FOOTNOTES:

When Heaven sends sorrow,Warnings go first,Lest it should burstWith stunning mightOn souls too brightTo fear the morrow.Can science bear usTo the hid springsOf human things?Why may not dream,Or thought’s day-gleam,Startle, yet cheer us?Are such thoughts fetters,While faith disownsDread of earth’s tones,Recks but Heaven’s call,And on the wall,Reads but Heaven’s letters?

When Heaven sends sorrow,Warnings go first,Lest it should burstWith stunning mightOn souls too brightTo fear the morrow.

Can science bear usTo the hid springsOf human things?Why may not dream,Or thought’s day-gleam,Startle, yet cheer us?

Are such thoughts fetters,While faith disownsDread of earth’s tones,Recks but Heaven’s call,And on the wall,Reads but Heaven’s letters?

But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true; if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style ‘which shirks, not meets’ your intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing disappears.

Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, whichEnoch Ardenmay suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate art for anunpleasing type. Many of the characters of real life, if brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they really are, if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are doubtless very unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to think of. We fear it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of person. A dirty sailor who didnotgo home to his wife is not an agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him shine. It is true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism. All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous, too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons why we should not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings, hopes—immortal thoughts and hopes—which have influenced the life of men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the ‘whole duty of man’, the ethicalcompendium, does not recognize. Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature—a good bit, of course, but a bit only—in disproportionate, unnatural, and revolting prominence; and, therefore, unless an artist use delicate care, we are offended. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right to mix them subtly and to use them freely.

A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper. An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is divided against itself. An excellent person striving with temptation is a very admirable being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being in description. We hope he will win and overcome his temptation, but we feel that he would be a more interesting being, a higher being, if he had not felt that temptation so much. The poet must make the struggle great in order to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the struggle be too great, we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt. The internal metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive, much else must be combined with them. If the excellence ofHamlethad depended on the ethicalqualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such goodness would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome prince, and a puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities relieve his moral excellence, and so he becomes ‘nice’. In proportion as an artist has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must disguise their imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many first-rate accessories as may make his readers forget that they are themselves second-rate. The suddenmillionairesof the present day hope to disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding among aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with characters artistically imperfect will use an ornate style, will fit them into a scene where there is much else to look at.

For these reasons ornate art is within the limits as legitimate as pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of pure art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best things by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is necessary to describe inferior things among other things, with a list of enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not belong to it. Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect types, are as much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A really great landscape needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but moonlight is an equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unrealityto what will not stand the bare truth. And just so does romantic art.

There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as good perfection as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises and unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types; on the contrary it is its office to make the best of imperfect types and lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches its subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect of it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours it can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the type, so to say,in difficulties. It gives a representation of it in its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the language of old philosophy, not with what nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.

This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see, the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image. Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master. Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one of his mostconsiderable efforts can be found which is not great because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no one else would have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may not like all we may have to say of him. But in our way we too are among his admirers. No one ever read him without seeing not only his great ability but his greatmind. He not only possesses superficial useable talents, but the strong something, the inner secret something which uses them and controls them; he is great, not in mere accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the problems of his age. He has striven to know whatis: he has endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be infatuated with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered his brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a student of mysticism, and a citizen of the world. He brings to the club sofa distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and little traces of thedemi-monde. He puts down what is good for the naughty and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings of a great man of the world upon such matters. He knows women, and therefore they wish to know him. If we blame many of Browning’s efforts, it is in the interest of art, and not from a wish to hurt or degrade him.

If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesqueart by an exaggerated instance we should have selected a poem which the chance of late publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has undertaken to describe what may be calledmind in difficulties—mind set to make out the universe under the worst and hardest circumstances. He takes ‘Caliban’, not perhaps exactly Shakespeare’s Caliban, but an analogous and worse creature; a strong thinking power, but a nasty creature—a gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation of him will show that Mr. Browning does not wish to take undue advantage of his readers by a choice of nice subjects.

’Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,And feels about his spine small eft-things course,Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;And while above his head a pompion-plant,Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,And now a flower drops with a bee inside,And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:

This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person, and is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on account of his personal discomfort:

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!‘Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.‘Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.‘Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:He hated that He cannot change His cold,Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fishThat longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,And thaw herself within the lukewarm brineO’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;Only she ever sickened, found repulseAt the other kind of water, not her life,(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,And in her old bounds buried her despair,Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.‘Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,That floats and feeds; a certain badger brownHe hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eyeBy moonlight; and the pie with the long tongueThat pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,And says a plain word when she finds her prize,But will not eat the ants; the ants themselvesThat build a wall of seeds and settled stalksAbout their hole—He made all these and more,Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!‘Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.

‘Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

‘Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:He hated that He cannot change His cold,Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fishThat longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,And thaw herself within the lukewarm brineO’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;Only she ever sickened, found repulseAt the other kind of water, not her life,(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,And in her old bounds buried her despair,Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

‘Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,That floats and feeds; a certain badger brownHe hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eyeBy moonlight; and the pie with the long tongueThat pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,And says a plain word when she finds her prize,But will not eat the ants; the ants themselvesThat build a wall of seeds and settled stalksAbout their hole—He made all these and more,Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote them to illustrate, not thesuccessof grotesque art, but thenatureof grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A thinking faculty more in difficulties—a great type,—an inquisitive, searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere descriptionof the thought at all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever. Hardly any one could have amassed so many ideas at once nasty and suitable. But scarcely any readers—any casual readers—who are not of the sect of Mr. Browning’s admirers will be able to examine it enough to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of style, many of Mr. Browning’s works make a demand upon the reader’s zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal. They have on the turf the convenient expression ‘staying power’: some horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition. There is not enough of ‘staying power’ in human nature. One of his greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.

We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty recent production. All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece asCaliban upon Seteboswere an isolated error, a venial and particular exception, we should have given it no prominence. We have put it forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known pieces do so almost equally; what several of his devotees think his best piece is quiteenough illustrative for anything we want. It appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon in the hope of their conversion, though this is, according to Mr. Browning, what they really said when they came away:

Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week,Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,Take the church-road, for the bell’s due chimeGives us the summons—’t is sermon-time.Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?Up stumps Solomon—bustling too?Shame, man! greedy beyond your yearsTo handsel the bishop’s shaving-shears?Fair play’s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?Stand on a line ere you start for the church.Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbsAnd buzz for the bishop—here he comes.

Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?Up stumps Solomon—bustling too?Shame, man! greedy beyond your yearsTo handsel the bishop’s shaving-shears?Fair play’s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?Stand on a line ere you start for the church.

Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbsAnd buzz for the bishop—here he comes.

And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation concludes:

But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,And the rest sit silent and count the clock,Since forced to muse the appointed timeOn these precious facts and truths sublime,—Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,In saying Ben Ezra’s Song of Death.For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,Called sons and sons’ sons to his side,And spoke, ‘This world has been harsh and strange;Something is wrong: there needeth a change.But what, or where? at the last, or first?In one point only we sinned, at worst.‘The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,And again in his border see Israel set.When Judah beholds Jerusalem,The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:To Jacob’s House shall the Gentiles cleave,So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.‘Ay, the children of the chosen raceShall carry and bring them to their place:In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blameWhen the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o’erThe oppressor triumph for evermore?‘God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,Bade never fold the hands nor sleep’Mid a faithless world,—at watch and ward,Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.By His servant Moses the watch was set:Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.‘Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!And if, too heavy with sleep—too rashWith fear—O Thou, if that martyr-gashFell on Thee coming to take Thine own,And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne—‘Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.But, the judgement over, join sides with us!Thine too is the cause! and not more ThineThan ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!‘We withstood Christ then? be mindful howAt least we withstand Barabbas now!Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,To have called these—Christians, had we dared!Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,And Rome make amends for Calvary!‘By the torture, prolonged from age to age,By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,And the summons to Christian fellowship,—‘We boast our proof that at least the JewWould wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.Thy face took never so deep a shadeBut we fought them in it, God our aid!A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!’

For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,Called sons and sons’ sons to his side,And spoke, ‘This world has been harsh and strange;Something is wrong: there needeth a change.But what, or where? at the last, or first?In one point only we sinned, at worst.

‘The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,And again in his border see Israel set.When Judah beholds Jerusalem,The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:To Jacob’s House shall the Gentiles cleave,So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.

‘Ay, the children of the chosen raceShall carry and bring them to their place:In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blameWhen the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o’erThe oppressor triumph for evermore?

‘God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,Bade never fold the hands nor sleep’Mid a faithless world,—at watch and ward,Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.By His servant Moses the watch was set:Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.

‘Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!And if, too heavy with sleep—too rashWith fear—O Thou, if that martyr-gashFell on Thee coming to take Thine own,And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne—

‘Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.But, the judgement over, join sides with us!Thine too is the cause! and not more ThineThan ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!

‘We withstood Christ then? be mindful howAt least we withstand Barabbas now!Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,To have called these—Christians, had we dared!Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,And Rome make amends for Calvary!

‘By the torture, prolonged from age to age,By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,And the summons to Christian fellowship,—

‘We boast our proof that at least the JewWould wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.Thy face took never so deep a shadeBut we fought them in it, God our aid!A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!’

It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediaeval subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque subjects, and no age where real life was so fit to suggest them. Then, more than at any other time, good principles have been under great hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilization, the germs of modern civilization, the little remains of what had been, the small beginnings of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism and cruelty. Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the special theme of grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends afford more copiously than could have been furnished before Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of destruction. Aburiedlife like the spiritual mediaeval was Mr. Browning’s natural element, and he was right to be attracted by it. His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant; that he has forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on which he, at any rate, could not; that onthese occasions and in these poems he has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.

We say ‘sane’ because there is a most formidable and estimableinsanetaste. The will has great though indirect power over the taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to which, at first, no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon them they have a power over us just because of their natural offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood: experienced soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and newness of blood almost to death and fainting, but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as theywillbear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone; they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it, and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to detestable stanzas.

Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning’s admirers certainly, will say thatthese grotesque objects exist in real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest—to recall—the perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram’s apology. Anyhow this world exists. ‘Thereisgood wine—therearepretty women—therearecomfortable benefices—thereismoney, and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept, which hardly any one will call a “creed”, which most people will consider a sort of unbelief.’ Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He mustseehis religion, he must nave an ‘object-lesson’ in believing. He must have a creed that willtake, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of solitary religion—the ‘obdurate questionings’,the high ‘instincts’, the ‘first affections’, the ‘shadowy recollections’,

Which, do they what they may,Are yet the fountain-light of all our day—Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

the great but vague faith—the unutterable tenets seem to him worthless, visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they move about ‘in worlds not realized’. We wish he could be tried like the prophet once; he would have found God in the earthquake and the storm; he could have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough religion: he would have known that crude men and ignorant women felt them too, and he would accordingly have trusted them; but he would have distrusted and disregarded the ‘still small voice’; he would have said it was ‘fancy’—a thing you thought you heard to-day, but were not sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a nice illusion, an immaterial prettiness; he would ask triumphantly ‘How are you to get the mass of men to heed this little thing?’ he would have persevered and insisted ‘My wifedoes not hear it’.

But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the nature of grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that he has given many excellent specimens of that art within its proper boundaries and limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may call thebourgeoisnature indifficulties; in the utmost difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural. He has made of it something homely, comic, true; reminding us of whatbourgeoisnature really is. By showing us the type underabnormal conditions, he reminds us of the type under its best and most satisfactory conditions—

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,By famous Hanover city;The river Weser, deep and wide,Washes its walls on the southern side;A pleasanter spot you never spied;But, when begins my ditty,Almost five hundred years ago,To see the townsfolk suffer soFrom vermin was a pity.Rats!They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,And bit the babies in the cradles,And ate the cheeses out of the vats,And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,Split open the kegs of salted sprats,Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,And even spoiled the women’s chatsBy drowning their speakingWith shrieking and squeakingIn fifty different sharps and flats.At last the people in a bodyTo the Town Hall came flocking:‘’Tis clear’, cried they, ‘our Mayor’s a noddy;And as for our Corporation—shockingTo think we buy gowns lined with ermineFor dolts that can’t or won’t determineWhat’s best to rid us of our vermin!You hope, because you’re old and obese,To find in the furry civic robe ease?Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a rackingTo find the remedy we’re lacking,Or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!’At this the Mayor and CorporationQuaked with a mighty consternation.

Rats!They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,And bit the babies in the cradles,And ate the cheeses out of the vats,And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,Split open the kegs of salted sprats,Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,And even spoiled the women’s chatsBy drowning their speakingWith shrieking and squeakingIn fifty different sharps and flats.

At last the people in a bodyTo the Town Hall came flocking:‘’Tis clear’, cried they, ‘our Mayor’s a noddy;And as for our Corporation—shockingTo think we buy gowns lined with ermineFor dolts that can’t or won’t determineWhat’s best to rid us of our vermin!You hope, because you’re old and obese,To find in the furry civic robe ease?Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a rackingTo find the remedy we’re lacking,Or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!’At this the Mayor and CorporationQuaked with a mighty consternation.

A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic dignitaries from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand guilders if he does.

Into the street the Piper stept,Smiling first a little smile,As if he knew what magic sleptIn his quiet pipe the while;Then, like a musical adept,To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,And green and blue his sharp eye twinkledLike a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;And ere three shrill notes the pipe utteredYou heard as if an army muttered;And the muttering grew to a grumbling;And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,Families by tens and dozens,Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—Followed the Piper for their lives.From street to street he piped advancing,And step for step they followed dancing,Until they came to the river Weser,Wherein all plunged and perished!—Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar,Swam across and lived to carry(As he, the manuscript he cherished)To Rat-land home his commentary:Which was, ‘At the first shrill notes of the pipe,I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,And putting apples, wondrous ripe,Into a cider-press’s gripe:And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:And it seemed as if a voice(Sweeter far than by harp or by psalteryIs breathed) called out, “Oh rats, rejoice!The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!”And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,All ready staved, like a great sun shoneGlorious scarce an inch before me,Just as methought it said, “Come, bore me!”—I found the Weser rolling o’er me.’You should have heard the Hamelin peopleRinging the bells till they rocked the steeple.‘Go’, cried the Mayor, ‘and get long poles,Poke out the nests and block up the holes!Consult with carpenters and builders,And leave in our town not even a traceOf the rats!’—when suddenly, up the faceOf the Piper perked in the market-place,With a ‘First, if you please, my thousand guilders!’A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;So did the Corporation too.For council dinners made rare havocWith Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;And half the money would replenishTheir cellar’s biggest butt with Rhenish.To pay this sum to a wandering fellowWith a gipsy coat of red and yellow!‘Beside,’ quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,‘Our business was done at the river’s brink;We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,And what’s dead can’t come to life, I think.So, friend, we’re not the folks to shrinkFrom the duty of giving you something for drink,And a matter of money to put in your poke;But as for the guilders, what we spokeOf them, as you very well know, was in joke.Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!’The piper’s face fell, and he cried,‘No trifling! I can’t wait, beside!I’ve promised to visit by dinner timeBagdat, and accept the primeOf the Head-Cook’s pottage, all he’s rich in,For having left, in the Caliph’s kitchen,Of a nest of scorpions no survivor—With him I proved no bargain-driver,With you, don’t think I’ll bate a stiver!And folks who put me in a passionMay find me pipe to another fashion.’‘How?’ cried the Mayor, ‘d’ye think I’ll brookBeing worse treated than a Cook?Insulted by a lazy ribaldWith idle pipe and vesture piebald?You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,Blow your pipe there till you burst!’Once more he stept into the streetAnd to his lips againLaid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;And ere he blew three notes (such sweetSoft notes as yet musician’s cunningNever gave the enraptured air)There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustlingOf merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,Out came the children running.All the little boys and girls,With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.Tripping and skipping ran merrily afterThe wonderful music with shouting and laughter.And I must not omit to sayThat in Transylvania there’s a tribeOf alien people that ascribeThe outlandish ways and dressOn which their neighbours lay such stress,To their fathers and mothers having risenOut of some subterraneous prisonInto which they were trepannedLong time ago in a mighty bandOut of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,But how or why, they don’t understand.

The piper’s face fell, and he cried,‘No trifling! I can’t wait, beside!I’ve promised to visit by dinner timeBagdat, and accept the primeOf the Head-Cook’s pottage, all he’s rich in,For having left, in the Caliph’s kitchen,Of a nest of scorpions no survivor—With him I proved no bargain-driver,With you, don’t think I’ll bate a stiver!And folks who put me in a passionMay find me pipe to another fashion.’

‘How?’ cried the Mayor, ‘d’ye think I’ll brookBeing worse treated than a Cook?Insulted by a lazy ribaldWith idle pipe and vesture piebald?You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,Blow your pipe there till you burst!’

Once more he stept into the streetAnd to his lips againLaid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;And ere he blew three notes (such sweetSoft notes as yet musician’s cunningNever gave the enraptured air)There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustlingOf merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,Out came the children running.

All the little boys and girls,With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.Tripping and skipping ran merrily afterThe wonderful music with shouting and laughter.

And I must not omit to sayThat in Transylvania there’s a tribeOf alien people that ascribeThe outlandish ways and dressOn which their neighbours lay such stress,To their fathers and mothers having risenOut of some subterraneous prisonInto which they were trepannedLong time ago in a mighty bandOut of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,But how or why, they don’t understand.

Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of pure art. We live in the realm of thehalfeducated. The number of readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it guide—did it even seriously try to guide—the taste of England. Without guidance young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of books; they have to choose which they like; many of them would much like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew how. But left to themselves they take, not pure art, but showy art; not that which permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, butglaringart which catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature—the fatigue—arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due appreciation of pure art—of that art which must be known before it is admired—which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you appreciate it—which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your love. Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of men—and in a light literature counts for more than that of men—women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy literature, an exaggerated literature seem to be fated tous. These are our curses, as other times had theirs.

And yetThink not the living times forget,Ages of heroes fought and fell,That Homer in the end might tell;O’er grovelling generations pastUpstood the Gothic fane at last;And countless hearts in countless yearsHad wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;Ere England Shakespeare saw, or RomeThe pure perfection of her dome.Others I doubt not, if not we,The issue of our toils shall see;And (they forgotten and unknown)Young children gather as their ownThe harvest that the dead had sown.

FOOTNOTES:[36]The first words in Lord Jeffrey’s celebrated review of theExcursionwere, ‘This will never do.’

[36]The first words in Lord Jeffrey’s celebrated review of theExcursionwere, ‘This will never do.’

Formsof intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their subtlest and most artful charm when life is already passing from them. Searching and irresistible as are the changes of the human spirit on its way to perfection, there is yet so much elasticity of temper that what must pass away sooner or later is not disengaged all at once even from the highest order of minds. Nature, which by one law of development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier growth should propel its fibres into the later, and so transmit the whole of its forces in an unbroken continuity of life. Then comes the spectacle of the reserve of the elder generation exquisitely refined by the antagonism of the new. That current of new life chastens them as they contend against it. Weaker minds do not perceive the change; clearer minds abandon themselves to it. To feel the change everywhere, yet not to abandon oneself to it, is a situation of difficulty and contention. Communicating in this way to the passing stage of culture the charm of what is chastened, high-strung,athletic, they yet detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its difficulties and finally proving it impossible. Such is the charm of Julian, of St. Louis, perhaps of Luther; in the narrower compass of modern times, of Dr. Newman and Lacordaire; it is also the peculiar charm of Coleridge.

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute’. Ancient philosophy sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in a necessary formula, and types of life in a classification by ‘kinds’ orgenera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known except relatively under conditions. An ancient philosopher indeed started a philosophy of the relative, but only as an enigma. So the germs of almost all philosophical ideas were enfolded in the mind of antiquity, and fecundated one by one in after ages by the external influences of art, religion, culture in the natural sciences, belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes preoccupied by a formula or theory, not so much new as penetrated by a new meaning and expressiveness. So the idea of ‘the relative’ has been fecundated in modern times by the influence of the sciences of observation. These sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refinements of change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. A faculty for truth is a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and fugitive details.The moral world is ever in contact with the physical; the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the ground of the inductive science. There it has started a new analysis of the relations of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an organism increases in perfection the conditions of its life become more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature. Character merges into temperament; the nervous system refines itself into intellect. His physical organism is played upon not only by the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the vibrations of long past acts reaching him in the midst of the new order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the medium of language and ideas. It seems as if the most opposite statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the influences of the world and of society ceaselessly playing upon him, so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray word, or glance, or touch. The truth of these relations experience gives us; not the truth of eternal outlines effected once for all, but a world of fine gradations and subtly linked conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change; and bids us by constant clearing of the organs of observation and perfecting of analysis to make what we can of these. To the intellect, to the critical spirit, these subtleties of effect are more precious than anything else. What is lost in precisionof form is gained in intricacy of expression. To suppose that what is called ‘ontology’ is what the speculative instinct seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of logicians. Who would change the colour or curve of a roseleaf for that οὐσία ἀχρώματος, ἀσχημάτιστος, ἀναφής. A transcendentalism that makes what is abstract more excellent than what is concrete has nothing akin to the leading philosophies of the world. The true illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo, lost to sense, understanding, individuality; but such an one as Goethe, to whom every moment of life brought its share of experimental, individual knowledge, by whom no touch of the world of form, colour, and passion was disregarded.

The literary life of Coleridge was a disinterested struggle against the application of the relative spirit to moral and religious questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the absolute; to affirm it effectively; to get it acknowledged. Coleridge failed in that attempt, happily even for him, for it was a struggle against the increasing life of the mind itself. The real loss was, that this controversial interest betrayed him into a direction which was not for him the path of the highest intellectual success; a direction in which his artistic talent could never find the conditions of its perfection. Still, there is so much witchery about his poems, that it is as a poet that he will most probably be permanently remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his determination to affirm the absolute, weaken or modify his poetical gift?

In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the compositionof a volume of poems—theLyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth then wrote is already vibrant with that blitheélanwhich carried him to final happiness and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and obscure dejection which cling like some contagious damp to all his writings. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrative conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between nature and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a kind of ‘heavenly alchemy’:

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