Front matter (continued 4)

Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial, tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who did not admire as he did. But any one who sits down to trace the history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is conspicuously wanting. He has evidently conceived an ideal and done his best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting—"he has rouged her up to the eyes."

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs. Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it; there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of self-dedication to the poetic office, with the assiduous and systematic labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain—a scraping of the soul, as Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of a bird in a cage. Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid—but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a passionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slave-owners. In fact the Jamaica Emancipation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home, by resulting in a large decrease in her father's fortune. It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and passionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

She spent a happy though precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and ennobling effect. Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life.

She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. "You," she writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems, "you are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day." And again in the preface: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain."

There is something very impressive about the earnestness of this. Its fault is perhaps that it is a little too outspoken: and, from a human point of view, we cannot help regretting that she did not a little more fall into that error which she so indignantly repudiates: if she had mistaken pleasure a little more, not perhaps for the final cause, but for one of the primary causes of poetry, we cannot help feeling that she might have done, if not such earnest, at least more artistic work.

One of the things that one expects to find in the biography of a poet is a detailed account of methods of composition. It is interesting to know whether morning or evening hours were devoted to writing; whether the act of composition was slow or quick; whether the poem was worked out in the mind before it was transmitted to paper; what proportion finished compositions bear to unfinished; whether incomplete work was ever resumed; whether the observation of language was systematised in any way. All these things one is particularly anxious to hear in the case of a poetess whose work bears at once traces of hasty and elaborate workmanship, whose vocabulary is so extraordinarily eclectic, whose rhymes are so peculiar, and often—may we say?—so unsatisfactory. Mr. Ingram's biography, abounding as it does in details of what we may call the interviewer's type, is almost entirely silent on these points. We hear indeed incidentally that the solid morning hours were Mrs. Browning's habitual hours of work; and a curious correspondence has been made public between herself and Horne, which shows that her rhymes, according to herself, were deliberately and painfully selected, principally in the case of dissyllabic rhymes (even, we fear, such pairs as Goethe and duty, Bettine and between ye) because she held that English composers, though the language was rich in these rhythmical combinations, had been instinctively slow in applying them to serious poetry. If Elizabeth Browning's, or indeed Robert Browning's, dissyllabic rhymes are the best defence that can be urged for this position, we must affirm that the general instinct on the whole has been right: such rhymes give a sense of fantastic elaborateness, and tend to concentrate the reader's attention too closely upon the technique of the composition. This is, however, a minor point. But it is interesting to observe that this very detail, which constitutes a blemish in the eyes of even indulgent critics, was a subject upon which Mrs. Browning had not only definite ideas, but enthusiastic convictions.

One other thing may be noted. It is alleged, though without certainty, that "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a poem consisting of over four hundred lines, was actually composed within twelve consecutive hours. If that is so, it is a marvellous tour de force. The poem is one which, in spite of obvious faults, has an immense outburst of lyrical power and magnificent feeling; it contains many lines which linger in the memory; and every one who has had any experience of composition will recognise at once that, if this tradition about its origin be true, it is easy to understand why the poem was allowed to remain as it does. Besides the repugnance which most writers (and especially, we are inclined to think, Mrs. Browning) have felt for the limæ labor, the painful excision and chiselling of a work of any kind, there is a special distaste for meddling with a work which springs to life as it were in a moment; such work grows to have, even in the course of a few hours, a sentient individuality of its own which almost defies mutilation.

Mrs. Browning's best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of sonnets entitled "From the Portuguese"—strung, in Omar's words, like pearls upon the string of circumstance. In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality—like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. Their fervour indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her—coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write:

And again:

Such a heart deserved all the love it could get.

The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,—such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet."

This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain—even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country—

And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words.

That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism—alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life—reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic—touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears.

They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so—"With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No—"Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes:

Or:

II

"Mr. Kenyon," wrote Miss Barrett, "was with me yesterday.... he accused me of writing a certain paper in the Athenæum, and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance, 'You diplomatic!'"

Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what he has to say in the most lucid possible manner—that is not enough—but by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence.

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her classical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the Aposiopesis—in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Classical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency,—to use a colloquial expression—that she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray wrote φωνἁντα συνετοἱσιν on his Odes he meant that there would be many people to whom they would not appeal; but it is ridiculous to say that the merit of poetry is in proportion to the paucity of its admirers. If Mrs. Browning aimed at any particular class it was perhaps at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from. Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a recumbent warrior, naming it Hector. Then came her version of the "Prometheus Vinctus"; her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in "Wine of Cyprus," when she read, as she writes, "the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end"; her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi, the little row of miniature classics, annotated in her own hand, standing within easy reach of her couch. Of course she was an omnivorous reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, "from Genesis to Malachi,—never stopped by the Chaldean,—and the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas." But it was evidently in Greek, in the philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato, that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman's lot to possess. Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and unscholarly; her classical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and poems have seldom quite the genuine ring; we do not mean that she did not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the task; but her learning is not an animated part of her; it is sometimes almost an incubus. The character of her allusions too is often remote and fanciful. They fall, it is true, from a teeming brain, but they are not the simple direct comparisons which would occur to a man who had made Greek literature his own, but rather the unexpected, modern turns which so often surprise a student, like the red bunches of valerian which thrust out of the sand-stone frieze of a Sicilian temple—such comparisons, for instance, as the celebrated one in Aurora Leigh of the peasant who might have been gathering brushwood in the ear of a colossus had Xerxes carried out his design of carving Athos into the likeness of a man. Her characterization of the classical poets in "The Poet's Vow" will also illustrate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a passage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity,—from the faded white flower of a Titanic brow to the withered grass of a heart trampled on by its own beloved—from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love." ... It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is not Greek.

The two poems which are the best instances of the classical mood, are the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast, half god, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength and in her weakness. In "The Dead Pan," in spite of its solemn refrain, the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage: the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the lyric mood passing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. But when we turn to the other, "A Musical Instrument," what a relief we experience. "What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the metrical ear. There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish elements out of which such divinity is compounded—these are flung down in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of the English language.

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning's poems. She had at one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such perfection by Rossetti. There is a peculiar charm about such composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of passion is more simple and direct, and the passion itself is of a less complex and restrained character. Besides, there is a certain element of horror and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers for it, but is not unnatural when mediævalized. Nothing in Mrs. Browning can bear comparison with "Sister Helen" or "The Beryl Stone"; but "The Romaunt of the Page" and the "Rhyme of the Duchess May" stand among her most successful pieces.

The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge. Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master's hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! Some chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer, but Miss Mitford's friend who catches up the lyre and will have her last word. The poem passes, still in the same metre, out of the definite materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a class of poems, of so-called modern life, of which "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" shall stand for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well be. The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate exteriors and callous hearts,—these are like the creations of Charlotte Brontë, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all—the spirit is so high, the passion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors.

But we must turn to what after all is Mrs. Browning's most important and most characteristic work, Aurora Leigh. Unfortunately its length alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being popular. Ten thousand lines of blank verse is a serious thing. The fact that the poem is to a great extent autobiographical, combined with the comparative mystery in which the authoress was shrouded and the romance belonging to a marriage of poets—these elements are enough to account for the general enthusiasm with which the poem was received. Landor said that it made him drunk with poetry,—that was the kind of expression that its admirers allowed themselves to make use of with respect to it. And yet in spite of these credentials, the fact remains that it is a difficult volume to work through. It is the kind of book that one begins to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three-hundred to come. Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker about three-fourths of the way through. As she herself wrote,

Now what is the reason of this? In the first place it is a romance with a rather intricate plot, and a romance requires continuous reading and cannot be laid aside for a few days with impunity. Secondly, it requires hard and continuous study; there is hardly a page without two or three splendid thoughts, and several weighty expressions; it is a perfect mine of felicitous though somewhat lengthy quotations upon almost every question of art and life, yet it is sententious without being exactly epigrammatic. Thirdly, it is very digressive, distressingly so when you are once interested in the story. Lastly, it is not dramatic; whoever is speaking, Lord Howe, Aurora, Romney Leigh, Marian Earle, they all express themselves in a precisely similar way; it is even sometimes necessary to reckon back the speeches in a dialogue to see who has got the ball. In fact it is not they who speak, but Mrs. Browning. To sum up, it is the attempted union of the dramatic and meditative elements that is fatal to the work from an artistic point of view.

Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. Aurora Leigh is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realise in concrete form the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from within. To attack it from its material side is like picking off the outer covering of a bud to assist it to blow, rather than by watering the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action; in fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is the only possible one, with this difference, that in Aurora Leigh this attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of pure and more general enthusiasms. The insoluble enigma is unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all; whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased transmission of hereditary sin.

It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry, the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with rather than assisted by them. But we may give a few specimens of various kinds. "I," she says,

And this is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy; she is describing the high edge of a chalk down:

And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into sight over the sea's rim:

We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening:

It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning's work as though either she herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. The longest of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. It seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she will be best remembered are some of her shortest—the expression of a single overruling mood—the parable without the explanation—the burst of irrepressible feeling.

I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most characteristic work she ever produced—characteristic that is of her strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. These are: "Loved Once," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Catarina to Camoens," "Cowper's Grave," "The Cry of the Children," "The Mask," and lastly "Confessions," which seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given to each.

The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. Of course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar satisfaction to that special sense—whatever it be, for there is no defining it—to which metre and rhyme both appeal. At the same time there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be prolonged into monotony. At what precise moment this lapse into monotony takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is certainly the case in "The Dead Pan," though the refrain is there varied.

To a certain extent too it must be confessed that this same monotony affects two of the poems which we have mentioned: "Loved Once," and "Catarina to Camoens." The former of these deals with the permanence of a worthy love; and the refrain, "Loved Once," is dismissed as being the mere treasonous utterance of those who have never understood what love is. The poem gains, too, a pathetic interest from the fact that it records the great estrangement of Mrs. Browning's life.

"Catarina to Camoens" is the dying woman's answer to her lover's sonnet in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we may say with the author of Ionica, "I bless them for the good I feel; but yet I bless them with a sigh." The poem is vitiated by the unusually large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains.

"The Swan's Nest," the story of a childish dream and its disappointment, is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation rather than upon intensity of feeling.

"The Mask" is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable of human experiences—the necessity of dissembling suffering:

It is not necessary to quote from either "Cowper's Grave" or "The Cry of the Children." The former is the true Elegiac; the latter—critics may say what they will—goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the eyes. We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language, structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to maintain.

Lastly, "Confessions" is the story of passionate love, lavished by a soul so exclusively and so prodigally on men that it has, in the jealous priestly judgment, sucked away and sapped the natural love for the Father of men. The poor human soul under the weight of this accusation clings only to the thought of how utterly it has loved the brothers that it has seen. "And how," comes the terrible question, "have they requited it? God's love, you have rejected it—what have you got in its stead from man?"

We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was—how Mrs. Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"

We need not doubt it; she is worthy to be counted among these,

THE LATE MASTER OF TRINITY (DR. W. H. THOMPSON)

THE interest that attaches to the life of a notable man is generally very complex: it entwines itself with the great events which our hero helped to bring about, his personal relations with the other great men of his time, his view of the movements agitating society. And then there is a further interest in his private life. We desire to see the secret sources from which he drew the inspiration he carried into the outside world; we are anxious to know whether he was most real when before the public, and made his inner life subserve his outer, or whether he withdrew from the dust of battle and the rush of the world, into the quiet of his own circle, feeling that he was returning home. All these varying moods are an attractive study: when the mask falls away and we know that he was most dispirited when he seemed most serene, or in reality buoyed up by a divine elation when apparently crushed by a sorrow that seemed irreparable—the disentangling the central strand from the variegated web is a task of fascinating difficulty.

But in the life which we are here endeavouring to trace there was no such bewildering complexity. The secret history of an essentially reticent mind cannot be written; it is at the best sympathetic guessing. In a life where events are rare, circumstances monotonous, a character with few friends and fewer intimates, withdrawn alike from the political, the religious, the social arena, there can be little to record, unless there has been some definite line taken throughout, some marked attitude which a nature has consistently maintained towards the outer world.

In the case of the late Master of Trinity we can lay our finger at once upon the characteristic which made him what he was—which gave to a personality such an exclusive strength that when it fades from the world we feel that no replacing is possible. He stood to the action and thought of the present day in the character of a judge: like Rhadamanthus in the old fables, who dealt not with motives or tendencies, but with recorded acts, who sate to give judgment upon them, his function was one of pure criticism. How much that is needed in an age where on the one hand so much is excused on the score of irresistible fatality, while on the other hand such an unreasonable preponderance is given to the value of action, is acutely felt in the face of such a loss as his.

It is a part of the strange irony of life that the personalities which make themselves most strenuously felt among their own generation have a way of slipping out of history. A man who is much occupied in leaving his mark in life, in stemming or colouring the whirling stream that passes him, has little time to spend in piling monuments on the banks to be the envy and wonder of the fluid tides that come and go. The wild grief that we often encounter in books, sometimes in real life, that centres about the disappearance of some apparently unemphatic figure can be thus explained: his vitality did not lend itself to visible labour; it was content to modify the temporary and fluctuating. When such an attitude is artistically maintained: when a character most highly gifted, with a taste and delicacy of perception that overrides the captiousness of less instinctive critics, is seen to devote itself not to gathering straws, but to merely watching life, an atmosphere is created which is at once intensely attractive and baffling. When a patient silence is maintained upon questions which appear to the young and fervent to be essential to the progress of the race; when an impenetrable contempt for fanaticism and extravagance occasionally steals out in pungent sentences; when the outbursts of not unnatural emotions are drily repressed; when the overbalancing of enthusiasm is not forgiven, a deep and provoking wonder grows gradually up as to what standpoint such a critic has reached that such judgments should be possible; as to what platforms, what further heights are visible, that the plain should seem so low and despicable. Of all fascinations there is none like the fascination of contempt, and when this is seen, justified by a sure touch, a genuine grasp of ideas, a most piercing intellect, and seen moreover steadfast in a place of which the very atmosphere is that of generous and ardent spirits, the wonder becomes almost intolerable.

There is a great and common misapprehension which accepts no criticism as valid except what proceeds from a basis of superior capacity. The ordinary man requires the critic to be a better man than the performer whom he dissects, to be able to beat his victim on his own ground. But this is a deep-seated error. The creative power often confers no clearness of vision on its possessor; the best critics are seldom originative men. The critic is, in fact, meant to clear the air about great work for ordinary people; to ascertain the best points of view, and to sting to death the crawling nerveless creatures who are just capable of obscuring by the closeness of their imitative powers the beauty of their great exemplar.

To this task the late Master of Trinity brought an instinctive taste of the first order. He possessed a mind so delicate as to be only saved from becoming hypercritical by a certain robustness and virility of taste, a literary discrimination which led the men to whom he lectured to scribble down his very epithets on the margins of their note-books, and which carried into all he wrote a flavour few writers have leisure to bestow. And yet he was no pedant.

But this critical faculty had its negative side; it grew at the expense of the other sides of his intellect. No faculty can be sustained in such perfection except by a loss of balance. And there is something like a sense of failure that crosses us when we look over the list of works by which he will soon be known: an edition of a dialogue or two of Plato's, a few reviews, a sermon or two, occasional contributions to a classical journal—and that is all.

There is a dissatisfaction attending the production of all work even in the most creative minds; but when to this there is added a keenly fastidious taste, working in a region where there can hardly be a constant glow of enthusiasm to propel a student through his exertions, it will be seen that natural difficulty must have been great. In his later years, moreover, the Master had to contend with constant ill-health—and ill-health, too, engendering a hypochondriacal tendency, which is of all physical evils the hardest for a student to struggle against. A malaise which seems to require the distraction of the mind is fatal to its attaining a firm standpoint for laborious origination. And so his intellect turned aside into the easier path of wide and various literary diversion, the impulse, the imperious conscience, so to speak, of the writer to produce, growing fainter and fainter.

Such a mind as this, with its insight into philosophy, its unique power of entering into the heart of subtle ideas and refined phrases, joined with its keen discernment of the modern spirit, might have done a great work of reconciliation. The Master was the founder of the present Cambridge Platonic School; but he is more the suggester and inspirer of the movement, than its leader—or even, to any great extent, its pioneer. He was neither the hard progressive thinker nor the revolutionary scholar—he was merely one of those who by their acute touch, by the subtle mastery with which they present ideas, inspire enthusiastic effort—the Master, indeed, made more than one subtle mind which came under his influence, turn in that direction and do the tasks that he was perhaps himself incapable of performing.

But to the outer world he was perhaps best known as a conversationalist; he had the kind of reputation upon which stories are fathered. Men who knew the oracular background from which Dr. Thompson's utterances proceeded, who knew the inimitable air, the droop of the eyelids, the inscrutable coldness of the eyes and lips, the poise of the head, were ready to give a fictitious value to sayings that had the sanction of his name. To couple his name, falsely or truly, with an epigram gave it an indefinable prestige; his personality thrown into the scale made a sarcasm that might have passed unnoticed into a crushing hit.

Those of his epigrams that survive (and there are a considerable number of a first-rate order) will appeal, it must be confessed, chiefly to those whose humour is of the caustic and derisive order. When he said, for instance, on hearing that the numbers of a rival college were diminishing, that he had heard that emigration was increasing among the lower classes, or that he had never realised what was the full force of the expression in the bidding prayer, "the inferior clergy," till he saw the minor canons of a northern cathedral—the fancy, though irresistibly tickled by the collocation, will on reflection recognise the cruelty of the expressions. And yet those who knew him best concur in saying that the Master was an intrinsically kind man; so promptly generous indeed that in the days when he was a college tutor, undergraduates in trouble went naturally to him for help and advice—a most weighty proof to those who know the undergraduate world and its reticence.

The explanation is that these sayings were uttered solely with reference to the amusement of those who heard them, with no ulterior idea: he had no wish that the venom of these stings should circulate and rankle—least of all that they should penetrate to those who formed the subjects of them. But he could not resist an epigram—when, for instance, on accompanying a popular preacher who was to preach at St. Mary's, he found that they were so hampered by the crowd at the door as to be almost unable to force an entrance—his suave utterance, "Make way, gentlemen, or some of us will be disappointed," was genuinely uttered, because the thought had occurred to him, and he was convinced that it would amuse the throng, and with no sort of wish to harrow the feelings or dash the satisfaction of the divine at his side.

Only two years before the Master's death, the writer of these pages heard him say in a meditative manner at the Lodge at Trinity, speaking of an offensive speaker at a meeting held the previous day, "So-and-so was very unfortunate; he reminded me of his father"—whereupon, his sentences having somewhat an oracular effect about them, those present instinctively turned in his direction, thinking that some interesting reminiscences had been aroused—when he continued "he succeeded in being at once dull and flippant" (a pause), "no uncommon combination." This last is a specially characteristic utterance—a strong personal judgment relieved by a general application—if we may use the word—a "back-hander" to humanity. This was what he delighted in doing. No one, again, had a greater power of freezing enthusiasm, when expressed with what he considered unnecessary vehemence. A well-known divine tells me that in his undergraduate days he was once spending the evening in Thompson's rooms, and the conversation turned on the respective merits of certain celebrated Madonnas. This gentleman expressed himself strongly in favour of Raffaell's "Madonna della Seggiola" as compared with Lionardo's "Vierge aux Rochers," adding, "There can be no reasonable doubt on the subject." "When you are older you will think differently," said Thompson.

"Have you forgotten my rusty sword?" muttered Bentley to some contumacious Fellow of Trinity, threatening to revive an ancient regulation long in abeyance. The late Master's sword was neither rusty, nor were mankind ever suffered to forget it. About once in every calendar year, at one of the college meetings, it would whistle flashing from its sheath, and go straight to the heart of the opponent through the vulnerable point of the harness. Thompson never thrust but he killed.

When upon the discussion of some trivial point he turned stiffly to a dilettante Fellow who had professed ignorance of the question, and said: "I am surprised Mr.——, that you are not acquainted with the fact: it is so very unimportant"; or when, at a lecture, after closing a list of books that he recommended, he ended by saying of one of the works of his predecessor in the mastership, that "he had looked through it and corrected some of the grosser blunders,"—we cannot help feeling that such improvisations, though amazingly ingenious in themselves had better not have been uttered if they were (as they actually were) capable of personal application. If humour is the saline element, the wholesome preservative of the tone of life, we sometimes meet it concentrated, when its bitterness seems its only characteristic. It is worth noting too, that though a deeply conscientious, nay religious man, Thompson managed to create a very opposite impression upon his pupils. An old pupil of his has told me that he experienced a curious shock of surprise at finding Thompson's name on the title-page of a book of family prayer. It had hardly occurred to him to think of him as a clergyman.

The Mastership of Trinity is a unique position; with its traditions it confers a kind of intellectual peerage upon its occupant. It is the only great position at Cambridge which is of Crown appointment and not elective. At another college the man who means to end by being Master has to gain the confidence of and conciliate his colleagues; and a Headship is generally conferred upon the man who has best deserved it by worth and weight, and by cheerful labour spent in furthering the college interests; but at Trinity no such exertions are needed. College opinion is, of course, considered; but a man has far more need to impress the outer world. If, on attaining this position, a man isolates himself from his fellow-workers, makes no efforts to attain popularity, arrogates to himself a critical position, no remarks are possible, so common elsewhere, of the type of "kicking away the ladder by which the ascent was made." It is a great testimony to Dr. Thompson's weight and impressiveness, that among the remarks that have been made as to his manner of administrating the position, it has never been hinted that he was unworthy to succeed that intellectual Titan, Whewell. Dr. Thompson had no encyclopædic knowledge to show; he had no vast capacities of dealing with general subjects; he had not a remarkably comprehensive mind. But he was a man of whom it was impossible to think meanly; he extorted admiration even where he did not win sympathy. His presence among heads of houses, in the Senate House, at Boards and Syndicates, was instinctively felt to confer an honour upon his associates; he had, in fact, some of the "kingly" attributes about him. He moved naturally in an atmosphere of deference, not only the deference conceded to a man whose speech is feared; his manner had something to do with it, no doubt. It was majestic; there is no other word.

It is to be feared that the impression he will leave will be that of a man whose mind was deliberately depreciative; and it cannot be denied that his best things were in the depreciatory manner. But they were only occasional flashes in much conversation of the subtle, deft type that perpetually flowed from him. Of course such a stream cannot be remembered if it is not "photographed" at the time. It only exists in beautiful impressions left on the hearer's mind. Friends who went to see him for a few minutes' chat on business stayed an hour beguiled by the entertainment. It is said of him, that "much of the enjoyment of talking to him was that the expectation of conversational friandises was so frequently gratified." Such a delicate turn as occurs in the prefatory remarks to his edition of the Phædrus will illustrate this. He says, that in sorting "a heap of Neoplatonic rubbish, many remarks emerge that are learned, even sensible"; the inversion of the two epithets—the suspicion hinted that the ground covered by the first is by no means conterminous with the ground of the second, is the kind of turn he delighted to give.

At no period of his life was he probably a very arduous worker; though always fond of serious and sustained reading he used to lament the change of the dinner-hour—which, in the old barbarian days was at such a time as four—as depriving him of his long peaceful evenings, when he did all the work he ever did; and, as has been already said, he was the victim for many years of a very hypochondriacal temperament—which may account for many things—for his never applying himself to the production of a magnum opus—for the acid turn of his wit. He was a great smoker at one time; it is said to have affected him injuriously.

The wonderful magnificence of his face and figure will haunt those who knew them well. The complexion like parchment; the large ear; the short snow-white hair in such strange contrast to the coal-black mobile eyebrows, with which, as is recorded of Dr. Keate, he seemed able to point at anything; then the critical wrinkles of the brow; the droop of the eyelid, slowly raised as he turned to you, as though to give your faltering remarks his more particular attention; the eye, formerly so keen, in latter days so curiously dull and obscured; the depressed curve of the lip drawn down at the corners—it was a face which it will be absolutely impossible to forget, which it was impossible not to take delight in watching; it was a face from which you could not help expecting some memorable utterance.

There is a strange pathos in his criticism when he was first shown the magnificent but somewhat appalling portrait of himself painted by Mr. Herkomer, taken when he was not far from the end. "Do I really look as though I held the world so cheap?" he said. It was like a kind of recantation, a kind of protest against the opinion which held him to be so innately an unkindly man; a kind of claim to be reckoned as one of the human race whom he was popularly supposed to despise.

An impressive figure is gone from us. We cannot, without a pang, see our characteristic types pass and disappear from the gallery of life. The late Master of Trinity possessed, perhaps, a character that appealed more to the older, to the humorous than to the young, the generous, the ardent. But we shall terribly misunderstand him if we do not see that a heart beat beneath the cynical mask, that the figure inside the sardonic shrine was of pure gold.

1886.

HENRY BRADSHAW

THOSE who on that grey February day, with its pitiless east wind, straggled sadly away from the shadow of the great church where they had laid all that was mortal of their friend, must have found it hard to believe that the familiar figure would never again be seen pacing down that very walk. Day by day it used to pass along the huge white front of the Fellows' buildings, with steps short but never hurried, the broad shoulders swaying almost imperceptibly, the great head set back, and the kindly humorous eye glancing over the great buttresses that fronted him, as he clasped the well-worn note-book to his side. And the mourners felt the blank still more, because it was just on such occasions as that which they had been attending, that he knew how to render sympathy and comfort as no one else alive could do. They could some of them remember how in such moments of unutterable regret, he would come close to them with no easy words of healing, for a grief that words could not touch, but with love and sadness and mute inquiry in his eyes, would in tender demonstration take and retain a hand—and nothing more—only saying, perhaps, "I understand," and so pass on, knowing that by showing human fellowship, by suffering with you—for he made no pretence not to suffer—he had done far more than if he had pointed you to a help of which you knew already, and to a strength to which you could not yet aspire.

And thus it was that the grey-headed contemporaries of his undergraduate days wept at that vault with men young enough to have been his sons, all feeling that the earth was poorer—not only for all the learning that had descended almost unrecorded into the grave, not because of the works unfinished that no one else could dare to do, but because they had lost so much love. And not love of an ordinary kind: Henry Bradshaw loved both well and wisely—of the words and events of intercourse with him you never wished a single thing done or said otherwise. He was one of those on whom had fallen the true priestly nature. It came so naturally to him to bear others' burdens that it at last became natural for others to lay them on him; he knew that repentant recital of failures to one whom we revere is in itself a potent absolution—and he had the true priest's tact: he did not want to set right, to give advice, but to hear what his friend had to say: how it was said was nearly as important to him as what was said; the more detailed was the difficulty or the struggle or the misadventure, the better he was pleased. "Go on," he would say, if the inquirer feared he wearied him, "tell me every thing you can: it is so interesting." In that word lay the secret of his influence over the young men who talked so naturally to him of all their doings—the young men that many complain it is so hard to influence. The fact is, they do not want merely sympathy—that they can get, and more than they want, in their home circle—where it is apt to be (they think) unintelligent sympathy—which floods but does not fill. No! what they want is to feel that their trials are interesting. It is the season of egoism—they are supremely interested in themselves, self-conscious. Any one who finds them interesting too will influence them.

No one is ever widely loved who has not mannerisms—those little ways and methods that stir such smiling affection, that are so eagerly consulted during life, and that wring the heart with pathos, and brim the eyes to recall, when all is over. Who that knew them well will ever forget those broad high rooms? They were on the first-floor, by the Hall, looking into the College Court in front with all its trim stillness, broken only by the drip of the falling fountain. The windows that looked that way were always bright with flowers, geranium and lobelia as I remember them. The room behind looked across a little grassy court, on the huddled high-roofed buildings of St. Catharine's, with their Flemish outline, on the left, and the huge glossy walnut in the inner court; straight in front it commanded Queen's Lane from end to end, and on the right there rose the battlemented brick towers and the quaint oaken flèche seen over apple trees and orchard walls—and the whole view rounded off by the high garden-elms across the river.

In the window-boxes in that room—for many years his favourite sitting-room—grew stubbly smoke-dried evergreens, cypress and lignum vitæ. On the left as you entered stood a huge serviceable deal press with innumerable drawers, on one side of which were pinned notices and invitations; to the left of the room, books, the larger at the top in a book-case, passing over the door and embedding it—a family picture or two, and some dusky oil paintings. In one corner an untenanted frame, with the glass in it, showing the wall-paper through, which he would neither take down nor get refilled. A large telescope on a stand by one of the windows—and the broad table with its rough red cloth strewn with books and papers, in orderly confusion, at which his visitor would find him sitting, with his back to the fire, writing in that broad blunt readable hand, or handling affectionately some yellow manuscript or brown clasped quarto. "How nice of you," he would say as you entered and stepped on to the square bordered carpet laid on the bare boarded floor. "I suppose you mean that I ought to get it stained," he would add with a smile, interpreting a hardly momentary glance that you gave as you crossed the threshold.

In the outer room, rarely used except in the summer, were many books and a few pictures—an original sketch by Thackeray, a bold pen-and-ink drawing of the view from the back window of the rooms—six postcards illustrated and sent him by some artistic friend on a tour, a grand piano, on which I never heard him or any one but Dr. Stanford presume to play. In this room were held the delightful Sunday evening assemblies to which friends used to drop in uninvited for tea and talk, while he would sit caressing the hand of some more favoured intimate, or dropping those wonderfully humorous sentences, sometimes caustic, had it not been for the glance with which they were accompanied, shooting through with little shafts of criticism any affectation or prejudice, any little idiosyncrasy and personal peculiarity that displayed itself in those round him, and laughing every now and then with that delightful intimate laugh, that irradiated his face. "Oh I forgot," he would say (after mentioning the name of some other undergraduate) to the young friend sitting by him, reputed to be exclusive in his social estimates—"not b.s." (best set), or, by a little gesture with his finger he would indicate the "nasus aduncus"—or on the entrance of another he would playfully hide a little gold charm which he wore on his watch chain, because the newcomer was supposed to have an aversion to it—and if the delinquent pleaded that such an aversion had never been hinted or expressed, "Oh, I like you to dislike it," he would say, "it's so characteristic."

And one special gift he had, which is indeed rare. He could rebuke and yet not give offence—for he was never an instant out of season. He could, with a little barbed speech, pierce right to the heart of some weakness, probe some secret fault that, unconsciously to its possessor, was betraying itself to others, stab a pretence or an arrogance through and through at the right moment, and yet never make the auditor dislike him. As a rule, the critic and the censor are obeyed and hated. We recognise that we are the better for the stroke, but we hate the hand that directed it. But with Henry Bradshaw it was never so: one could not feel personal resentment, though the little wound rankled long. Even those whom he emphatically did not like, with whom he was most unsparing of criticism and direct derision, did not resent it: they were uneasy under it, but anxious for his good opinion, anxious to redeem themselves in his eyes.

The conversation with him, as I remember it, was never sustained or argumentative. He did not care to sift the problems of life and being, or to hear them sifted before him—that was not the way in which life presented itself to him. He was hereditarily endowed with much of the Quietist instinct: he had not (on the surface, at least) questionings of heart and searchings of spirit. He was what can be called a life-philosopher; that is to say, he was not for ever deducing a system from faith or experience, like some restless spirits, and modifying it from day to day; he was simply acting, when it became him to act, in the way that his pure high instincts led him, and growing wiser so. And thus voluble or flashy talkers, keen, disputative, absorbed spirits, conversational dogmatists, found little to satisfy them in him: they were even apt to despise him in his greatness; and he too was uneasy in such society, he sported his door against them, he gave them no encouragement—unless, indeed, he had been their father's friend; then everything was forgiven.

In his bedroom, which latterly became his sitting-room, he kept all the Irish pamphlets which he and his father had amassed—for he was of Irish descent. It was a very characteristic room—the walls were covered to the top with bookcases, painted white, and gradually sloping away inwards as they descended, so that he could have the larger books at the top, and the smaller at the bottom. These were filled with grey and white and blue paper volumes, many unbound and dusty, tied up in masses with strings and paper of all colours; in one corner an immense heap standing high up on the floor. "I know they oughtn't to be here—they ought to be in the library," he would say, "but of course that has never been done." It was in this room, so he told us, that he used to be ceaselessly annoyed by a mouse, which began to perambulate about 2 A.M., night after night, for many weeks: night after night he would resolve, he said, to "humour it no longer"—but night after night he would at last get up and open the door for it to go into his other room, which it instantly did, returning by some secret way to renew its wanderings the next night. "There never was such a pampered mouse," he used to say.

The rooms all through were filled with little mementoes, of which he would sometimes give us the history, from the little pictures and ornaments on the ledges and chimney-pieces, to the incongruous-looking tea-set that he used, and that formed so integral a part of the picture in tête-à-tête talks with him—every single piece of which was a memorial of some one. In former times he had a little toy, a model of the old Eton Long Chamber bedsteads that stood on his table. One evening a fantastic wild friend, who had been at Eton with him, was sitting with him—a man who had been miserable, hounded and persecuted through the whole of his school-life there—and, stung by a sudden thought, perhaps some barbarous association, seized this model with the tongs, and crushed it into the fire—the owner sate immovable till the holocaust was over, and then said gently, "Was that necessary?"

Nothing was more remarkable than the kind of men to be found in his rooms: any one engaged in arduous literary work of a nature involving special research we were sure to see there sooner or later. Many of the rising men in the University who knew greatness when they saw it—and not only these, but scapegraces to whom Bradshaw accorded an almost fatherly protection, "outsiders," so called, who for some venial social defect, some ungraciousness of manner, or want of refining influences, society in general had rigorously excluded—these were to be found expanding in his presence—and the strangest thing about these intimacies was a point to which many will bear testimony, that if they grew at all, they grew to include all the home circle of which his friend was a part. "All my brothers and sisters," said one who was much with him, "unknown to him before—he came to realise and love them all for themselves."

He was a wonderful instance of a man, unmethodical and dreamy by nature, made business-like by consideration for other people: his library-work was always exactly done. His own private work suffered by the rigorous self-sacrifice with which he devoted his time to the details of business: invitations and other social requirements did not come off so well. He was said frequently to neglect these. "I hardly ever go out," he used to say, though it was not for want of being asked: but it so soon got to be understood that such was his habit, and he was so welcome when he did come, though he had not announced his intention of so doing, that the delinquencies were accepted in the spirit in which they had been committed. Indeed, so great was his dislike of being forced to a decision, that it is related of him that a friend who had written to ask him to dinner, on receiving no answer, sent him two postcards, with "Yes" written on one, "No" on the other, and by return of post received them both.

When one speaks of Bradshaw's "work," it is hard to make the uninitiated quite understand either its extent, its importance, or its perfection. He knew more about printed books than any man living—he could tell at a glance the date and country, generally the town, at which a book was published. And the enormous range of this subject cannot be explained without a technical knowledge of the same. He was one of the foremost of Chaucer scholars, a very efficient linguist in range (though for reading, not speaking purposes), as, for instance, in the case of the old Breton language, which he evolved from notes and glosses, scribbled between the lines and on margins of Mass books—and his joy at the discovery of a word that he had suspected but never encountered was delightful to see. He could acquire a language for practical purposes with great rapidity—as, for instance, Armenian, which he began on a Thursday morning at Venice, and could read, so as to decipher titles for cataloguing, on Saturday night. He had a close and unrivalled knowledge of cathedral statutes and constitutions. He was an advanced student in the origins of liturgies—especially Irish—and, indeed, in the whole of Irish literature and printing he was supreme—and, finally, he was by common consent the best palæographist, or critic of the date of MSS. in the world.

The story of his adventure in the Parisian Library is worth recording here: a book had been lost for nearly a century; he went over to Paris to see if he could discover it. Search was fruitless, though there was a strong presumption as to the part of the library where it would be found. He stood in one of the classes describing its probable appearance to the librarian, and to illustrate it said, "About the height, thickness, and of similar binding to this," taking a book out of the shelves as he did so. It was the missing volume.

So too he would refer Oxford men by memory to the case and shelf of the Bodleian where they would find the book for which they had looked in vain—and most characteristic of him was the explanation which he once gave me of his enormous knowledge. "You know," he said, "I have never worked at anything for myself, except, perhaps, at Chaucer, all my life long: all the things that I do know I have stumbled across in investigating questions for other people." How much of this knowledge was merely held in solution in that amazing brain, how much was committed to paper, I do not know—of the latter, comparatively little. He had a long series of miscellaneous note-books, but most of them so technical as to be unintelligible except to one as far advanced in such knowledge as himself. His published works are but a few pamphlets.

The way in which all this work was done, all this knowledge was accumulated, was, among the other peculiarities of his genius, the most amazing. No man ever seemed to have more leisure; he would talk with perfect readiness not only on any special matter that any friend wished to consult him on, but he enjoyed trivial, leisurely gossip, and never showed impatience to continue his work, or the least desire to return to it. The secret was that he never left off. Except for rare holidays, visits to relations or foreign tours, he never left Cambridge for years. His hours were most perplexing; he would generally work very late at night, sometimes till four or five in the morning, if there was much work on hand, go to the library about eleven, return for lunch, then back to the library again, with perhaps a visit to a Board or Syndicate till tea-time—for he took no exercise except spasmodically. Then he would go into Hall, or not, as the fancy took him, on the majority of days not doing so, and tasting nothing but tea and bread-and-butter in his rooms—and then from eight o'clock he would sit there, working if uninterrupted, but with his doors generally open to welcome all intruders, ceaselessly, patiently acquiring, amassing, disintegrating the enormous mass of delicate and subtle information which not only did he never forget, but all of which he seemed to carry on the surface, and carry so lightly and easily too—for he did not appear to be erudite—he never played the rôle of the learned man, though with acquirements as ponderous and detailed, and to the generality of people as uninteresting, as the real or the fictitious Casaubon.

Yet this knowledge was not only of things that lay inside his own subjects, but extended to all kinds of paths that could never have been suspected. I have never met a person so nearly omniscient. If you wanted to hear private and personal details about a man with whom you became connected in a business or official capacity, he could give them. He drew the man, or the family, or the place he lived in. I once travelled up to London with him and pointed out a great house that was gradually getting absorbed into the creeping metropolis but which still preserved its country characteristics, stately and smoke-dried. "Yes," he said, "it used to be much fresher; I used often to go there when I was a boy; it belonged to the——" and there came out a little string of old-world anecdotes and tales. Presently we passed a church (near Barnet) with an ivied tower, which had been engulfed in the town. This also I showed him. "Yes," he said, "I was christened there."

The story is almost too well-known to require repetition, of Mommsen, who said, after half-an-hour's conversation with Bradshaw on some historical specialité: "If I had had a shorthand writer with me, I could have got in half-an-hour's talk enough materials to have made an interesting volume." And this fabric had been ceaselessly growing and expanding, fitting itself into order and connecting itself together, ever since the early days when in the school-yard at Eton, a boy who was possessed of some bibliographical treasures saw Henry Bradshaw issue out of college, carrying two curious volumes under his arms, stealing off to some secret haunt to study them, and greeted him with: "Hullo, Bradshaw, whose books have you got there?" The only answer, delivered without a sign of confusion, in the tones which even then were more expressive in their imperturbability than most men's, "Yours."

Professor Prothero, in his Life of Henry Bradshaw, gives a rationalistic explanation of this story that I can hardly credit. He says that the books were from the School Library, and that Bradshaw's reply was meant to indicate that the volumes belonged as much to one person as another. As this explanation deprives the story of most of its point and all of its humour, I have preferred to retain it in its lighter, if more apocryphal, form—the form in which I heard it from one of Bradshaw's Eton friends. And we may here add the delightful touch with which he dismissed the claims of a celebrated forger of MSS. to have been the writer of the "Codex Sinaiticus." "I am sure if he had ever seen it, he could never have pretended to have written it," he said.

And in an instant the whole structure breaks and melts before our eyes: the knowledge gone, God knows whither: the centre of so many quiet activities, of so many dependent lives slipped from its place. However often we say to ourselves that nothing runs to waste, that hoarded experience—gathered painfully in life and seemingly only to be applied in life—thus vanishing in an instant, is hidden not gone, the blank is there. As Bradshaw himself said to a friend after a great trial that he had told him of, which seemed to have in it no wholesome flavour, to be nothing either in prospect or in retrospect, but the very root of bitterness itself, "Everything is the result of something—whether it is our own fault or not, it means something: what we have to do is to try and interpret it."

And we feel that when such a life, acting as it did so directly on others and affecting them so visibly, is cut short, there is not a sheer waste of love. And though we may be called fanciful, we seem to trace a hopeful analogy in the ease with which he renewed old intimacies, silent for a long interval—he took up the friendship where he had laid it down: there was no adjustment necessary—one became part of his life again at once, because one had never ceased to be so. Such an affection, when it has passed the veil, seems to be waiting for us still—it seems emphatically to have but gone before.

1885.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

FEW poetical writers lived more consistently in the shadow of death than Christina Rossetti. There was a certain taint of doom about her writings from the first, and something of the hollow-eyed listlessness of low vitality, that characterises the artistic work of the school to which she primarily belonged, is never absent for very long together from her writings. There is extant a portrait of her at about the age of thirty-six, by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which will be familiar to many of my readers. After subtracting from it the languorous mannerism of the artist, there remains in the wide, pathetic eyes, the wistful uplifting of the eyebrows and the depressed curves of the stately mouth something dreary and uncomforted about the whole aspect. And a later photograph, which I have had the privilege of seeing, has the same regretful patience. For many years she had been an invalid, and lived a life of singular seclusion in Torrington Square, one of the dreariest and least romantic of London thoroughfares. Latterly she had been an acute sufferer from a wearing disease, borne with silent fortitude. One after another, her mother, and the two aunts to whom she devoted her tenderest care, were taken from her; and her brother William Michael, the critic and editor of Shelley, was the only survivor of the brilliant circle in which her life began. Her fervent religious faith, inspired and matured by desolate experience, had nothing dreary or undecided about it; it issued in a sedulous dutifulness and a patient devotion that were the best proof of its sincerity.

Her artistic nature developed early, and before she was seventeen, a little volume entitled Verses by Christina Rossetti, dedicated to her mother, was printed by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, at his private printing-press in Regent's Park. This is now one of the rarest of bibliographical treasures. Here her precise delineation of natural objects, and a certain delicate antique charm, are distinctly observable. But in 1850, under the nom-de-plume of Ellen Alleyne, she contributed verses to the Germ, that fertile organ of the pre-Raphaelites, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. Of these lyrics we shall presently have occasion to quote one, "Dreamland," which shows how early her lyrical gift had matured. And indeed it may be said that of the seven poems which she contributed to the Germ, at least five are among her best lyrics.

In 1862 appeared Goblin Market and other Poems; and in this, as is so often the case with the work of poets done before the thirty-fifth year—the year that has so often been fatal to genius—she reached the zenith of her poetical powers. Not that much of her later work was not excellent, and would have sufficed for a definite reputation; but it may be said that twenty or thirty of these earlier poems are those by which she will be best remembered.

Some writers have the power of creating a species of aerial landscape in the minds of their readers, often vague and shadowy, not obtruding itself strongly upon the consciousness, but forming a quiet background, like the scenery of portraits, in which the action of the lyric or the sonnet seems to lie. I am not now speaking of pictorial writing, which definitely aims at producing, with more or less vividness, a house, a park, a valley, but lyrics and poems of pure thought and feeling, which have none the less a haunting sense of locality in which the mood dreams itself out.

Christina Rossetti's mise-en-scène is a place of gardens, orchards, wooded dingles, with a churchyard in the distance. The scene shifts a little, but the spirit never wanders far afield; and it is certainly singular that one who lived out almost the whole of her life in a city so majestic, sober, and inspiriting as London, should never bring the consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and populous murmur into her writings. She, whose heart was so with birds and fruits, cornfields and farmyard sounds, never even revolts against or despairs of the huge desolation, the laborious monotony of a great town. She does not sing as a caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom stirred by the flashing water, the hanging groundsel of her wired prison, but with a wild voice, with visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities of toil and tillage. The dewy English woodland, the sharp silences of winter, the gloom of low-hung clouds, and the sigh of weeping rain are her backgrounds; and it is strange that one of Italian blood should write with no alien longings for warm and sun-dried lands. Robert Browning, who brings into sudden being by a word, the whole atmosphere of the fiery Italian summer, the terraced vines, the gnarled olive, the bulging plaster where the scorpion lies folded, still yearned for an English spring morning. But Christina Rossetti, unlike even her brother, had no leanings to the home of her race.

The critic of future ages, if he were confronted with the works of Mrs. Browning and Miss Rossetti, and a history of their lives, would, it may be said, acting on internal evidence only, assign such poems as Aurora Leigh and the Casa-Guidi Windows to Miss Rossetti, and trace the natural heart-beats which still thrilled her for the home of her origin, and equally attribute the essentially English character of Miss Rossetti's feeling to the English poetess. It is said that Miss Rossetti never visited Italy, and had no wish to do so. It is a strange thing that the two greatest of English poetesses should have, so to speak, so passionately adopted each other's country as their own.

The only point in which Christina Rossetti's imagery may be held to be tropical, is in the matters of fruit. In "Goblin Market," in the "Pageant of the Months," even in such a poem as the "Apple Gathering," and in many other poems she seems to revel in descriptions of fruit which the harsh apples and half-baked plums of English gardens can hardly have suggested. Keats is the only other English poet who had the same sensuous delight in the pulpy juiciness of summer fruit. It will be found, I think, that in the majority of English poets fruit is quite as often typical of immaturity and acidity as of cooling and delight. And even Stevenson couples the onion and the nectarine as the noblest fruits of God's creation. But the

are hardly the produce of the rushy glen where the leering goblin merchants tramped and whisked up and down.

This leads me to speak of another region which Christina Rossetti trode with an eager familiarity—the land of dreams and visions. With the exception of Coleridge, who, in his three great poems, moved in that difficult and turbid air with so proud a freedom, it may be said that no English poet except Christina, her brother, and James Thomson, have ever successfully attempted such work. Mr. Yeats, it is true, of younger writers, has passed beyond the threshold of that eerie and unsubstantial land; but with him it is the melancholy Celtic twilight, the home of old earth-spirits, neither high nor hopeful, but with a bewildered sadness, as of discrowned kings and discredited magicians. To a characteristically English poet such as Wordsworth, such a region, as he betrays in the memorable sonnet, "The world is too much with us," was a place of desperate soulless horror. But Christina Rossetti, in "Goblin Market," and the "Ballad of Boding," as her brother in "Rose Mary," and "Sister Helen," passed successfully along the narrow road of allegory. In English hands such subjects are apt to pass with fatal swiftness into the ludicrous and the grotesque. Witness the merry horned demons of monkish MSS., and the cheerful oddities, so far aloof from fantastic horror, of our English gurgoyles and stall-work, the straddling and padding forms of Bunyan. What is needed is a sort of twilight of the soul, a simple directness such as children value, a sense of grave verisimilitude, hopelessly alien from the business-like Puritan mind.

Then, too, there is the singular creation of the modern ballad, initiated by Coleridge, and carried to supreme perfection by D. G. Rossetti, and in a less degree by his sister; that vague, dream-laden writing which, using old forms of austere simplicity, charges them with a whole world of modern sicknesses and degenerate dreams. It was this that Matthew Arnold went so passionately in search of in a poem like the "Scholar Gipsy," and yet could contrive no inner picture of the haunted wanderer's thoughts, but only touch in the external aspects of the phantom traveller, as seen unexpectedly by human toilers and pleasure-seekers engaged in homely exercises.

But Miss Rossetti, in such poems as "Brandons Both," and in a supreme degree in the exquisite ballad of "Noble Sisters," which we will quote in extenso, laid a secure hand on the precise medium required:—

NOBLE SISTERS