137-140, 303 Byng, Admiral, II. 310 Byron, Lord, III. 11; his life and works, 102-151

Cædmon, hymns of, I. 57, 61; his metrical paraphrase of parts of the Bible, 61-64, 185 Calamy, Edmund, II. 58 Calderon, I. 161, 279; II. 155 Calvin, John, II. 11, 45, 301 Camden, William, I. 246 Campbell, Thomas, III. 76, 112 Carew, Thomas, I. 238 Carlyle, Thomas, I. 6; III. 100, 176; style and mind, 308; vocation, 327; philosophy, morality, and criticism, 336; conception of history, 348 Carteret, John (Earl Granville), II. 311 Castlereagh, Lord, I. 319 Catherine, St., play of, I. 76 Cellini, Benvenuto, I. 26, 114, 184 Cervantes, I. 100, 151, 222; II. 410 Chalmers, George, I. 72 Chandos, Duke of (John Brydges), III. 8 Chapman, George, I. 330 Charles of Orleans, I. 84, 158 Charles I of England, III. 276 Charles II and his court, II. 140 seq. Chateaubriand, I. 4; II. 346 Chatham. See Pitt Chaucer, I. 106, 126, 157; II. 265 Chesterfield, Lord, II. 278 seq., 444; III. 15 Chevy Chase, ballad of, I. 125 Chillingworth, William, I. 245; II. 35, 38, 300 Christianity, introduction of, into Britain, I. 56, 63 seq. Chroniclers, French, I. 83 Chroniclers, Saxon, I. 68 Cibber, Colley, III. 8, 17 Cimbrians, the, I. 41 Clarendon, Lord Chancellor (Edward Hyde), I. 245; II. 140 Clarke, Dr. John, II. 289, 301 Classic spirit in Europe, its origin and nature, II. 170-173 Classical authors translated, I. 180, 190 Clive, Lord, III. 272 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, III. 73 Collier, Jeremy, II. 225, 256 Collins, William, III. 37 Colman, George, II. 220 Comedy-writers, English, II. 188 seq. Comines, Philippe de, I. 124 Commerce in sixteenth century, I. 172; III. 165 Comte, Auguste, III. 362 Condillac, Stephen-Bonnot de, III. 333, 363 Congreve, William, II. 188-210, 283 Conybeare, J. J., I. 54 seq. Corbet, Bishop, II. 35 Corneille, II. 224, 236 Cotton, Sir Robert, I. 246 Court pageantries in the sixteenth century, I. 176, 177 Coventry, Sir John, II. 142 Coverdale, Miles, II. 20 Cowley, Abraham, I. 242-244; II. 34, 71 Cowper, William, III. 67-73 Crabbe, George, III. 71, 112 Cranmer, Archbishop, II. 15, 23 Crashaw, Richard, II. 34 Criticism and History, III. 267 Cromwell, Oliver, I. 6; II. 35, 50; III. 276, 319, 351 Crowne, John, II. 157 Curll, Edmund, III. 18

Daniel, Samuel, I. 246 Dante, I. 135, 158, 161; II. 110; III. 335 Darwin, Charles, I. 13 Davie, Adam, I. 93 Davies, Sir John, II. 34 Daye, John, II. 47 Decker, Thomas, I. 281 De Foe, II. 307, 402-410; III. 169 Delille, James, III. 21 Denham, Sir John, II. 185-188 Denmark, I. 34, 35 Dennis, John, II. 331 Descartes, II. 149, 233; III. 333 Dickens, Charles, III. 85, 100; his novels, 187-221 Domesday Book, I. 72, 78, 104 Donne, John, I. 240, 241; II. 35 Dorat, C. J., III. 16, 140 Dorset, Earl of (Charles Sackville), II. 179, 180 Drake, Admiral, I. 173 Drake, Dr. Nathan, I. 173, 271 Drama, formation of the, I. 291 seq. Drayton, Michael, I. 205; II. 34 Drummond, William, II. 100 Dryden, John, I. 18; II. 100; his comedies, 153-157, 184; his life and writings, II. 222-272, 332; III. 5, 329 Dudevant, Madame (George Sand), III. 207 Dunstan, St., I. 36 seq. Durer, Albert, II. 9, 10 Dyer, Sir Edward, I. 203

Earle, John, I. 246 Eddas, the Scandinavian, I. 42-46; III. 123, 124 Edgeworth, Maria, III. 253 Edward VI, II. 28 Edwy and Elgiva, story of, I. 38 Eliot, George. See Evans, Mary A. England, climate of, I. 33 English Constitution, formation of the, I. 105 Elizabeth, Queen, I. 175-177, 245, 270 Elwin, Whitwell, III. 5 Erigena, John Scotus, I. 64, 69 Esménard, Joseph Alphonse, I. 163 Essex, Robert, Earl of, I. 270, 273 Etheredge, Sir George, II. 137, 158 Evans, Mary A. (George Eliot), III. 85, 179, 185 Eyck, Van, I. 151

Falkland, Lord, I. 245 Farnese, Pietro Luigi, II. 6 Farquhar, George, II. 188, 209 Faust, III. 47 Feltham, Owen, I. 246 Fenn, Sir John, I. 172 Ferguson, Dr. Adam, II. 304; III. 271 Fermor, Mrs. Arabella, III. 15, 16 Feudalism, the protection and character of, I. 73 Fichte, III. 335 Fielding, Henry, I. 319; II. 135, 434-433, 450 Fitmore, Sir Robert, II. 305 Finsborough, Battle of, an Anglo-Saxon poem, I. 54 Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, I. 275; II. 26 Flemish artists, I. 170, 178 Fletcher, Giles, II. 34 Fletcher, John, I. 291, 307-317; II. 45, 100 Ford, John, I. 291, 297 seq., 312; II. 248 Fortescue, Sir John, I. 113 seq. Fox, Charles James, II. 276, 311, 315 seq. Fox, George, II. 52, 58, 133 Fox, John, II. 13 seq. Francis of Assisi, I. 161 Freeman, Edward A., I. 74 Frisians, the, I. 32, 33 Froissart, I. 83, 102, 126, 127, 132 Froude, J. A., I. 104; II. 15 seq. Fuller, Thomas, I. 318

Gaimar, Geoffroy, I. 76, 92 Gainsborough, Thomas, landscape painter, II. 220 Garrick, David, II. 444, 448 Gaskell, Mrs. Elisabeth C., III. 85, 185 Gay, John, II. 211, 279; III. 4, 29-32 Geoffrey of Monmouth, I. 134 German ideas, introduction of, in Europe and England, III; 328 Germany, drinking habits in, II. 7 Gibbon, Edward, II. 444 Gladstone, William Ewart, III. 274 Glencoe, Massacre of, III. 302 Glover, Richard, III. 37 Godwin, William, II. 95 Goethe, I. 6, 18; II. 111, 118, 430; III. 48, 74, 125-131, 327 Goldsmith, Oliver, II. 211, 307, 440-443 Goltzius, I. 196 Gower, John, I. 90, 163 Grammont, Count de, II. 135, 169, 170 Gray, Thomas, III. 36 Greene, Robert, I. 206, 210, 281, 283, 364 Grenville, George, II. 310 Gresset, J. B. Lewis, III. 16 Grey, Lady Jane, I. 180, 270 Grostete, Robert, I. 90, 93 Grote, George, III. 185 Guicciardini, Ludovic, I. 173 Guido, I. 16 Guizot, I. 107; III. 276, 282, 305 Guy of Warwick, I. 77

Habington, William, I. 240 Hakluyt, Richard, I. 246 Hale, Sir Matthew, II. 16 Hales, John, I. 245; II. 35, 37, 301 Halifax, Charles, Montague, Earl of, II. 329, 334. 361, 366 Hall, Bishop, Joseph, I. 246; II. 35 Hallam, Henry, I. 118; III. 276 Hamilton, Anthony, II. 136 seq. Hamilton, Sir William, III. 185 Hampden, John, III. 276 Hampole, I. 93 Hardyng, John, I. 269 Harrington, Sir John, I. 237 Harrison, William, I. 173 seq. Hastings, Warren, II. 317; III. 272, 285, 291 Hawes, Stephen, I. 165 Hegel, I. 18, 22, 159; II. 271, 331 seq. Heine, I. 2, 32, 360; III. 39, 48, 74, 87 Hemling, Hans, I. 170 Henry Beauclerk, I. 76 Henry of Huntingdon, I. 39, 76 Henry VIII and his Court, I. 269; II. 15 Herbert, George, I. 240 Herbert, Lord, I. 246 Herder, John Godfrey von, I. 6 Herrick, Robert, I. 238, 239 Hertford, Earl of, I. 270 Hervey, Lord, III. 26 Heywood, Mrs. Eliza, III. 18 Heywood, John, I. 186, 280 Hill, Aaron, III. 8 History, philosophy of. See the Introduction, passim. Hobbes, Thomas, II. 147-152, 250 Hogarth, William, II. 450-453; III. 18 Holinslied's Chronicles, I. 176, 246, 275 Holland, I. 31 seq. Homer and Spenser, I. 217 Hooker, Richard, I. 245; II. 35 seq. Horn, Ring, romance of, I. 77, 100 Hoveden, John, I. 90 Howard, John, II. 320 Howe, John, III. 299 Hugo, Victor, I. 2, 165; II. 270; III. 74, 87 Hume, David, II. 304, 440; III. 294, 352 Hunter, William, martyrdom of, II. 31, 32 Hutcheson, Francis, II. 304, 320; III. 271

Iceland and its legends, I. 35, 42 Independency in the sixteenth century, II. 49 seq., 90 Industry, British, in the nineteenth century, III. 165 Irish, the ancient, I. 38 Italian writings and ideas, taste for, in sixteenth century, I. 181, 182; vices of the Italian Renaissance, II. 3-7

James I and his Court, I. 237 seq. James II, III. 282 Jewell, Bishop, I. 277 Johnson, Samuel, I. 319; II. 303, 321, 444-453; III. 10, 38, 345 Joinville, Sire de, I. 83 Jones, Inigo, I. 174, 321 Jones, Sir William, II. 444 Jonson, Ben, I. 208, 265, 280; II. 100; III. 155; sketch of his life, I. 318-321; his learning, style, etc., 321-327; his dramas, 327-333; his comedies, 333-345; compared with Molière, 345; fanciful comedies and smaller poems, 345-350 Jordaens, Jacob, I. 178 Jowett, Benjamin, III. 100, 334 Judith, poem of, I. 60, 61 Junius, Letters of, II. 311 seq.; III. 106 Jutes, the, and their country, I. 31 seq.

Keats, John, III. 130 Kemble, John M., I. 37, 49 Knighton, Henry, I. 123 Knolles, Richard, I. 246 Knox, John, II. 8, 28; III. 354 Kyd, Thomas, I. 280

Lackland, John, I. 102 LaHarpe, III. 345 Lamartine, I. 2; III. 74, 87 Lamb, Charles, III. 73, 76 Languet, Hubert, I. 194 Latimer, Bishop, I. 109; II. 17, 27 seq. Lanfranc, first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, I. 76 Langtoft, Peter, I. 90 Laud, Archbishop, II. 38; III. 287 Lavergne, Léonce de, I. 33 Law, William, II. 303 Layamon, I. 92 Lebrun, Ponce Denis Econchard, I. 163 Lee, Nathaniel, II. 241 Leibnitz, III. 23 Leighton, Dr. Alexander, II. 49, 88 Lely, Sir Peter, II. 320 Leo X, Pope, II. 4 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, I. 4 Lingard, Dr. John, I. 34, 35 Locke, John, II. 71, 300, 303 seq., 320 Lockhart, John Gibson, III. 78 Lodge, Thomas, I. 204, 280 Lombard, Peter, I. 157, 160 Loménie de Brienne, Cardinal, III. 311 London in Henry VIII's time, I. 173; in the present day, III. 164 Longchamps, William, I. 97 Longus, Greek romance-writer, I. 209 Lorris, Guillaume de, I. 84, 95 Loyola, I. 161, 171; III. 273 Ludlow, Edmund, II. 51 Lulli, a renowned Italian composer, II. 233 Lully, Raymond; I. 161 Luther, Martin, I. 26, 171; II. 3-7; and the Reformation, 7-14 Lydgate, John, I. 164, 165 Lyly, John, I. 192 Lyly, William, I. 180

Macaulay, Thomas Babington (Lord), III. 100; his works, 267-307 Machiavelli, I. 183 Mackenzie, Henry, III. 35, 51 Mackintosh, Sir James, III. 276 Macpherson, James, III. 36 Malcolm, Sir John, III. 78 Malherbe, Francis de, III. 329 Malte-brun, Conrad, I. 31 Mandeville, Bernard, II. 303 Manners of the people in the sixteenth century, I. 178 seq. Marguerite of Navarre, I. 132 Marlborough, Duchess of, III. 26 Marlborough, Duke of, II. 275, 307; III. 259 Marlowe, Christopher, I. 211, 280; III. 73; his dramas, I. 282-291 Marston, John, I. 320 Martyr, Peter, II. 23 Martyrs in the reign of Mary, II. 30-34 Marvell, Andrew, II. 254 Masques, under James I, I. 177, 348 Massillon, II. 28 Massinger, Philip, I. 280, 281, 297 seq. Maundeville, Sir John, I. 91, 102 May, Thomas, II. 57 Medici, Lorenzo de, I. 182 Melanchthon, Philip, II. 13, 23 Merlin, I. 77 Meung, Jean de, I. 93, 162 Michelet, Jules, I. 4, 57; III. 325 Middleton, Thomas, I. 291 Mill, John Stuart, III. 100, 176, 360-408 Milton, John, I. 62, 215, 245; II. 71-84; his prose writings, 84-100; his poetry, 100-128, 347, 348; III. 272 Molière, I. 213, 359, 361; II. 188 seq., 418; III. 214 Mommsen, Theodor, I. 19 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, II. 424; III. 8, 15 Montesquieu, Ch., I. 21, 25 Moore, Thomas, II. 440; III. 75, 138 More, Sir Thomas, I. 246, 276 Müller, Max, III. 361 Muller, Ottfried, I. 6 Murray, John, III. 78, 138, 140 Musset, Alfred de, I. 2, 199, 282, 324, 358; II. 267; III. 39, 74, 87, 430

Nash, Thomas, I. 281 Nayler, James, II. 53, 57 Neal's History of the Puritans, II. 53, 88 Newcastle, Duchess of (Margaret Lucas), II. 187 Newspaper, first daily, III. 44 Newton, Sir Isaac, II. 289, 301 Nicole, Peter, II. 283 Norman Conquest, the, I. 71, 72, 73; its effects on the national language and literature, 87 seq., 123-125; III. 151 Normans, the character of, I. 74; how they became French, 75; their taste and architecture, 75; their literature, chivalry, and success, 76-80; their position and tyranny in England, 87-90; III. 152 Nott, Dr. John, I. 191 Novel, the English--its characteristics, II. 402 seq.; the modern school of novelists, III. 185 Nut-brown Maid, the--an ancient ballad, 190

Oates, Titus, II. 257 Occam, William, I. 161 Occleve, Thomas, I. 163 Ochin, Bernard, II. 23 Oliphant, Mrs., II. 424 Olivers, Thomas, II. 290 Orrery, Earl of, III. 8 Otway, Thomas, II. 241, 248 Ouseley, Sir William, III. 78 Overbury, Sir Thomas, I. 246 Owen, John, II. 58

Paganism of poetry and painting in Italy in the sixteenth century, I. 181 seq. Paley, William, II. 300 Palgrave, Sir Francis, I. 33 Parnell, Dr. Thomas, III. 4 Pascal, III. 300, 400; III. 25, 306 Pastoral poetry, I. 204 seq. Peele, George, I. 280 Penn, William, II. 288; III. 299 Pepys, Samuel, II. 142, 143, 146 Percy, Thomas, III. 73 Petrarch, I. 126, 185, 190 Philips, Ambrose, III. 4 Philosophy and history, III. 308 Philosophy and poetry, connection of, I. 157 Picts, I. 38 Pickering, Dr. Gilbert, II. 223 Piers Plowman's Crede, I. 122 Piers Ploughman, Vision of, I. 120 seq., 185 Pitt, William, first Earl of Chatham, II. 276, 310 seq.; III. 275 Pitt, William (second son of the preceding), II. 311, 217 seq.; III. 65 Pleiad, the, I. 18 Pluche, Abbé, II. 342 Poe, Edgar Allan, II. 405 Pope, Alexander, II. 252, 328, 332, 381; III. 5-28, 112, 117, 28O Prayer-book, English, II. 23-27 Preaching at the Reformation period, II. 27 Presbyterians and Independents in the sixteenth century, II. 49 seq., 90 Price, Dr. Richard, II. 304, 321; III. 271 Priestly, Dr., III. 66 Prior, Matthew, III. 4, 28 Proclus, I. 159 Prynne, William, II. 57 Pulci, an Italian painter, I. 182 Pultock, Robert, II. 438 Purchas, Samuel, I. 246 Puritans, the, II. 45 seq., 132 seq. Puttenham, George, I. 185, 246 Pym, John, III. 276

Quarles, Francis, I. 240

Rabelais, I. 149, 222, 265, 366; II. 144, 388, 438 Racine, I. 371; II. 224, 284; III. 218, 306 Raleigh, Sir Walter, I. 214, 246, 273; II, 34 Rapin, II. 224 Ray, John, II. 303 Reformation in England made way for by the Saxon character and the situation of the Norman Church, I. 122-125, 165; II. 7 seq. Reid, Thomas, II. 304, 320, 440 Renaissance, the English; manners of the time, I. 169-185; the theatre its original product, 264 seq. Renan, Ernest, I. 19, 127 Restoration, period of the, in England, II. 131 seq., 209 Revolution, period of the, in England, II. 273 seq. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, II. 220, 320, 444 Richard Cœur de Lion, I. 101 Richardson, Samuel, II. 135, 303, 412-424, 444; III. 8, 35 Ridley, Nicholas, II. 30 Ritson, Joseph, I. 108 seq. Robert of Brunne, I. 93 Robert of Gloucester, I. 93 Robertson, Dr. William, II. 440; III. 3, 38, 352 Robespierre, II. 284 Robin Hood ballads, I. 109 seq., 178, 185 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot), II. 143 seq., 184, 337; III. 28, 140 Rogers, John, martyrdom of, II. 31 Rogers, Samuel, III. 112 Roland, Song of, I. 77, 81 seq. Rollo, a Norse leader, I. 74 Ronsard, Peter de, I. 18 Roscellinus, I. 160 Roscommon, Earl of, II. 184 Roses, wars of the, I. 114, 124, 172, 287 Rotheland, Hugh de, I. 90 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste, III. 22 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, II. 447; III. 16, 34 Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, III. 392 Rubens, I. 151, 177, 178, 232, 366; III. 27 Rückert, III. 74 Russel, Lord William, II. 141

Sacheverell, Dr., II. 273, 306 Sacy, Lemaistre de, II. 22 Sadeler, I. 196 Sainte-Beuve, I. 6 St. John. See Bolingbroke, Lord Saint-Simon, I. 3; III. 217 St. Theresa, I. 161 Saintré, Jehan de, I. 102 Sand, George. See Dudevant, Madame Savage, Richard, III. 18 Sawtré, William, I. 124 Saxons, the, I. 31 seq.; characteristics of the race, 71; contrast with the Normans, 74, 75; their endurance, 103 seq.; their invasion of England, III. 151, 152 Scaliger, III. 345 Schelling, I. 22 Schiller, III. 48, 74, 87 Scotland in the seventeenth century, II. 134 Scott, Sir Walter, I. 4; II. 222, 361 seq., 440; III. 74, 105, 107, 260; his novels and poems, 78 Scotus, Duns, I. 159 seq. Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, I. 195 Sedley, Sir Charles, I. 240; II. 179 Selden, John, I. 246 Seres, William, II. 47 Settle, Elkanah, II. 225, 240 Sévigné, Madame de, III. 15, 306 Shadwell, Thomas, II. 157, 240, 261 Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, third Earl of, II. 304 Shakespeare, William, I. 186, 206, 245, 280; II. 230, 238 seq.; III. 155; general idea of, I. 350-353; his life and character, 354-366; his style, 366-371, and manners, 372-377; his dramatis personæ, 377-382; his men of wit, 382-386, and women, 386-391; his villains, 391, 392; the principal characters in his plays, 393-407; fancy, imagination--ideas of existence--love; harmony between the artist and his work, 407-419 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, III. 74, 95-100, 130 Shenstone, William, III. 37 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, II. 212 seq., 311, 440 Sherlock, Bishop, II. 292, 301, 412 Shirley, James, I. 280; II. 153 Sidney, Algernon, I. 245; II. 71, 141 Sidney, Sir Phillip, I. 186, 194-204, 245, 266; II. 39; III. 155 Skelton, John, I. 165 Smart, Christopher, III. 37 Smith, Adam, II. 304, 320 Smith, Sidney, II. 282; III. 100 Smollett, Tobias, II. 308, 433-437, 440 Society in Great Britain in the present day, III. 169; in England and in France, 430 South, Dr. Robert, II. 292, 295 Southern, Thomas, II. 241 Southey, Robert, II. 438; III. 72, 76, 134, 287 Speed, John, I. 246 Spelman, Sir Henry, I. 246 Spencer, Herbert, III. 185 Spencer, Edmund, I. 186, 207, 213, 245; II. 71, 110; his life, character and poetry, I. 214-237; II. 236; III. 155, 424 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, III. 100, 334 Steele, Sir Richard, II. 311, 327; III. 259 Stendhal, Count de, I. 25, 74, 142 Sterling, John, III. 309 Sterne, Laurence, II. 437-440; III. 35 Stewart, Dugald, II. 320, 440; III. 61 Stillingfleet, Bishop, II. 292, 301 Stowe, John, I. 246 Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of, III. 276 Strafford, William, I. 172 Strype, John, I. 268 Stubbes, John, I. 175, 180 Suckling, Sir John, I. 238; II. 181 Sue, Eugène, III. 220 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, I. 185-192; II. 16 Swift, Jonathan, II. 135. 224, 303, 311, 327 seq.; III. 259, 288; sketch of his life, II. 360-368; his wit, 368-371; his pamphlets, 371-379; his poetry, 380-389; his philosophy, etc., 389-401

Taillefer, I. 79, 89 Tasso, I. 222, 229 Taylor, Jeremy, I. 246; II. 35, 38, 44 Temple, Sir William, II. 173, 365, 389; III. 3, 272 Teniers, David, III. 83 Tennyson, Alfred, III. 100, 185, 410-438 Thackeray, William M. III. 85, 100; his novels, 223-265 Theatre, the, in the sixteenth century, I. 264 seq.; after the Restoration, II. 153-155, 188 seq., 226 seq. Thibaut of Champagne, I. 84 Thierry, Augustin, I. 4, 35, 56, 88; III. 305 Thiers, Louis Adolphe, III. 282, 305 Thomson, James, III. 32-35 Thorpe, John, I. 47, 55 Tickell, Thomas, III. 4 Tillotson, Archbishop, II. 292 seq. Tindal, Matthew, II. 303 Titian, I. 236, 366 Tocqueville, Alexis de, I. 19 Toland, John, II. 303 Toleration Act, the, III. 298, 299, 300 Tomkins, Thomas, II. 32 Townley, James, II. 220 Turner, Sharon, I. 48, 54 seq. Tutchin, John, III. 18 Tyndale, William, II. 19 seq., 28, 47

Urfé, Honoré d', I. 197, 315 Usher, James, I. 246

Vanbrugh, Sir John, II. 187-209 Vane, Sir Harry, II. 143 Vega, Lope de, I. 161, 279; II. 155 Village feasts of sixteenth century described, I. 178-180 Villehardouin, a French chronicler, I. 83, 102 Vinci, Leonardo da, I. 16 Voltaire, I. 16; II. 447; III. 22, 137, 346 Vos, Martin de, I. 196

Wace, Robert, I. 76, 78 seq., 89 Waller, Edmund, I. 240; II. 71, 153, 181-184; III. 3 Walpole, Horace, III. 15 Walpole, Sir Robert, II. 274, 280 Walton, Isaac, I. 246 Warburton, Bishop, II. 303 Warner, William, I. 212 Warton, Thomas, I. 72, 88, 95, 162; III. 73 Watt, James, II. 320 Watteau, Anthony, III. 14 Watts, Isaac, III. 37 Webster, John, 291, 297 seq.; II. 248 Wesley, John, II. 280-291 Wetherell, Elizabeth, III. 179 Wharton, Lord, III. 26 Whitfield, George, II. 289-230 Wiclif, John, I. 123, 286; II. 15 Wilkes, John, II. 310 William III, II. 173 Wither, George, II. 35 William of Malmesbury, I. 75 William the Conqueror, I. 78 seq. Windham, William, II. 311 Witenagemote, the, I. 46 Wollastom William Hyde, III. 271 Wolsey, Cardinal, I. 165; II. 16 Wordsworth, William, III. 73, 88-95 Wortley, Lady Mary. See Montagu Wyatt, Sir Thomas, I. 185, 180, 187 Wycherley, William, I. 18; II. 157-167, 178, 187, 188, 202, 250, 337

Yonge, Charlotte Mary, III. 179 Young, Arthur, II. 320 Young, Edward, III. 37