The
character
and purpose of his writing must be borne in mind.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v12 - Gre to Hen
A New-Englander of good Puritan stock, he was born July 8th,
1790, in the old Connecticut coast town of Guilford. He had such
schooling as the place afforded, but at fifteen became a clerk in
his uncle's store, where he remained until
his majority. His bookish ancestry, or the
writing ichor of a man predestined to
letters, led him while yet a school-lad to
scribble verses, practicing a 'prentice hand.
When twenty-one he went to New York,
entering a counting-room and only leaving
it, after twenty years of service, for a sim-
ilar position with John Jacob Astor, held
for sixteen years,- a long life of mercantile
employment. But Halleck's interests lay
in another direction. All his spare money
went for books, and soon after arriving in
the great city he formed the friendship with
Drake which lasted until the latter's death
in 1820, and inspired what is perhaps Halleck's best short lyric.
Halleck and Drake were collaborators in the clever satiric (Croaker'
papers, which, appearing during 1819 in the New York Evening Post,
caught the public fancy, as Irving and Paulding caught it with the
'Salmagundi' papers. The same year Halleck's long satirical poem
'Fanny' was published, and met with success. A European trip at
the age of thirty-two broadened his culture; and in the Poems'
issued in 1827 several pieces show this influence, including the famil-
iar martial lay of Marco Bozzaris. '
In 1849, Mr. Astor having granted him a small annuity, the poet
returned to his native Guilford to live with his sister in one of the
town's old-time houses, and to lead a life of quiet, studious retire-
ment. Between brother and sister, neither of whom had married, a
tender and beautiful friendship existed. Not much literary work was
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
## p. 6862 (#242) ###########################################
6862
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
done by Halleck during the last twenty years, though his poem 'Con-
necticut' belongs to this period, and reflects his love for his own
State. He died at Guilford, November 19th, 1867, aged seventy-seven.
Full honor has been awarded him since. On the eightieth anniver-
sary of his birth a fine obelisk, erected through the efforts of leading
men of letters, was dedicated with imposing ceremony at Guilford,
and was the first monument to an American poet, as the statue to
Halleck in Central Park, New York, set up in 1877, is the first memo-
rial of its kind. An address by Bayard Taylor and a poem by Dr.
Holmes on this occasion indicated the quality of the respect felt for
the poet. His 'Poetical Writings' have been edited by James Grant
Wilson (1869), who at the same time prepared his biography.
Fitz-Greene Halleck will always have a place in the American
anthology. His verse to-day strikes the ear as somewhat academic
and confined; the body of his work is slender, nor was his range
wide. But as a forerunner of greater singers, and within his limita-
tions, he produced poetry that is felicitous in diction, skillful in the
handling of metres, and possessed of feeling in the lyric vein and of
fire in the heroic. Two or three of his compositions certainly have
vitality enough for a prolonged existence. He cannot be overlooked
in tracing the development of letters in the United States.
Α
MARCO BOZZARIS
T MIDNIGHT, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power.
In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring,
Then pressed that monarch's throne - a king;
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,
As Eden's garden bird.
At midnight, in the forest shades,
Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band-
True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.
There had the Persian's thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Platæa's day;
## p. 6863 (#243) ###########################################
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
6863
And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arms to strike, and soul to dare,
As quick, as far, as they.
-
An hour passed on- - the Turk awoke;
That bright dream was his last:
He woke to hear his sentries shriek,
"To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek! "
He woke to die 'midst flame and smoke,
And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,
And death-shots falling thick and fast
As lightnings from the mountain cloud;
And heard, with voice as trumpet loud,
Bozzaris cheer his band:-
"Strike - till the last armed foe expires;
Strike for your altars and your fires;
Strike for the green graves of your sires,
God and your native land! "
—
—
—
—
They fought like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain;
They conquered-but Bozzaris fell,
Bleeding at every vein.
His few surviving comrades saw
His smile when rang their proud hurrah,
And the red field was won;
Then saw in death his eyelids close
Calmly, as to a night's repose,
Like flowers at set of sun.
Come to the bridal chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels
For the first time her first-born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm
With banquet song, and dance, and wine:
And thou art terrible - the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony are thine.
## p. 6864 (#244) ###########################################
6864
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
But to the hero, when his sword
Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard
The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come when his task of fame is,wrought;
Come with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought;
Come in her crowning hour and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight
Of sky and stars to prisoned men
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,
When the land wind, from woods of palm
And orange groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.
She wore no funeral weeds for thee,
Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume
Like torn branch from death's leafless tree,
In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,
The heartless luxury of the tomb.
But she remembers thee as one
Long loved, and for a season gone;
For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed,
Her marble wrought, her music breathed;
For thee she rings the birthday bells;
Of thee her babes' first lisping tells;
For thine her evening prayer is said
At palace couch and cottage bed;
Her soldier, closing with the foe,
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow;
His plighted maiden, when she fears
For him, the joy of her young years,
Thinks of thy fate, and checks her tears.
And she, the mother of thy boys,
Though in her eye and faded cheek
Is read the grief she will not speak,
## p. 6865 (#245) ###########################################
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
6865
XII-430
The memory of her buried joys;
And even she who gave thee birth,
Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth,
Talk of thy doom without a sigh;
For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's-
One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die.
ROBERT BURNS
TH
HERE have been loftier themes than his,
And longer scrolls, and louder lyres,
And lays lit up with Poesy's
Purer and holier fires.
Yet read the names that know not death:
Few nobler ones than Burns are there;
And few have won a greener wreath
Than that which binds his hair.
His is that language of the heart
In which the answering heart would speak;
Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start,
Or the smile light the cheek.
And his that music to whose tone
The common pulse of man keeps time,
In cot or castle's mirth or moan,
In cold or sunny clime.
And who hath heard his song, nor knelt
'Before its spell with willing knee,
And listened, and believed, and felt
The Poet's mastery?
O'er the mind's sea, in calm and storm,
O'er the heart's sunshine and its showers,
O'er Passion's moments, bright and warm,
O'er Reason's dark, cold hours;
On fields where brave men "die or do,"
In halls where rings the banquet's mirth,
Where mourners weep, where lovers woo,
From throne to cottage hearth:
## p. 6866 (#246) ###########################################
6866
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
What sweet tears dim the eyes unshed,
What wild vows falter on the tongue,
When Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,'
Or 'Auld Lang Syne,' is sung!
Pure hopes, that lift the soul above,
Come with the Cotter's hymn of praise;
And dreams of youth, and truth, and love,
With Logan's banks and braes.
And when he breathes his master-lay
Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall,
All passions in our frames of clay
Come thronging at his call.
Imagination's world of air,
And our own world, its gloom and glee,-
Wit, pathos, poetry, are there,
And death's sublimity.
And Burns, though brief the race he ran,
Though rough and dark the path he trod,
Lived, died, in form and soul a Man,
The image of his God.
Through care, and pain, and want, and woe,
With wounds that only death could heal,-
Tortures the poor alone can know,
The proud alone can feel,-
He kept his honesty and truth,
His independent tongue and pen,
And moved, in manhood as in youth,
Pride of his fellow-men.
Strong sense, deep feeling, passions strong,
A hate of tyrant and of knave,
A love of right, a scorn of wrong,
Of coward and of slave;
A kind, true heart, a spirit high,
That could not fear and would not bow,
Were written in his manly eye
And on his manly brow.
Praise to the bard! His words are driven,
Like flower seeds by the far winds sown,
## p. 6867 (#247) ###########################################
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
6867
Where'er, beneath the sky of heaven,
The birds of fame have flown.
Praise to the man! A nation stood
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,-
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,-
As when a loved one dies.
―――
And still, as on his funeral day,
Men stand his cold earth-couch around,
With the mute homage that we pay
To consecrated ground.
And consecrated ground it is,—
The last, the hallowed home of one
Who lives upon all memories,
Though with the buried gone.
Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined;
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.
Sages, with Wisdom's garland wreathed,
Crowned kings, and mitred priests of power,
And warriors with their bright swords sheathed,
The mightiest of the hour;
And lowlier names, whose humble home
Is lit by Fortune's dimmer star,
Are there; o'er wave and mountain come,
From countries near and far,
Pilgrims whose wandering feet have pressed
The Switzer's snow, the Arab's sand,
Or trod the piled leaves of the West-
My own green forest-land:
All ask the cottage of his birth,
Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,
And gather feelings not of earth
His fields and streams among.
They linger by the Doon's low trees,
And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries!
The Poet's tomb is there.
## p. 6868 (#248) ###########################################
6868
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK
*
But what to them the sculptor's art,
His funeral columns, wreaths, and urns?
Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of Robert Burns?
ON THE DEATH OF JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE
REEN be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.
GR
Tears fell when thou wert dying,
From eyes unused to weep;
And long, where thou art lying,
Will tears the cold turf steep.
When hearts whose truth was proven
Like thine, are laid in earth,
There should a wreath be woven
To tell the world their worth;
And I who woke each morrow
To clasp thy hand in mine,
Who shared thy joy and sorrow,
Whose weal and woe were thine,-
It should be mine to braid it
Around thy faded brow,
But I've in vain essayed it,
And feel I cannot now.
While memory bids me weep thee,
Nor thoughts nor words are free;
The grief is fixed too deeply
That mourns a man like thee.
## p. 6869 (#249) ###########################################
6869
JEHUDAH HALLEVI
(1080-? )
BY RICHARD GOTTHEIL
N THE sunny lands of Spain, the Jews, outcast from their East-
ern homes, had found a second fatherland. Under the rule of
Arabic caliphs, Orientals as they themselves were, occasion
had been given them to develop that taste for literature which their
continued occupation with the Bible had instilled into them. Cor-
dova, Granada, and Toledo soon became homes of Jewish learning, in
which the glory of the schools of Babylon and Palestine was well-nigh
hidden. Under the influence of a quieter life, the heart of the Jew
expanded and his imagination had freedom to run its own course.
The Hebrew muse, which had almost forgotten the force with which
it had poured forth psalm and song in ancient days, awoke again to
a sense of its power. The harp of David was once more strung to
catch the outpourings of hearts thankful and gay. The priests in the
Temple of God, less grand outwardly now, but more fully the expres-
sion of the feelings of the individual, chanted anew Israel's songs of
praise and of sanctification.
Of the many poets which this new life produced,-lived as it was
among a people to whom poetry was so natural a mode of expres-
sion,-to Abulhasan Jehudah ben Hallevi all unite in giving the crown.
Born in Toledo, Old Castile, in 1080, his songs and verses soon
became so well known and so oft recited that the person of their
author has been almost forgotten in the love shown his productions.
He lived only for his pen, and no deeds are accounted him which
might make the telling of his life more than of a passing interest.
He was learned-as most of the men of his race then were-in all
the sciences of the Arabians; had made himself proficient in the lan-
guage of both Quran and Bible, was learned in the practice of medi-
cine and facile in the discussion of philosophy. His was a thoroughly
religious nature; and in joining together philosophy, and poetry, and
medicine, he was following a custom not unknown in the Jewish
high schools. In philosophy he communed with man about God, in
poetry with God about man; while his service to his fellow-men was
through his power in the healing art. "I occupy myself in the hours
which belong neither to the day nor to the night, with the vanity of
medical science, although I am unable to heal. I physic Babel, but it
continues infirm," are his own words in a letter to a friend. This
## p. 6870 (#250) ###########################################
6870
JEHUDAH HALLEVI
art he practiced in Toledo and Cordova; and in one of these places
he wrote in the Arabic tongue a philosophical work (Kuzari') which,
though perhaps bad philosophy, is a poetical and beautiful defense of
his own faith against the conflicting claims of Christianity and Mo-
hammedanism.
But at the early age of thirteen, his pen had commenced to run
in the cadence of rhyme and metre. His first poems were upon sub-
jects which touch the young,- poems of friendship, of love, and of
wine, in which he made the old sedate and stately language of the
Bible shake with youthful mirth and laughter. And though he never
really forsook such subjects light and gay, these poems were not the
real expression of his inmost being. A strong sense of the Divine
presence, a romantic love for the home of his faith,-in spite of its
second home in Spain,-have made of Jehudah Hallevi the chief of
the national poets of Israel whose love was rooted in the land of the
patriarchs and prophets. Of all his three hundred religious poems-
almost one third of the poet's legacy-
-none bear the stamp of intense
feeling as do these national ones. In verse after verse he bemoans
the ruins of the ancient places, bewails the exile of Israel's children,
and sings the larger hope of her returned glory.
So strong was the love of Zion within him that he could not rest
until he had seen in the flesh that which his spiritual eye had beheld
since his youth. He had already reached the age of sixty when he
set out on his long journey to the Holy Land; alone, because he had
not sufficiently persuaded others up to the pitch of his own faith.
And yet not entirely alone! His muse went with him; and his track
was strewn with the brightest pearls which have fallen from his lips.
He reached Palestine; but our knowledge of his further doings there
is cut off. His body must have been laid in the sacred soil; but
no man knoweth the place of his sepulture. Like Elijah of old, he
went up to heaven. The popular fancy has seized upon so welcome
a figure, and has told how he was cut down by an Arab at the very
walls of Jerusalem, after he had poured forth the 'Ode to Zion,'
which has done more than any of his other pieces to keep his memory
alive; and of which Heine-of the elder poet's race, and inwardly
also of his faith-has said:-
"Tears of pearl, that on the golden
Thread of rhyme are strung together,
From the shining forge of poetry
Have come forth in song celestial.
"And this is the song of Zion
That Jehudah ben Hallevi
Sang when dying on the holy
Ruins of Jerusalem. »
## p. 6871 (#251) ###########################################
JEHUDAH HALLEVI
6871
Jehudah Hallevi has thus become the exponent of suffering Israel,
the teller of its woes, the prophet of its hopes. A depth of pure
feeling is revealed in him; a freedom from artificial constraint, and a
power of description, which we meet with nowhere among the Middle-
Age Hebrew poets. As a true poet, love remains his theme to the
end; but the love of the fair one is exchanged for a love purer and
greater, his people, his faith.
"But a wan and woeful maiden
Was his love: a mournful image
Of despair and desolation,
Who was named Jerusalem.
"Even in his early boyhood
Did he love her, deeply, truly,
And a thrill of passion shook him
At the word Jerusalem. »
And that people has returned his love a thousandfold.
Richard Gotthril
NOTE. -See Songs of Zion by Hebrew Singers of Medieval Times'; trans-
lated into English verse by Mrs. Henry Lucas. London, 1894.
A
ODE TO ZION
RT thou not, Zion, fain
To send forth greetings from thy sacred rock
Unto thy captive train,
Who greet thee as the remnants of thy flock?
Take thou on every side-
East, West, and South, and North-their greetings multiplied.
Sadly he greets thee still,
The prisoner of hope, who, day and night,
Sheds ceaseless tears, like dew on Hermon's hill
Would that they fell on thy mountain's height!
Harsh is my voice when I bewail thy woes,
But when in fancy's dream
I see thy freedom, forth its cadence flows
Sweet as the harps that hung by Babel's stream.
## p. 6872 (#252) ###########################################
6872
JEHUDAH HALLEVI
My heart is so distressed
For Bethel ever blessed,
For Peniel, and each sacred place.
The Holy Presence there
To thee is present where
Thy Maker opes thy gates, the gates of heaven to face.
Oh! who will lead me on
To seek the spots where, in far distant years,
The angels in their glory dawned upon
Thy messengers and seers ?
Oh! who will give me wings
That I may fly away,
And there, at rest from all my wanderings,
The ruins of my heart among thy ruins lay?
I'll bend my face unto thy soil, and hold
Thy stones as precious gold.
And when in Hebron I have stood beside
My fathers' tomb, then will I pace in turn
Thy plains and forest wide,
Until I stand in Gilead and discern
Mount Hor and Mount Abarim, 'neath whose crest
The luminaries twain, thy guides and beacons, rest.
Thy air is life unto my soul; thy grains
Of dust are myrrh, thy streams with honey flow;
Naked and barefoot, to thy ruined fanes
How gladly would I go!
To where the ark was treasured, and in dim
Recesses dwelt the holy cherubim.
Perfect in beauty, Zion! how in thee
Do love and grace unite!
The souls of thy companions tenderly
Turn unto thee; thy joy was their delight,
And weeping, they lament thy ruin now.
In distant exile, for thy sacred height
They long, and towards thy gates in prayer they bow.
Thy flocks are scattered o'er the barren waste,
Yet do they not forget thy sheltering fold;
Unto thy garments' fringe they cling, and haste
The branches of thy palms to seize and hold.
Shinar and Pathros! come they near to thee?
Naught are they by thy light and right Divine.
## p. 6873 (#253) ###########################################
JEHUDAH HALLEVI
6873
To what can be compared the majesty
Of thy anointed line?
To what the singers, seers, and Levites thine?
The rule of idols fails and is cast down,-
Thy power eternal is, from age to age thy crown.
The Lord desires thee for his dwelling-place
Eternally; and blest
Is he whom God has chosen for the grace
Within thy courts to rest.
Happy is he that watches, drawing near,
Until he sees thy glorious lights arise,
And over whom thy dawn breaks full and clear
Set in the Orient skies.
-
But happiest he who with exultant eyes
The bliss of thy redeemed ones shall behold,
And see thy youth renewed as in the days of old.
SEPARATION
Translation of Alice Lucas.
A
ND so we twain must part! Oh, linger yet,—
Let me still feed my glance upon thine eyes.
Forget not, love, the days of our delight,
And I our nights of bliss shall ever prize.
In dreams thy shadowy image I shall see,-
Oh, even in my dream be kind to me!
-
Though I were dead, I none the less should hear
Thy step, thy garment rustling on the sand.
And if thou waft me greetings from the grave,
I shall drink deep the breath of that cold land.
Take thou my days, command this life of mine,
If it can lengthen out the space of thine.
No voice I hear from lips death-pale and chill,
Yet deep within my heart it echoes still.
My frame remains-my soul to thee yearns forth;
A shadow I must tarry still on earth.
Back to the body dwelling here in pain
Return, my soul; make haste and come again!
Translation of Emma Lazarus. From The Poems of Emma Lazarus. Copy-
right, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , Boston
## p. 6874 (#254) ###########################################
6874
JEHUDAH HALLEVI
THE EARTH IN SPRING
HEN, day by day, her broidered gown
She changes for fresh wonder;
A rich profusion of gay robes
She scatters all around her.
THEN
From day to day her flowers' tints
Change quick, like eyes that brighten;
Now white, like pearl, now ruby red,
Now emerald green they'll lighten.
She turns all pale; from time to time
Red blushes quick o'er-cover;
She's like a fair fond bride that pours
Warm kisses on her lover.
The beauty of her bursting spring
So far exceeds my telling,
Methinks sometimes she pales the stars
That have in heaven their dwelling.
Translation of Edward G. King.
LONGING FOR JERUSALEM
O
CITY of the world, with sacred splendor blest,
My spirit yearns to thee from out the far-off West;
A stream of love wells forth when I recall thy day;
Now is thy temple waste, thy glory passed away.
Had I an eagle's wings, straight would I fly to thee,
Moisten thy holy dust with wet cheeks streaming free.
Oh! how I long for thee! albeit thy King has gone,
Albeit where balm once flowed, the serpent dwells alone.
Could I but kiss thy dust, so would I fain expire,
As sweet as honey then, my passion, my desire!
Translation of Emma Lazarus. From The Poems of Emma Lazarus. ' Copy-
right, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , Boston.
## p. 6875 (#255) ###########################################
6875
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
(1834-1894)
HE sneer of Disraeli, that a critic is a man who has failed
in the branch of work he sets up to judge, is like saying
that a mill-race is a stream which has failed to run in its
own channel: making a definition serve as an insult. The man who
does not fail is too busy with his own creations to spare much time
for shaping judgments on others'. And so far as it implies that
the failure leaves the critic no claim to be heard, it is shallow to the
point of stupidity. On the contrary, the only thing which does give
his verdicts weight is the fact that he has
wrought enough in the given field to know.
its technic and its implications. Experi-
ence without success is the very condition
of most good professional criticism. The
limitations and perversions involved by this
are equally clear, and must be allowed for.
Mr. Hamerton was in this generation the
best literary exponent of art to the public,
and of different classes of art to each other;
- for artists are often as narrow and dis-
torted in their estimates of other branches
than their own as the public is in its esti-
mates of all, and are perhaps even more
acrid and unreasonable. This position he
P. G. HAMERTON
owed precisely to the fact that he was a trained and learned artist,
versed in the technics of a singularly wide range of artistic methods,
but neither a great nor a popular artist; combined of course with
other qualities which marked him out for an efficient interpreter.
His analytic powers, his remarkable freedom from bias or bigotry, his
catholicity of taste and sanity of mind, gave him unusual insight and
foresight; few men have measured work or reputations with more
sobriety of judgment, or made fewer mistakes in prophecy.
The character and purpose of his writing must be borne in mind.
He was not instructing artists but the public, even though a special,
wealthy, and fairly cultivated public; a body which, as he has said,
is at once practically ignorant of art and sorely affronted at being
taxed with such ignorance. He was therefore in the general position
## p. 6876 (#256) ###########################################
6876
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
of a schoolmaster with a voluntary school of jealous and conceited
pupils. His lucid and pleasing literary style, his clearness of analy-
sis, his justness of spirit, and a temper never ruffled even into a tu
quoque, gave him unequaled power of persuasiveness over this audi-
ence; but great depth or originality of exposition would have been
worse than wasted. He says himself that "the vulgarization of rudi-
ments has nothing to do with the advance of science"; nor has it
anything to do with the advance of art, except-and the exception
is of the first importance-by raising the level of the buyers of art
work. Hence it is unreasonable to blame him for the commonplace-
ness which artists fret over in his art writing: it was an indispensable
part of his service and influence; and probably fewer are beyond the
need and scope of his commonplaces than would like to acknowledge
it. Indeed, through his guiding of public taste, he had much more
influence even on the development of art forms themselves than is
generally supposed: it is due mainly to him that etching, the most
individual and expressive of the methods of engraving, has been
raised from an unfamiliar specialty to the foremost place in the favor
of cultivated art lovers.
His literary services to art taken as a whole-his quarter-century
editing of the Portfolio which he founded, with his clear and patient
analysis of current works of art, and his indirect and conciliatory but
all the more effective rebuffs to public ignorance and presumption;
his thorough technical works on Etching, on Landscape, on all the
Graphic Arts; his life of Turner; his 'Thoughts on Art,' steadily read-
able and clarifying; and much other matter-have probably done
more than all other art writing of the age together to put the public
mind into the only state from which anything good can be hoped
for art; to wit, a willing recognition of its ignorance of the primary
laws and limitations of artistic processes, and its lack of any right
to pass on their embodiments till the proper knowledge is acquired.
He has removed some of that ignorance, but in the very process
contrives to explain how vast a body is still left, and how crude,
random, and worthless any judgments based upon that vacuity of
knowledge must be. To do this and yet rouse no irritation in his
pupils, but leave instead a great personal liking, is a signal triumph
of good exposition, good manners, and intrinsic good feeling. Mr
Hamerton never indulges in the acrimony by which critics so often
mar their influence; he assumes that when his readers make mistakes,
they do so from misunderstanding, and would be glad of knowledge
courteously presented: and he is rewarded by being both listened
to and liked. And to the uninstructed who listen teachably, his
incomparably lucid explanations of the principles of artistic values
and sacrifices, the piecemeal attempts of different forms of art to
## p. 6877 (#257) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6877
interpret nature, and their insuperable boundaries, the technics of
materials, the compulsion to imaginative work by physical limitations,
and other pieces of analysis, form the best of preliminary trainings
in rational judgment of art, and render the worst class of ignorant
misjudgments wholly impossible.
His literary work unconnected with art was of considerable volume,
and equals the other in general repute and appreciation. Best known.
of all his books is The Intellectual Life,' which deserves its fame as
being the chief storehouse of philosophic consolation to the vast class
of literary weaklings developed by a comfortable democracy. It is a
perpetual healing in the hours of despondency that come to every
aspiring but limited worker, when he looks on his petty accomplish-
ment by the light of his ambition. It consists of a set of short con-
versational articles, many of them in the form of letters, developing
the thesis that the intellectual life is not a matter of volume but of
quality and tendency; that it may be lived intensely and satisfyingly
with little actual acquirement and no recognized position; that it
consists not in the amassing of facts or even in power of creation, but
in the constant preference of higher thought to lower, in aspiration
rather than attainment; and that any one mind is in itself as worthy
as another. The single utterance that "It never could have been
intended that everybody should write great books," naïvely obvious
as it is, was worth writing the book for, as an aid to self-content.
It is full of the gentlest, firmest, most sympathetically sensible
advice and suggestion and remonstrance, as to the limitations of
time and strength, the way in which most advantages breed com-
pensating obstacles so that conditions are far more equal than they
appear, the impossibility of achievement without sacrifice, the need of
choice among incompatible ends, and many other aspects of life as
related to study and production. Its teaching of sobriety and attain-
ability of aim, of patient utilization of means, and of contentment in
such goal as our powers can reach, is of inestimable value in an age
of a general half-education which breeds ambitions in far greater
number than can be realized.
'Human Intercourse' is a collection of essays on life and society,
some of them ranking among his best: the admirable chapter on
'The Noble Bohemianism' is really an estray from The Intellectual
Life. ' The book 'French and English,' most of it first published in
the Atlantic Monthly, is a comparison of the two peoples and modes
of life and thought, of great charm and suggestiveness. His double
position, as a loyal Englishman by birth and long residence and a sort
of adoptive Frenchman by marriage and also long residence, made
him solicitous to clear up the misunderstandings each people had of
the other; and he wrote much to this end, with his usual calm sense
## p. 6878 (#258) ###########################################
6878
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
and gentlemanly urbanity. Five Modern Frenchmen is a set of
excellent biographies of French artists and others. Chapters on
Animals' explains itself. He wrote two novels, Wenderholme and
'Marmorne,' deserving of more reading than they receive; and a
number of other works, besides publishing collected volumes of
shorter papers, and at twenty-one a volume of poems.
Mr. Hamerton was born in Laneside, near Shaw, Lancashire, Eng-
land, September 10th, 1834. After preparing for Oxford, he went to
Paris to study art and literature. A few years later he set up a camp
at Loch Awe, Scotland, to paint landscapes; this he described in 'A
Painter's Camp in the Highlands,' and began to gain the note as a
man of letters which he vainly hoped to gain as an artist. From 1866
to 1868 he was art critic for the London Saturday Review. In 1869
he established the Portfolio, a high-grade art review, addressing a
public of supposably cultivated art lovers rather than the miscella-
neous mass; but how little he felt himself dispensed from rudimentary
exposition, and how low an estimate he set on even their connoisseur-
ship, may be learned from the first chapter of the Thoughts on Art. '
He married a French lady of Autun, and spent the latter part of his
life mostly there or in Boulogne; he died in the latter place Novem-
ber 5th, 1894.
Greater geniuses in dying have deprived the world of less service
and less enjoyment. Many of his readers felt a personal bereavement
in his loss, as in that of a companion with a nature at once lofty
and tender, a safe guide and elevating friend, unfailing in charm,
comfort, and instructiveness.
PEACH-BLOOM
From The Sylvan Year'
Τ'
HERE is a corner of a neglected old garden at the Val Ste.
Veronique in which grows a certain plant very abundantly,
that inevitably reminds us of an ancient philosopher.
To-
wards the end of March it is all carpeted with young hemlock,
which at this stage of its existence lies almost perfectly flat upon
the ground, and covers it with one of the most minutely beauti-
ful designs that can possibly be imagined; the delicate division.
of the fresh green leaves making a pattern that would be fit for
some room, if a skillful manufacturer copied it. Our own hem-
lock is believed to be identical with that which caused the death
of Socrates, but its action in northern countries is much feebler
than in the warmer climate of the Mediterranean.
## p. 6879 (#259) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6879
In the same old abandoned garden where the hemlock grows
on the walls there remain a few fruit-trees, and amongst these
some peaches and apricots. They are in full bloom towards the
end of March; and of all the beautiful sights to be seen at this
time of the year, I know of none to be compared to these old
peach-trees with their wreath of rosy bloom, which would be
beautiful in any situation but is especially in this, because there
happen to be some mellow-tinted walls behind them, the very
background that a painter would delight in. There is some pretty
coloring in the apricot blossoms, on account of the pink calyx
and the pinkish brown of the young twigs, which has an influ-
ence on the effect; but the peach is incomparably richer. And
after the grays of wintry trees and wintry skies, the sight is
gladdened beyond measure by the flush of peach-blossom and the
blue of the clear spring heaven. But to enjoy these two fresh
and pure colors to the utmost we need some quiet coloring in
the picture, and nothing supplies this better than such old walls.
as those of the monastic buildings at the Val Ste. Veronique;
walls that Nature has been painting in her own way for full
four hundred years, with the most delicate changes of gray and
brown and dark gleamings of bronze and gold. There is some-
thing, too, which gratifies other feelings than those of simple
vision in the renewal of the youth of Nature, contrasting with
the steady decay of any ancient human work; and in the con-
trast between her exquisiteness, her delicacy, her freshness, as
exhibited in a thing so perfect as a fresh peach-blossom, with its
rosy color, its almond perfume, its promise of luscious fruit,—and
the roughness of all that man can do, even at his best.
THE FASCINATION OF THE REMOTE
From the Life of J. M. W. Turner'
T HAS been remarked before, that whereas with most men the
maturing of the faculties leads from imagination to reason,
from poetry to prose, this was not the case with Turner, who
became more and more poetical as he advanced in life; and this
might in some measure account for his ever-increasing tendency
to desert the foreground, where objects are too near to have
much enchantment about them, in order to dream, and make
others dream, of distances which seem hardly of this world.
## p. 6880 (#260) ###########################################
6880
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
The fascination of the remote, for minds which have any
imaginative faculty at all, is so universal and so unfailing that it
must be due to some cause in the depths of man's spiritual
nature. It may be due to a religious instinct, which makes him
forget the meanness and triviality of common life in this world,
to look as far beyond it as he can to a mysterious infinity of
glory, where earth itself seems to pass easily into heaven.
It
may be due to a progressive instinct, which draws men to the
future and the unknown, leading them ever to fix their gaze on
the far horizon, like mariners looking for some visionary Atlantis
across the spaces of the wearisome sea. Be this as it may, the
enchantments of landscape distances are certainly due far more
to the imagination of the beholder than to any tangible or expli-
cable beauty of their own. It is probable that minds of a com-
mon order, which see with the bodily eyes only and have no
imaginative perception, receive no impressions of the kind which
affected Turner; but the conditions of modern life have devel-
oped a great sensitiveness to such impressions in minds of a
higher class. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to name
any important imaginative work in literature, produced during
the present century, in which there is not some expression prov-
ing the author's sensitiveness to the poetry of distance. I will
not weary the reader with quotations, but here is just one from
Shelley, which owes most of its effect upon the mind to his per-
ception of two elements of sublimity-distance and height; in
which perception, as in many other mental gifts, he strikingly
resembled Turner. The stanza is in the 'Revolt of Islam':
"Upon that rock a mighty column stood,
Whose capital seemed sculptured in the sky,
Which to the wanderers o'er the solitude
Of distant seas, from ages long gone by,
Had made a landmark; o'er its height to fly,
Scarcely the cloud, the vulture, or the blast
Has power; and when the shades of evening lie
On earth and ocean, its carved summits cast
The sunken daylight far through the aerial waste. "
-----
This was written in 1817, just about the time when Turner
was passing from his early manner to the sublimities of his ma-
turity; and there is ample evidence, of which more may be said
later, that Turner and Shelley were as much in sympathy as two
## p. 6881 (#261) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6881
men can be, when one is cultivated almost exclusively by means
of literature and the other by graphic art. But however great
may have been the similarity of their minds, whatever suscepti-
bility to certain impressions they may have had in common, the
two arts which they pursued differed widely in technical condi-
tions. It may, or it may not, be as easy to write verses as to
paint, when both are to be supremely well done; but it is certain
that poetic description requires less realization than pictorial, so
that less accurate observation will suffice for it, and an inferior
gift of memory. In the whole range of the difficulties which
painters endeavor to overcome, there is not one which tries their
powers more severely than the representation of distant effects.
in landscape. They can never be studied from nature, for they
come and go so rapidly as to permit nothing but the most inade-
quate memoranda; they can never be really imitated, being usu-
ally in such a high key of light and color as to go beyond the
resources of the palette; and the finest of them are so mysteri-
ous that the most piercing eyesight is baffled, perceiving at the
utmost but little of all that they contain. The interpretation
of such effects, however able and intelligent it may be, always
requires a great deal of good-will on the part of the spectator,
who must be content if he can read the painter's work as a sort
of shorthand, without finding in it any of the amusement which
may be derived from the imitation of what is really imitable.
For all these reasons it would be a sufficiently rash enterprise
for an artist to stake his prospects on the painting of distances;
but there is another objection even yet more serious. Such
painting requires not only much good-will in the spectator, but
also great knowledge, freedom from vulgar prejudices, and some
degree of faith in the painter himself. When people see a noble
effect in nature, there is one stock observation which they almost
invariably make; they always say, or nearly always, "Now, if
we were to see that effect in a picture we should not believe it
to be possible. " One would think that after such a reflection on
their own tendency to unbelief in art and to astonishment in the
presence of nature, people would be forewarned against their
own injustice; but it is not so. They will make that observa-
tion every time they see a fine sunset or a remarkable cloud in
the natural world, and remain as unjust as ever to the art which
represents phenomena of the same order. Turner had to contend
against this disposition to deny the truth of everything that is
XII-431
## p. 6882 (#262) ###########################################
6882
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
not commonplace. He was too proud and courageous to allow
it to arrest his development, and would not submit to dictation
from any one as to the subjects of his larger pictures. He knew
the value of money, and would work very hard to earn it, but
no money consideration whatever was permitted to interfere
between him and the higher manifestations of his art.
TREES IN ART
From 'Landscape >
T MAY, however, not be absolutely safe to conclude that the
Greeks had no landscape painting, because we find only con-
ventional and decorative representations of trees on vases.
If it is true that the mural paintings at Herculaneum and Pom-
peii were not always essentially modern at the time when they
were painted upon the wall, but rather in many cases copies and
reminiscences of uch more ancient art, it would seem possible
that the painters of antiquity may have at least gone so far in the
direction of true landscape painting as to have attained the notion
of mass in foliage. Some of the Pompeian pictures give large-
leaved shrubs seen near the figures, with much of the liberty and
naturalness in this disposal of the leaves that were afterwards
fully attained by the Venetians; whilst many of the landscapes
really show foliage in mass, not so learnedly as in modern land-
scape painting, but quite with the knowledge that masses had a
light side, and a dark side, and a roundness that might be painted
without insisting on the form of each leaf. The same observa-
tion of mass is to be seen in the Campanian interpretation of
mountains, which, though extremely simple and primitive, and
without any of the refinements of mountain form that are per-
ceptible to ourselves, exhibit nevertheless the important truth that
the facets of a mountain catch the light.
In mediæval landscape painting, trees were of great import-
ance from the first, on account of the free decorative inventive-
ness of the mediæval mind, that exercised itself in illumination
and tapestry and in patterns for dress, for all of which leaves
and flowers were the best natural materials or suggestions. The
history of tree drawing in the Middle Ages is very like its history
in Greece. As Apollo and Semele were placed on each side the
laurel, of which the leaves were few and distinctly individualized,
## p. 6883 (#263) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6883
so Adam and Eve were placed on each side the apple-tree, which
was often represented as a bare thin stem branching into a sort
of flat oval at the top that was filled with distinct leaves and
fruit, and sometimes even surrounded by a line. In other draw-
ings or paintings the tree was allowed to develop itself more
freely; but the artist still attended to the individual leaves, and
the tree was usually kept small, like the young trees in our
gardens. Even in hunting scenes where a forest is represented,
as in the manuscript of the hunting-book by Gaston Phoebus,*
the trees have short bare trunks and a few leaves, and are about
the height of a man on horseback, often not so high. They an-
swer, in short, to the trees in boxes of toys for children, except
that they are more prettily designed.
The nearest approach to foliage attained by the mediæval
love of the distinct leaf is in the backgrounds to tapestries, and
decorative paintings designed on the same principles, where the
leaves, although individually perfect, are so multiplied that the
mere numbers make them appear innumerable.
In this way
the distinct designers of the Middle Ages attained a sort of infin-
ity, though it is not the same as the real infinity of nature where
details cannot be counted. One of the best examples of this is
the background to Orcagna's fresco of the Dream of Life' in
the Campo Santo of Pisa, where the orange-trees stand behind the
figures and fill the upper part of the picture from side to side
with their dense foliage studded with fruit, and between their
thin stems every inch of space is filled with a diaper of flat green
leaves to represent the close shrubbery or underwood in the gar-
den. This is still quite mediæval in spirit, because the leaves
are distinctly drawn, and all are countable, however numerous;
they are also decorative, as primitive art was sure to be.
It is difficult to fix with precision the date when the idea of
mass in foliage began to acquire importance, and I know that if
I give a date, some earlier examples may be found which would
seem to throw it farther back in art history; but occasional pre-
cursors do not invalidate the rights of a century in which an
idea first takes effectual root. There is a very remarkable land-
scape background by Giovanni Bellini in his picture of The
Death of Peter Martyr' in our National Gallery, the most elabo-
rate example of tree painting among our older pictures. The
*The book is entitled 'Des Deduitz de la Chasse des Bestes Sauvages,'
and is in the National Library at Paris.
## p. 6884 (#264) ###########################################
6884
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
idea is to show trees in a wood, with stems crossing each other
and supporting an immense quantity of highly wrought foliage.
Well, in this picture the foliage is not flat; there is a sense of
mass; and yet to a modern eye it is easily visible that Bellini
was still hampered by the mediæval interest in the leaf, and
driven by that to bestow prodigious pains upon the individual
leaves that he portrayed by thousands. In the same fifteenth cen-
tury a manuscript of the Epistles of Ovid, now in the National
Library of Paris, was illuminated with subjects that have land-
scape backgrounds of a very advanced kind; and here the foliage
is completely massed, with considerable breadth of shaded parts
and only touches for the lights.
We may remember, then, that classical tree painting began
with the stem and a reduced number of distinct leaves, but
attained masses of foliage in the Campanian paintings or earlier,
and that mediæval painting began in the same way with the leaf
and the stem, but led to masses about the fifteenth century, after
passing through an intermediate stage in which there was a great
multiplicity of distinctly painted leaves.
THE NOBLE BOHEMIANISM
From Human Intercourse ›
A
MONGST the common injustices of the world, there have been
few more complete than its reprobation of the state of
mind and manner of life that have been called Bohemian-
ism; and so closely is that reprobation attached to the word, that
I would gladly have substituted some other term for the better
Bohemianism, had the English language provided me with one.
It may, however, be a gain to justice itself that we should be
compelled to use the same expression, qualified only by an ad-
jective, for two states of existence that are the good and the bad
conditions of the same; as it will tend to make us more charita-
ble to those whom we must always blame, and yet may blame
with a more or less perfect understanding of the causes that led
them into error.
The lower forms of Bohemianism are associated with several
kinds of vice, and are therefore justly disliked by people who
know the value of a well-regulated life, and when at the worst,
regarded by them with feelings of positive abhorrence. The vices
## p. 6885 (#265) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6885
connected with these forms of Bohemianism are idleness, irregu-
larity, extravagance, drunkenness, and immorality; and besides
these vices, the worst Bohemianism is associated with many re-
pulsive faults that may not be exactly vices, and yet are almost
as much disliked by decent people. These faults are slovenli-
ness, dirt, a degree of carelessness in matters of business often
scarcely to be distinguished from dishonesty, and habitual neg-
lect of the decorous observances that are inseparable from a high
state of civilization.
After such an account of the worst Bohemianism, in which,
as the reader perceives, I have extenuated nothing, it may seem
almost an act of temerity to advance the theory that this is only
the bad side of a state of mind and feeling that has its good and
perfectly respectable side also. If this seems difficult to believe,
the reader has only to consider how certain other instincts of
humanity have also their good and bad developments. The
religious and the sexual instincts, in their best action, are on
the side of national and domestic order; but in their worst action
they produce sanguinary quarrels, ferocious persecutions, and the
excesses of the most degrading sensuality.
Again, before going to the raison d'être of Bohemianism, let
me point to one consideration of great importance to us if
we desire to think quite justly. It is, and has always been, a
characteristic of Bohemianism to be extremely careless of appear-
ances, and to live outside the shelter of hypocrisy; so its vices
are far more visible than the same vices when practiced by men
of the world, and incomparably more offensive to persons with a
strong sense of what is called "propriety. " At the time when
the worst form of Bohemianism was more common than it is
now, its most serious vices were also the vices of the best
society. If the Bohemian drank to excess, so did the nobility and
gentry; if the Bohemian had a mistress, so had the most exalted
personages. The Bohemian was not so much blamed for being a
sepulchre as for being an ill-kept sepulchre, and not a whited.
sepulchre like the rest. It was far more his slovenliness and
poverty than his graver vices that made him offensive to a cor-
rupt society with fine clothes and ceremonious manners.
Bohemianism and Philistinism are the terms by which, for
want of better, we designate two opposite ways of estimating.
wealth and culture. There are two categories of advantages
in wealth, the intellectual and the material. The intellectual
――
## p. 6886 (#266) ###########################################
6886
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
advantages are leisure to think and read, travel, and intelligent
conversation. The material advantages are large and comfortable
houses, tables well served and abundant, good coats, clean linen,
fine dresses and diamonds, horses, carriages, servants, hot-houses,
wine cellars, shootings. Evidently the most perfect condition of
wealth would unite both classes of advantages; but this is not
always, or often, possible, and it so happens that in most situa-
tions a choice has to be made between them. The Bohemian is
the man who with small means desires and contrives to obtain
the intellectual advantages of wealth, which he considers to be
leisure to think and read, travel, and intelligent conversation.
The Philistine is the man who, whether his means are small or
large, devotes himself wholly to the attainment of the other set
of advantages, a large house, good food and wine, clothes,
horses, and servants.
-
The intelligent Bohemian does not despise them; on the con-
trary, when he can afford it, he encourages them and often sur-
rounds himself with beautiful things; but he will not barter his
mental liberty in exchange for them, as the Philistine does so
readily. If the Bohemian simply prefers sordid idleness to the
comfort which is the reward of industry, he has no part in the
higher Bohemianism, but combines the Philistine fault of intel-
lectual apathy with the Bohemian fault of standing aloof from
industrial civilization. If a man abstains from furthering the
industrial civilization of his country, he is only excusable if he
pursues some object of at least equal importance. Intellectual
civilization really is such an object, and the noble Bohemianism
is excusable for serving it rather than that other civilization of
arts and manufactures which has such numerous servants of its
own. If the Bohemian does not redeem his negligence of mate-
rial things by superior intellectual brightness, he is half a Philis-
tine; he is destitute of what is best in Bohemianism (I had nearly
written of all that is worth having in it); and his contempt for
material perfection has no longer any charm, because it is not the
sacrifice of a lower merit to a higher, but the blank absence of
the lower merit not compensated or condoned by the presence of
anything nobler or better.
I have said that the intelligent Bohemian is generally a man.
of small or moderate means, whose object is to enjoy the best
advantages (not the most visible) of riches. In his view these
advantages are leisure, travel, reading, and conversation.
His
## p. 6887 (#267) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6887
estimate is different from that of the Philistine, who sets his
heart on the lower advantages of riches, sacrificing leisure, travel,
reading, and conversation, in order to have a larger house and
more servants. But how, without riches, is the Bohemian to
secure the advantages that he desires? for they also belong to
riches. There lies the difficulty, and the Bohemian's way of
overcoming it constitutes the romance of his existence. In abso-
lute destitution the intelligent Bohemian life is not possible. A
little money is necessary for it; and the art and craft of Bohemi-
anism is get for that small amount of money such an amount
of leisure, reading, travel, and good conversation as may suffice
to make life interesting. The way in which an old-fashioned
Bohemian usually set about it was this: he treated material com-
fort and outward appearances as matters of no consequence,
accepting them when they came in his way, but enduring the pri-
vation of them gayly. He learned the art of living on a little.
He spent the little that he had, first for what was really neces-
sary, and next for what really gave him pleasure; but he spent
hardly anything in deference to the usages of society. In this
way he got what he wanted. His books were second-hand and
ill bound, but he had books and read them; his clothes were
shabby, yet still kept him warm; he traveled in all sorts of
cheap ways, and frequently on foot; he lived a good deal in some
unfashionable quarters in a capital city, and saw much of art,
nature, and humanity.
To exemplify the true theory of Bohemianism, let me describe
from memory two rooms; one of them inhabited by an English
lady not at all Bohemian, the other by a German of the coarser
sex who was essentially and thoroughly Bohemian. The lady's
room was not a drawing-room, being a reasonable sort of sitting-
room without any exasperating inutilities; but it was extremely,
excessively comfortable. Half hidden amongst its material com-
forts might be found a little rosewood bookcase containing a
number of pretty volumes in purple morocco, that were seldom
if ever opened. My German Bohemian was a steady reader in
six languages; and if he had seen such a room as that, he would
probably have criticized it as follows. He would have said:-
"It is rich in superfluities, but has not what is necessary. The
carpet is superfluous; plain boards are quite comfortable enough.
One or two cheap chairs and tables might replace this costly
furniture. That pretty rosewood bookcase holds the smallest
## p. 6888 (#268) ###########################################
6888
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
number of books at the greatest cost, and is therefore contrary
to true economy; give me rather a sufficiency of long deal
shelves all innocent of paint. What is the use of fine bindings
and gilt edges? This little library is miserably poor. It is all
in one language, and does not represent even English literature
adequately: there are a few novels, books of poems, and travels,
but I find neither science nor philosophy. Such a room as that,
with all its comfort, would seem to me like a prison. My mind
needs wider pastures. " I remember his own room, a place to
make a rich Englishman shudder. One climbed up to it by a
stone corkscrew-stair, half ruinous, in an old mediæval house. It
was a large room, with a bed in one corner, and it was wholly
destitute of anything resembling a carpet or a curtain. The
remaining furniture consisted of two or three rush-bottomed
chairs, one large cheap lounging-chair, and two large plain
There were plenty of shelves (common deal, unpainted),
and on them an immense litter of books in different languages,
most of them in paper covers, and bought second-hand, but in
readable editions. In the way of material luxury there was a
pot of tobacco; and if a friend dropped in for an evening, a jug
of ale would make its appearance. My Bohemian was shabby in
his dress, and unfashionable; but he had seen more, read more,
and passed more hours in intelligent conversation than many
who considered themselves his superiors. The entire material
side of life had been systematically neglected, in his case, in
order that the intellectual side might flourish. It is hardly neces-
sary to observe that any attempt at luxury or visible comfort,
any conformity to fashion, would have been incompatible, on
small means, with the intellectual existence that this German
scholar enjoyed.
The class in which the higher Bohemianism has most steadily
flourished is the artistic and literary class, and here it is visible
and recognizable because there is often poverty enough to com-
pel the choice between the objects of the intelligent Bohemian
and those of ordinary men. The early life of Goldsmith, for
example, was that of a genuine Bohemian. He had scarcely
any money, and yet he contrived to get for himself what the
intelligent Bohemian always desires; namely, leisure to read and
think, travel, and interesting conversation. When penniless and
unknown, he lounged about the world thinking and observing; he
traveled in Holland, France, Switzerland, and Italy, not as people
## p. 6889 (#269) ###########################################
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
6889
do in railway carriages, but in leisurely intercourse with the
inhabitants. Notwithstanding his poverty he was received by the
learned in different European cities; and, notably, heard Voltaire
and Diderot talk till three o'clock in the morning. So long as
he remained faithful to the true principles of Bohemianism he
was happy in his own strange and eccentric way; and all the
anxieties, all the slavery of his later years were due to his apos-
tasy from those principles. He no longer estimated leisure at its
true value, when he allowed himself to be placed in such a situa-
tion that he was compelled to toil like a slave in order to clear
off work that had been already paid for, such advances having
been rendered necessary by expenditure on Philistine luxuries.
He no longer enjoyed humble travel; but on his later tour in
France with Mrs. Horneck and her two beautiful daughters, in-
stead of enjoying the country in his own old simple innocent
way, he allowed his mind to be poisoned with Philistine ideas, and
constantly complained of the want of physical comfort, though he
lived far more expensively than in his youth. The new apart-
ments, taken on the success of the 'Good-natured Man,' con-
sisted, says Irving, "of three rooms, which he furnished with
mahogany sofas, card tables, and bookcases; with curtains, mir-
rors, and Wilton carpets. " At the same time he went even
beyond the precept of Polonius, for his garments were costlier
than his purse could buy, and his entertainments were so extrav-
agant as to give pain to his acquaintances. All this is a deser-
tion of real Bohemian principles. Goldsmith ought to have
protected his own leisure, which from the Bohemian point of
view was incomparably more precious to himself than Wilton
carpets and coats "of Tyrian bloom. "
Corot, the French landscape painter, was a model of consistent
Bohemianism, of the best kind. When his father said, "You
shall have £80 a year, your plate at my table, and be a painter;
or you shall have £4,000 to start with if you will be a shop-
keeper," his choice was made at once. He remained always
faithful to true Bohemian principles, fully understanding the
value of leisure, and protecting his artistic independence by the
extreme simplicity of his living. He never gave way to the
modern rage for luxuries; but in his latter years, when enriched
by tardy professional success and hereditary fortune, he employed
his money in acts of fraternal generosity to enable others to lead
the intelligent Bohemian life.
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6890
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON
Wordsworth had in him a very strong element of Bohemian-
ism. His long pedestrian rambles, his interest in humble life
and familiar intercourse with the poor, his passion for wild nature
and preference of natural beauty to fine society, his simple.
and economical habits, are enough to reveal the tendency. His
"plain living and high thinking" is a thoroughly Bohemian idea,
in striking opposition to the Philistine passion for rich living and
low thinking. There is a story that he was seen at a breakfast-
table to cut open a new volume with a greasy butter-knife. To
every lover of books this must seem horribly barbarous; yet at
the same time it was Bohemian, in that Wordsworth valued the
thought only and cared nothing for the material condition of the
volume. I have observed a like indifference to the material con-
dition of books in other Bohemians who took the most lively
interest in their contents. I have also seen "bibliophiles" who
had beautiful libraries in excellent preservation, and who loved
to fondle fine copies of books that they never read. That is
Philistine, it is the preference of material perfection to intel-
lectual values.
Some practical experience of the higher Bohemianism is a
valuable part of education.
