No More Learning

Whose dog is he, that he should aspire
to so high an honor as prescribing for a king of kings? No:
that is left to such men as I. What do we care about his new
discoveries? As our fathers did, so are we contented to do.
The prescription that cured our ancestors shall cure us; and what
Locman and Abou Avicenna ordained, we may be satisfied to
ordain after them. " He then dismissed me, to make fresh plans
for destroying any influence or credit that the new physician
might acquire, and for preserving his own consequence and rep-
utation at court.


## p. 10318 (#142) ##########################################

10318
1
EDUARD MÖRIKE
EDUARD MÖRIKE
(1804-1875)
ENTLEST and sweetest of all the Suabian poets was Eduard
Mörike. He was born on September 8th, 1804, at Ludwigs-
burg, the birthplace also of Justinus Kerner, David Strauss,
and Friedrich Theodor Vischer, with all of whom Mörike subse-
quently formed friendships. He was destined for the ministry, and
studied theology at Tübingen. The gentleness of his character and
his quiet winning manners seemed to have marked him for this
career. He served as curate in several places in Würtemberg, and
in 1834 secured an independent pastorate at
Cleversulzbach, near Weinsberg. Here he
remained until in 1843 the state of his
health obliged him to resign. For several
years he earned his livelihood as a pri-
vate teacher; and in 1851, having married
the daughter of the lady with whom he
and his sister had been living, he went to
Stuttgart, where he had been appointed
to a tutorship in St. Katharine's Institute.
In 1866 he was forced to retire altogether
from active labors. The remaining years of
his life were rendered happy by the com-
forts of a congenial home, and by inter-
course with the steadily increasing number
of friends and admirers who sought the poet out. He died on June
4th, 1875. This was the simple outward life of the man, without stir-
ring adventure or event, and without heart-breaking grief. But his
inner life was as rich as it was sunny. This contented him. From
the quiet beauties of his mental world he dreaded to go forth into
the actualities of life. Few poets have been able in the same degree
to make the circumstances of their career conform so well to their
intellectual needs. The simple character and customs of his Suabian
countrymen were sufficient for him; the Suabian landscapes satisfied
him. He felt no desire to study men under other conditions, or to
seek new emotions under strange skies. He lived in his own poet's
heart: the unaccustomed and the sublime left his simple spirit un-
touched. His life was that of a poet, without the storm and stress
and without the world-woe.



## p. 10319 (#143) ##########################################

EDUARD MÖRIKE
10319
His first important work was a novel in two volumes, published
in 1832, and entitled 'Maler Nolten' (Nolten the Painter). In its first
form much was obscure; but in the revision which Mörike undertook
late in life, the underlying design of the work came out more clearly,
and the early crudities were polished away by the maturer hand.
The story is full of finely poetic fancy; it is one of the best exam-
ples of that perfectly naïve blending of the realistic and fantastic,
of the natural and the supernatural, which is one of Mörike's char-
acteristic charms. But the novel is now outlived. It had its roots
in the soil of Romanticism, where the mysterious "blue flower" still
bloomed in the vesper light of a departing day. Its intense subject-
ivity transcends all psychological interest, and by losing its foothold
in reality deprives the book of a lasting place in literature.
But Maler Nolten' was an undoubted success, and won for its
author a host of friends. In 1838, however, appeared a book which
still remains his most important contribution to literature,-the first
edition of his collected poems. Whether these lyrics have the fresh-
ness of the folk-song, the solemnity of the hymn, or the pathos and
humor of the idyl, their tone is always true. A convincing proof
of Mörike's lyric quality is his popularity with the great song com-
posers. The perfect form of the simple song, which charms with
its naïve grace and thrills with its restrained emotion, is attained
in his poetry as in that of no other German bard except Goethe
and Uhland. Clearness, harmony, and limpid flow distinguished his
diction, which is free from all "patchwork" and useless phrases;
while sincerity of feeling and tenderness of sympathy characterize
his conceptions. In his delicate fancy no sharp boundary separates
the real world from the fairy realms of the imagination; and in the
midst of scenes from actual life there suddenly appear elves and
gnomes and nixies, which seem to have their being by the same
right of reality as the men and women of coarser mold. This is the
privilege only of the naïve and unspoiled poet, to whom fancy is as
real as fact. It is only from such a mind that the true folk-song and
the true fairy tale can spring.
And Mörike has enriched German literature with one of its most
charming fairy tales, 'Das Hutzelmännlein' (The Little Dried-up Man),
published in 1852. Four years later came the idyllic tale 'Mozart
auf der Reise nach Prag' (Mozart on the Way to Prague). His 'Die
Regenbrüder' (Rain Brothers) was taken by Ignaz Lachner as the
text of his opera.
Translations from Theocritus and Anacreon-for
Mörike was a close student of the Greeks-and several compilations
complete the list of the poet's literary works.
General recognition came to Mörike slowly. Nevertheless his
poems passed through five editions during his lifetime; and as he


## p. 10320 (#144) ##########################################

10320
EDUARD MÖRIKE
added poem after poem to his lyric treasury, leaf after leaf was
added to the chaplet of his fame. Before he died, Mörike had come
to be recognized as one of the chief lyric poets of his time; and the
succeeding generation has sustained this judgment. He was the last
great poet of the Suabian group.
MY RIVER
IVER! my river in the young sunshine!
Oh, clasp afresh in thine embrace
This longing, burning frame of mine,
And kiss my breast, and kiss my face!
So there! -Ha, ha! — already in thine arms!
I feel thy love—I shout -I shiver;
But thou outlaughest loud a flouting song, proud river,
And now again my bosom warms!
-
R
The droplets of the golden sunlight glide.
Over and off me, sparkling, as I swim
Hither and thither down thy mellow tide,
Or loll amid its crypts with outstretched limb;
I fling abroad my arms, and lo!
Thy wanton waves curl slyly round me;
But ere their loose chains have well bound me,
Again they burst away and let me go!
O sun-loved river! wherefore dost thou hum,
Hum, hum alway, thy strange, deep, mystic song
Unto the rocks and strands? -for they are dumb,
And answer nothing as thou flowest along.
Why singest so all hours of night and day?
Ah, river! my best river! thou, I guess, art seeking
Some land where souls have still the gift of speaking
With nature in her own old wondrous way!
Lo! highest heaven looms far below me here;
I see it in thy waters, as they roll,
So beautiful, so blue, so clear,
'Twould seem, O river mine, to be thy very soul!
Oh, could I hence dive down to such a sky,
Might I but bathe my spirit in that glory,
So far outshining all in ancient fairy story,
I would indeed have joy to die!


## p. 10321 (#145) ##########################################

EDUARD MÖRIKE
What on cold earth is deep as thou? Is aught?
Love is as deep, love only is as deep:
Love lavisheth all, yet loseth, lacketh naught;
Like thee, too, love can neither pause nor sleep.
Roll on, thou loving river, thou! Lift up
Thy waves, those eyes bright with a riotous laughing!
Thou makest me immortal! I am quaffing
The wine of rapture from no earthly cup!
XVIII-646
At last thou bearest me, with soothing tone,
Back to thy bank of rosy flowers:
Thanks, then, and fare thee well! Enjoy thy bliss alone!
And through the year's melodious hours
Echo forever from thy bosom broad
All glorious tales that sun and moon be telling;
And woo down to their soundless fountain dwelling
The holy stars of God!
A
TWO LOVERS
SKIFF swam down the Danube's tide;
Therein a bridegroom sate, and bride,—
He one side, she the other.
"Tell me, my dearest heart," said she,
"What present shall I make to thee? "
And back her little sleeve she stripped,
And deeply down her arm she dipped.
And so did he, the other side,
And laughed and jested with his bride:
"Fair lady Danube, give me here
Some pretty gift to please my dear. "
She drew a sparkling sword aloft,
Just such the boy had longed for, oft.
The boy, what holds he in his hand?
Of milk-white pearls a costly band.
He binds it round her jet-black hair;
She looks a princess, sitting there.
10321
"Fair lady Danube, give me here,
Some pretty gift to please my dear! "


## p. 10322 (#146) ##########################################

:
10322
EDUARD MÖRIKE
Once more she'll try what she can feel;
She grasps a helmet of light steel.
On his part, terrified with joy,
Fished up a golden comb the boy.
A third time clutching in the tide,
Woe! she falls headlong o'er the side.
The boy leaps after, clasps her tight;
Dame Danube snatches both from sight.
Dame Danube grudged the gifts she gave:
They must atone for't in the wave.
An empty skiff glides down the stream,
The mountains hide the sunset gleam.
And when the moon in heaven did stand,
The lovers floated dead to land,
He one side, she the other.
AN HOUR ERE BREAK OF DAY
From Lyrics and Ballads of Heine and other German Poets': G. P. Putnam's
Sons, publishers. Translated by Frances Hellman. Copyright 1892, by
Frances Hellman.
s I once sleeping lay,
An hour ere break of day,
As
Sang near the window, on a tree,
A little bird, scarce heard by me
An hour ere break of day.
"Give heed to what I say:
Thy sweetheart false doth play
Whilst I am singing this to thee,
He hugs a maiden, cozily,
An hour ere break of day. "
"Alas! no further say!
Hush! I'll not hear thy lay!
Fly off, away fly from my tree,-
Ah! love and faith are mockery
An hour ere break of day. "


## p. 10323 (#147) ##########################################

10323
JOHN MORLEY
(1838-)
HE not infrequent union in English public life of the man of
letters with the politician, is illustrated in the career of John
Morley. In an address on the study of literature, deliv-
ered by him in 1887 to the students of the London Society for the
Extension of University Teaching, he refers to the fact that he has
strayed from literature into the region of politics, adding that he is
"not at all sure that such a journey conduces to the aptness of one's
judgment on literary subjects. " Had Mr. Morley's essays in criticism
been concerned exclusively with literature,
his political life might not have been of
profit to him as a man of letters. As it
is, his Miscellanies'- studies of men and
their times-and his biographies witness to
the fruitful influence of actual contact with
present-day affairs upon the critical spirit.
Mr. Morley has enriched his literary products
through his public life. The biographer of
Richard Cobden, of Edmund Burke, and of
Horace Walpole was certainly aided in his
estimates of these statesmen by his own
political experience; and in his estimates of
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, by contact
with the social-philosophic and humanita-
rian spirit of the extreme Gladstone party. It is significant that Mr.
Morley chose as subjects of political biography, men identified with.
the more liberal tendencies of modern English statesmanship. He
himself is a radical and a scientific idealist, who places his reliance
upon the future rather than upon the past. His political career did
not open, however, until he was well established as a writer and
editor. Born at Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1838, he was educated at
Cheltenham, and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he obtained his
B. A. in 1859. Ten years later he was an unsuccessful candidate to
Parliament for his native place. In the mean time he had undertaken
the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, a position which he held
from 1867 to 1882. Mr. Morley's sound literary sense, and his well-
developed critical faculty, were put to valuable use in the conduct of
JOHN MORLEY



## p. 10324 (#148) ##########################################

10324
JOHN MORLEY
this important periodical. He drew to his aid men like George Henry
Lewes, Bagehot, and Cairnes. The apparently insignificant innovation
of signing articles was due to his influence. His editorial qualifica-
tions were further exhibited in his conduct of the Pall Mall Gazette
from 1880 to 1883, and of Macmillan's Magazine from 1883 to 1885.
From 1883, however, he was drawn more and more into a purely
political career. In that year he had been a successful candidate for
Newcastle-on-Tyne; and in 1886 he was appointed chief secretary for
Ireland, an office to which he was reappointed in 1892.
In Morley's essays and biographies he exhibits the same spirit
of radicalism which has governed his political career. He is drawn
naturally to a consideration of those writers, thinkers, and statesmen
whose influence upon their times has been in the direction of essen-
tially modern ideals of government and social constitution, or who
have stood as representatives of a new order in opposition to the old.
For this reason Mr. Morley has found congenial subjects of critical
biography in the French philosophers and thinkers of the eighteenth
century. His studies of Vauvenargues, of Turgot, of Condorcet, of
Diderot, are written in a spirit of sympathetic criticism which wit-
nesses to his divination of the dominating social and political forces
of a given era, and to his recognition of the concrete expression of
these forces in the individual. In this sense his life of Rousseau is
a study of French politics in the eighteenth century. The author of
the Social Contract,' although more of a vaporist and dreamer than
a politician, exerted a strong influence upon the political temper of
his own and later times. Mr. Morley traces this influence through the
social and political confusions of the Revolution, and into the readjust-
ing forces of the nineteenth century, where it gives birth to those
"schemes of mutualism, and all other shapes of collective action for
a common social good, which have possessed such commanding attrac-
tion for the imagination of large classes of good men in France ever
since. " In his elaborate analysis of the 'Social Contract,' Mr. Morley
displays his own insight into difficult problems of society and of poli-
tics. His modern habit of mind is shown in his appreciation of the
time-spirit as the most reliable interpreter of the phenomena of his-
tory. He is indeed a historical critic rather than a creator in the
domain of literature. He has used the essay more as a vehicle for his
political reflections than for itself as a literary product. He possesses,
however, ideals of style which are high, exacting, and comprehensive.
These are expressed in his clear, strong English, compactly fitted
to his thought. He has given to the literature of his century a not
inconsiderable body of vigorous and well-tempered prose.


## p. 10325 (#149) ##########################################

JOHN MORLEY
10325
ROUSSEAU AT MONTMORENCY
From Rousseau'
THE
HE many conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hid-
den in such profound obscurity that we are as yet unable
to explain why in certain natures a period of stormy moral
agitation seems to be the indispensable antecedent of their highest
creative effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another,
in which the current of stimulating force made rapid way from
the lower to the higher parts of character, only expending itself
after having traversed the whole range of emotion and faculty,
from their meanest, most realistic, most personal forms of exer-
cise, up to the summit of what is lofty and ideal. No man was
ever involved in such an odious complication of moral maladies
as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Within three years of
this miserable epoch he had completed not only the 'New Heloïsa,'
which is the monument of his fall, but the 'Social Contract,'
which was the most influential, and 'Emilius,' which was perhaps
the most elevated and spiritual of all the productions of the pro-
lific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor light-
hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
lay in the circumstance that he began to write late; and it is true
that no other author so considerable as Rousseau waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigor of his inspiration. No tale of years,
however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength
and incommunicable savor; nor can the splendid mechanical move-
ment of those characters which keep the balance of the world
even, impart to literature the peculiar quality, peculiar but not
the finest, that comes from experience of the black and unlighted
abysses of the soul.
The period of actual production was externally calm. The
'New Heloïsa' was completed in 1759, and published in 1761.
The Social Contract' was published in the spring of 1762, and
'Emilius' a few weeks later. Throughout this period Rousseau
was, for the last time in his life, at peace with most of his fel-
lows; that is to say, though he never relented from his antipathy
to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more real
and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them trans-
formed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among
the greatest people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg


## p. 10326 (#150) ##########################################

10326
JOHN MORLEY
(1702-64) was a marshal of France, and as intimate a friend of
the King as the King was capable of having. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most beautiful, and
continued to be one of the most brilliant leaders of the last
aristocratic generation that was destined to sport on the slopes of
the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal and homely
soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their
dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect sincerity and
straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient apart-
ment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated
when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was
a constant guest at their table, where he met the highest names
in France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or
to walk with him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as
ever to shine in conversation, yet eager to show his great friends
that they had to do with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought
him of reading the 'New Heloïsa' aloud to them. At ten in
the morning he used to wait upon the maréchale, and there by
her bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the repent-
ance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wol-
mar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which
enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the
rest of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be
enchanted. This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the
uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at
least as maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess
as it was in presences less imposing.
One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which
a man bears himself in his relations with persons of greater con-
sideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies
with a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had
a dog whose name was Duc. When he came to sit at a duke's
table, he changed his dog's name to Turc. Again, one day in a
transport of tenderness he embraced the old marshal - the duch-
ess embraced Rousseau ten times a day, for the age was effusive:
"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used to hate the great before I
knew you, and I hate them still more, since you make me feel
so strongly how easy it would be for them to have themselves
adored. " On another occasion he happened to be playing at
chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his
cottage. In spite of the signs and grimaces of the attendants, he


## p. 10327 (#151) ##########################################

JOHN MORLEY
10327
insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he
said with respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honor your Serene
Highness too much not to beat you at chess always. " A few
days after, the vanquished prince sent him a present of game,
which Rousseau duly accepted. The present was repeated; but
this time Rousseau wrote to Madame de Boufflers that he would
receive no more, and that he loved the prince's conversation
better than his gifts. He admits that this was an ungracious
proceeding; and that to refuse game "from a prince of the blood.
who throws so much good feeling into the present, is not so
much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his inde-
pendence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
know his place. " Considering the extreme virulence with which
Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind
from his friends, we find some inconsistency in this condemna-
tion of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung; unless
the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is allowed to
modify the quality of the donation, and that would be a hardly
defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame
de Boufflers, the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet
more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judi-
cious warning when she bade him beware of laying himself open
to a charge of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness
of his virtue, and so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus
would have accepted such marks of esteem without feeling in
them any hurt to their disinterestedness and frugality. " Perhaps
there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed
from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us
that after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully
to sup with a mason who was his neighbor and his friend. On
the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau conducted
himself not unworthily with these high people. His letters to
them are for the most part marked by self-respect and a moder-
ate graciousness; though now and again he makes rather too
much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his independence
with something too much of protestation.
Their relations with
him are a curious sign of the interest which the members of
the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing the
destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale de
Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate
in the place of honor at her table, and embraces his Theresa.


## p. 10328 (#152) ##########################################

10328
JOHN MORLEY
The Prince of Conti pays visits of courtesy, and sends game
to a man whom he employs at a few sous an hour to copy
manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in sending him
the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.
When his dog dies, the countess writes to sympathize with his
chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace it. And
when persecution and trouble and infinite confusion came upon
him, they all stood as fast by him as their own comfort would
allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the un-
happy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities
which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men,
and made women devoted to him, until he drove both men and
women away? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot,
as with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have
now parted company. But they are instantly succeeded by new
devotees. And the lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not
silly women led captive by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was
one of the most distinguished spirits of her time. Her friend-
ship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made Rousseau
against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form;
and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the vic-
tory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.
As a
matter of fact he had no feelings to conquer, any more than the
supposed object of them ever bore him any ill-will for his indif-
ference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards believed.
There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Mont-
morency, which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would
ever have afflicted him, if his natural irritation had not been
made intense and irresistible by the cruel distractions that fol-
lowed the publication of 'Emilius. ' He was tolerably content
with his present friends. The simplicity of their way of dealing
with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the never-
ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the
patronizing friends whom he had just cast off. Perhaps, too, he
was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank may
have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary
friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the
peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed,
wrote a tragedy; but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko. ' That Rousseau was
thoroughly capable of this hateful emotion of sensitive literary


## p. 10329 (#153) ##########################################

JOHN MORLEY
10329
jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others
of a meanness of this kind, unless he is capable of it himself.
The resounding success which followed the 'New Heloïsa' and
'Emilius' put an end to this apprehension, for it raised him
to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Vol-
taire stood triumphant. This very success unfortunately brought
troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last chance of ending his
days in full reasonableness.
Meanwhile he enjoyed his last interval of moderate whole-
someness and peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green
earth. One of the letters commemorates his delight in the great
scudding southwest winds of February, soft forerunners of the
spring, so sweet to all who live with nature. At the end of his
garden was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat
composing or copying. It was not music only that he copied.
He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts of his romance,
which he sold to the Duchess of Luxembourg and other ladies for
some moderate fee. Sometimes he moved from his own lodging
to the quarters in the park which his great friends had induced
him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was of
white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude,
in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every
kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me,
that I composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of 'Emilius. '
With what eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to
breathe the balmy air! What good coffee I used to take under the
porch in company with my Theresa! My cat and my dog made
the rest of our party. That would have sufficed for all my life,
and I should never have known weariness. And so to the as-
surance, so often repeated under so many different circumstances,
that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fate had only
allowed, he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting
happiness.


## p. 10330 (#154) ##########################################

10330
JOHN MORLEY
CONDORCET
From Critical Miscellanies'
OⓇ
F THE illustrious thinkers and writers who for two genera-
tions had been actively scattering the seed of revolution in
France, only Condorcet survived to behold the first bitter
ingathering of the harvest. Those who had sown the wind were
no more; he only was left to see the reaping of the whirlwind,
and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and
Diderot, Rousseau and Helvétius, had vanished; but Condorcet
both assisted at the Encyclopædia and sat in the Convention,—
the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also
came in due season to partake of its fruit, at once a precursor,
and a sharer in the fulfillment. In neither character has he
attracted the good-will of any of those considerable sections and
schools into which criticism of the Revolution has been mainly
divided. As a thinker he is roughly classed as an Economist;
and as a practical politician he figured first in the Legislative
Assembly, and next in the Convention. Now, as a rule, the
political parties that have most admired the Convention have
had least sympathy with the Economists; and the historians who
are most favorable to Turgot and his followers are usually most
hostile to the actions and associations of the great revolutionary
chamber successively swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robes-
pierre. Between the two, Condorcet's name has been allowed to
lie hidden for the most part in a certain obscurity, or else has
been covered with those taunts and innuendoes which partisans
are wont to lavish on men of whom they do not know exactly
whether they are with or against them.
Generally, the men of the Revolution are criticized in blocks.
and sections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under
any of these received schools. He was an Economist, but he
was something more; for the most characteristic article in his
creed was a passionate belief in the infinite perfectibility of human
nature. He was more of a Girondin than a Jacobin, yet he
did not always act, any more than he always thought, with the
Girondins; and he did not fall when they fell, but was proscribed
by a decree specially leveled at himself. Isolation of this kind is
assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains the coldness
with which Condorcet's memory has been treated; and it flowed.
from some marked singularities both of character and opinion,


## p. 10331 (#155) ##########################################

JOHN MORLEY
10331
which are of the highest interest, if we consider the position of
the man, and the lustre of that ever-memorable time. « Condor-
cet," said D'Alembert, "is a volcano covered with snow. " Said
another, less picturesquely, "He is a sheep in a passion. " "You
may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation to his per-
son," wrote Madame Roland, "that it is a subtle essence soaked
in cotton. " The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these,
of warm impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, only
shows that he of whom they were spoken belonged to the class
of natures which may be called non-conducting. They are not
effective, because without this effluence of power and feeling
from within, the hearer or onlooker is stirred by no sympathetic
thrill. They cannot be the happiest, because consciousness of the
inequality between expression and meaning, between the influence
intended and the impression conveyed, must be as tormenting as
to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. If to be
of this non-conducting temperament is impossible in the really
greatest sorts of men, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at
least it is no proper object of blame; for it is constantly the
companion of lofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps
unfortunate that Condorcet should have permitted himself to be
drawn into a position where his want of that magical quality
by which even the loathed and loathsome Marat could gain the
sympathies of men, should be so conspicuously made visible.
Frankly, the character of Condorcet, unlike so many of his con-
temporaries, offers nothing to the theatrical instinct. None the
less on this account should we weigh the contributions which he
made to the stock of science and social speculation, and recog-
nize the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for
human well-being, his eager and resolute belief in its indefinite
expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by a destiny
that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical
days.
I
UNTIL the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of
Condorcet's life were as little externally disturbed or specially
remarkable as those of any other geometer and thinker of the
time. He was born in a small town in Picardy, in the year 1743.
His father was a cavalry officer; but as he died when his son was
only three years old, he could have exerted no influence upon the


## p. 10332 (#156) ##########################################

10332
JOHN MORLEY
future philosopher, save such as comes of transmission through
blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle, but there is no record
of any intercourse between them. His mother was a devout and
trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin, and
for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl,
by way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of
a vile world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage
in a state of educational and political subjection which prevents
the growth of a large intelligence, made healthy and energetic
by knowledge and by activity, we may expect to read of pious
extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was weakened physically
by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous clothing;
and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him
from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire.
His earliest instructors, as happened to most of the skeptical phi-
losophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall.
That these adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions
which their order had acquired in three centuries, and with the
training of the nation almost exclusively in their hands, should
still have been unable to shield their persons from proscription
and their creed from hatred, is a remarkable and satisfactory in-
stance how little it avais ecclesiastical bodies to have a monopoly
of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out of
harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as
the spirit of the time. The Jesuits were the great official teach-
ers of France for the first half of the eighteenth century. In
1764 the order was thrust forth from the country, and they left
behind them an army of the bitterest enemies Christianity has
ever had.
To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons
which they had themselves supplied. The intelligence which
they had so honorably developed and sharpened, turned inevita-
bly against the incurable faults in their own system. They were
admirable teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the
Jesuits at Rheims, was able, when he was only fifteen years old,
to go through such performances in analysis as to win especial
applause from illustrious judges like D'Alembert and Clairaut.
It was impossible, however, for Jesuits, as it has ever been for
all enemies of movement, to constrain within prescribed limits
the activity which has once been effectively stirred. Mathematics
has always been in the eyes of the Church a harmless branch of
knowledge; but the mental energy that mathematics first touched


## p. 10333 (#157) ##########################################

JOHN MORLEY
10333
is sure to turn itself by-and-by to more complex and dangerous
subjects in the scientific hierarchy.
At any rate, Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn
to problems beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to
solve. "For thirty years," he wrote in 1790, "I have hardly ever
passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences. "
Thus, when only seventeen, when the ardor of even the choicest
spirits is usually most purely intellectual, moral and social feeling
was rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it afterwards
attained in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on
integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon
the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obliga-
tion. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensi-
bility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early
enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of
a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only
the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself
by way of rational intrenchment. This sensibility caused Condor-
cet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had
at first powerfully attracted him. To derive delight from what
inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience
and offended his reason; because he perceived that the character
which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the
anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to
the finest impressions of humanity. It was this same sensibility,
fortified by reason, which drove him while almost still at school to
reflect, as he confided to Turgot he had done, on the moral ideas
of virtue and justice.
It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was
unable to satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the special-
ist, but felt the necessity of placing social aims at the head and
front of his life, and of subordinating to them all other pursuits.
That he values knowledge only as a means to social action, is
one of the highest titles to our esteem that any philosopher can
have. Such a temper of mind has penetrated no man more fully
than Condorcet, though there are other thinkers to whom time
and chance have been more favorable in making that temper
permanently productive. There is a fine significance in his words,
after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office:
"We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I
mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for


## p. 10334 (#158) ##########################################

10334
JOHN MORLEY
the future laboring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself
for a while that one was working for the public weal. " It is
true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the
process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that
sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is
something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised dis-
appointment at having to exchange active public labor for geo-
metrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally
professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books.
His correspondence shows that even when his mind seemed to
be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly
on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely
to stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the
strength of justice in society. It would have been, in one sense,
more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social inter-
ests, if we remember the contention of his latter days, and the
catastrophe which brought them to so frightful a close. But
Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happi-
ness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower
upon the mortal struggles of a society in a state of revolution.
In measuring other men of science -as his two volumes of
Eloges abundantly show-one cannot help being struck by the
eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social
improvement, of anxiety that the lives and characters of our
fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too
absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from
his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to
consummate it. "You are very happy," he once wrote to Tur-
got, "in your passion for the public good, and your power to
satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior
to that of study. "
In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became con-
nected with the Academy; to the mortification of his relations,
who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of cavalry, as
his father had been before him. About the same time or a little
later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help
making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In com-
pany with D'Alembert, he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire. To
the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been
any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is
true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a
"


## p. 10335 (#159) ##########################################

JOHN MORLEY
10335
great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual
authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously
invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the repre-
sentatives of a powerful organization and an accepted system.
Voltaire filled a place before men's eyes in the eighteenth cen-
tury as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in
the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire's place was abso-
lutely unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor
organization for its maintenance. Again, there have been others,
like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent
contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and
elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the
most part labored for the generation that followed them, and won
comparatively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire,
during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that
belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid
to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved
for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before
or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side,
sɔ precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so
thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women
who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame
has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous.
With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of
this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly
inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary
expression in a country where that art is more highly prized
than anywhere else; he was the most brilliant of wits among a
people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion; he won the
admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his
interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing
flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks
vigor and freshness and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter,
and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of
all institutions, the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to
honor and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against
oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, perse-
vering, and absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of
oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his
eye.


## p. 10336 (#160) ##########################################

10336
JOHN MORLEY
THE CHURCH AND THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA'
From 'Diderot and the Encyclopædists'
HE Church had known how to deal with intellectual insur-
THE gents, from Abélard in the twelfth century down to Gior-
dano Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were
isolated; they were for the most part submissive; and if they
were not, the arm of the Church was very long, and her grasp
mortal. And all these meritorious precursors were made weak
by one cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness
could compensate. They had the scientific idea, but they lacked
the social idea.
·
After the middle of the last century, the insurrection against
the pretensions of the Church, and against the doctrines of Christ-
ianity, was marked in one of its most important phases by a new
and most significant feature. In this phase it was animated at
once by the scientific idea and by the social idea.
Its
leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy, and with
as wide a range, as their instruments allowed; and they scattered
over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into ener
getic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The great
symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the
'Encyclopædia. '
•
•
The Encyclopædia' was virtually a protest against the old
organization, no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly
stated, the great central moral of it all was this: that human
nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desir-
able abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of
bad education and bad institutions. This cheerful doctrine now
strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred
years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the begin-
ning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to
asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism.
in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social
improvement since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one.
form or another. The conviction that the character and lot of
man are indefinitely modifiable for good, was the indispensable
antecedent to any general and energetic endeavor to modify the
conditions that surround him,


## p. 10337 (#161) ##########################################

10337
WILLIAM MORRIS
XVIII-647
(1834-1896)
BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
ILLIAM MORRIS was a man of such varied activities and exu-
berant vitality, that an account of his career as a man of
letters can give but an inadequate impression of his person-
ality. The present sketch, however, must be restricted to the single
aspect of his life by virtue of which he won a place among the
greatest English writers of the nineteenth century; and may mention,
thereafter only to ignore them, his epoch-
making work as a decorative designer, his
revival of the well-nigh lost art of printing
beautiful books, and the socialist propa-
ganda which he carried on for so many
years, and with so much of fiery energy.
All of these things belong to the character
of the man rather than of the poet; and it
is with the poet alone that we are now
concerned.

With a volume entitled The Defence
of Guenevere, and Other Poems,' published
in 1858, Morris made his first appearance in
literature. At this time the fame of Tenny-
son as the greatest of Victorian poets was
fully established; the fame of Browning, with fifteen volumes already
to his credit, was rapidly growing; and the chief poetical work of
Matthew Arnold had already been produced. The affinities of the
new poet were, however, with none of these masters, but rather with
two men whose voices were yet to be heard. It was not until 1861
that Swinburne published 'The Queen Mother' and 'Rosamund,'
to be followed in 1864 by Atalanta in Calydon,' in 1865 by Chaste-
lard,' and in 1866 by the famous first series of Poems and Ballads. '
As for Rossetti, while it is true that some of the most characteris-
tic of his youthful pieces had appeared in the Germ as early as
1850, yet it was not until 1870 that the manuscript collection of his
'Poems' was exhumed from the grave of his wife, and given to the
world.
WILLIAM MORRIS


## p. 10338 (#162) ##########################################

10338
WILLIAM MORRIS
Thus we see that Morris must be considered the pioneer of the
poetical movement with which these three men are chiefly identified.
Whether we give them the vague title of Pre-Raphaelites, or of
apostles of mediævalism, or of representatives of the stained-glass
school of poetry, it is evident that they were united, at least in their
earlier years, by the possession of common ideals and a common in-
spiration. The fact is also worth noting that 'The Defence of Guen-
evere,' a considerable section of which deals with material taken from
the cycle of Arthurian legend, was published in the year that gave
birth to the first group of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King. ' A com-
parison of these two volumes is instructive; for it shows how diver-
gent were the aims of Tennyson's exquisite but sophisticated art and
the simpler and bolder art of the new poet. In diction, in emotional
color, and in envisagement of the period with which both are con-
cerned, the two works are very sharply contrasted: that of Tennyson
embodies the last and most subtle refinement of a continuous literary
tradition, while that of Morris harks back to earlier modes of thought
and expression, and sacrifices the conventional trappings of modern
song in order to reproduce with more of vital truthfulness the spirit of
a vanished past. This point must be insisted upon, because it differ-
entiates, not merely the two singers that have been named, but the
two groups to which they respectively belong; and because it offers
what justification there may be for the epithet "Pre-Raphaelite" so
frequently applied to one of the groups. As the genius of Morris
developed, his art became far finer; but it retained to the last those
qualities of simplicity and sincerity that had informed it in its be-
ginnings.
The distinctive achievement of Morris in English poetry is that of
a story-teller by right divine-such a story-teller as Chaucer alone
had been before him. But although the poet himself pays tribute to
«that mastery
That from the rose-hung lanes of woody Kent
Through these five hundred years such songs have sent
To us, who, meshed within this smoky net
Of unrejoicing labor, love them yet,"
yet the parallel may not be carried very far. Morris lacks the wit,
the shrewdness, the practical good sense, and the dramatic faculty of
Chaucer: he has instead the sentiment of romance in a heightened
degree, the sense of pure beauty in nature and in life, the melan-
cholic strain of a "dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,"
and taking refuge in an idealized golden age of the past from a vain
effort "to set the crooked straight" in this modern workaday world.
As a story-teller in verse, Morris conquered the public with 'The


## p. 10339 (#163) ##########################################

WILLIAM MORRIS
10339
Life and Death of Jason' (1867), and 'The Earthly Paradise' (1868–70).
'The Earthly Paradise' is a cycle of twenty-four narrative poems
with a prologue. "Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway," so
runs the argument, "having considered all that they had heard of the
Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it: and after many troubles and the
lapse of many years, came old men to some Western land, of which
they had never before heard; there they died, when they had dwelt
there certain years, much honored of the strange people. " The land
in which these "mariners of Norway" found their final haven was
inhabited by a people descended from the ancient Greeks, and in-
heriting the poetical traditions of their race. After their guests had
tarried with them for a while, they were thus addressed by the chief
priest of the land:
--
"Dear guests, the year begins to-day;
And fain are we, before it pass away,
To hear some tales of that now altered world,
Wherefrom our fathers in old time were hurled
By the hard hands of fate and destiny.
Nor would ye hear perchance unwillingly
How we have dealt with stories of the land
Wherein the tombs of our forefathers stand;
Wherefore henceforth two solemn feasts shall be
In every month, at which some history
Shall crown our joyance. »
The scheme is thus provided for the story-telling; and for a whole
year the elders of the land alternate with the wanderers in recount-
ing legendary tales. The former choose for their themes such stories
as those of Atalanta, Alcestis, Cupid and Psyche, and Pygmalion and
Galatea; the latter explore the rich fields of medieval romance, and
tell of Ogier the Dane, Gudrun and her lovers, the search for "the
land east of the sun and west of the moon," and the fateful history
of Tannhäuser. The twenty-four tales thus linked together are given
in a variety of poetical forms, and differ greatly in length. They are
"full of soft music and familiar olden charm," to use Mr. Stedman's
felicitous phrase; they blend clearness of poetic vision with the sense
of wonder; they are fresh, pathetic, vividly picturesque, and the loveli-
ness of their best passages is beyond all praise. Of the earlier 'Life
and Death of Jason' it should be said that the poem was originally
planned to fill a place in The Earthly Paradise,' but so outgrew the
author's purpose as to make a volume of itself.
The poetical work subsequently produced by Morris comprises the
following volumes: Love is Enough, a Morality' (1872), The Story of
Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs' (1876), and 'Poems
by the Way' (1892). In the opinion of Morris himself, as well as in


## p. 10340 (#164) ##########################################

10340
WILLIAM MORRIS
that of most of his critics, the epic of Sigurd' is the greatest of
his works. Mr. William Sharp has written of this poem in the fol-
lowing terms:
-
"In this great work we come upon William Morris as the typical sagaman
of modern literature. The breath of the North blows across these billowy
lines as the polar wind across the green waves of the North Sea. The noise
of waters, the splashing of oars, the whirling of swords, the conflict of battle,
cries and heroic summons to death, re-echo in the ears. All the romance
which gives so wonderful an atmosphere to his earlier poems, all the dreamy
sweetness of 'The Earthly Paradise' and creations such as 'Love is Enough,'
are here also; but with them are a force, a vigor and intensity, of which, save
in his translation of the Odyssey,' there are few prior indications. "
The eight or ten volumes of imperishably beautiful verse thus far
described, constitute one of the chief glories of the Victorian era;
but they still represent only a part of the prodigious literary achieve-
ment of William Morris. Another phase of his genius, second in
importance only to the one just under discussion, is illustrated by
the series of romances in prose and verse that were produced during
the last seven years of his life. Having lived so long in the world
of medieval romancers and sagamen, he began in 1889 to write sagas
and medieval romances of his own; and may almost be said to have
enriched English literature with a new form of composition. The
more important of these works are The House of the Wolfings'
(1889), The Roots of the Mountains' (1890), The Story of the Glit-
tering Plain' (1891), The Wood Beyond the World' (1894), and The
Well at the World's End' (1896). Two others -The Water of the
Wondrous Isles' and 'The Sundering Flood'—were left for posthu-
mous publication. These romances show, even better than his poetry,
how deeply Morris penetrated into the essential spirit of medieval-
ism. As far as material goes, they are pure inventions; and the
reader marvels at the imaginative wealth which they display. Some-
times, as in 'The House of the Wolfings,' they afford an insight into
that early life of our Teutonic ancestors of which Tacitus gives us
a few glimpses; but their scenes for the most part are laid in some
land "east of the sun and west of the moon, >>>> to which the poet
alone has access. They take us back to the springtime of the world,
as the sagamen and the romancers conceived of it; and unfold to
us vistas of sheer delight. They tell us of noble men and lovely
women, of perilous guests and heroic deeds; they are tinged with
the melancholy that must ever be a residuum in the contemplative
modern mind, however objective its grasp; but the subtle perplex-
ities of modern life are left far behind. In form, they mingle act-
ual verse with a sort of poetic prose that is not marred by cæsuric
effects; having, as Mr. Watts-Dunton says, "the concrete figures and


## p. 10341 (#165) ##########################################

WILLIAM MORRIS
10341
impassioned diction that are the poet's vehicle," but entering into no
competition with works of acknowledged metrical structure.
If Morris were not a great original poet and romancer, his fame
would still be secure as one of the greatest of English translators.
He gave us the 'Eneid' in 1876, the Odyssey' in 1887, 'Beowulf'
in 1895, and a long series of Icelandic sagas during the last quarter-
century of his life.