The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

So sweetly, or thine eyelids leave so clear

Thy gracious eyes that never made a tear�

Though for their love our tears like blood should flow,

Though love and life and death should come and go,

45 So dreadful, so desirable, so dear? Yea, sweet, I know; I saw in what swift wise0 how swiftly

Beneath the woman's and the water's kiss

Thy moist limbs melted into Salmacis,

And the large light turned tender in thine eyes,

50 And all thy boy's breath softened into sighs; But Love being blind,2 how should he know of this?

Au Mus.e du Louvre, Mars 1863. 3

1863 1866

Ave atque Vale1

In Memory of Charles Baudelaire

Nous devrions �pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs; Les morts, les �pauvres niorts, ont de grandes douleurs, Et quand Octobre souffle, emondeur des vieux arbres, Son vent melancolique a Ventour de leurs marbres, Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats.

�"Les Fleurs du Mai"2

Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,3

Brother, on this that was the veil4 of thee?

Or quiet sea-flower molded by the sea,

Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,

2. Love, personified in classical mythology as Eros of suffering felt or inflicted"; "it has the languid, or Cupid, is often represented as blindfolded or lurid beauty of close and threatening weather�a blind. heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot3. At the Museum of the Louvre, March 1863 house scents in it." These qualities are also cele( French). brated in Swinburne's elegy, into which are woven 1. Hail and farewell (Latin); a line from an elegy many allusions to Baudelaire's poems, especially by Catullus occasioned by a farewell visit to the his "Litanies de Satan," which Swinburne regarded grave of his brother, to whom he brought gifts, a as the keynote poem of Les Fleurs du Mai. situation closely echoed in Swinburne's final 2. From "La Servante au Grand Coeur" ("The stanza. Swinburne's elegy likewise begins with a Great-hearted Servant"): We must nevertheless visit to the grave of a man whom the poet regards bring some flowers to her [or him]. / The dead, the as a brother but had never met. Charles Baudelaire poor dead, have great sadnesses, / And when Octo( 1821�1867) had impressed Swinburne as one of ber, the pruner of old trees, blows, / Its melancholy the "most perfect poets of the century." In 1861, wind in the vicinity of their marble tombs, / Then in an essay on the 2nd edition of Baudelaire's col-indeed they must find the living highly ungrateful lection Les Fleurs du Mai (Flowers of Evil, 1857), (French). Swinburne had commented on the French poet's 3. Respectively, symbols of love, mourning, and preoccupation with "sad and strange things"�"the poetic fame. sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid relish 4. I.e., the body as a veil for the soul.

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AVE ATQUE VALE / 1501

Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads0 weave, wood nymphs Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?

Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,

Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat

And full of bitter summer, but more sweet

To thee than gleanings of a northern shore

Trod by no tropic feet?5

2

For always thee the fervid languid glories

Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;

Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs

Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,

The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave

That knows not where is that Leucadian grave6

Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.

Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,

The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear

Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,

Blind gods that cannot spare. 3

Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother,

Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us:

Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous,

Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other

Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime;

The hidden harvest of luxurious time,

Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech;

And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep

Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep;

And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each,

Seeing as men sow men reap.7 4

O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping,

That were athirst for sleep and no more life

And no more love, for peace and no more strife!

Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping

Spirit and body and all the springs of song,

Is it well now where love can do no wrong,

Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang

Behind the unopening closure of her lips?

Is it not well where soul from body slips

And flesh from bone divides without a pang

As dew from flower-bell drips? 5

It is enough; the end and the beginning

Are one thing to thee, who art past the end.

5. A voyage to the tropics in Baudelaire's youth In this section Swinburne makes allusions to made a lasting impact on his poetry. Baudelaire's "Lesbos." 6. According to legend, the poet Sappho, who was 7. Cf. Galatians 6.7: "Whatsoever a man soweth, horn on the island of Lesbos, Idlled herself by leap-that shall he also reap." ing from the rock of Leucas into the Ionian Sea.

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1 502 / ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend,

For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning,

No triumph and no labour and no lust,

50 Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.

O quiet eyes wherein the light saith naught,

Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night

With obscure finger silences your sight,

Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought,

55 Sleep, and have sleep for light.

6

Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over,

Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet,

Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet

Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover,

60 Such as thy vision here solicited,8 Under the shadow of her fair vast head,

The deep division of prodigious breasts,

The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep,

The weight of awful tresses that still keep

65 The savor and shade of old-world pine forests

Where the wet hill-winds weep? 7

Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?

O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,

Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?

70 What of despair, of rapture, of derision,

What of life is there, what of ill or good?

Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood?

Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours, The faint fields quicken any terrene0 root, earthly

75 In low lands where the sun and moon are mute

And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers

At all, or any fruit?

8

Alas, but though my flying song flies after,

O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet

so Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet,

Some dim derision of mysterious laughter

From the blind tongueless warders of the dead,

Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's9 veiled head,

Some little sound of unregarded tears

85 Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes,

And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs�

These only, these the hearkening spirit hears,

Sees only such things rise. 9

Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow,

90 Far too far off for thought or any prayer.

8. An allusion to Baudelaire's "La Geante" ("The 9. Queen of the underworld. Giantess").

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AVE ATQUE VALE / 1503

What ails us with thee, who are wind and air?

What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow?

Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire,

Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire,

95 Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find.

Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies,

The low light fails us in elusive skies,

Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind

Are still the eluded eyes.

10 100 Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes,

Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul,

The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll

I lay my hand on, and not death estranges

My spirit from communion of thy song�

io5 These memories and these melodies that throng

Veiled porches of a Muse funereal1� These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold

As though a hand were in my hand to hold,

Or through mine ears a mourning musical2

110 Of many mourners rolled.

11 I among these, I also, in such station

As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods,

And offering to the dead made, and their gods,

The old mourners had, standing to make libation,

us I stand, and to the gods and to the dead

Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed

Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom,

And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear,

And what I may of fruits in this chilled air,

120 And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb

A curl of severed hair.3

12

But by no hand nor any treason stricken,

Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King,

The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing,

125 Thou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken

There fall no tears like theirs4 that all men hear

Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear

Down the opening leaves of holy poets' pages.

Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns;

ljo But bending us-ward with memorial urns

1. According to Jerome McGann, Swinburne event that made "a ruinous thing" of the Greek associates Baudelaire's distinctive kind of poetry victory. His son, Orestes, visits Agamemnon's grave with a tenth muse, one who inspires songs of lam-and dedicates on it a lock of his own hair; it is entation ("funereal"). What is meant by this muse's discovered soon thereafter by his sister, Electra, "veiled porches" seems tantalizingly obscure. who visits her father's grave to offer mourning liba2. I.e., a musical mourning. tions. 3. For lines 120�29 see Aeschylus's The Libation 4. Referring to the muses and holy poets, not to Bearers 4-8. King Agamemnon, after returning Orestes and Electra [noted by Jerome McGann]. home from Troy, had been treacherously slain, an

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1 502 / ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

The most high Muses that fulfill all ages

Weep, and our God's heart yearns.

�3 For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often

Among us darkling here the lord of light5

135 Makes manifest his music and his might

In hearts that open and in lips that soften

With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine.

Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine,

And nourished them indeed with bitter bread;

140 Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came;

The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame

Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed

Who feeds our hearts with fame. 14

Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting,

145 God of all suns and songs he too bends down

To mix his laurel with thy cypress6 crown.

And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting,

Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art,

Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart,

150 Mourns thee of many his children the last dead,

And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs

Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes,

And over thine irrevocable head

Sheds light from the under skies.7

15

155 And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean,8

And stains with tears her changing bosom chill;

That obscure Venus of the hollow hill,

That thing transformed which was the Cytherean,

With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine

160 Long since, and face no more called Erycine;9

A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god.

Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell

Did she, a sad and second prey,1 compel

Into the footless places once more trod,

165 And shadows hot from hell.

16 And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,2 No choral salutation lure to light

5. Apollo, god of light and poetry. (Odes 1.2.33-34). 6. Associated with mourning. "Laurel": the crown 1. The first "prey" of Venus had been Tannhauser, of Apollo, a wreath honoring poets. whom she had lured into the "footless places" of 7. I.e., flickering light of the underworld. her cave. Raudelaire is her "second prey." Swin8. Of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Hades. burne, after reading Baudelaire's 1861 pamphlet 9. The Venus of medieval legends held her court on Wagner's Tannhauser (1845), described this inside a mountain in Germany (the Horselberg). Venus as "the queen of evil, the lady of lust." This later Venus is a transformed version of the 2. Such a miraculous event occurred when Tannjoyous foam-born goddess associated with the hauser made a pilgrimage to Rome to seek absoisland of Cythera and also worshipped in Sicily at lution for having lived in sin with Venus. Previously a shrine on Mount Eryx (hence "Erycine"). The the pope had denied absolution until the day his Roman poet Horace described her as "blithe god-staff should bloom. dess of Eryx, about whom hover mirth and desire"

.

WALTE R PATER / 150 5 170A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. There is no help for these things; none to mend And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend, Will make death clear or make life durable. Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine And with wild notes about this dust of thine 175 At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell3 And wreathe an unseen shrine. 17 Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. 180 Out of the mystic and the mournful garden Where all day through thine hands in barren braid Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, 185 Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started, Shall death not bring us all as thee one day Among the days departed? 18 190For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, Take at my hands this garland, and farewell. Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell, And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, With sadder than the Niobean womb,4 And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb. 195Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done; There lies not any troublous thing before, Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, All waters as the shore. 1866-67 1868

3. Presumably the abode of the ghosts of the dead. than the goddess Leto, the goddess's children� 4. After Niobe boasted of having more children Apollo and Diana (Artemis)�killed them all. WALTER PATER

1839-1894

Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 1873, was the first of several volumes that established Walter Pater as one of the most influential writers of the late Victorian period. His flair for critical writing may have first been sparked when he was an undergraduate at Oxford (1858�62), where he heard and enjoyed the lectures of Matthew Arnold, who was then professor of poetry. After graduation Pater remained at Oxford, a shy bachelor who spent his life teaching classics (for the story of his earlier years see "The Child in the House" [1895], an

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1506 / WALTER PATER

autobiographical sketch that provides a helpful introduction to all of his writings). In

view of his quiet disposition Pater was surprised and even alarmed by the impact

made by his books on young readers of the 1870s and 1880s. Some of his younger

followers such as Oscar Wilde and George Moore may have misread him. As T. S.

Eliot wrote somewhat primly, "[Pater's] view of art, as expressed in The Renaissance,

impressed itself upon a number of writers in the nineties, and propagated some con

fusion between life and art which is not wholly irresponsible for some untidy lives."

It can be demonstrated that Pater's writings (especially his historical novel Marius

the Epicurean, 1885) have much in common with the works of his earnest-minded

mid-Victorian predecessors, but his disciples overlooked these similarities. To them

his work seemed strikingly different and, in its quiet way, more subversive than the

head-on attacks against traditional Victorianism made by Algernon Charles Swin

burne or Samuel Butler. Instead of recommending a continuation of the painful quest

for Truth that had dominated Oxford in the days of John Henry Newman, Pater

assured his readers that the quest was pointless. Truth, he said, is relative. And instead

of echoing Thomas Carlyle's call to duty and social responsibilities, Pater reminded

his readers that life passes quickly and that our only responsibility is to enjoy fully

"this short day of frost and sun"�to relish its sensations, especially those sensations

provoked by works of art. This epicurean gospel was conveyed in a highly wrought prose style that baffles

anyone who likes to read quickly. Pater believed that prose was as difficult an art as

poetry, and he expected his own elaborate sentences to be savored. Like Gustave

Flaubert (1821�1880), the French novelist whom he admired, Pater painstakingly

revised his sentences with special attention to their rhythms, seeking always the right

word, le mot juste, as Flaubert called it. For many years Pater's day would begin with

his making a careful study of a dictionary. What Pater said of Dante is an apt descrip

tion of his own polished style: "He is one of those artists whose general effect largely

depends on vocabulary, on the minute particles of which his work is wrought, on the

colour and outline of single words and phrases." An additional characteristic of his

highly wrought style is its relative absence of humor. Pater was valued among his

friends for his flashes of wit and for his lively and irreverent conversation, but in

his writings such traits are suppressed. As Michael Levey observed in The Case of

Walter Pater (1978), "Even for irony the mood of his writing is almost too intense." In addition to being a key figure in the transition from mid-Victorianism to the

"decadence" of the 1890s, Pater commands our attention as the writer of exemplary

impressionistic criticism. In each of his essays he seeks to communicate what he

called the "special unique impression of pleasure" made on him by the works of some

artist or writer. His range of subjects included the dialogues of Plato, the paintings

of Leonardo da Vinci, the plays of Shakespeare, and the writings of the French

Bomantic school of the nineteenth century. Of particular value to students of English

literature are his discriminating studies of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Cole-

ridge, Charles Lamb, and Sir Thomas Browne in his volume of Appreciations (1889)

and his essay on the poetry of William Morris titled "Aesthetic Poetry" (1868). These

and other essays by Pater were praised by Oscar Wilde in a review in 1890 as "abso

lutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity. For he to whom the present

is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. . . . The

true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad

generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure." The final sentences of his Appreciations volume are a revealing indication of Pater's

critical position. After having attempted to show the differences between the classical

and romantic schools of art, he concludes that most great artists combine the qualities

of both. "To discriminate schools, of art, of literature," he writes, "is, of course, part

of the obvious business of literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production,

it is easy to be overmuch occupied concerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate

contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all

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STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE / 150 7

successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the

vulgarity which is dead to form."

From Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Preface

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is,"1 has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals�music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life�are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience�metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable or not, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, by analyzing and reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, "La Gioconda," the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola,2 are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a

1. Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism at of the Renaissance. "La Gioconda": another name the Present Time" (1864; p. 1384). for Leonardo da Vinci's painting the Mona Lisa 2. Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), Italian phi-(1503�6; see below). "The hills of Carrara": marble losopher and classical scholar, subject of an essay quarries in Italy, particularly associated with by Pater that was included in Studies in the History Michelangelo.

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1 50 8 / WALTER PATER

wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyze, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule for those who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in the words of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve: De se borner a connaitre de pres les belles choses, et a sen nourrir en exquis amateurs, en humanistesaccomplish

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct

abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of tempera

ment, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods,

types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have been

some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question he asks

is always: In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find

itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The

ages are all equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."4 Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off all debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallized a part, but only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood,5 sometimes, as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transmute,

we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mys

tical sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature,

drawing strength and color and character from local influences, from the hills

and streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the

active principle in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic of

Wordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, to mark the

degree in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the Renaissance, and touch what I think the chief points in that complex, manysided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those who originally used it to denote that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was only one of many results of a general excitement and enlightening

3. To confine themselves to knowing beautiful ought to be "a recent critique." things intimately, and to sustain themselves by 4. From Blake's annotations to The Works of Sir these, as sensitive amateurs and accomplished Joshua Reynolds (1778). The "genius" was the humanists do (French). In 1980 the editor Donald German artist Albrecht Diirer (1471-1528). j. Hill discovered that this quotation is by the 5. Wordsworth's ode is actually titled "Intimations French man of letters Charles-Augustin Sainte-of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child- Beuve (1804-1869) rather than about him; hood"; both poems were published in 1807. therefore, Hill conjectures that "a recent critic"

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STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE / 150 9

of the human mind, but of which the great aim and achievements of what, as

Christian art, is often falsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result.

This outbreak of the human spirit may be traced far into the Middle Age itself,

with its motives already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty, the

worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious

system of the Middle Age imposed on the heart and the imagination. 1 have

taken as an example of this movement, this earlier Renaissance within the

Middle Age itself, and as an expression of its qualities, two little compositions

in early French; not because they constitute the best possible expression of

them, but because they help the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renais

sance ends also in France, in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings

of Joachim du Bellay6 are in many ways the most perfect illustration. The

Renaissance, in truth, put forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later

growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweet

ness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence, just as its earliest

phases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascesis,7 of the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth. But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the Renaissance

mainly lies�in that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too

much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the

imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities,

with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character,

for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture

of an age, move for the most part from different starting points, and by uncon

nected roads. As products of the same generation they partake indeed of a

common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but of the pro

ducers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage or disad

vantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and

the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the

conspicuous places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle

of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little curious

of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to time, eras of

more favorable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together

than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual world combine

in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth century in Italy is one

of these happier eras, and what is sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true

of that of Lorenzo:8 it is an age productive in personalities, many-sided, cen

tralized, complete. Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action

of the world has elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe

a common air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. There is

a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike communicate.

The unity of this spirit gives unity to all the various products of the Renais

sance; and it is to this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in the

best thoughts which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth

century owes much of its grave dignity and influence. I have added an essay on Winckelmann,9 as not incongruous with the stud

6. French poet and critic (ca. 1 522�1560), subject patron of the arts. Pericles (ca. 495-429 B.C.E.), a of another essay in Studies of the History of the statesman who led Athens during its period of Renaissance. greatest political and cultural dominance. 7. Asceticism (Greek). 9. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717�1768), 8. Lorenzo de Medici (1449�1492, also known as German classicist. Lorenzo the Magnificent), ruler of Florence and

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151 0 / WALTER PATER

ies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his lifelong struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.

["LA GIOCONDA"]1

"La Gioconda" is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the "Melancholia" of Diirer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least. As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limit, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio,2 faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams, and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By what strange affinities had the dream and the person grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's brain, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in II Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes' and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labor never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come,"4 and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and molded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and

I. Or Mona Lisa, the famous painting by Leonardo from the essay on Leonardo. da Vinci (1452�1519) that now hangs in the Lou-2. Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), Florenvre in Paris. The sitter for the portrait may have tine painter and sculptor. Giorgio Vasari (1511 � been Lisa, the third wife of the Florentine Fran-1 574), author of Lives of the Most Excellent Italian cesco del Giocondo (to whom Pater refers as "II Painters (1550). Giocondo")�hence her title, La Gioconda. Mona 3. Mimics or clowns. (more correctly Monna) Lisa means "Madonna 4. lCorinthiansl0.il. Lisa" or "My Lady Lisa." This selection is drawn

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STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE / 1511

imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.5 She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy,6 and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Conclusion7

Aeyei JIOV 'HpaKA.ei.Tog OTL JIOLVTU "/ojpei Kai ovdev /livei"

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without�our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibers, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them�the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound�processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn.9 Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them�a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

Or, if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of color from the wall� movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest�but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under

5. A powerful Italian family during the Renais-changes which bring it closer to my original meansance, notorious for scandalous conduct. ing. I have dealt more fully in Maritis the Epicurean 6. Helen's father was Zeus (who approached Leda with the thoughts suggested by it [Pater's note to in the form of a swan). the 3rd edition, 1888]. 7. This brief "Conclusion" was omitted in the sec-8. Heraclitus says, "All things give way; nothing ond edition of this book, as I conceived it might remaineth" [Pater's translation]. The Greek phi- possibly mislead some of those young men into losopher was active ca. 500 B.C.E. whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have 9. Grain. thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight

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151 2 / WALTER PATER

a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions�colour, odour, texture�in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off�that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving

and unweaving of ourselves.

Philoso-phiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren.1 The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us�for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

1. To philosophize is to cast off inertia, to make oneself alive (German). "Novalis" was the pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772�1801), German Romantic writer.

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS / 151 3

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful2 brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel,3 or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau4 is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biased by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnes as Victor Hugo' says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve�les hommes sont tons condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world,"6 in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion�that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

1868 1873

2. Awe-inspiring. 5. French novelist and poet (1802-1885). The 3. Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), German ide-quotation is taken from his work Le Dernier Jotir alistic philosopher. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), d'un Condamnd (The Last Day of a Condemned French founder of positivism. Man, 1832). "Voltaire" was the pen name of the 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712�1778), Swiss-French author and philosopher Francois-Marie born French political theorist and philosopher; his Arouet (1694-1778). Confessions were published in 1781 and 1788. 6. Luke 16.8. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 1844-1889

It has been said that the most important date in Gerard Manley Hopkins's career was 1918, twenty-nine years after his death, for it was then that the first publication of his poems made them accessible to the world of readers. During his lifetime these remarkable poems, most of them celebrating the wonders of God's creation, had been

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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

known only to a small circle of friends, including his literary executor, the poet Robert Bridges, who waited until 1918 before releasing them to a publisher. Partly because his work was first made public in a twentieth-century volume, but especially because of his striking experiments in meter and diction, Hopkins was widely hailed as a pioneering figure of "modern" literature, miraculously unconnected with his fellow Victorian poets (who during the 1920s and 1930s were largely out of fashion among critical readers). And this way of classifying and evaluating his writings has long persisted. In 1936 a substantial selection of his poems led off The Faher Book of Modern Verse, one of the most influential anthologies of the century, featuring poets such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot (the only one whose selections occupy more pages than those allotted to Hopkins). And the first four editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962�79) grouped Hopkins with these twentieth-century poets. To reclassify him is not to repudiate his earlier reputation as a "modern" but rather to suggest that his work can be better understood and appreciated if it is restored to the Victorian world out of which it developed.

Hopkins was born near London into a large and cultivated family in comfortable circumstances. After a brilliant career at Highgate School, he entered Oxford in 1863, where he was exposed to a variety of Victorian ways of thinking, both secular and religious. Among the influential leaders at Oxford was Matthew Arnold, professor of poetry; but more important for Hopkins was his tutor, Walter Pater, an aesthetician whose emphasis on the intense apprehension of sensuous beauty struck a responsive chord in Hopkins. At Oxford he was also exposed to the Broad Church theology of one of the tutors at his college (Balliol), Benjamin Jowett. But Hopkins became increasingly attracted first to the High Church movement represented at Oxford by Edward Pusey, and then to Roman Catholicism. Profoundly influenced by John Henry Newman's conversion to Rome and by subsequent conversations with New- man, Hopkins entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. The estrangement from his family that resulted from his conversion was very painful for him; his parents' letters to him were so "terrible" (he reported to Newman) that he could not bear to "read them twice." And this alienation was heightened by his decision not only to become a Roman Catholic but to become a priest and, in particular, a Jesuit priest, for many Victorian Protestants regarded the Jesuit order with a special distrust. For the rest of his life, Hopkins served as a priest and teacher in various places, among them Oxford, Liverpool, and Lancashire. In 1884 he was appointed professor of classics at University College in Dublin.

At school and at Oxford in the early 1860s, Hopkins had written poems in the vein of John Keats. He burned most of these early writings after his conversion (although drafts survive), for he believed that his vocation must require renouncing such personal satisfactions as the writing of poems. Only after his superiors in the church encouraged him to do so did he resume writing poetry. Yet during the seven years of silence, as his letters show, he had been thinking about experimenting with what he called a "new rhythm." The result, in 1876, was his rhapsodic lyric-narrative, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," a long ode about the wreck of a ship in which five Franciscan nuns were drowned. The style of the poem was so distinctive that the editor of the Jesuit magazine to which he had submitted it "dared not print it," as Hopkins reported. During the remaining fourteen years of his life, Hopkins wrote poems but seldom submitted them for publication, partly because he was convinced that poetic fame was incompatible with his religious vocation but also because of a fear that readers would be discouraged by the eccentricity of his work.

Hopkins's sense of his own uniqueness is in accord with the larger philosophy that informs his poetry. Drawing on the theology of Duns Scotus, a medieval philosopher, he felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe "selves," that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS / 1515

universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize its specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. In the act of instress, therefore, the human being becomes a celebrant of the divine, at once recognizing God's creation and enacting his or her own God-given identity within it.

Poetry for Hopkins enacts this celebration. It is instress, and it realizes the inscape of its subject in its own distinctive design. Hopkins wrote, "But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry." To create inscape, Hopkins seeks to give each poem a unique design that captures the initial inspiration when he is "caught" by his subject. Many of the characteristics of Hopkins's style�his disruption of conventional syntax, his coining and compounding of words, his use of ellipsis and repetition�can be understood as ways of representing the stress and action of the brain in moments of inspiration. He creates compounds to represent the unique interlocking of the characteristics of an object�"piecebright," "dapple-dawn-drawn," "blue-bleak." He omits syntactical connections to fuse qualities more intensely�"the dearest freshness deep down things." He creates puns to suggest how God's creation rhymes and chimes in a divine patterning. He violates conventional syntactic order to represent the shape of mental experience. In the act of imaginative apprehension, a language particular to the moment generates itself.

Hopkins also uses a new rhythm to give each poem its distinctive design. In the new metric system he created, which he called sprung rhythm, lines have a given number of stresses, but the number and placement of unstressed syllables is highly variable. Hopkins rarely marks all the intended stresses, only those that readers might not anticipate. To indicate stressed syllables, Hopkins often uses both the stress (') and the "great stress" ("). A curved line marks an "outride"�one or more syllables added to a foot but not counted in the scansion of the line; they indicate a stronger stress on the preceding syllable and a short pause after the outride. Here, for example, is the scansion for the first three lines of "The Windhover":

I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

Hopkins argued that sprung rhythm was the natural rhythm of common speech and written prose, as well as of music. He found a model for it in Old English poetry and in nursery rhymes, but he claimed that it had not been used in English poetry since the Elizabethan age.

The density and difficulty that result from Hopkins's unconventional rhythm and syntax make his poetry seem modern, but his concern with the imagination's shaping of the natural world puts him very much in the Romantic tradition; and his creation of a rough and difficult style, designed to capture the mind's own motion, resembles the style of Robert Browning. "A horrible thing has happened to me," Hopkins wrote in 1864, "I have begun to doubt Tennyson." He criticizes Tennyson for using the grand style as a smooth and habitual poetic speech. Like Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Henry James as well as Browning, Hopkins displays a new mannerism, characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth century, which paradoxically combines an elaborate aestheticism with a more complex representation of consciousness.

In Hopkins's early poetry his singular apprehension of the beauty of individual objects always brings him to an ecstatic illumination of the presence of God. But in his late poems, the so-called terrible sonnets, his distinctive individuality comes to isolate him from the God who made him thus. Hopkins wrote, "To me there is no resemblance: searching nature, I taste sel/but at one tankard, that of my own being."

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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

In the terrible sonnets Hopkins confronts the solipsism to which his own stress on individuality seems to lead him. Like the mad speakers of so many Victorian dramatic monologues, he cannot escape a world solely of his own imagining. Yet even these poems of despair, which simultaneously echo the bleaker side of the Romantic tradition and anticipate more modern attitudes, reflect a traditional religious vision: the dark night of the soul as described by the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross.

In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats calls Hopkins's poetry "a last development of poetical diction." Yeats's remark indicates the anomaly that Hopkins's work poses. Perhaps it is only appropriate for a writer who stressed the uniqueness of inscape to strike us with the individuality of his achievement.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;1 It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.2 Why do men then now not reck his rod?

5 Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for� all this, nature is never spent; despite 10 There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs� Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

1877 1918

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves!0 the elves'-eyes! quarries

5 The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold;1 lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles0 set on a flare! white poplars Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!�

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!�What?�Prayer, patience, alms, vows, io Look, look: a May-mess,2 like on orchard boughs!

I. Hopkins explained this image in a letter: "I 2. I.e., from the crushing of olives. mean foil in its sense of leaf or tinsel. . . . Shaken 1. Coined by analogy with quicksilver. The stargoldfoil gives off broad glares like sheet lightning light night resembles the lawns below it, where the and also, and this is true of nothing else, owing to dew, reflecting the starlight, looks like gold. its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small 2. A profusion of growing things such as May blosmany cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too." soms.

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SPRING / 1517

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!3 These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling4 shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.0 saints 1877 1918

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked0 string tells, each hung bell's plucked

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

5 Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors0 each one dwells; within Selves'�goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;2 io Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is� Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces.

1877 1918

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring� When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

5 The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy? io A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.�Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid's child,1 thy choice and worthy the winning.

1877 1918

3. Willows, here with yellow spots like meal. 2. Acts in a just manner. 4. Picket fence. "Shocks": sheaves of grain. 1. Jesus, son of the Virgin Mary. J. Fulfills its individuality.

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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

The Windhover1

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion," king-darling dom of daylight's dauphin,2 dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling* wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a how-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,�the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!4 AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!0 knight

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion5 Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall6 themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

1877 1918

Pied1 Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things� For skies of couple-colour as a brinded2 cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,3 finches' wings; 5 Landscape plotted and pieced�fold, fallow, and plough;4 And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.0 equipment

All things counter, original, spare,5 strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; io He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

1877 1918

1. Kestrel, a small falcon noted for hovering in the air. 2. A prince who is heir to the French throne. 3. Rippling. "Rung upon the rein": circled at the end of a rein. 4. The verb can be read as imperative or indicative. All three meanings are relevant: to prepare for action, to fasten together, to collapse. 5. The ridge between two furrows of a plowed field.

6. Break the surface of. 1. Of two or more colors in blotches, variegated. 2. Brownish orange in color with streaks of gray. 3. I.e., freshly fallen chestnuts, bright as coals. 4. Divided into fields used as pastures ("fold"), lying fallow, or plowed for cultivation. The landscape thus appears like patches of different colors. 5. Rare. "Counter": contrary.

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BINSEY POPLARS / 15 19

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks1 rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

5 I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

10 Majestic�as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!� These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

1877 1918

Binsey Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank 5 Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

io O if we but knew what we do When we delve0 or hew� dig Hack and rack0 the growing green! torture Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, is That, like this sleek and seeing ball0 the eye But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve:

20 After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc unselve0 rob of self

1. Sheaves of grain.

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15 18 / GERAR D MANLE Y HOPKIN S 25The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene. 1879 1918

Duns Scotus's Oxford1

Towery city and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in;2 graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping�folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release

10 He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty" the rarest-veined unraveller; a not reality Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fired France for Mary without spot.3

1879 1918

Felix Randal

Felix Randal the farrier," O is he dead then? my duty blacksmith

all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

5 Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed1 and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom2 Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever3 he offended!

1. Duns Scotus, the medieval theologian, lectured powers"), with the "there" of its new surburban at Oxford about 1301. His idea that individuality "brickish skirt": housing developments and indusis the final perfection of any creature influenced trial complexes that were built around the perimHopkins's conception of inscape. When Hopkins eter of the city in the 19th century. came on two of Scotus's commentaries in 1872, he 3. In Paris, Scotus was influential in defending wrote that he was immediately "flush with a new the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception�i.e., stroke of enthusiasm . . . when I took in any that Mary was born without original sin. inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus." 1. In Extreme Unction (the sacrament for the 2. Hopkins contrasts the "here" of the "grey dying.) beauty" of the medieval city of Oxford, where 2. Holy Communion preceded by confession and country and town are both protected ("coped," as absolution. within a priest's cloak) and in equilibrium ("poised 3. In whatever way.

.

[CARRION COMFORT] / 1521

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. 10 My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,

Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years, When thou at the random4 grim forge, powerful amidst peers,

Didst fettle0 for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering prepare

sandal!

1880 1918

Spring and Fall:1 to a young child 5io15Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wan wood leafmeal2 lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost0 guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. spirit 1880 1918

[Carrion Comfort]1

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee,2 Not untwist�slack they may be�these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

5 But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock?3 lay a lionlimb against me? scan

4. Built with stones of irregular size and shape. is filtered through the leaves. 1. This deceptively simple poem is deeply in-1. This title was supplied by Bridges. The poem is formed by Christian theology: according to Cath-one of the "terrible sonnets," as are the three fololic doctrine, the fall of Adam and Eve brought into lowing poems. the world both mortality and the legacy of Original 2. The satisfaction of giving in to despair as a kind Sin for all human beings ("the blight man was born of "comfort" is implicitly likened to a vulture's sat- for"). isfaction in feasting on dead flesh. 2. Coined by analogy with piecemeal. "Wan-3. I.e., why would you roughly rock me with your wood": pale or dim; the forest maybe pale because world-wringing right foot? of light-colored autumn leaves or dim because light

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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie,4 sheer and clear. 10 Nay in all that toil, that coil,� since (seems) 1 kissed the rod, tumult Hand rather,' my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whom though? The Hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. 1885 1918

No worst, there is none

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

5 My cries heave, herds-long;1 huddle in a main, a chief- woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing� Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked "No lingering! Let me be fell: force2 I must be brief." O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

io Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance0 deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, endurance Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

1885 1918

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

I wake and feel the fell0 of dark, not day. bitterness What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

4. Metaphors of winnowing, or removing the 17. empty husks ("chaff") that are blown away from 5. I.e., the hand that wields the rod. the valuable grain that remains, appear frequently 1. Like the succession of cries made by cattle that in the Bible to represent the separation of virtue have been following one another in a long line. from wickedness. See, e.g., Psalm 1.4, Luke 3.16� 2. Necessarily, inevitably. "Fell": fierce.

.

THAT NATURE IS A HERACLITEAN FIRE / 1523

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters' sent To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree 10 Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

1885 1918

That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire1 and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy0 race on an air- built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers,0 in gay-gangs | they swaggerers

throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches. Shivelights and shadowtackle2 in long | lashes lace, lance, and pair. Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches3 Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches Squadroned masks and manmarks4 | treadmire toil there Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, | nature's bonfire burns on. But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selved0 most individual

spark Man, how fast his firedint | his mark on mind, is gone! Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone Sheer off, disseveral,0 a star, | death blots black out; nor mark separate

Is any of him at all so stark But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood,5 immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

1888 1918

1. Letters undelivered or returned to the sender rigging. "Shivelights": strips of light. by the post office. 3. Ruts described as peeled places. "Parches" is a 1. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus (fl. ca. 500 verb whose subject is wind. B.C.E.) taught that all things are in flux and that 4. The marks that people have made on the earth they ultimately return to the basic principle of fire. by walking ("footfretted") on it. 2. Branches imagined as the shadows of a ship's 5. Kindling. "Jack": ordinary man.

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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Thou art indeed just, Lord

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.1

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

5 Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes0 thickets

io Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again

With fretty chervil,2 look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build�but not I build; no, but strain,

Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

1889 1918

From Journal1

May 3 [1866], Cold. Morning raw and wet, afternoon fine. Walked then with Addis, crossing Bablock Hythe, round by Skinner's Weir2 through many fields into the Witney road. Sky sleepy blue without liquidity. From Cumnor Hill saw St. Philip's and the other spires through blue haze rising pale in a pink light. On further side of the Witney road hills, just fleeced with grain or other green growth, by their dips and waves foreshortened here and there and so differenced in brightness and opacity the green on them, with delicate effect. On left, brow of the near hill glistening with very bright newly turned sods and a scarf of vivid green slanting away beyond the skyline, against which the clouds shewed the slightest tinge of rose or purple. Copses in grey-red or grey-yellow�the tinges immediately forerunning the opening of full leaf. Meadows skirting Seven-bridge road voluptuous green. Some oaks are out in small leaf. Ashes not out, only tufted with their fringy blooms. Hedges springing richly. Elms in small leaf, with more or less opacity. White poplars most beautiful in small grey crisp spray-like leaf. Cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple orchis. Over the green

1. "Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with acter of his imagination. The brackets and thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: abbreviations are Hopkins's. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" 2. Dam. William E. Addis (1844-1917), friend of (Jeremiah 12.1). The Latin was Hopkins's title. Hopkins at Oxford; like him he became a Catholic 2. A kind of herb, related to parsley. convert and priest. The places mentioned are I. With the exception of one year, Hopkins kept a around Oxford. Compare Matthew Arnold's evojournal from May 1866 to Feb. 1875. Its most cation of this same landscape in "The Scholar interesting entries are minutely observed descrip-Gypsy" (p. 1361). tions of natural phenomena, which reveal the char

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JOURNAL / 1525

water of the river passing the slums of the town and under its bridges swallows shooting, blue and purple above and shewing their amber-tinged breasts reflected in the water, their flight unsteady with wagging wings and leaning first to one side then the other. Peewits flying. Towards sunset the sky partly swept, as often, with moist white cloud, tailing off across which are morsels of grey-black woolly clouds. Sun seemed to make a bright liquid hole in this, its texture had an upward northerly sweep or drift from the W, marked softly in grey. Dog violets. Eastward after sunset range of clouds rising in bulky heads moulded softly in tufts or bunches of snow�so it looks�and membered somewhat elaborately, rose-coloured. Notice often imperfect fairy rings. Apple and other fruit trees blossomed beautifully.

$ $ $

Feb.�1870. One day in the Long Retreat (which ended on Xmas Day) they were reading in the refectory Sister Emmerich's account3 of the Agony in the Garden4 and I suddenly began to cry and sob and could not stop. I put it down for this reason, that if I had been asked a minute beforehand I should have said that nothing of the sort was going to happen and even when it did I stood in a manner wondering at myself not seeing in my reason the traces of an adequate cause for such strong emotion�the traces of it I say because of course the cause in itself is adequate for the sorrow of a lifetime. I remember much the same thing on Maundy Thursday when the presanctified Host5 was carried to the sacristy. But neither the weight nor the stress of sorrow, that is to say of the thing which should cause sorrow, by themselves move us or bring the tears as a sharp knife does not cut for being pressed as long as it is pressed without any shaking of the hand but there is always one touch, something striking sideways and unlooked for, which in both cases undoes resistance and pierces, and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly to the body and cleared the understanding in its passage. On the other hand the pathetic touch by itself, as in dramatic pathos, will only draw slight tears if its matter is not important or not of import to us, the strong emotion coming from a force which was gathered before it was discharged: in this way a knife may pierce the flesh which it had happened only to graze and only grazing will go no deeper.

$ # $

May 18 [1870].�Great brilliancy and projection: the eye seemed to fall perpendicular from level to level along our trees, the nearer and further Park; all things hitting the sense with double but direct instress. 4 * *

This was later. One day when the bluebells were in bloom I wrote the following. I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. It[s inscape] is [mixed of] strength and grace, like an ash [tree]. The head is strongly drawn over [backwards] and arched down like a cutwater6 [drawing itself back from the line of the keel.] The lines of the bells strike and overlie this, rayed but not symmetrically, some lie parallel. They look steely against [the] paper, the shades lying between the bells and behind the cockled petal

3. The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ; 5. The bread wafer sanctified for Holy Communfrom the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich, ion. "Maundy Thursday": the Thursday before an Augustinian nun (1774�1824). Easter, day of the Last Supper. 4. Luke 22.39-44. 6. The forward edge of a ship's prow.

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15 18 / GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

ends and nursing up the precision of their distinctness, the petal-ends themselves being delicately lit. Then there is the straightness of the trumpets in the bells softened by the slight entasis7 and [by] the square splay of the mouth. One bell, the lowest, some way detached and carried on a longer footstalk, touched out with the tips of the petals on oval / not like the rest in a plane perpendicular of the axis of the bell but a little atilt, and so with [the] squarein- rounding turns of the petals.

* *

Aug. 10 [1872].�I was looking at high waves. The breakers always are parallel to the coast and shape themselves to it except where the curve is sharp however the wind blows. They are rolled out by the shallowing shore just as a piece of putty between the palms whatever its shape runs into a long roll. The slant ruck8 or crease one sees in them shows the way of the wind. The regularity of the barrels surprised and charmed the eye; the edge behind the comb or crest was as smooth and bright as glass. It may be noticed to be green behind and silver white in front: the silver marks where the air begins, the pure white is foam, the green / solid water. Then looked at to the right or left they are scrolled over like mouldboards9 or feathers or jibsails seen by the edge. It is pretty to see the hollow of the barrel disappearing as the white combs on each side run along the wave gaining ground till the two meet at a pitch and crush and overlap each other.

About all the turns of the scaping from the break and flooding of wave to its run out again I have not yet satisfied myself. The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf but it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running: I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by every big pebble the backwater runs over�if it were clear and smooth there would be a network from their overlapping, such as can in fact be seen on smooth sand after the tide is out�; then I saw it run browner, the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds, while the strength of the back-draught shrugged the stones together and clocked them one against another.

1959

7. Outward curvature. 9. Curved iron plates attached to plowshares. 8. Fold or crease.

.

Li ^kt Verse

The Victorian era produced a remarkable outburst of humorous prose and verse from the time of Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836�37) at the beginning of the period to the operas of W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan near the end. The following selections provide examples of two varieties of Victorian light verse. One, represented by Gilbert, makes lighthearted mockery of institutions such as the Court of Chancery and marriage, as well as prevalent cultural trends and styles. This burlesque mode, employed to poke fun at a host of social and political issues and figures, can also be found in the pages of Punch, a humorous and satirical magazine that began publication in

1841. Although exaggeration and absurdity are important ingredients in these writings, the comic worlds they create are still recognizably related to the ordinary world.

The other variety is a more distinctive Victorian specialty, nonsense writing, represented here by compositions by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Originally intended for children, these playful writings have often been equally relished by adults. In the twentieth century Carroll's Alice books in particular proved especially attractive to psychoanalytically minded readers; those interested in literary parody, philosophical speculation, and linguistic and mathematical puzzles also found them an absorbing, as well as an amusing, study. Whatever critical approach we choose for our readings, the great popularity of these works in their own era encourages us to question the Victorians' reputation for somber and stuffy humorlessness.

EDWARD LEAR

1812-1888

Edward Lear was a landscape painter who spent much of his life in Mediterranean countries. In 1846 he published his first Book of Nonsense, a collection of limericks for children. The form of the limerick was not invented by Lear, but his use of it helped establish its popularity. In later volumes of the Book of Nonsense, he used other verse forms, some of them modeled on rhythms developed by his close friend Tennyson. Best-remembered as the author of "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" (1870), Lear classified his own poems as "nonsense pure and absolute."

1 527

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152 8 / LIGH T VERS E Limerick There was an Old Man who supposed That the street door was partially closed; But some very large rats ate his coats and his hats, While that futile old gentleman dozed. 1846 The Jumblies 5ioThey went to sea in a sieve, they did; In a sieve they went to sea; In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a sieve they went to sea. And when the sieve turned round and round, And everyone cried, "You'll be drowned!" They called aloud, "Our sieve ain't big, But we don't care a button; we don't care a fig� In a sieve we'll go to sea!" Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumbbes live. Their heads are green, and their hands are blue; And they went to sea in a sieve. is20 They sailed away in a sieve, they did, In a sieve they sailed so fast, With only a beautiful pea-green veil Tied with a ribbon, by way of a sail, To a small tobacco-pipe mast. And everyone said who saw them go, "Oh! won't they be soon upset, you know, For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long; And, happen what may, it's extremely wrong In a sieve to sail so fast." 25so The water it soon came in, it did; The water it soon came in. So, to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet In a pinky� paper all folded neat; And they fastened it down with a pin. And they passed the night in a crockery-jar; And each of them said, "How wise we are! Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long, Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong, While round in our sieve we spin." tiny 35 And all night long they sailed away; And, when the sun went down, They whistled and warbled a moony song

.

LEWIS CARROLL / 152 9

To the echoing sound of a coppery gong, In the shade of the mountains brown,

40 "O Timballoo! how happy we are When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar! And all night long, in the moonlight pale, We sail away with a pea-green sail

In the shade of the mountains brown."

45 They sailed to the Western Sea, they did�

To a land all covered with trees; And they bought an owl, and a useful cart, And a pound of rice, and a cranberry tart,

And a hive of silvery bees;

50 And they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws, And a lovely monkey with lollipop paws, And seventeen bags of edelweiss tea, And forty bottles of ring-bo-ree,

And no end of Stilton cheese.

55 And in twenty years they all came back �

In twenty years or more; And everyone said, "How tall they've grown! For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,

And the hills of the Chankly Bore."1

60 And they drank their health, and gave them a feast Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast; And everyone said, "If we only live, We, too, will go to sea in a sieve,

To the hills of the Chankly Bore." 65 Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live. Their heads are green, and their hands are blue; And they went to sea in a sieve.

1871

1. Lear here invents names that are half plausible "the Torrible Zone" is a play on the Torrid Zone, because they resemble the real names of geograph-the region along the equator between the Tropics ical features: a bore is a surge wave that rises reg-of Cancer and Capricorn. ularly in estuaries or when two tides meet, while LEWIS CARROLL 1832-1898

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a deacon in the Anglican Church and a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford as well as a pioneer in the art of portrait photography. Most of his publications were mathematical treatises, but his fame rests on the strange pair of books he wrote for children: Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking- Glass (1871), both published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The various songs and poems scattered throughout the stories are frequently parodies of ditties such as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "How doth the little busy bee," nursery classics that a child like Alice would have been able to recite. Others, like "The Mouse's Tale,"

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1 530 / LIGHT VERSE

whose text is set out in the form of a long and twisting tail, are playful in different ways. "Jabberwocky," provided here and followed by the discussion that Alice and Humpty Dumpty conduct about its meaning, is a particularly good example of Carroll's fondness for word games. It is an indication of the poem's popularity that the invented word chortle, formed by blending chuckle and snort, has passed into English.

Jabberwocky1

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the raome raths outgrabe.

5 "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand; 10 Long time the manxome foe he sought� So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, is Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head 20 He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy.

25 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

1855 1871

[Humpty Dumpty's Explication of "Jabberwocky"]1

"You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir," said Alice. "Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem 'Jabberwocky'?"

1. From Through the Looking-Glass, chap. 1. 1. From Through the Looking-Glass, chap. 6.

.

CARROLL: [EXPLICATION OF "JABBERWOCKY"] / 1531

"Let's hear it," said Humpty Dumpty. "I can explain all the poems that ever were invented�and a good many that haven't been invented just yet." This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:

" 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe."

"That's enough to begin with," Humpty Dumpty interrupted: "there are plenty of hard words there. 'Brillig' means four o'clock in the afternoon�the time when you begin broiling things for dinner."

"That'll do very well," said Alice: "and 'slithy'?"2 "Well, 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy.' 'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see

it's like a portmanteau3�there are two meanings packed up into one word." "I see it now," Alice remarked thoughtfully: "and what are 'toves'?" "Well, 'toves' are something like badgers�they're something like lizards�

and they're something like corkscrews." "They must be very curious creatures." "They are that," said Humpty Dumpty: "also they make their nests under

sundials�also they live on cheese." "And what's to 'gyre' and to 'gimble'?" "To 'gyre' is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To 'gimble' is to make

holes like a gimlet." "And the 'wabe' is the grass plot round a sundial, I suppose?" said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity. "Of course it is. It's called 'wabe,' you know, because it goes a long way

before it, and a long way behind it " "And a long way beyond it on each side," Alice added. "Exactly so. Well then, 'mimsy' is 'flimsy and miserable' (there's another

portmanteau for you). And a 'borogove' is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round�something like a live mop." "And then 'mome raths'?" said Alice. "If I'm not giving you too much trouble." "Well, a 'rath' is a sort of green pig: but 'mome' I'm not certain about. I

think it's short for 'from home'�meaning that they'd lost their way, you know." "And what does 'outgrabe' mean?" "Well, 'outgribing' is something between bellowing and whistling, with a

kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you'll hear it done, maybe�down in

the wood yonder�and when you've once heardWho's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?" "I read it in a book," said Alice. it you'll be quite content. 1871

2. Concerning the pronunciation of these words, pronounced like the 'o' in 'borrow.' I have heard Carroll later said: "The 'i' in 'slithy' is long, as in people try to give it the sound of the 'o' in 'worry.' 'writhe'; and 'toves' is pronounced so as to rhyme Such is Human Perversity." with 'groves.' Again, the first 'o' in 'borogoves' is 3. Large suitcase.

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1 532 / LIGHT VERSE

The White Knight's Song1

I'll tell thee everything I can; There's little to relate. I saw an aged, aged man, A-sitting on a gate. 5 "Who are you, aged man?" I said. "And how is it you live?" And his answer trickled through my head Like water through a sieve.

He said "I look for butterflies 10 That sleep among the wheat;

I make them into mutton-pies, And sell them in the street. I sell them unto men," he said,

"Who sail on stormy seas; is And that's the way I get my bread� A trifle, if you please."

But I was thinking of a plan To dye one's whiskers green, And always use so large a fan 20 That they could not be seen. So, having no reply to give To what the old man said, I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!" And thumped him on the head.

25 His accents mild took up the tale; He said, "I go my ways, And when I find a mountain-rill, I set it in a blaze; And thence they make a stuff they call 30 Rowland's Macassar Oil2�Yet twopence-halfpenny is all They give me for my toil."

But I was thinking of a way To feed oneself on batter, 35 And so go on from day to day Getting a little fatter. I shook him well from side to side, Until his face was blue; "Come, tell me how you live," I cried 40 "And what it is you do!"

He said, "I hunt for haddocks' eyes Among the heather bright,

I. From Through the Looking-Glass, chap. 8. Car-"Resolution and Independence" (1807). roll's "Song" is a parodic version of William Words-2. Brand of hair oil, much used in the 19th cenworth's poem concerning an aged leech gatherer: tury.

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CARROLL : TH E WHIT E KNIGHT' S SON G / 153 3 And work them into waistcoat-buttons In the silent night. 45 And these I do not sell for gold Or coin of silvery shine, But for a copper halfpenny, And that will purchase nine. "I sometimes dig for buttered rolls, 50 Or set limed twigs3 for crabs; I sometimes search the grassy knolls For wheels of hansom-cabs. And that's the way" (he gave a wink) "By which I get my wealth� 55 And very gladly will I drink Your Honor's noble health." I heard him then, for I had just Completed my design To keep the Menai bridge4 from rust 60 By boiling it in wine. I thanked him much for telling me The way he got his wealth, But chiefly for his wish that he Might drink my noble health. 65 And now, if e'er by chance I put My fingers into glue, Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot Into a left-hand shoe, Or if I drop upon my toe 70 A very heavy weight, I weep, for it reminds me so Of that old man I used to know� Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow, Whose hair was whiter than the snow, 75 Whose face was very like a crow, With eyes, like cinders, all aglow, Who seemed distracted with his woe. Who rocked his body to and fro, And muttered mumblingly and low, so As if his mouth were full of dough, Who snorted like a buffalo� That summer evening long ago A-sitting on a gate. 1856 1871

3. A method of catching small birds, which 4. Suspension bridge in Wales (completed in become caught on birdlime, a sticky substance. 1826).

.

1534

W. S. GILBERT 1836-1911 Before becoming a full-time writer, William Schwenck Gilbert worked in the civil service and as a lawyer. In 1869 he published Bab Ballads, a collection of narrative verses he had first contributed to a magazine called Fun. These ballads are indeed funny but also curiously macabre in their imperturbable accounts of disasters, cannibalism, and murders. Gilbert's skills as a writer of light verse, together with his experience in devising plays for the London theater, contributed to his triumphant success as a librettist in a series of light operas that he composed in collaboration with the eminent musician Sir Arthur Sullivan. For twenty-five years (1871�96). Gilbert and Sullivan captivated audiences in London and New York with productions such as H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Princess Ida (1884)�a comedic response to Tennyson's poem The Princess (1847)�and The Mikado (1885). Most of these operas exhibit Gilbert's satirical flair; gentle fun is poked at the pretentious ineffectuality of the House of Lords and of corner-cutting lawyers and politicians as well as of bumbling admirals and generals. The good- hearted quality is especially evident in the happy endings of the operas: the satire is usually blunted in the finale by a jovial-spirited acceptance of characters who in earlier scenes were exposed as foolish or inept.

In recognition of his work, Gilbert was knighted by King Edward VII in 1907 (some twenty-five years after Sullivan was knighted in token of Queen Victoria's interest in his "serious" music). Gilbert died on May 29, 1911, while attempting to save a young woman from drowning.

When I, Good Friends, Was Called to the Bar1

When I, good friends, was called to the bar, I'd an appetite fresh and hearty, But I was, as many young barristers are, An impecunious party.0 penniless individual 5 I'd a swallow-tail coat of a beautiful blue� A brief which I bought of a booby2� A couple of shirts and a collar or two, And a ring that looked like a ruby!

CHORUS. A couple of shirts, etc.

In Westminster Hall31 danced a dance, io Like a semidespondent fury;4 For I thought I should never hit on a chance Of addressing a British jury � But I soon got tired of third-class journeys,5 And dinners of bread and water;

1. Before a breach of promise suit begins in Trial 3. Courtrooms of the Court of Chancery in Lon- by Jury, the singer of this piece, the judge presiding don. over the case, tells the court how he "came to be 4. The Furies are the avenging goddesses in Greek a judge." mythology. 2. A fool or dunce. "Brief: a summary of the facts 5. Rritish passenger trains had first-, second-, and of a case that is prepared (usually by a solicitor) to third-class sections. assist a barrister in presenting the case in court.

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GILBERT: IF YOU'RE ANXIOUS FOR TO SHINE / 1535

15 So I fell in love with a rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter.

CHORUS. SO he fell in love, etc.

The rich attorney, he jumped with joy, And replied to my fond professions: "You shall reap the reward of your pluck, my boy, 20 At the Bailey and Middlesex Sessions.6 You'll soon get used to her looks," said he, "And a very nice girl you'll find her! She may very well pass for forty-three In the dusk, with a light behind her!"

CHORUS. She may very well, etc.

25 The rich attorney was good as his word; The briefs came trooping gaily, And every day my voice was heard At the Sessions or Ancient Bailey. All thieves who could my fees afford 30 Relied on my orations, And many a burglar I've restored To his friends and his relations.

CHORUS. And many a burglar, etc.

At length I became as rich as the Gurneys7� An incubus8 then I thought her, 35 So I threw over that rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter. The rich attorney my character high Tried vainly to disparage� And now, if you please, I'm ready to try 40 This Breach of Promise of Marriage!

1875

If You're Anxious for to Shine in the High Aesthetic Line1

Am I alone, And unobserved? I am! Then let me own I'm an aesthetic sham!

6. Meetings of the county court of Middlesex sons in their sleep. (which includes London). "Bailey": the Old Bailey 1. Sung in Patience (Act 1) by Reginald Bun- was a court where criminals were tried. thorne, a caricature of contemporary poets of the 7. A wealthy banking family. "aesthetic school" such as Oscar Wilde. 8. Evil spirit (usually male) that descends on per

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1 536 / LIGHT VERSE

5 This air severe Is but a mere Veneer!

This cynic smile Is but a wile 10 Of guile!

This costume chaste Is but good taste Misplaced!

Let me confess! 15 A languid love for lilies does not blight me!

Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me! I do not care for dirty greens By any means. I do not long for all one sees

20 That's Japanese.2 I am not fond of uttering platitudes

In stained-glass attitudes. In short, my medievalism's affectation, Born of a morbid love of admiration!

25 If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. And everyone will say,

30 As you walk your mystic way, "If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man

must be!"

Be eloquent in praise of the very dull old days which have long since passed away, And convince 'em, if you can, that the reign of good Oueen Anne was Culture's palmiest3 day. 35 Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever's fresh and new, and declare it's crude and mean, For Art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine.4

2. Admiring Japanese vases and paintings had become a cult practice among aesthetes like the painter James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). Bunthorne's other references are probably to Pre- Raphaelite paintings such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's portraits of languidly gazing women (sometimes in green dresses) in which the subject might be posed in a cramped posture recalling that of a figure in a stained-glass window.

3. Most prosperous. Queen Anne (1665-1714) ruled from 1702 to 1714. 4. Napoleon's wife (1763�1814), empress of France from 1804 to 1811.

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GILBERT: IF YOU'RE ANXIOUS FOR TO SHINE / 1537

And everyone will say, As you walk your mystic way, "If that's not good enough for him which is good enough for me, 40 Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth this kind of youth must be!"

Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion5 must excite your languid spleen,0 melancholy An attachment a la Plato6 for a bashful young potato, or a nottoo- French French bean! Though the Philistines7 may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.8 45 And everyone will say, As you walk your flowery way, "If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit

me,

Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!"

1881

5. Gilbert here begins to play with the concept of "vegetable love," a phrase taken from Andrew Marveil's poem "To His Coy Mistress" (1681). 6. Platonic love denotes a spiritual relationship, devoid of sexual desire. 7. A term used by Matthew Arnold to describe the respectable middle classes, who predictably disapproved of the aesthetes' flamboyant behavior.

8. Another reference to frequently repeated motifs in Pre-Raphaelite art. Piccadilly: a busy street in central London.

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Victorian Issues

EVOLUTION

One of the most dramatic controversies in the Victorian age concerned theories of evolution. This controversy exploded into prominence in 1859 when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published, but it had been rumbling for many years previously. Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830) and Robert Chambers's popular book Vestiges of Creation (1843^46) had already raised issues that Tennyson aired in his In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). It was Darwin, however, with his monumental marshaling of evidence to establish his theory of natural selection, who finally brought the topic fully into the open, and the public, as well as the experts, took sides.

The opposition aroused by Darwin's treatise came from two different quarters. The first consisted of some of his fellow scientists, who affirmed that his theory was unsound. The second consisted of religious leaders who attacked his theory because it seemed to contradict a literal interpretation of the Bible. Sometimes the two kinds of opposition combined forces, as in 1860 when his scientific opponents selected Bishop Wilberforce to be their spokesman in spearheading their attack on The Origin of Species. In replying to such attacks, Darwin had the good fortune to be supported by two of the ablest popularizers of science in his day, T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. Moreover, although shy by temperament, Darwin was himself (as Tyndall affirms and the selections printed here will illustrate) an exceptionally effective expositor of his own theories.

Darwin rightly saw himself as a scientist and for the most part restricted his attention to observations about the natural world; the applications of his concept of "the survival of the fittest" to activities within and between human societies and cultures, which came to be known in the late nineteenth century as "Social Darwinism," were primarily conducted by other writers, most notably Herbert Spencer. Nevertheless, the shock that Darwin felt as a young man when he first saw the "savages" of South America's Tierra del Fuego (described in the extract provided from The Descent of Man, 1871) stayed with him all his life, and was probably one of the factors that caused him to speculate about social behaviors and systems in evolutionary terms.

It is instructive to compare the selections here with Tennyson's In Memoriam, Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" (1864), and the extracts from the writings of Huxley.

1538

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1539

CHARLES DARWIN

Charles Darwin (1809�1882) developed an interest in geology and biology at Cambridge, where he was studying to become a clergyman. Aided by a private income, he resolved to devote the rest of his life to scientific research. The observations he made during a long voyage to the South Seas on the HMS Beagle (on which he served as a naturalist) led Darwin to construct hypotheses about evolution. In 1858, more than twenty years after his return to England from his voyage, he ventured to submit a paper developing his theory of the origin of species. A year later, when his theory appeared in book form, as The Origin of Species, Darwin emerged as a famous and controversial figure.

From The Origin of Species

From Chapter 3. Struggle for Existence

We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence. Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult�at least I have found it so�than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind, the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that, though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.

[THE TERM, STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE, USED IN A LARGE SENSE]

I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture. A plant which annually produces a thousand seeds, of which only one of an average comes to maturity, may be more truly said to struggle with the plants of the same and other kinds which already clothe the ground. The mistletoe is dependent on the apple and a few other trees, but can only in a farfetched sense be said to struggle with these trees, for, if too many of these parasites grow on the same tree, it languishes and dies. But several seedling mistletoes, growing close together on the same branch, may more truly be said to struggle with each other. As the mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on them; and it may methodically be said to struggle with other fruit-bearing plants, in tempting the birds to devour and thus disseminate its seeds. In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience' sake the general term of Struggle for Existence.

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1 154 0 / EVOLUTION

[GEOMETRICAL RATIO OF INCREASE]

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase. Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product. Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus1 applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.

There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty- five years, and at this rate, in less than a thousand years, there would literally not be standing-room for his progeny. Linnaeus2 has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds�and there is no plant so unproductive as this�and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there should be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase; it will be safest to assume that it begins breeding when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth six young in the interval, and surviving till one hundred years old; if this be so, after a period of from 740 to 750 years there would be nearly nineteen million elephants alive, descended from the first pair.

ft ft �

[COMPLEX RELATIONS OF ALL ANIMALS AND PLANTS TO EACH OTHER IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE]

Many cases are on record showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings, which have to struggle together in the same country.

ft * ft

Nearly all our orchidaceous plants absolutely require the visits of insects to remove their pollen-masses and thus to fertilise them. I find from experiments that humble-bees' are almost indispensable to the fertilisation of the hearts- ease (Viola tricolor), for other bees do not visit this flower. I have also found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; for instance, 20 heads of Dutch clover (Trifolium repens) yielded 2,290 seeds, but 20 other heads protected from bees produced not one. Again, 100 heads

I. Thomas Robert Malthus (1 766-1834), British 2. Carl Linnaeus (1707�1778), Swedish natural- social theorist who argued that the population, ist who developed the binomial system�genus increasing geometrically, would grow beyond the plus species name�for naming plants and animals means of subsistence, which increased arithmeti-(e.g., Viola tricolor, below). cally, without the necessary natural checks of pov-3. Bumblebees. erty, disease, and starvation.

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DARWIN: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES / 1541

of red clover (T. pratense) produced 2,700 seeds, but the same number of protected heads produced not a single seed. Humble-bees alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. It has been suggested that moths may fertilise the clovers; but I doubt whether they could do so in the case of the red clover, from their weight not being sufficient to depress the wing petals. Hence we may infer as highly probable that, if the whole genus of humble- bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great measure upon the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Col. Newman,4 who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Col. Newman says, "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

In the case of every species, many different checks, acting at different periods of life, and during different seasons or years, probably come into play; some one check or some few being generally the most potent; but all will concur in determining the average number or even the existence of the species. In some cases it can be shown that widely-different checks act on the same species in different districts. When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this! Every one has heard that when an American forest is cut down a very different vegetation springs up; but it has been observed that ancient Indian ruins in the Southern United States, which must formerly have been cleared of trees, now display the same beautiful diversity and proportion of kinds as in the surrounding virgin forest. What a struggle must have gone on during long centuries between the several kinds of trees each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect�between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey�all striving to increase, all feeding on each other, or on the trees, their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! Throw up a handful of feathers, and all fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is the problem where each shall fall compared to that of the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins!

From Chapter 15. Recapitulation and Conclusion

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz,5 "as

4. Henry Wenman Newman (1 788-1865), British German philosopher and mathematician; he was a army officer who succeeded to his father's estates contemporary of Isaac Newton, who set forth the in 1829. law of universal gravitation. 5. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716),

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1 54 2 / EVOLUTION

subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

Why, it may be asked, until recently did nearly all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists disbelieve in the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quality; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when inter- crossed are invariably sterile, and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration;6 and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.

But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to clear and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell7 first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the agencies which we see still at work. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of even a million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the "plan of creation," "unity of design," &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only re-state a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future,�to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.8 Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for

6. Calculations based on the genealogies within the Bible put the age of the world at no more than six thousand years. 7. Charles Lyell (1797-1875), geologist whose book Principles of Geolog)- (1830�33) was important in dissociating geological theory from the Bible and in establishing nature as the record of the earth's history, which be saw as a process of lengthy and gradual change rather than swift catastrophic events.

8. Despite the initial theological resistance to Darwin's theory, his ideas were swiftly accepted by his fellow scientists, and intellectual elites, even in the Church, soon followed suit. It would take much longer for the larger public to come around, although Darwin's burial in Westminster Abbey� a great civic honor�suggests he had won over many of his fellow citizens.

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DARWIN: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES / 1543

thus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

* # *

It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question is difficult to answer, because the more distinct the forms are which we consider, by so much the arguments in favour of community of descent become fewer in number and less in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. All the members of whole classes are connected together by a chain of affinities, and all can be classed on the same principle, in groups subordinate to groups. Fossil remains sometimes tend to fill up very wide intervals between existing orders.

Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a fully developed condition; and this in some cases implies an enormous amount of modification in the descendants. Throughout whole classes various structures are formed on the same pattern, and at a very early age the embryos closely resemble each other. Therefore I cannot doubt that the theory of descent with modification embraces all the members of the same great class or kingdom. I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability to injurious influences. We see this even in so trifling a fact as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak- tree. With all organic beings excepting perhaps some of the very lowest, sexual production seems to be essentially similar. With all, as far as is at present known the germinal vesicle is the same; so that all organisms start from a common origin. If we look even to the two main divisions�namely, to the animal and vegetable kingdoms�certain low forms are so far intermediate in character that naturalists have disputed to which kingdom they should be referred. As Professor Asa Gray9 has remarked, "the spores and other reproductive bodies of many of the lower algae may claim to have first a characteristically animal, and then an unequivocally vegetable existence." Therefore, on the principle of natural selection with divergence of character, it does not seem incredible that, from such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed; and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form.

ft ft ft

When we feel assured that all the individuals of the same species, and all the closely allied species of most genera, have within a not very remote period descended from one parent, and have migrated from some one birth-place; and when we better know the many means of migration, then, by the light which geology now throws, and will continue to throw, on former changes of

9. American botanist (1810-1888).

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1 154 4 / EVOLUTION

climate and of the level of the land, we shall surely be enabled to trace in an admirable manner the former migrations of the inhabitants of the whole world. Even at present, by comparing the differences between the inhabitants of the sea on the opposite sides of a continent, and the nature of the various inhabitants on that continent, in relation to their apparent means of immigration, some light can be thrown on ancient geography.

The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record.' The crust of the earth with its imbedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognised as having depended on an unusual concurrence of favourable circumstances, and the blank intervals between the successive stages as having been of vast duration. But we shall be able to gauge with some security the duration of these intervals by a comparison of the preceding and succeeding organic forms. We must be cautious in attempting to correlate as strictly contemporaneous two formations, which do not include many identical species, by the general succession of the forms of life. As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation; and as the most important of all causes of organic change is one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical conditions, namely, the mutual relation of organism to organism,�the improvement of one organism entailing the improvement or the extermination of others; it follows, that the amount of organic change in the fossils of consecutive formations probably serves as a fair measure of the relative though not actual lapse of time. A number of species, however, keeping in a body might remain for a long period unchanged, whilst within the same period several of these species by migrating into new countries and coming into competition with foreign associates, might become modified; so that we must not overrate the accuracy of organic change as a measure of time.

In the future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer,2 that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited,3 they seem to me to

1. Geology had captured the early Victorian imagination, largely thanks to the radical theories of Charles Lyell and to mounting interest in dinosaurs (a term coined in 1842 by the pioneering comparative anatomist Sir Richard Owen, who was the first to classify "dinosauria'' as a suborder of large extinct reptiles). Perhaps Darwin here forecasts one reason why popular interest would shift in the later part of the century; after his Origin was published, biology, not geology, became the focal point of public debate.

2. British social theorist (1820-1903), who developed the concept of social Darwinism. 3. I.e., before the earliest geological period of the Paleozoic (now dated at more than 544 million years ago).

.

CHARLES DARWIN / 1545

become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

1859

CHARLES DARWIN

After he published The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote several treatises, some of which develop and clarify the theory of The Origin of Species. One of these works, The Descent of Man (1871), was especially provocative in its stress on the similarities between humans and animals and in its naturalistic explanations of the beautiful colorings of birds, insects, and flowers.

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From The Descent of Man

[NATURAL SELECTION AND SEXUAL SELECTION] 1

A brief summary will here be sufficient to recall to the reader's mind the more salient points in this work. Many of the views which have been advanced are highly speculative, and some no doubt will prove erroneous; but I have in every case given the reasons which have led me to one view rather than to another. It seemed worth while to try how far the principle of evolution would throw light on some of the more complex problems in the natural history of man. False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form. The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in innumerable points of structure and constitution, both of high and of the most trifling importance�the rudiments which he retains, and the abnormal reversions to which he is occasionally liable�are facts which cannot be disputed. They have long been known, but until recently they told us nothing with respect to the origin of man. Now when viewed by the light of our knowledge of the whole organic world, their meaning is unmistakable. The great principle of evolution stands up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are considered in connection with others, such as the mutual affinities of the members of the same group, their geographical distribution in past and present times, and their geological succession. It is incredible that all these facts should speak falsely. He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation. He will be forced to admit that the close resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog�the construction of his skull, limbs, and whole frame, independently of the uses to which the parts may be put, on the same plan with that of other mammals�the occasional reappearance of various structures, for instance of several distinct muscles, which man does not normally possess, but which are common to the Quadrumana2� and a crowd of analogous facts�all point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the codescendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.

$ >* *

By considering the embryological structure of man�the homologies which he presents with the lower animals, the rudiments which he retains, and the reversions to which he is liable�we can partly recall in imagination the former condition of our early progenitors; and can approximately place them in their

1. From chap. 21. 2. Animals, such as monkeys, whose hind feet and forefeet can be used as hands�hence "four-handed."

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DARWIN: THE DESCENT OF MAN / 1547

proper position in the zoological series. We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed amongst the Quadrumana, as surely as would the common and still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. The Quadrumana and all the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long line of diversified forms, either from some reptile- like or some amphibianlike creature, and this again from some fishlike animal. In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchiae,3 with the two sexes united in the same individual, and with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This animal seems to have been more like the larvae of our existing marine ascidians4 than any other known form.

# � #

Sexual selection has been treated at great length in these volumes; for, as I have attempted to show, it has played an important part in the history of the organic world.

* $ $ The belief in the power of sexual selection rests chiefly on the following considerations. The characters which we have the best reason for supposing to have been thus acquired are confined to one sex; and this alone renders it probable that they are in some way connected with the act of reproduction. These characters in innumerable instances are fully developed only at maturity; and often during only a part of the year, which is always the breeding season. The males (passing over a few exceptional cases) are the most active in courtship; they are the best armed, and are rendered the most attractive in various ways. It is to be especially observed that the males display their attractions with elaborate care in the presence of the females; and that they rarely or never display them excepting during the season of love. It is incredible that all this display should be purposeless. Lastly we have distinct evidence with some quadrupeds and birds that the individuals of the one sex are capable of feeling a strong antipathy or preference for certain individuals of the opposite sex.

Bearing these facts in mind, and not forgetting the marked results of man's unconscious selection, it seems to me almost certain that if the individuals of one sex were during a long series of generations to prefer pairing with certain individuals of the other sex, characterized in some peculiar manner, the offspring would slowly but surely become modified in this same manner. I have not attempted to conceal that, excepting when the males are more numerous than the females, or when polygamy prevails, it is doubtful how the more attractive males succeed in leaving a larger number of offspring to inherit their superiority in ornaments or other charms than the less attractive males; but I have shown that this would probably follow from the females�especially the

3. Gills. cata, or popularly "sea squirts," sometimes 4. Part of a group of marine animals called tuni-assumed to be ancestors of the vertebrate animals.

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more vigorous females which would be the first to breed, preferring not only the more attractive but at the same time the more vigorous and victorious males.

Although we have some positive evidence that birds appreciate bright and beautiful objects, as with the bowerbirds of Australia, and although they certainly appreciate the power of song, yet I fully admit that it is an astonishing fact that the females of many birds and some mammals should be endowed with sufficient taste for what has apparently been effected through sexual selection; and this is even more astonishing in the case of reptiles, fish, and insects. But we really know very little about the minds of the lower animals. It cannot be supposed that male birds of paradise or peacocks, for instance, should take so much pains in erecting, spreading, and vibrating their beautiful plumes before the females for no purpose. We should remember the fact given on excellent authority in a former chapter, namely that several peahens, when debarred from an admired male, remained widows during a whole season rather than pair with another bird.

Nevertheless I know of no fact in natural history more wonderful than that the female argus pheasant should be able to appreciate the exquisite shading of the ball-and-socket ornaments and the elegant patterns on the wing feathers of the male. He who thinks that the male was created as he now exists must admit that the great plumes, which prevent the wings from being used for flight, and which, as well as the primary feathers, are displayed in a manner quite peculiar to this one species during the act of courtship, and at no other time, were given to him as an ornament. If so, he must likewise admit that the female was created and endowed with the capacity of appreciating such ornaments. I differ only in the conviction that the male argus pheasant acquired his beauty gradually, through the females having preferred during many generations the more highly ornamented males; the aesthetic capacity of the females having been advanced through exercise or habit in the same manner as our own taste is gradually improved. In the male, through the fortunate chance of a few feathers hot having been modified, we can distinctly see how simple spots with a little fulvous5 shading on one side might have been developed by small and graduated steps into the wonderful ball-and-socket ornaments; and it is probable that they were actually thus developed.

� � * He who admits the principle of sexual selection will be led to the remarkable conclusion that the cerebral system not only regulates most of the existing functions of the body, but has indirectly influenced the progressive development of various bodily structures and of certain mental qualities. Courage, pugnacity, perseverance, strength and size of body, weapons of all kinds, musical organs, both vocal and instrumental, bright colours, stripes and marks, and ornamental appendages have all been indirectly gained by the one sex or the other, through the influence of love and jealousy, through the appreciation of the beautiful in sound, color or form, and through the exertion of a choice; and these powers of the mind manifestly depend on the development of the cerebral system.

ft ft �

5. Dull yellow.

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LEONARD HUXLEY / 154 9

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians6 on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind�such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts,7 and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to everyone not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs8�as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system�with all these exalted powers�Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

1871

6. Natives inhabiting the islands off the southern 7. Crafts and skills. tip of South America, Tierra de! Fuego, which Dar-8. Incidents described in chap. 4 to demonstrate win had visited in 1832. See his Voyage of the Bea-that animals may be endowed with a moral sense. gle (1839), chap. 10. LEONARD HUXLEY

At meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the reading of a paper is followed by a discussion. In 1860, at Oxford, this discussion developed into a debate between Thomas Henry Huxley (1825�1895), a defender of Charles Darwin's theories, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805�1873). Although he had studied mathematics as an undergraduate, Wilberforce could hardly lay claim to be a scientist. He was willing, nevertheless, to speak on behalf of those scientists who disagreed with The Origin of Species (1859), and he reportedly came to the meeting

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ready to "smash Darwin." The bishop's principal qualifications for this role were his great powers as a smoothly persuasive orator (he was commonly known by his detractors as "Soapy Sam"), but he met more than his match in Huxley.

Because no complete transcript of this celebrated debate was made at the time, Huxley's son Leonard (1860�1933), in writing his father's biography, had to reconstruct the scene by combining quotations from reports made by magazine writers and other witnesses. The account given here is from chapter 14.

From The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley

[THE HUXLEY-WILBERFORCE DEBATE AT OXFORD]

The famous Oxford Meeting of 1860 was of no small importance in Huxley's career. It was not merely that he helped to save a great cause from being stifled under misrepresentation and ridicule�that he helped to extort for it a fair hearing; it was now that he first made himself known in popular estimation as a dangerous adversary in debate�a personal force in the world of science which could not be neglected. From this moment he entered the front fighting line in the most exposed quarter of the field. * * *

It was the merest chance, as I have already said, that Huxley attended the meeting of the section that morning. Dr. Draper' of New York was to read a paper on the Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin. "I can still hear," writes one who was present, "the American accents of Dr. Draper's opening address when he asked 'Air we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?' " However, it was not to hear him, but the eloquence of the Bishop, that the members of the Association crowded in such numbers into the Lecture Room of the Museum, that this, the appointed meeting place of the section, had to be abandoned for the long west room, since cut in two by a partition for the purposes of the library. It was not term time, nor were the general public admitted; nevertheless the room was crowded to suffocation long before the protagonists appeared on the scene, 700 persons or more managing to find places. The very windows by which the room was lighted down the length of its west side were packed with ladies, whose white handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of the Bishop's speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the crowd.

On the east side between the two doors was the platform. Professor Hen- slow, the President of the section, took his seat in the center; upon his right was the Bishop, and beyond him again Dr. Draper; on his extreme left was Mr. Dingle, a clergyman from Lanchester, near Durham, with Sir J. Hooker and Sir J. Lubbock in front of him, and nearer the center, Professor Beale of King's College, London, and Huxley.2

The clergy, who shouted lustily for the Bishop, were massed in the middle of the room; behind them in the northwest corner a knot of undergraduates (one of these was T. H. Green,3 who listened but took no part in the cheering) had gathered together beside Professor Brodie,4 ready to lift their voices, poor

1. John W. Draper (1811-1882), British-born John Lubbock (1834-1913), banker, statesman, chemist, photographer, and historian who was a naturalist, and Darwin's neighbor; and Lionel professor at the University of the City of New York. Smith Beale (1828-1905), professor of medicine. 2. Except for the clergyman Dingle, all those 3. Later a prominent British philosopher (1836� named are scientists of some repute: John Stevens 1882). Henslow (1796-1861), professor of botany at 4. Sir Benjamin Brodie (1783�1862), physiologist Cambridge; Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817� and surgeon. 1911), botanist (and Henslow's son-in-law); Sir

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HUXLEY: LIFE AND LETTERS OF THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY / 1551

minority though they were, for the opposite party. Close to them stood one of the few men among the audience already in Holy orders, who joined in�and indeed led�the cheers for the Darwinians.

So "Dr. Draper droned out his paper, turning first to the right hand and then to the left, of course bringing in a reference to the Origin of Species which set the ball rolling."

An hour or more that paper lasted, and then discussion began. The President "wisely announced in limine5 that none who had not valid arguments to bring forward on one side or the other would be allowed to address the meeting; a caution that proved necessary, for no fewer than four combatants had their utterances burked6 by him, because of their indulgence in vague declamation."

First spoke (writes Professor Farrar7) a layman from Brompton, who gave his name as being one of the Committee of the (newly formed) Economic section of the Association. He, in a stentorian voice, let off his theological venom. Then jumped up Richard Greswell8 with a thin voice, saying much the same, but speaking as a scholar; but we did not merely want any theological discussion, so we shouted them down. Then a Mr. Dingle got up and tried to show that Darwin would have done much better if he had taken him into consultation. He used the blackboard and began a mathematical demonstration on the question�"Let this point Abe man, and let that point B be the mawnkey." He got no further; he was shouted down with cries of "mawnkey." None of these had spoken more than three minutes. It was when these were shouted down that Henslow said he must demand that the discussion should rest on scientific grounds only.

Then there were calls for the Bishop, but he rose and said he understood his friend Professor Beale had something to say first. Beale, who was an excellent histologist,9 spoke to the effect that the new theory ought to meet with fair discussion, but added, with great modesty, that he himself had not sufficient knowledge to discuss the subject adequately. Then the Bishop spoke the speech that you know, and the question about his mother being an ape, or his grandmother.

From the scientific point of view, the speech was of small value. It was evident from his mode of handling the subject that he had been "crammed up to the throat," and knew nothing at first hand; he used no argument beyond those to be found in his Quarterly article, which appeared a few days later, and is now admitted to have been inspired by Owen.1 "He ridiculed Darwin badly and Huxley savagely; but," confesses one of his strongest opponents, "all in such dulcet tones, so persuasive a manner, and in such well turned periods, that I who had been inclined to blame the President for allowing a discussion that could serve no scientific purpose, now forgave him from the bottom of my heart."

The Bishop spoke thus "for full half an hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness and unfairness." "In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock pigeons were what rock

5. As a starting point (Latin). 9. A biologist specializing in the study of the mi6. Suppressed, hushed. nute structure of the tissues of plants and animals. 7. Adam Storey Farrar (1826-1905), canon of 1. Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), a leading zool- Durham and professor of divinity at Durham Uni-ogist and paleontologist who was opposed to Darversity. win's theories. Wilberforce's review of Darwin's 8. A clergyman who was a tutor of Worcester Col-The Origin of Species (1859) appeared in the July lege, Oxford. 1860 issue of the Quarterly Revieiv.

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pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?"

This was the fatal mistake of his speech. Huxley instantly grasped the tactical advantage which the descent to personalities gave him. He turned to Sir Benjamin Brodie, who was sitting beside him, and emphatically striking his hand upon his knee, exclaimed, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands."2 The bearing of the exclamation did not dawn upon Sir Benjamin until after Huxley had completed his "forcible and eloquent" answer to the scientific part of the Bishop's argument, and proceeded to make his famous retort.

On this (continues the writer in Macmillan's Magazine) Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words� words which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.

The fullest and probably most accurate account of these concluding words is the following, from a letter of the late John Richard Green, then an undergraduate, to his friend, afterwards Professor Royd Dawkins:3

I asserted�and I repeat�that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man�a man of restless and versatile intellect�who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

The result of this encounter, though a check to the other side, cannot, of course, be represented as an immediate and complete triumph for evolutionary doctrine. This was precluded by the character and temper of the audience, most of whom were less capable of being convinced by the arguments than shocked by the boldness of the retort, although, being gentlefolk, as Professor Farrar remarks, they were disposed to admit on reflection that the Bishop had erred on the score of taste and good manners. Nevertheless, it was a noticeable feature of the occasion, Sir M. Foster4 tells me, that when Huxley rose he was received coldly, just a cheer of encouragement from his friends, the audience as a whole not joining in it. But as he made his points the applause grew and widened, until, when he sat down, the cheering was not very much less than that given to the Bishop. To that extent he carried an unwilling audience with him by the force of his speech. The debate on the ape question, however, was continued elsewhere during the next two years, and the evidence was com

2. Cf. 2 Samuel 5.19 (where the Lord promises to British historian. deliver the Philistines into David's hands). 4. Sir Michael Foster (1836-1907), British phys3. William Boyd Dawkins (1838-1929), British iologist and educator. geologist and archaeologist. Green (1837�1883),

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GOSSE: FATHER AND SON / 1553

pleted by the unanswerable demonstrations of Sir W. H. Flower5 at the Cambridge meeting of the Association in 1862.

The importance of the Oxford meeting lay in the open resistance that was made to authority, at a moment when even a drawn battle was hardly less effectual than acknowledged victory. Instead of being crushed under ridicule, the new theories secured a hearing, all the wider, indeed, for the startling nature of their defense.

1901

5. Sir William Henry Flower (1831-1899), British zoologist. SIR EDMUND GOSSE

Philip Henry Gosse (1810�1888) was a zoologist of some repute and also an ardent adherent of a strict Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren. In an attempt to reconcile his scientific knowledge with his fundamentalist religious position, Gosse published in 1857 a work called Omphalos, the Greek word for "navel." The term is of central significance in the book's primary assertion that the earth carries the marks of a past that did not actually happen: just as Adam and Eve were created with navels even though they had not been born to a mother, Gosse argues, so had God created the world with what appear to be millions of years' worth of accumulated rock strata. The book pleased no one. Gosse's agonized experience is described by his son, the literary critic Sir Edmund Gosse (1849�1928), in an autobiography published in 1907. This selection is from chapter 5.

From Father and Son

So, through my Father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis, 1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other. It was this discovery, that there were two theories of physical life, each of which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth of the other, which shook the spirit of my Father with perturbation. It was not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony, and accepted the servitude of error.

This was the great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one army or the other. Lyell1 was surrounding himself with disciples, who were making strides in the direction of discovery. Darwin had long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of animals and plants.

1. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), British geologist.

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Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray and even Agassiz,2 each in his own sphere, were coming closer and closer to a perception of that secret which was first to reveal itself clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun that modest statement of the new revelation, that "abstract of an essay," which developed so mightily into The Origin of Species. Wollaston's Variation of Species3 had just appeared, and had been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness.

On the other side, the reactionaries, although never dreaming of the fate which hung over them, had not been idle. In 1857 the astounding question had for the first time been propounded with contumely,"1 "What, then, did we come from orangoutang?" The famous Vestiges of Creation* had been supplying a sugar-and-water panacea for those who could not escape from the trend of evidence, and who yet clung to revelation. Owen6 was encouraging reaction by resisting, with all the strength of his prestige, the theory of the mutability of species.

In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great mover of men, that, before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain bodyguard of sound and experienced naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be privately made aware of its tenor. Among those who were thus initiated, or approached with a view towards possible illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and later on by Darwin, after meetings of the Royal Society7 in the summer of 1857.

My Father's attitude towards the theory of natural selection was critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter,8 a great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself of remodeling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species.* * *

My Father had never admired Sir Charles Lyell. I think that the famous

Lord Chancellor manner of the geologist intimidated him, and we undervalue

the intelligence of those whose conversation puts us at a disadvantage. For

Darwin and Hooker, on the other hand, he had a profound esteem, and I know

not whether this had anything to do with the fact that he chose, for his impet

uous experiment in reaction, the field of geology, rather than that of zoology

2. Noted scientists: Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker tion"; it asserted that all parts of nature were (1817-1911), British botanist and explorer; Alfred evolving onward and upward toward a greater state Russel Wallace (1823-1913), British naturalist; of perfection under God's direction. Asa Gray (1810-1888), American botanist; and 6. Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), a leading Brit- Louis Agassiz (1807�1873), Swiss geologist and ish zoologist and paleontologist who was opposed comparative anatomist. to Darwin's theories. 3. On the Variation of Species, with Especial Ref-7. The Royal Society of London for the Promotion erence to Insecta (1856), by the British entomolo-of Natural Knowledge; founded in 1660, it was an gist Thomas V. Wollaston (1822-1878). important meeting place for independent scien4. Insolent or insulting language or treatment. tists. 5. This popular work of 1843�46 by Robert 8. William B. Carpenter (1813-1885), British Chambers claimed to be "the first attempt to con-naturalist. nect the natural sciences into a history of crea

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GOSSE: FATHER AND SON / 1555

or botany. Lyell had been threatening to publish a book on the geological history of Man, which was to be a bombshell flung into the camp of the catastrophists. My Father, after long reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell's sails, and justify geology to godly readers of Genesis. It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.

The theory, coarsely enough, and to my Father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this�that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act of creation; it emphasized the fact that any breach in the circular course of nature could be conceived only on the supposition that the object created bore false witness to past processes, which had never taken place.

Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipations of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume. My Father lived in a fever of suspense, waiting for the tremendous issue. This Omphalos of his, he thought, was to bring all the turmoil of scientific speculation to a close, fling geology into the arms of Scripture, and make the lion eat grass with the lamb.9 It was not surprising, he admitted, that there had been experienced an ever-increasing discord between the facts which geology brings to light and the direct statements of the early chapters of Genesis. Nobody was to blame for that. My Father, and my Father alone, possessed the secret of the enigma; he alone held the key which could smoothly open the lock of geological mystery. He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. This was to be the universal panacea; this the system of intellectual therapeutics which could not but heal all the maladies of the age. But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away.

In the course of that dismal winter, as the post began to bring in private letters, few and chilly, and public reviews, many and scornful, my Father looked in vain for the approval of the churches, and in vain for the acquiescence of the scientific societies, and in vain for the gratitude of those "thousands of thinking persons," which he had rashly assured himself of receiving. As his reconciliation of Scripture statements and geological deductions was welcomed nowhere; as Darwin continued silent, and the youthful Huxley was scornful, and even Charles Kingsley,1 from whom my Father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he coufd not "give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie"� as all this happened or failed to happen, a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning teacups.*' *

c

1907

9. Allusion to the biblical prophecy of a new world (Isaiah 11.6-7). order in which "the wolf also shall dwell with the 1. Clergyman and novelist (1819-1875). lamb . . . and the lion shall eat straw like the ox"

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1 556 / INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?

INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?

In 1835 the French statesman and author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Manchester: "From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage." De Tocqueville's graphic sense of the wealth and the wretchedness that the Industrial Revolution had created epitomized contemporary responses to the way in which manufacturing had transformed nineteenth-century England. Victorians debated whether the machine age was a blessing or a curse, whether the economic system was making humanity happier or more miserable. Did the Industrial Revolution represent progress, and how, in fact, was progress to be defined?

The Industrial Revolution was the result of a complex set of causes, none of which, by itself, could have given rise to the phenomenon: the crucial technological innovations would have meant little without notable population growth, an increase in agricultural efficiency that released much of the workforce from field labor, and key economic changes, such as greater mobility of capital. Transformations in the production of textiles led to the first and most dramatic break with age-old practices. First powered by hand, or sometimes by water, machinery to speed up spinning and weaving processes was developed in England in the eighteenth century; by the 1780s manufacturers were installing steam engines, newly improved by James Watt, in large buildings called mills or factories. Mill towns, producing cotton or woollen cloth for the world's markets, grew quickly in northern England; the population of the city of Manchester, for example, increased tenfold in the years between 1760 and 1830. The development of the railways in the 1830s initiated a new phase in the industrial age, marked by an enormous expansion in the production of iron and coal. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution had already created profound economic and social changes. Hundreds of thousands of workers had migrated to the industrial towns, where they lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing and labored very long hours�fourteen a day or more�at very low wages. Employers often preferred to hire women and children, who worked for even less money than men.

Moved by the terrible suffering of the workers, which was intensified by a severe depression in the early 1840s, writers and legislators drew increasingly urgent attention to the condition of the working class. A number of parliamentary committees and commissions in the 1830s and 1840s introduced testimony about working conditions in mines and factories that led to the beginning of government regulation and inspection, particularly of the working conditions of women and children. Other eyewitness accounts created a growing consciousness of the plight of the workers. In The Condition of the Working Class (1845), Friedrich Engels described the conclu sions he drew in the twenty months he spent observing industrial conditions in Manchester. In a series of interviews written for the Morning Chronicle (1849�52), later published as London Labour and the London Poor (1861�62), the journalist Henry Mayhew created a portrait of working London by collecting scores of interviews with workers. Novels portraying the painful consequences of industrialism, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), began to appear.

The terrible living and working conditions of industrial laborers led a number of writers to see the Industrial Revolution as an appalling retrogression. Thomas Carlyle and John Buskin both lamented the changed conditions of labor, the loss of craftsmanship and individual creativity, and the disappearance of what Karl Marx called the "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" between employer and employee that they believed had existed in earlier economies. They criticized industrial manufacture not only for the misery of the conditions it created but also for its regimentation of minds and hearts as well as bodies and resources. In works such as Past and Present (1843)

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and Unto This Last (1860), Carlyle and Ruskin advocated a nostalgic and conservative ideal, in which employers and workers returned to a medieval relationship to craft and to authority and responsibility. Other writers drew more radical conclusions. William Morris's perception of the workers' plight led him to socialism, though a socialism with a medieval ideal; and Marx, in collaboration with Engels, based The Communist Manifesto of 1848 in part on Engels's observation of Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class. The outrage expressed by these authors is very different from the satisfaction evident in the writings of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who congratulated England on the progress that industrialism had enabled.

It is instructive to compare the selections in this section with Carlyle's chapter "Captains of Industry" from Past and Present; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem about child labor, "The Cry of the Children" (1843); Ruskin's arguments about manufacture in The Stones of Venice (1851�53); and William Morris's explanation in "How I Became a Socialist" (1894).

For additional texts concerning industrialism, see "Industrialism: Progress or Decline?" at Norton Literature Online.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

In a book titled Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), the poet Robert Southey (1774�1843) had sought to expose the evils of industrialism and to assert the superiority of the traditional feudal and agricultural way of life of England's past. His romantic conservatism provoked Macaulay (1800�1859) to review the book in a long and characteristic essay, published in the Edinburgh Review (1830). As in his popular History of England (1849�61), Macaulay seeks here to demolish his opponent with a bombardment of facts and figures, demonstrating that industrialism and middle-class government have resulted in progress and increased comforts for humankind.

From A Review of Southey's Colloquies

[EVIDENCE OF PROGRESS]

* * * Perhaps we could not select a better instance of the spirit which pervades the whole book than the passages in which Mr. Southey gives his opinion of the manufacturing system. There is nothing which he hates so bitterly. It is, according to him, a system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a system of actual servitude, a system which destroys the bodies and degrades the minds of those who are engaged in it. He expresses a hope that the competition of other nations may drive us out of the field; that our foreign trade may decline; and that we may thus enjoy a restoration of national sanity and strength. But he seems to think that the extermination of the whole manufacturing population would be a blessing, if the evil could be removed in no other way.

Mr. Southey does not bring forward a single fact in support of these views; and, as it seems to us, there are facts which lead to a very different conclusion.

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In the first place, the poor rate1 is very decidedly lower in the manufacturing than in the agricultural districts. If Mr. Southey will look over the Parliamentary returns on this subject, he will find that the amount of parochial relief required by the laborers in the different counties of England is almost exactly in inverse proportion to the degree in which the manufacturing system has been introduced into those counties. The returns for the years ending in March, 1825, and in March, 1828, are now before us. In the former year we find the poor rate highest in Sussex,2 about twenty shillings to every inhabitant. Then come Buckinghamshire, Essex, Suffolk, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, and Norfolk. In all these the rate is above fifteen shillings a head. We will not go through the whole. Even in Westmoreland and the North Riding of Yorkshire, the rate is at more than eight shillings. In Cumberland and Monmouthshire, the most fortunate of all the agricultural districts, it is at six shillings. But in the West Riding of Yorkshire,' it is as low as five shillings: and when we come to Lancashire, we find it at four shillings, one-fifth of what it is in Sussex. The returns of the year ending in March, 1828, are a little, and but a little, more unfavourable to the manufacturing districts. Lancashire, even in that season of distress, required a smaller poor rate than any other district, and little more than one-fourth of the poor rate raised in Sussex. Cumberland alone, of the agricultural districts, was as well off as the West Riding of Yorkshire. These facts seem to indicate that the manufacturer4 is both in a more comfortable and in a less dependent situation than the agri

cultural laborer.

As to the effect of the manufacturing system on the bodily health, we must beg leave to estimate it by a standard far too low and vulgar for a mind so imaginative as that of Mr. Southey, the proportion of births and deaths. We know that, during the growth of this atrocious system, this new misery, to use the phrases of Mr. Southey, this new enormity, this birth of a portentous age, this pest which no man can approve whose heart is not seared or whose understanding has not been darkened, there has been a great diminution of mortality, and that this diminution has been greater in the manufacturing towns than anywhere else. The mortality still is, as it always was, greater in towns than in the country. But the difference has diminished in an extraordinary degree. There is the best reason to believe that the annual mortality of Manchester, about the middle of the last century, was one in twenty-eight. It is now reckoned at one in forty-five. In Glasgow and Leeds a similar improvement has taken place. Nay, the rate of mortality in those three great capitals of the manufacturing districts is now considerably less than it was, fifty years ago, over England and Wales, taken together, open country and all. We might with some plausibility maintain that the people live longer because they are better fed, better lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness, and that these improvements are owing to that increase of national wealth which the manufacturing system has produced.

Much more might be said on this subject. But to what end? It is not from bills of mortality and statistical tables that Mr. Southey has learned his political creed. He cannot stoop to study the history of the system which he abuses, to strike the balance between the good and evil which it has produced, to

1. Taxes on property, to provide food and lodging unemployment. for the unemployed or unemployable. The amount 2. A predominantly agricultural district, or rate of such taxes varied from district to district 3. A manufacturing district, in England, depending on local conditions of 4. I.e., factory worker.

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compare district with district, or generation with generation. We will give his own reason for his opinion, the only reason which he gives for it, in his own words:

We remained a while in silence looking upon the assemblage of dwellings below. Here, and in the adjoining hamlet of Millbeck, the effects of manufacturer and of agriculture may be seen and compared. The old cottages are such as the poet and the painter equally delight in beholding. Substantially built of the native stone without mortar, dirtied with no white lime, and their long low roofs covered with slate, if they had been raised by the magic of some indigenous Amphion's music,5 the materials could not have adjusted themselves more beautifully in accord with the surrounding scene; and time has still further harmonized them with weather stains, lichens, and moss, short grasses, and short fern, and stoneplants of various kinds. The ornamented chimneys, round or square, less adorned than those which, like little turrets, crest the houses of the Portuguese peasantry, and yet not less happily suited to their place; the hedge of clipped box beneath the windows, the rose bushes beside the door, the little patch of flower ground, with its tall hollyhocks in front; the garden beside, the beehives, and the orchard with its bank of daffodils and snowdrops, the earliest and the profusest in these parts, indicate in the owners some portion of ease and leisure, some regard to neatness and comfort, some sense of natural, and innocent, and healthful enjoyment. The new cottages of the manufacturers are upon the manufacturing pattern� naked, and in a row.

"How is it," said I, "that everything which is connected with manufactures presents such features of unqualified deformity? From the largest of Mammon's temples down to the poorest hovel in which his helotry6 are stalled, these edifices have all one character. Time will not mellow them; nature will neither clothe nor conceal them; and they will remain always as offensive to the eye as to the mind."

Here is wisdom. Here are the principles on which nations are to be governed. Rosebushes and poor rates, rather than steam engines and independence. Mortality and cottages with weather stains, rather than health and long life with edifices which time cannot mellow. We are told that our age has invented atrocities beyond the imagination of our fathers; that society has been brought into a state compared with which extermination would be a blessing; and all because the dwellings of cotton-spinners are naked and rectangular. Mr. Southey has found out a way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture may be compared. And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look at a cottage and a factory, and to see which is the prettier. Does Mr. Southey think that the body of the English peasantry live, or ever lived, in substantial or ornamented cottages, with boxhedges, flower gardens, beehives, and orchards? If not, what is his parallel worth? We despise those mock philosophers,7 who think that they serve the cause of science by depreciating

5. According to Greek mythology, Amphion's Jeremy Bentham, who had equated poetry with magical skill as a harp player caused the walls of pushpin, an idle pastime. It should be noted, how- Thebes to be erected without human aid. ever, that although Macaulay often attacked the 6. I.e., slaves (helots were a class of serfs in Utilitarians for their narrow preoccupation with ancient Sparta). Mammon: the devil of covetous-theory, his own position had much in common ness. with theirs. 7. Presumably such Utilitarian philosophers as

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literature and the fine arts. But if anything could excuse their narrowness of mind, it would be such a book as this. It is not strange that, when one enthusiast makes the picturesque the test of political good, another should feel inclined to proscribe altogether the pleasures of taste and imagination.

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It is not strange that, differing so widely from Mr. Southey as to the past progress of society, we should differ from him also as to its probable destiny. He thinks, that to all outward appearance, the country is hastening to destruction; but he relies firmly on the goodness of God. We do not see either the piety or the rationality of thus confidently expecting that the Supreme Being will interfere to disturb the common succession of causes and effects. We, too, rely on his goodness, on his goodness as manifested, not in extraordinary interpositions, but in those general laws which it has pleased him to establish in the physical and in the moral world. We rely on the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth, and on the natural tendency of society to improvement. We know no well-authenticated instance of a people which has decidedly retrograded in civilization and prosperity, except from the influence of violent and terrible calamities, such as those which laid the Roman Empire in ruins, or those which, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, desolated Italy.8 We know of no country which, at the end of fifty years of peace and tolerably good government, has been less prosperous than at the beginning of that period. The political importance of a state may decline, as the balance of power is disturbed by the introduction of new forces. Thus the influence of Holland and of Spain is much diminished. But are Holland and Spain poorer than formerly? We doubt it. Other countries have outrun them. But we suspect that they have been positively, though not relatively, advancing. We suspect that Holland is richer than when she sent her navies up the Thames,9 that Spain is richer than when a French king was brought captive to the footstool of Charles the Fifth.1

History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society. We see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations, mischievous prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates faster than governments can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can destroy. We see the wealth of nations increasing, and all the arts of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection, in spite of the grossest corruption and the wildest profusion on the part of rulers.

The present moment is one of great distress. But how small will that distress appear when we think over the history of the last forty years; a war,2 compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; taxation, such as the most heavily taxed people of former times could not have conceived; a debt larger than all the public debts that ever existed in the world added together; the food of the people studiously rendered dear;3 the currency imprudently

8. These "calamities" were invasions by outside 2. The wars against France and Napoleon, extend- powers: in 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome, and the ing, with some interruptions, from 1792 to 1815. French and Spanish fought for control of the Ital-During the war years England lost one in six men ian states in the early 16th century. of fighting age and had to endure the pressure of 9. In 1667 a Dutch fleet displayed its power by Napoleon's trade boycotts; the historian Derek sailing up the river Thames without being chal-Beales claims that the resulting economic disruplenged by the English navy. tion was comparable to that experienced in World 1. Charles V, Holy Roman emperor (and king of War I. Spain as Charles I), captured the king of France, 3. Expensive. Francis I, in the battle of Pavia (1525).

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debased, and imprudently restored. Yet is the country poorer than in 1790? We firmly believe that, in spite of all the misgovernment of her rulers, she has been almost constantly becoming richer and richer. Now and then there has been a stoppage, now and then a short retrogression; but as to the general tendency there can be no doubt. A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.

If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty millions, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, that cultivation, rich as that of a flower garden, will be carried up to the very tops of Ren Nevis and Helvellyn,4 that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, that there will be no highways but railroads, no traveling but by steam, that our debt, vast as it seems to us, will appear to our great-grandchildren a trifling encumbrance, which might easily be paid off in a year or two, many people would think us insane. We prophesy nothing; but this we say: If any person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the crash in 17205 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered as an intolerable burden, that for one man of ten thousand pounds then living there would be five men of fifty thousand pounds, that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one-half of what it then was, that the post office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles the Second, that stage coaches would run from London to York in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels.6 Yet the prediction would have been true; and they would have perceived that it was not altogether absurd, if they had considered that the country was then raising every year a sum which would have purchased the fee-simple of the revenue of the Plantagenets,7 ten times what supported the Government of Elizabeth, three times what, in the time of Cromwell,8 had been thought intolerably oppressive. To almost all men the state of things under which they have been used to live seems to be the necessary state of things. We have heard it said that five per cent is the natural interest of money, that twelve is the natural number of a jury, that forty shillings is the natural qualification of a county voter. Hence it is that, though in every age everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been taking place, nobody seems to reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. Rut so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason. "A million a year will beggar us," said the patriots of 1640. "Two millions a year will grind the country to powder," was the cry in 1660. "Six millions a year, and a debt of fifty millions!" exclaimed Swift, "the high allies have been