Part 12
[The monarch satirized in this poem was Francesco IV., Duke of Modena, a petty Nero, who executed not a few of the Italian patriots of 1831.]
A most wonderful steam-machine, One time set up in China-land, Outdid the insatiate guillotine, For in three hours, you understand, It cut off a hundred thousand heads In a row, like hospital beds.
This innovation stirred a breeze, And some of the bonzes even thought Their barbarous country by degrees To civilization might be brought, Leaving Europeans, with their schools, Looking like fools.
The Emperor was an honest man-- A little stiff, and dull of pate; Like other asses, hard and slow. He loved his subjects and the State, And patronized all clever men Within his ken.
His people did not like to pay Their taxes and their other dues,-- They cheated the revenue, sad to say: So their good ruler thought he'd choose As the best argument he'd seen, This sweet machine.
The thing's achievements were so great, They gained a pension for the man,-- The executioner of State,-- Who got a patent for his plan, Besides becoming a Mandarin Of great Pekin.
A courtier cried: "Good guillotine! Let's up and christen it, I say!" "Ah, why," cries to his counselor keen A Nero of our present day, "Why was not born within _my_ State A man so great?"
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature.'
[Illustration: WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE.]
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
(1809-)
In view of his distinguished career, it is interesting to know that it is a part of Mr. Gladstone's unresting ambition to take a place among the literary men of the time, and to guide the thoughts of his countrymen in literary as well as in political, social, and economic subjects. Mr. Gladstone's preparation to become a man of letters was extensive. Born in Liverpool December 29th, 1809, he was sent to Eton and afterwards to Oxford, where he took the highest honors, and was the most remarkable graduate of his generation. His fellow students carried away a vivid recollection of his _viva voce_ examination for his degree: the tall figure, the flashing eye, the mobile countenance, in the midst of the crowd who pressed to hear him, while the examiners plied him with questions till, tested in some difficult point in theology, the candidate exclaimed, "Not yet, if you please" and began to pour forth a fresh store of learning and argument.
From the university Mr. Gladstone carried away two passions--the one for Greek literature, especially Greek poetry, the other for Christian theology. The Oxford that formed these tastes was intensely conservative in politics, representing the aristocratic system of English society and the exclusiveness of the Established Church, whose creed was that of the fourth century. Ecclesiasticism is not friendly to literature; but how far Oxford's most loyal son was permeated by ecclesiasticism is a matter of opinion. Fortunately, personality is stronger than dogma, and ideas than literary form; and Mr. Gladstone, than whom few men outside the profession of letters have written more, is always sure of an intelligent hearing. His discussion of a subject seems to invest it with some of his own marvelous vitality; and when he selects a book for review, he is said to make the fortune of both publisher and author, if only the title be used as a crotchet to hang his sermon on.
And this not merely because curiosity is excited concerning the opinion of the greatest living Englishman (for notwithstanding his political vacillations, his views on inward and higher subjects have little changed since his Oxford days, and may easily be prognosticated), but on account of the subtlety and fertility of his mind and the adroitness of his argument. Plunging into the heart of the subject, he is at the same time working round it, holding it up for inspection in one light and then in another, reasoning from this premise and that; while the string of elucidations and explanations grows longer and longer, and the atmosphere of complexity thickens. It was out of such an atmosphere that a barrister advised his client, a bigamist, to get Mr. Gladstone to explain away one of his wives.
When Mr. Gladstone made his debut as an author, he locked horns with Macaulay in the characteristic paper 'Church and State' (1837). He published his 'Studies in Homer and the Homeric Age' in 1858, 'Juventus Mundi' in 1869, 'Homeric Synchronism' in 1857. In 1879 most of his essays, political, social, economic, religious, and literary, written between 1843 and 1879, were collected in seven volumes, and appeared under the title of 'Gleanings of Past Years.' He has published a very great number of smaller writings not reprinted.
From that time to the present, neither his industry nor his energy has abated; but he is probably at his best in the several remarkable essays on Blanco White, Bishop Patterson, Tennyson, Leopardi, and the position of the Church of England. The reader spoiled for the Scotch quality of weight by the "light touch" which is the graceful weapon of the age, wonders, when reading these essays, that Mr. Gladstone has not more assiduously cultivated the instinct of style,--sentence-making. Milton himself has not a higher conception of the business of literature; and when discussing these congenial themes, Mr. Gladstone's enthusiasm does not degenerate into vehemence, nor does he descend from the high moral plane from which he views the world.
It is the province of the specialist to appraise Mr. Gladstone's Homeric writings; but even the specialist will not, perhaps, forbear to quote the axiom of the pugilist in the Iliad concerning the fate of him who would be skillful in all arts. No man is less a Greek in temperament, but no man cherishes deeper admiration for the Greek genius, and nowhere else is a more vivid picture of the life and politics of the heroic age held up to the unlearned. While the critic may question technical accuracy, or plausible structures built on insufficient data, the laity will remember how earnestly Mr. Gladstone insists that Homer is his own best interpreter, and that the student of the Iliad must go to the Greek text and not elsewhere for accurate knowledge.
But Greek literature is only one of Mr. Gladstone's two passions, and not the paramount one. That he would have been a great theologian had he been other than Mr. Gladstone, is generally admitted. And it is interesting to note that while he glories in the combats of the heroes of Hellas, his enthusiasm is as quickly kindled by the humilities of the early Church. He recognizes the prophetic quality of Homer, but he bows before the sublimer genius of an Isaiah, and sees in the lives and writings of the early Fathers the perfect bloom of human genius and character.
MACAULAY
From 'Gleanings of Past Years'
Lord Macaulay lived a life of no more than fifty-nine years and three months. But it was an extraordinarily full life, of sustained exertion; a high table-land, without depressions. If in its outer aspect there be anything wearisome, it is only the wearisomeness of reiterated splendors, and of success so uniform as to be almost monotonous. He speaks of himself as idle; but his idleness was more active, and carried with it hour by hour a greater expenditure of brain power, than what most men regard as their serious employments. He might well have been, in his mental career, the spoiled child of fortune; for all he tried succeeded, all he touched turned into gems and gold. In a happy childhood he evinced extreme precocity. His academical career gave sufficient, though not redundant, promise of after celebrity. The new Golden Age he imparted to the Edinburgh Review, and his first and most important, if not best, Parliamentary speeches in the grand crisis of the first Reform Bill, achieved for him, years before he had reached the middle point of life, what may justly be termed an immense distinction.
For a century and more, perhaps no man in this country, with the exceptions of Mr. Pitt and of Lord Byron, had attained at thirty-two the fame of Macaulay. His Parliamentary success and his literary eminence were each of them enough, as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any brain and heart of a meaner order. But to these was added, in his case, an amount and quality of social attentions such as invariably partake of adulation and idolatry, and as perhaps the high circles of London never before or since have lavished on a man whose claims lay only in himself, and not in his descent, his rank, or his possessions....
One of the very first things that must strike the observer of this man is, that he was very unlike to any other man. And yet this unlikeness, this monopoly of the model in which he was made, did not spring from violent or eccentric features of originality, for eccentricity he had none whatever, but from the peculiar mode in which the ingredients were put together to make up the composition. In one sense, beyond doubt, such powers as his famous memory, his rare power of illustration, his command of language, separated him broadly from others: but gifts like these do not make the man; and we now for the first time know that he possessed, in a far larger sense, the stamp of a real and strong individuality. The most splendid and complete assemblage of intellectual endowments does not of itself suffice to create an interest of the kind that is, and will be, now felt in Macaulay. It is from ethical gifts alone that such an interest can spring.
These existed in him not only in abundance, but in forms distant from and even contrasted with the fashion of his intellectual faculties, and in conjunctions which come near to paradox. Behind the mask of splendor lay a singular simplicity; behind a literary severity which sometimes approached to vengeance, an extreme tenderness; behind a rigid repudiation of the sentimental, a sensibility at all times quick, and in the latest times almost threatening to sap, though never sapping, his manhood. He who as speaker and writer seemed above all others to represent the age and the world, had the real centre of his being in the simplest domestic tastes and joys. He for whom the mysteries of human life, thought, and destiny appear to have neither charm nor terror, and whose writings seem audibly to boast in every page of being bounded by the visible horizon of the practical and work-day sphere, yet in his virtues and in the combination of them; in his freshness, bounty, bravery; in his unshrinking devotion both to causes and to persons; and most of all, perhaps, in the thoroughly inborn and spontaneous character of all these gifts,--really recalls the age of chivalry and the lineaments of the ideal. The peculiarity, the _differentia_ (so to speak) of Macaulay seems to us to lie in this: that while as we frankly think, there is much to question--nay, much here and there to regret or even censure--in his writings, the excess, or defect, or whatever it may be, is never really ethical, but is in all cases due to something in the structure and habits of his intellect. And again, it is pretty plain that the faults of that intellect were immediately associated with its excellences: it was in some sense, to use the language of his own Milton, "dark with excessive bright."...
His moderation in luxuries and pleasures is the more notable and praiseworthy because he was a man who, with extreme healthiness of faculty, enjoyed keenly what he enjoyed at all. Take in proof the following hearty notice of a dinner _a quattr' occhi_ to his friend: "Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and macaroni. I think that I will note dinners, as honest Pepys did."
His love of books was intense, and was curiously developed. In a walk he would devour a play or a volume. Once, indeed, his performance embraced no less than fourteen Books of the Odyssey. "His way of life," says Mr. Trevelyan, "would have been deemed solitary by others; but it was not solitary to him." This development blossomed into a peculiar specialism. Henderson's 'Iceland' was "a favorite breakfast-book" with him. "Some books which I would never dream of opening at dinner please me at breakfast, and _vice versa_!" There is more subtlety in this distinction than could easily be found in any passage of his writings. But how quietly both meals are handed over to the dominion of the master propensity! This devotion, however, was not without its drawbacks. Thought, apart from books and from composition, perhaps he disliked; certainly he eschewed. Crossing that evil-minded sea the Irish Channel at night in rough weather, he is disabled from reading; he wraps himself in a pea-jacket and sits upon the deck. What is his employment? He cannot sleep, or does not. What an opportunity for moving onward in the processes of thought, which ought to weigh on the historian! The wild yet soothing music of the waves would have helped him to watch the verging this way or that of the judicial scales, or to dive into the problems of human life and action which history continually is called upon to sound. No, he cared for none of this. He set about the marvelous feat of going over 'Paradise Lost' from memory, when he found he could still repeat half of it. In a word, he was always conversing, or recollecting, or reading, or composing; but reflecting never.
The laboriousness of Macaulay as an author demands our gratitude; all the more because his natural speech was in sentences of set and ordered structure, well-nigh ready for the press. It is delightful to find that the most successful prose writer of the day was also the most painstaking. Here is indeed a literary conscience. The very same gratification may be expressed with reference to our most successful poet, Mr. Tennyson. Great is the praise due to the poet; still greater, from the nature of the case, that share which falls to the lot of Macaulay. For a poet's diligence is, all along, a honeyed work. He is ever traveling in flowery meads. Macaulay, on the other hand, unshrinkingly went through an immense mass of inquiry, which even he sometimes felt to be irksome, and which to most men would have been intolerable. He was perpetually picking the grain of corn out of the bushel of chaff. He freely chose to undergo the dust and heat and strain of battle, before he would challenge from the public the crown of victory. And in every way it was remarkable that he should maintain his lofty standard of conception and performance. Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions. The tests of excellence in prose are as much less palpable as the public appetite is less fastidious. Moreover, we are moving downward in this respect. The proportion of middling to good writing constantly and rapidly increases. With the average of performance, the standard of judgment progressively declines. The inexorable conscientiousness of Macaulay, his determination to put out nothing from his hand which his hand was still capable of improving, was a perfect godsend to the best hopes of our slipshod generation.
It was naturally consequent upon this habit of treating composition in the spirit of art, that he should extend to the body of his books much of the regard and care which he so profusely bestowed upon their soul. We have accordingly had in him, at the time when the need was greatest, a most vigilant guardian of the language. We seem to detect rare and slight evidences of carelessness in his Journal: of which we can only say that in a production of the moment, written for himself alone, we are surprised that they are not more numerous and considerable. In general society, carelessness of usage is almost universal, and it is exceedingly difficult for an individual, however vigilant, to avoid catching some of the trashy or faulty usages which are continually in his ear. But in his published works his grammar, his orthography, nay, his punctuation (too often surrendered to the printer), are faultless. On these questions, and on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of a word, he may even be called an authority without appeal; and we cannot doubt that we owe it to his works, and to their boundless circulation, that we have not in this age witnessed a more rapid corruption and degeneration of the language.
To the literary success of Macaulay it would be difficult to find a parallel in the history of recent authorship. For this and probably for all future centuries, we are to regard the public as the patron of literary men; and as a patron abler than any that went before to heap both fame and fortune on its favorites. Setting aside works of which the primary purpose was entertainment, Tennyson alone among the writers of our age, in point of public favor and of emolument following upon it, comes near to Macaulay. But Tennyson was laboriously cultivating his gifts for many years before he acquired a position in the eye of the nation. Macaulay, fresh from college in 1825, astonished the world by his brilliant and most imposing essay on Milton. Full-orbed, he was seen above the horizon; and full-orbed after thirty-five years of constantly emitted splendor, he sank beneath it.
His gains from literature were extraordinary. The check for L20,000 is known to all. But his accumulation was reduced by his bounty; and his profits would, it is evident, have been far larger still had he dealt with the products of his mind on the principles of economic science (which however he heartily professed), and sold his wares in the dearest market, as he undoubtedly acquired them in the cheapest. No one can measure the elevation of Macaulay's character above the mercenary level, without bearing in mind that for ten years after 1825 he was a poor and a contented man, though ministering to the wants of a father and a family reduced in circumstances; though in the blaze of literary and political success; and though he must have been conscious from the first of the possession of a gift which by a less congenial and more compulsory use would have rapidly led him to opulence. Yet of the comforts and advantages, both social and physical, from which he thus forbore, it is so plain that he at all times formed no misanthropic or ascetic, but on the contrary a very liberal and genial estimate. It is truly touching to find that never, except as a minister, until 1851, when he had already lived fifty years of his fifty-nine, did this favorite of fortune, this idol of society, allow himself the luxury of a carriage.
It has been observed that neither in art nor letters did Macaulay display that faculty of the higher criticism which depends upon certain refined perceptions and the power of subtle analysis. His analysis was always rough, hasty, and sweeping, and his perceptions robust. By these properties it was that he was so eminently [Greek: phortikos], not in the vulgar sense of an appeal to spurious sentiment, but as one bearing his reader along by violence, as the River Scamander tried to bear Achilles. Yet he was never pretentious; and he said frankly of himself that a criticism like that of Lessing in his 'Laocoon,' or of Goethe on 'Hamlet,' filled him with wonder and despair. His intense devotion to the great work of Dante is not perhaps in keeping with the general tenor of his tastes and attachments, but is in itself a circumstance of much interest.
We remember however at least one observation of Macaulay's in regard to art, which is worth preserving. He observed that the mixture of gold with ivory in great works of ancient art--for example, in the Jupiter of Phidias--was probably a condescension to the tastes of the people who were to be the worshipers of the statue; and he noticed that in Christian times it has most rarely happened that productions great in art have also been the objects of warm popular veneration....
It has been felt and pointed out in many quarters that Macaulay as a writer was the child, and became the type, of his country and his age. As fifty years ago the inscription "Bath" used to be carried on our letter-paper, so the word "English" is, as it were, in the water-mark of every leaf of Macaulay's writing. His country was not the Empire, nor was it the United Kingdom. It was not even Great Britain. Though he was descended in the higher, that is the paternal, half from Scottish ancestry, and was linked specially with that country through the signal virtues, the victorious labors, and the considerable reputation of his father Zachary,--his country was England. On this little spot he concentrated a force of admiration and of worship which might have covered all the world. But as in space, so in time, it was limited. It was the England of his own age.
The higher energies of his life were as completely summed up in the present as those of Walter Scott were projected upon the past. He would not have filled an Abbotsford with armor and relics of the Middle Ages. He judges the men and institutions and events of other times by the instruments and measures of the present. The characters whom he admires are those who would have conformed to the type that was before his eyes: who would have moved with effect in the court, the camp, the senate, the drawing-room of to-day. He contemplates the past with no _desiderium_, no regretful longing, no sense of things admirable which are also lost and irrecoverable. Upon this limitation of his retrospects it follows in natural sequence that of the future he has no glowing anticipations, and even the present he is not apt to contemplate on its mysterious and ideal side. As in respect to his personal capacity of loving, so in regard to the corresponding literary power. The faculty was singularly intense, and yet it was spent within a narrow circle. There is a marked sign of this narrowness, in his disinclination even to look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he disliked.