No More Learning

-
-
Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the 'Causeries du Lundi,'
has discussed the question, "What is meant by a classic ? " It
was a question he was well fitted to answer, having himself lived
through many phases of taste, and having been in earlier life an
enthusiastic member of the romantic school; he was also a great
master of that sort of "philosophy of literature" which delights
in tracing traditions in it, and the way in which various phases
of thought and sentiment maintain themselves, through successive
modifications, from epoch to epoch. His aim, then, is to give the
word classic a wider, and as he says, a more generous sense than it
commonly bears; to make it expressly grandiose et flottant: and
in doing this, he develops, in a masterly manner, those qualities.
of measure, purity, temperance, of which it is the especial func-
tion of classical art and literature. - whatever meaning, narrower
or wider, we attach to the term-to take care.
―――――――
The charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature,
is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless
XIX-699


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WALTER PATER
listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the
absolute beauty of its artistic form is added the accidental, tran-
quil charm of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which
these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail
to excite us. "Romanticism," says Stendhal, ❝is the art of pre-
senting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of
their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest
possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them
with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their
grandfathers. " But then, beneath all changes of habits and be-
liefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion of music - which
what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the
best of us, and what pleased our grandparents may at least tran-
quillize us. The "classic" comes to us out of the cool and quiet
of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has
shown will at least never displease us. And in the classical lit-
erature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last cen-
tury, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in
beauty, which they possess indeed in a pre-eminent degree, and
which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else
in them.
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the
romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed
element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curi-
osity to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic tem-
per. Curiosity, and the desire of beauty, have each their place
in art, as in all true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient,
when one is not eager enough for new impressions and new
pleasures, one is liable to value mere academical properties too
highly, to be satisfied with worn-out or conventional types, with
the insipid ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later
Greek sculpture which passed so long for true Hellenic work;
to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the
artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating
products of art a mere irritation. And when one's curiosity is
in excess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is
liable to value in works of art what is inartistic in them; to be
satisfied with what is exaggerated in art, with productions like
some of those of the romantic school in Germany; not to dis-
tinguish jealously enough between what is admirably done, and
what is done not quite so well,- in the writings, for instance, of
Jean Paul. And if I had to give instances of these defects, then


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11171
I should say that Pope, in common with the age of literature to
which he belonged, had too little curiosity,- so that there is
always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as
it is; and coming down to our own time, that Balzac had an
excess of curiosity-curiosity not duly tempered with the desire.
of beauty.
But however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by
critics, or exaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies.
really at work at all times in art; molding it, with the balance
sometimes a little on one side, sometimes a little on the other;
generating, respectively, as the balance inclines on this side or
that, two principles, two traditions, in art, and in literature so
far as it partakes of the spirit of art. If there is a great over-
balance of curiosity, then we have the grotesque in art; if the
union of strangeness and beauty, under very difficult and com-
plex conditions, be a successful one, if the union be entire, then
the resultant beauty is very exquisite, very attractive.
With a
passionate care for beauty, the romantic spirit refuses to have it
unless the condition of strangeness be first fulfilled. Its desire
is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a profound alchemy,
by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings it even out
of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the grotesque,
may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression, about
its ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will have strength,
the grotesque, first of all: the trees shrieking as you tear off the
leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of convict life; for Red-
gauntlet, the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with
this strangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness,
as much beauty, as is compatible with that. "Énergique, frais, et
dispos" these, according to Sainte-Beuve, are the characteristics
of a genuine classic: "les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques
parce qu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont énergiques, frais, et
dispos. " Energy, freshness, intelligent and masterly disposition,
these are characteristics of Victor Hugo when his alchemy is
complete: in certain figures, like Marius and Cosette; in certain
scenes, like that in the opening of 'Les Travailleurs de la Mer,'
where Déruchette writes the name of Gilliatt in the snow, on
Christmas morning: but always there is a certain note of strange-
ness discernible there, as well.
-
The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curi-
osity and the love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of


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WALTER PATER
these qualities that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the
overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked
sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by
strong imagination, out of things unlikely or remote.
Few, probably, now read Madame de Staël's 'De l'Allemagne,'
though it has its interest, the interest which never quite fades
out of work really touched with the enthusiasm of the spiritual
adventurer, the pioneer in culture. It was published in 1810, to
introduce to French readers a new school of writers- the roman-
tic school, from beyond the Rhine; and it was followed, twenty-
three years later, by Heine's 'Romantische Schule,' as at once a
supplement and a correction. Both these books, then, connect
romanticism with Germany, with the names especially of Goethe
and Tieck; and to many English readers, the idea of romanti-
cism is still inseparably connected with Germany-that Germany
which, in its quaint old towns, under the spire of Strassburg
or the towers of Heidelberg, was always listening in rapt inac-
tion to the melodious, fascinating voices of the Middle Age, and
which, now that it has got Strassburg back again, has, I suppose,
almost ceased to exist. But neither Germany with its Goethe
and Tieck, nor England with its Byron and Scott, is nearly so
representative of the romantic temper as France, with Murger
and Gautier and Victor Hugo. It is in French literature that
its most characteristic expression is to be found; and that, as
most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiar conditions.
as ever reinforce it to the utmost.
For although temperament has much to do with the gener-
ation of the romantic spirit, and although this spirit, with its
curiosity, its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable
in excellent art (traceable even in Sophocles), yet still, in a lim-
ited sense, it may be said to be a product of special epochs.
Outbreaks of this spirit, that is, come naturally with particular
periods: times when, in men's approaches towards art and poetry,
curiosity may be noticed to take the lead; when men come to art
and poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a
long ennui, or in reaction against the strain of outward, practical
things: in the later Middle Age, for instance; so that mediæval
poetry, centring in Dante, is often opposed to Greek and Roman
poetry, as romantic poetry to the classical. What the romanticism
of Dante is, may be estimated, if we compare the lines in which
Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from whose broken twigs flows.


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11173
the blood of Polydorus,- not without the expression of a real
shudder at the ghastly incident,- with the whole canto of the
'Inferno,' into which Dante has expanded them, beautifying and
softening it, meanwhile, by a sentiment of profound pity. And
it is especially in that period of intellectual disturbance imme-
diately preceding Dante, amid which the Romance languages
define themselves at last, that this temper is manifested. Here,
in the literature of Provence, the very name of romanticism is
stamped with its true signification: here we have indeed a roman-
tic world, grotesque even, in the strength of its passions, almost
insane in its curious expression of them, drawing all things into
its sphere, making the birds-nay, lifeless things-its voices
and messengers; yet so penetrated with the desire for beauty
and sweetness that it begets a wholly new species of poetry,
in which the Renaissance may be said to begin. The last cen-
tury was pre-eminently a classical age; an age in which, for art
and literature, the element of a comely order was in the ascend-
ant; which, passing away, left a hard battle to be fought between
the classical and the romantic schools. Yet it is in the heart
of this century of Goldsmith and Stothard, of Watteau and the
'Siècle de Louis XIV. ,'-in one of its central, if not most charac-
teristic figures, in Rousseau,- that the modern or French roman-
ticism really originates. But what in the eighteenth century is
but an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve
and discretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of the
nineteenth breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness,
an incomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experi-
ence to some degree, but yearning also, in the genuine child-
ren of the romantic school, to be énergique, frais, et dispos,— for
those qualities of energy, freshness, comely order; and often, in
Murger, in Gautier, in Victor Hugo, for instance, with singular
felicity attaining them.
It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in fact, that French
romanticism, with much else, begins: reading his 'Confessions,'
we seem actually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit
in the French mind. The wildness which has shocked so many,
and the fascination which has influenced almost every one, in the
squalid yet eloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that
book, wandering under the apple blossoms and among the vines
of Neuchâtel or Vevey, actually give it the quality of a very
successful romantic invention. His strangeness or distortion, his


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WALTER PATER
III74
profound subjectivity, his passionateness,-the cor laceratum,—
Rousseau makes all men in love with these. "Je ne suis fait
comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus. Mais si je ne vaux pas
mieux, au moins je suis autre. " (I am not made like any one
else I have ever known. Yet, if I am not better, at least I am
different. ) These words, from the first page of the Confessions,'
anticipate all the Werthers, Renés, Obermanns, of the last hun-
dred years.
For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the
spirit of the whole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in
him was a peculiarity, became part of the general consciousness.
A storm was coming: Rousseau with others felt it in the air,
and they helped to bring it down; they introduced a disturbing
element into French literature, then so trim and formal, like our
own literature of the age of Queen Anne.
<
In 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the
spirit of "young France," the ennui of an immense disillusion.
In the last chapter of Edgar Quinet's Révolution Française,'
a work itself full of irony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two
books, Senancour's 'Obermann' and Châteaubriand's 'Génie du
Christianisme,' as characteristic of the first decade of the pres-
ent century. In those two books we detect already the disease
and the cure: in Obermann' the irony, refined into a plaint-
ive philosophy of "indifference"; in Châteaubriand's 'Génie du
Christianisme,' the refuge from a tarnished actual present, a
present of disillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the
Middle Age, as at an earlier period-in 'René' and 'Atala’—
into the free play of them in savage life. It is to minds in
this spiritual situation, weary of the present, but yearning for
the spectacle of beauty and strength, that the works of French
romanticism appeal. They set a positive value on the intense,
the exceptional: and a certain distortion is sometimes noticeable
in them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo or
Gwynplaine, something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre,
as the French themselves call it; though always combined with
perfect literary execution, as in Gautier's 'La Morte Amoureuse,'
or the scene of the "maimed" burial rites of the player, dead of
the frost, in his 'Capitaine Fracasse,'-true "flowers of the yew. "
It becomes grim humor in Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with
the devil-fish; or the incident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn
out at length, of the great gun detached from its fastenings on
shipboard, in 'Quatre-Vingt-Treize' (perhaps the most terrible of


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WALTER PATER
11175
all the accidents that can happen by sea); and in the entire epi-
sode, in that book, of the Convention. Not less surely does it
reach a genuine pathos: for the habit of noting and distinguish-
ing one's own most intimate passages of sentiment makes one
sympathetic; begetting, as it must, the power of entering, by all
sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of other minds:
so that pity is another quality of romanticism; both Victor Hugo
and Gautier being great lovers of animals and charming writ-
ers about them, and Murger being unrivaled in the pathos of
his 'Scènes de la Vie de Jeunesse. ' Penetrating so finely into
all situations which appeal to pity, above all, into the special or
exceptional phases of such feeling,- the romantic humor is not.
afraid of the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or
expression; pity, indeed, being of the essence of humor: so that
Victor Hugo does but turn his romanticism into practice, in his
hunger and thirst after practical Justice! -a justice which shall
no longer wrong children or animals, for instance, by ignoring,
in a stupid, mere breadth of view minute facts about them.
Yet the romanticists are antinomian too, sometimes; because the
love of energy and beauty, of distinction in passion, tended
naturally to become a little bizarre, plunging into the Middle
Age, into the secrets of old Italian story. "Are we in the In-
ferno? "— we are tempted to ask, wondering at something malign
in so much beauty. For over all a care for the refreshment of
the human spirit by fine art manifests itself, a predominant sense
of literary charm; so that, in their search for the secret of ex-
quisite expression, the romantic school went back to the forgotten
world of early French poetry, and literature itself became the
most delicate of the arts,-like "goldsmith's work," says Sainte-
Beuve, of Bertrand's 'Gaspard de la Nuit,'—and that peculiarly
French gift, the gift of exquisite speech, argute loqui, attained
in them a perfection which it had never seen before.
Stendhala writer whom I have already quoted, and of
whom English readers might well know much more than they
do-stands between the earlier and later growths of the roman-
tic spirit. His novels are rich in romantic quality; and his other
writings-partly criticism, partly personal reminiscences—are a
very curious and interesting illustration of the needs out of which
romanticism arose. In his book on Racine and Shakespeare,'
Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day; and
this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise, full


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WALTER PATER
•
of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823;
and its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in
the choice and treatment of subject, both in art and literature,
against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent.
In pleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty,
both of form and of motive, in writings like the 'Hernani' of Vic-
tor Hugo (which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism),
that he is chiefly concerned to justify. To be interesting and
really stimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and liter-
ature must follow the subtle movements of that nimbly shifting
e-Spirit, or Zeit-Geist, understood by French not less than by
German criticism, which is always modifying men's taste, as it
modifies their manners and their pleasures. This, he contends, is
what all great workmen had always understood. Dante, Shake-
speare, Molière, had exercised an absolute independence in their
choice of subject and treatment. To turn always with that ever
changing spirit, yet to retain the flavor of what was admirably
done in past generations,-in the classics, as we say,- is the
problem of true romanticism. "Dante," he observes, "was pre-
eminently the romantic poet. He adored Virgil, yet he wrote
the Divine Comedy,' with the episode of Ugolino, which is as
unlike the 'Eneid' as can possibly be. And those who thus obey
the fundamental principle of romanticism, one by one become
classical, and are joined to that ever increasing common league,
formed by men of all countries, to approach nearer and nearer to
perfection. "
Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, is in its essen-
tial characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all times,
in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and
the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one
by one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending
on the varying proportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty,
-natural tendencies of the artistic spirit at all times,-it must
always be partly a matter of individual temperament. The
eighteenth century in England has been regarded as almost
exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a type of so
much which breaks through what are conventionally thought the
influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in
it, and the reaction in favor of naturalism in poetry begins in
that century early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and
the born classicists. There are the born classicists who start with


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WALTER PATER
11177
form: to whose minds the comeliness of the old, immemorial,
well-recognized types in art and literature have revealed them-
selves impressively; who will entertain no matter which will not
go easily and flexibly into them; whose work aspires only to be
a variation upon, or study from, the older masters. "Tis art's
decline, my son! " they are always saying to the progressive ele-
ment in their own generation; to those who care for that which
in fifty years' time every one will be caring for. On the other
hand, there are the born romanticists, who start with an origi-
nal, untried matter, still in fusion; who conceive this vividly, and
hold by it as the essence of their work; who, by the very vivid-
ness and heat of their conception, purge away, sooner or later,
all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the whole effect
adjusts itself in clear, orderly, proportionate form; which form,
after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn.
The romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a
literary work, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities
in it; and in this sense, a very real distinction may be drawn
between good classical and good romantic work. But all critical
terms are relative; and there is at least a valuable suggestion in
that theory of Stendhal's, that all good art was romantic in its
day. In the beauties of Homer and Pheidias, quiet as they now
seem, there must have been, for those who confronted them for
the first time, excitement and surprise, -the sudden, unforeseen
satisfaction of the desire of beauty. Yet the Odyssey, with its
marvelous adventure, is more romantic than the Iliad; which
nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes, that
of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death of
Patroclus. Eschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whose
'Philoctetes,' were it written now, might figure, for the strange-
ness of its motive and the perfectness of its execution, as typi-
cally romantic; while of Euripides it may be said that his method
in writing his plays is to sacrifice readily almost everything else,
so that he may attain the fullness of a single romantic effect.
These two tendencies, indeed, might be applied as a measure
or standard all through Greek and Roman art and poetry, with
very illuminating results: and for an analyst of the romantic prin-
ciple in art, no exercise would be more profitable than to walk
through the collection of classical antiquities at the Louvre, or the
British Museum, or to examine some representative collection of
Greek coins, and note how the element of curiosity, of the love


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WALTER PATER
of strangeness, insinuates itself into classical design, and record
the effects of the romantic spirit there, the traces of struggle, of
the grotesque even, though overbalanced here by sweetness; as
in the sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the real sweetness of
mind in the sculptor is often overbalanced by the grotesque, by
the rudeness of his strength.
ner.
Classicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthu-
siastic band of French writers whose unconscious method he
formulated into principles, the reign of what is pedantic, conven-
tional, and narrowly academical in art; for him, all good art is
romantic. To Sainte-Beuve, who understands the term in a more
liberal sense, it is the characteristic of certain epochs, of certain
spirits in every epoch, not given to the exercise of original im-
agination, but rather to the working out of refinements of man-
ner on some authorized matter; and who bring to their perfection
in this way the elements of sanity, of order and beauty in man-
In general criticism, again, it means the spirit of Greece
and Rome, of some phases in literature and art that may seem
of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louis the
Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best an un-
critical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there
are typical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the
terms as we may, in application to particular epochs, there are
these two elements always recognizable; united in perfect art,-
in Sophocles, in Dante, in the highest work of Goethe, though
not always absolutely balanced there: and these two elements
may be not inappropriately termed the classical and romantic
tendencies.


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11179
COVENTRY PATMORE
(1823-1896)
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
OVENTRY KEARSEY DEIGHTON PATMORE was born at Woodford,
in Essex, England, on July 23d, 1823. The best impression
of the personality of this distinguished man may be found in
the pages of the Contemporary Review. It was written by Edmund
Gosse shortly after Patmore's death, which occurred in December
1896. It gives real insight into the character and accidental pecul-
iarities of a great psychological interpreter.
In the last ten years, Patmore's intention
and quality have begun once more to re-
ceive deserved attention and appreciation,
attracted principally by his 'Odes' (in 'The
Unknown Eros') and the strong mystical
characteristics of his prose essays, 'Princi-
ples in Art' and 'Religio Poetæ. '

Patmore's Poems (1844) attracted the
attention of Lord Houghton. They pleased
the Pre-Raphaelites, to whom he was in-
troduced by Tennyson; and he contributed
'The Seasons' to The Germ, which was the
organ of Rossetti and his colleagues. Pat-
more's poetic road was not smooth.
The
Angel in the House' had what Mr. Gosse calls a "rustic success. "
After that it became, in the mind of most readers, a work to be
classed with Mr. Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy. ' It included 'Tam-
erton Church Tower' (1853), The Betrothal' (1854), and The Es-
pousal (1856); the two latter he printed in The Angel in the
House' (1858), to which he afterwards added 'Faithful Forever' (1860)
and The Victories of Love' (1863). Then came 'Amelia' and 'The
Unknown Eros' (1877).
COVENTRY PATMORE
His important prose works are Principles in Art' (1889), 'Religio
Poetæ (1893), and 'The Rod, the Root, and the Flower' (1895). Mr.
Gosse laments the destruction of Sponsa Dei,' a "vanished master-
piece, not very long, but polished and modulated to the highest
degree of perfection. "


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COVENTRY PATMORE
The reason why the sensitive and singular poet destroyed 'Sponsa
Dei' may be inferred from the underlying motive of much of 'The
Unknown Eros. ' He was a mystic; he dwelt on the heights with St.
John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and the English poet Crashaw. And
his favorite theme was the spiritual beauty of the body redeemed by
Christ from degradation. He found in the sacramental union of man
and wife the truest and most glowing symbol of the union of God
and man; as he says in his 'Scire Te Ipsum,'-
"God, Youth, and Goddess, one, twain, trine,
In altering wedlock, flamed benign. »
If men knew the Christian mystics better, or many were able
to comprehend them, the 'Sponsa Dei,' which concerned itself with
human love as typical of the Divine, would not shock "the general
reader. " But though Patmore had a deep contempt for this undis-
tinguished person, his conscience was scrupulous when it came to
consider the moral effect of his beautiful revelation upon the weaker
brethren, and so the last of his works was destroyed.
In his essay on 'Love and Poetry in Principles in Art,' he
expresses his sense of the relation of human love to life:-
"Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or
at any rate feels, that love, though the least 'serious,' is the most significant
of all things. The wise do not talk much about this knowledge, for fear of
exposing its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the profligate and un-
believing; and because its light, though, and for the reason that, it exceeds
all others, is deficient in definition. But they see that to this momentary
transfiguration of life all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and
that it is for this the race exists, and not this for the race, the seed for the
flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this love,
and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest and
highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a 'great sacrament,' hold-
ing that, with Transubstantiation,— which it resembles,—it is only unreason-
able because it is above reason.
Nothing can reconcile the intimacies
of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious — and
true lovers always are- that for the season at least, they justify the words,
I have said, Ye are gods. Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being
nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. »
•
The poet who interprets this love is a seer, a mystic,- one who
knows the meaning of hidden things, the heart of the mysteries;
and "perfect poetry and song are in fact nothing more than per-
fect speech upon high and moving objects. " Thus Patmore speaks
in his essay on 'English Metrical Law. ' He earnestly believed it;
and though he was not in love with modern scientific methods, he
was willing to put the form of poetry to any test, in order that
the divinity of its spirit might be better understood and expressed.


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11181
"With this reprint I believe," he says, in the preface to the fifth
collective edition of his 'Poetical Works,' "that I am closing my task
as a poet, having traversed the ground and reached the end which in
my youth I saw before me. I have written little, but it is all my
best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared
time or labor to make my words true. I have respected posterity;
and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to
hope that it will respect me. "
Time has begun to show that Patmore had ground for his hope.
The peculiar management of the catalexis in his odes has repelled
many who do not seriously consider the relations of music and
rhythm, to whom psychology as applied to poetical form does not
appeal; and the boldness of his images, invariably borrowed from
the Scriptures, or the mystical outpourings of saints madly ecstatic
with Divine love, shocks folk brought up in those modern ideas of
purity which he condemns.
In his prose
marvelously effective and
condensed he is at times arrogant, intolerant, and always he is a
reckless Tory. Nevertheless his poetry and prose are treasures, the
value of which is becoming more and more apparent every day.
With the author of Religio Medici,' the writer of 'Religio Poetæ’
hated the multitude; he wrote only for the elect; and probably it
would not please him if he knew that his fame is so rapidly spread-
ing, that there are those of the multitude who respect and admire
more in his work than 'The Toys,' — which long ago seized the pop-
ular heart, though constructed on that catalectic method which has
caused some critics to pause when they had expected to go on
admiring.
-
-
Coventry Patmore assisted Lord Houghton in editing the 'Life
and Letters of Keats' (1848); he wrote a curious pamphlet, How I
Managed my Estate' (1886); the Life of Bryan Waller Procter'
(1877); and part of a translation from A. Bernard on the Love of
God' (1881).
His odes revive a quality not found in English poetry since Cra-
shaw; and his prose has, above all, that distinction which he so
loved. He is fervent, sincere, exalted; and if we do not understand
him in his highest moods, it is because we have not yet learned to
look with undazzled eyes at the very face of the sun.
manne Francis Egan
безит


## p. 11182 (#402) ##########################################

11182
COVENTRY PATMORE
Τ
WIND AND WAVE
HE wedded light and heat,
Winnowing the witless space,
Without a let,
What are they till they beat
Against the sleepy sod, and there beget
Perchance the violet!
Is the One found,
Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace,
To make heaven's bound;
So that in Her
All which it hath of sensitively good
Is sought and understood
After the narrow mode the mighty heavens prefer?
She, as a little breeze
Following still Night,
Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas
Into delight;
But in a while,
The immeasurable smile
is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent
With darkling discontent;
And all the subtle zephyr hurries gay,
And all the heaving ocean heaves one way,
T'ward the void sky-line and an unguessed weal;
Until the vanward billows feel
The agitating shallows, and divine the goal,
And to foam roll,
And spread and stray
And traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands,
And so the whole
Unfathomable and immense
Triumphing tide comes at the last to reach
And burst in wind-kissed splendors on the deafening beach,
Where forms of children in first innocence
Laugh and fling pebbles on the rainbowed crest
Of its untired unrest.


## p. 11183 (#403) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11183
THE TOYS
Y LITTLE Son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
MⓇ And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him, and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,-
His mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters, and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:—
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing thee in death,
And thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom thou hast molded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness. "
"IF I WERE DEAD"
"I
F I were dead, you'd sometimes say, Poor child! "
The dear lips quivered as they spake,
And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
Poor child, poor child!


## p. 11184 (#404) ##########################################

11184
COVENTRY PATMORE
I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.
It is not true that Love will do no wrong.
Poor child!
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,
And of those words your full avengers make?
Poor child, poor child!
And now, unless it be
That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,
O God, have thou no mercy upon me?
Poor child!
TO THE BODY
REATION'S and Creator's crowning good;
Wall of infinitude;
Foundation of the sky,
In heaven forecast
And longed for from eternity,
Though laid the last;
Reverberating dome,
CR
Of music cunningly built home
Against the void and indolent disgrace
Of unresponsive space;
Little sequestered pleasure-house
For God and for his Spouse;
Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,
Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,
Even to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,
And from the inmost heart
Outwards unto the thin
Silk curtains of the skin,
Every least part
Astonished hears
And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;
Formed for a dignity prophets but darkly name,
Lest shameless men cry "Shame! "
So rich with wealth concealed
That heaven and hell fight chiefly for this field;
Clinging to everything that pleases thee
With indefectible fidelity;
Alas, so true


## p. 11185 (#405) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11185
XIX-700
To all thy friendships that no grace
Thee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;
Which thus 'bides with thee as the Jebusite,
That, maugre all God's promises could do,
The chosen People never conquered quite;
Who therefore lived with them,
And that by formal truce and as of right,
In metropolitan Jerusalem.
For which false fealty
Thou needs must, for a season, lie
In the grave's arms, foul and unshriven,
Albeit in heaven
Thy crimson-throbbing glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go,
And does with envy see
Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she
Who left the roses in her body's lieu.
Oh, if the pleasures I have known in thee
But my poor faith's poor first-fruits be,
What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss
Then shall be his
Who has thy birth-time's consecrating dew
For death's sweet chrism retained,
Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned!
LOVE SERVICEABLE
From The Angel in the House'
WHA
HAT measure Fate to him shall mete
Is not the noble lover's care;
He's heart-sick with a longing sweet
To make her happy as she's fair.
Oh, misery, should she him refuse,
And so her dearest good mistake!
His own success he thus pursues
With frantic zeal for her sole sake.
To lose her were his life to blight,
Being loss to hers; to make her his,
Except as helping her delight,
He calls but accidental bliss;
And, holding life as so much pelf
To buy her posies, learns this lore:
He does not rightly love himself
Who does not love another more.


## p. 11186 (#406) ##########################################

11186
COVENTRY PATMORE
SAHARA
From The Angel in the House'
STOOD by Honor and the Dean,
I
They seated in the London train.
A month from her! yet this had been,
Ere now, without such bitter pain;
But neighborhood makes parting light,
And distance remedy has none.
Alone, she near, I felt as might
A blind man sitting in the sun;
She near, all for the time was well:
Hope's self, when we were far apart,
With lonely feeling, like the smell
Of heath on mountains, filled my heart.
To see her seemed delight's full scope;
And her kind smile, so clear of care,
Even then, though darkening all my hope,
Gilded the cloud of my despair.
She had forgot to bring a book.
I lent one: blamed the print for old;
And did not tell her that she took
A Petrarch worth its weight in gold.
I hoped she'd lose it; for my love
Was grown so dainty, high, and nice,
It prized no luxury above
The sense of fruitless sacrifice.
The bell rang; and with shrieks like death,
Link catching link, the long array,
With ponderous pulse and fiery breath.
Proud of its burthen, swept away.
And through the lingering crowd I broke,
Sought the hillside, and thence, heart-sick,
Beheld, far off, the little smoke
Along the landscape kindling quick.
What should I do, where should I go,
Now she was gone, my love! for mine
She was, whatever here below
Crossed or usurped my right divine.
Life without her was vain and gross,
The glory from the world was gone;


## p. 11187 (#407) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11187
And on the gardens of the Close
As on Sahara shone the sun.
Oppressed with her departed grace,
My thoughts on ill surmises fed;
The harmful influence of the place
She went to, filled my soul with dread.
She, mixing with the people there,
Might come back altered, having caught
The foolish, fashionable air
Of knowing all and feeling naught.
Or giddy with her beauty's praise,
She'd scorn our simple country life,
Its wholesome nights and tranquil days,
And would not deign to be my wife.
"My wife," "my wife,”—ah, tenderest word!
How oft, as fearful she might hear,
Whispering that name of "wife," I heard
The chiming of the inmost sphere.
I passed the home of my regret.
The clock was striking in the hall,
And one sad window open yet,
Although the dews began to fall.
Ah, distance showed her beauty's scope!
How light of heart and innocent
That loveliness which sickened hope
And wore the world for ornament!
How perfectly her life was framed;
And, thought of in that passionate mood,
How her affecting graces shamed
The vulgar life that was but good!
I wondered, would her bird be fed,
Her rose-plots watered, she not by;
Loading my breast with angry dread
Of light, unlikely injury.
So, filled with love and fond remorse,
I paced the Close, its every part
Endowed with reliquary force
To heal and raise from death my heart.
How tranquil and unsecular
The precinct! Once through yonder gate
I saw her go, and knew from far
Her love-lit form and gentle state.


## p. 11188 (#408) ##########################################

11188
COVENTRY PATMORE
Her dress had brushed this wicket; here
She turned her face, and laughed, with light
Like moonbeams on a wavering mere.
Weary beforehand of the night,
I went; the blackbird in the wood
Talked by himself, and eastward grew
In heaven the symbol of my mood,
Where one bright star engrossed the blue.
MARRIED LIFE
From The Wedding Sermon in The Victories of Love
L
OVERS, once married, deem their bond
Then perfect, scanning naught beyond
For love to do but to sustain
The spousal hour's delighted gain.
But time and a right life alone
Fulfill the promise then foreshown.
The bridegroom and the bride withal
Are but unwrought material
Of marriage; nay, so far is love,
Thus crowned, from being thereto enough,
Without the long compulsive awe
Of duty, that the bond of law
Does oftener marriage love evoke,
Than love which does not wear the yoke
Of legal vows submits to be
Self-reined from ruinous liberty.
Lovely is love; but age well knows
'Twas law which kept the lover's vows
Inviolate through the year or years
Of worship pieced with panic fears,
When she who lay within his breast
Seemed of all women perhaps the best,
But not the whole, of womankind,
Or love, in his yet wayward mind,
Had ghastly doubts its precious life
Was pledged for aye to the wrong wife.
Could it be else? A youth pursues
A maid, whom chance, not he, did choose,
Till to his strange arms hurries she
In a despair of modesty.


## p. 11189 (#409) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11189
Then simply and without pretense
Of insight or experience,
They plight their vows. The parents say,
"We cannot speak them yea or nay:
The thing proceedeth from the Lord! "
And wisdom still approves their word;
For God created so these two,
They match as well as others do
That take more pains, and trust him less
Who nev
fails, if asked, to bless
His children's helpless ignorance
And blind election of life's chance.
Verily, choice not matters much,
If but the woman's truly such,
And the young man has led the life
Without which how shall e'er the wife
Be the one woman in the world?
Love's sensitive tendrils sicken, curled
Round folly's former stay; for 'tis
The doom of all unsanctioned bliss
To mock some good that, gained, keeps still
The taint of the rejected ill.
Howbeit, though both were perfect, she
Of whom the maid was prophecy
As yet lives not, and Love rebels
Against the law of any else;
And as a steed takes blind alarm,
Disowns the rein, and hunts his harm,
So misdespairing word and act
May now perturb the happiest pact.
The more, indeed, is love, the more
Peril to love is now in store.
Against it nothing can be done
But only this: leave ill alone!
Who tries to mend his wife, succeeds
As he who knows not what he needs.
He much affronts a worth as high
As his, and that equality
Of spirits in which abide the grace
And joy of her subjected place;
And does the still growth check and blur
Of contraries, confusing her
Who better knows what he desires
Than he, and to that mark aspires


## p. 11190 (#410) ##########################################

11190
COVENTRY PATMORE
With perfect zeal, and a deep wit
Which nothing helps but trusting it.
So loyally, o'erlooking all
In which love's promise short may fall
Of full performance, honor that
As won, which aye love worketh at!
THE QUEEN
o heroism and holiness
How hard it is for man to soar;
But how much harder to be less
Than what his mistress loves him for!
T
He does with ease what do he must
. . .
Or lose her; and there's naught debarred. .
Ah, wasteful woman! she that may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing he cannot choose but pay,-
How has she cheapened Paradise!
How given for naught her priceless gift!
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men and men divine!
O queen! awake to thy renown,
Require what 'tis our wealth to give,
And comprehend and wear the crown
Of thy despised prerogative!
I who in manhood's name at length
With glad songs come to abdicate
The gross regality of strength,
Must yet in this thy praise abate,—
That through thine erring humbleness
And disregard of thy degree,
Mainly, has man been so much less
Than fits his fellowship with thee.
High thoughts had shaped the foolish brow,
The coward had grasped the hero's sword,
The vilest had been great, hadst thou,
Just to thyself, been worth's reward:
But lofty honors undersold
Seller and buyer both disgrace;
And favor that makes folly bold
Puts out the light in virtue's face.


## p. 11191 (#411) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11191
WHAT'S
WISDOM
HAT'S that which Heaven to man endears,
And that which eyes no sooner see
Than the heart says, with floods of tears,
"Ah, that's the thing which I would be! "
Not childhood, full of frown and fret;
Not youth, impatient to disown.
Those visions high, which to forget
Were worse than never to have known;
Not great men, even when they're good; -
The good man whom the Lord makes great,
By some disgrace of chance or blood
He fails not to humiliate; —
Not these: but souls, found here and there,
Oases in our waste of sin,
Where everything is well and fair,
And God remits his discipline;
Whose sweet subdual of the world
The worldling scarce can recognize,
And ridicule against it hurled
Drops with a broken sting, and dies;
Who nobly, if they cannot know
Whether a scutcheon's dubious field
Carries a falcon or a crow,
Fancy a falcon on the shield;
Yet ever careful not to hurt
God's honor, who creates success,
Their praise of even the best desert
Is but to have presumed no less;
And should their own life plaudits bring.
They're simply vexed at heart that such
An easy, yea, delightful thing
Should move the minds of men so much.
They live by law,- not like the fool,
But like the bard, who freely sings
In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule,
And finds in them not bonds, but wings.
They shine like Moses in the face,
And teach our hearts, without the rod,
That God's grace is the only grace,
And all grace is the grace of God.
Their home is home; their chosen lot
A private place and private name:
But if the world's want calls, they'll not
Refuse the indignities of fame.


## p. 11192 (#412) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11192
PATHOS
From Principle in Art'
PITY
Y differs from pathos in this: the latter is simply emo-
tional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature;
though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power
and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect,
may be indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul.
Pity is helpful, and is not deadened or repelled by circumstances
which disgust the simply sensitive nature; and its ardor so far
consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the
person who truly pities, finds the field of pathos extended far
beyond the ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives
tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In
an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity, and pathos which is the
feeling of pity, would be coextensive; and the latter would
demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some
ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other
hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity
for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass
of men and women there is sufficient virtue of pity, pity that
would act if it had the opportunity, to extend in them the feeling
of pity that is, pathos-to a far larger range of circumstances
than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even
if it had the chance.
Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity; for absolute wicked-
ness, with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be
quite content, cannot be certainly predicted of any individual
sufferer: but pathos, whether in a drawing-room tale of delicate
distress, or in a tragedy of Æschylus or Shakespeare, requires
that some obvious goodness or beauty or innocence or heroism
should be the subject of suffering, and that the circumstance or
narration of it should have certain conditions of repose, contrast,
and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending from the
immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten
that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the
fact of goodness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer,
contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sad-
ness of Desdemona's death is immensely heightened by the black
shadow of Iago; and perhaps the most intense touch of pathos
in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum, while his
betrayer occupies himself, between the acts of a comedy at the
Criterion, in devising how best he may excuse his presence there


## p. 11193 (#413) ##########################################

COVENTRY PATMORE
11193
by denying that he was aware of the contretemps, or by repre-
senting his news of it as non-official. The singer of Fair Rosa-
mund's sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang:
"Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were the lips that bled. "
Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman's tears.
"Naught is there under heaven's wide hollowness
That moves more dear compassion of mind
Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness. "
It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage
of happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic; but it is still
more the way in which she is given to smiling through them.
The author of the 'Rhetoric' shows his usual incomparable subt-
ilty of observation when he notes that a little good coming upon
or in the midst of extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest
pathos; and when the shaft of a passionate female sorrow is
feathered with beauty and pointed with a smile, there is no heart
that can refuse her her will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffer-
ing there is no pathos. Nothing in the 'Inferno' has this qual-
ity except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing,
through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos,
"tempering extremities with extreme sweet," or at least with the
memory of it.
Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of
pathos to their "crown," which is "remembering happier things. "
No one weeps in sympathy with the "base self-pitying tears" of
Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is without some con-
trasting dignity of curb. Even a little child does not move us
by its sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so
much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. A great
and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is
also a source of pathos; if indeed it be not the same with that
which Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceed-
ing ill and a little good. There is pathos in a departing pleas-
ure, however small. It is the fact of sunset, not its colors,-
which are the same as those of sunrise-that constitutes its sad-
ness; and in mere darkness there may be fear and distress, but
not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in literature as
the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding's novel, had
prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come; and


## p. 11194 (#414) ##########################################

11194
COVENTRY PATMORE
that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charter-house pensioner.
In each of these cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast
of noble reticence with a sorrow which has no direct expression.
The same necessity for contrast renders reconciliations far more
pathetic than quarrels, and the march to battle of an army to the
sound of cheerful military music more able to draw tears than
the spectacle of the battle itself.
The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few
writers are sufficiently aware of this. Humor is cumulative and
diffusive, as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew; but
how many a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the his-
torian of Little Nell by an attempt to make too much of it! A
drop of citric acid will give poignancy to a feast; but a draught
of it! Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye ever shed a
tear over the 'Vita Nuova,' whatever an Italian may have done.
Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of
weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence the exqui-
sitely touching points in 'A Pair of Blue Eyes,' 'Two on a
Tower,' The Trumpet-Major,' and other of Hardy's novels.
Pathos is the luxury of grief; and when it ceases to be
other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence
Tennyson's question in 'Love and Duty,' «Shall sharpest pathos
blight us? " involves a misunderstanding of the word; although
his understanding of the thing is well proved by such lyrics as
'Tears, idle tears,' and 'Oh, well for the fisherman's boy. ' Pleas-
ure, and beauty which may be said to be pleasure visible, are
without their highest perfection if they are without a touch of
pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound pleas-
ure and to great beauty, by the mere fact of the incongruity of
their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and
impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaust-
ible and (except by Dante) almost unworked mine of poetry,
Catholic theology, that the felicity of the angels and glorified
saints and of God himself would not be perfect without the edge
of pathos, which it receives from the fall and reconciliation of
man. Hence, on Holy Saturday, the Church exclaims, “O felix
culpa! " and hence "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner
that repenteth than over ninety-and-nine righteous who need no
repentance. " Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of
heaven; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its
beatitude.


## p. 11195 (#415) ##########################################

11195
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
(1779-1860)
AMES K. PAULDING was an accomplished man of letters, who
as writer, statesman, and man of the world, cut a consider-
able figure in the life of his time. He is best remembered
now for his association with Washington Irving; but his prose had a
literary quality and finish which make it good reading to-day. He
had a satiric humor, of the sort more familiar in Irving's serio-comic
Knickerbocker History of New York. ' Had his activities been less
diffused, had he stuck with more of single purpose to literature, his
literary impress would have been deeper.
As it is, he is an interesting part of the
intellectual life of the early century in the
United States.

JAMES K. PAULDING
James Kirke Paulding was born at Nine
Partners, Dutchess County, New York, on
August 22d, 1779. He got a scanty schooling
in his native place, and when only nineteen
went to New York City, where his sister
married Washington Irving's elder brother
William, with whom Paulding lived. This
brought him into close literary and social
communion with the Irvings, and led to the
collaboration of the three young men in the
famous Salmagundi, a semi-weekly period-
ical, the first numbers of which appeared in January 1807. The clever
pages, satirizing the follies of the day with searching yet kindly hu-
mor, were very warmly received: the suspension of Salmagundi with-
in the year was due to the publisher's refusal to pay the authors for
their services. The bulk of the papers was written by Paulding and
Washington Irving, William Irving's part being minor. In 1819 Paul-
ding put out another Salmagundi, written solely by himself; but-
perhaps because Irving's magic hand was missed-its reception was
comparatively cold. But in his other works- and his pen was pro-
lific-Paulding was decidedly a popular writer. The Diverting
History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan,' in 1812, ran through
many editions. For his best novel, The Dutchman's Fireside,' pub-
lished in 1831, and based on Mrs. Grant's descriptions of the manner


## p. 11196 (#416) ##########################################

11196
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
of the early Dutch settlers, he received the comfortable sum of
$1500: six editions appeared in a year, and the story was republished
in England and translated into French and Dutch. For the Ken-
tucky story of Westward Ho' (1832) he was paid the same sum.
Considering the time, these facts imply an established reputation.
As a poet he was less successful. His most elaborate metrical writ-
ing is The Backwoodsman' (1818), a study of emigrant life. The
'Life of George Washington,' published in 1835 and addressed to the
youth of the country, is his most important critical work.
In 1814 Paulding's brochure on The United States and England'
made him known to President Madison, and political preferment re-
sulted. He was appointed secretary of the first board of Navy Com-
missioners, and in Buchanan's administration served in the Cabinet
as Secretary of the Navy. That he was a conservative, not quick
to receive new ideas, is shown by his opposition to the introduction
of steam in ships, and by the fact that one of his latest pieces of
writing was a defense of slavery in all its workings. After retiring
from public life, Paulding purchased a residence near Hyde Park on
the Hudson River, and passed his concluding years in dignified ease,
writing occasional magazine articles. He died on April 6th, 1860;
his dear and long-time friend, Irving, having passed away but a few
months before. The Literary Life of James Kirke Paulding' by his
son William was published in 1867.
Paulding is most enjoyable for the present reader in his lighter
papers, and the literary skits of his early days. As joint author of
the Salmagundi papers he has a certain distinction which in literary
history will preserve his name.
PLINY THE YOUNGER
From The Dutchman's Fireside. ' Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.
M*
ADAM VANCOUR was extremely fortunate in procuring a
most efficient auxiliary in the engineering of this her good
work, in the person of Master Pliny Coffin (the sixteenth),
whilom of Nantucket Island. Pliny was the youngest of nine
sons and an unaccountable number of daughters, born unto Cap-
tain Pliny Coffin (the fifteenth). Being called after his uncle,
Deacon Pliny Mayhew (the tenth), he was patronized by that
worthy "spermaceti candle of the church," as he was called,
and sent to school at an early age, with a view to following in
the footsteps of the famous divine. But Pliny the younger had a


## p. 11197 (#417) ##########################################

JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11197
natural and irresistible vocation to salt water; insomuch that at
the age of eighteen months or thereabouts, being left to amuse
himself under the only tree in Nantucket, which grew in front
of Captain Coffin's (the fifteenth) house, he crawled incontinently
down to the seaside, and was found disporting himself in the
surf like unto a young gosling. In like manner did Pliny the
younger, at a very early age, display a vehement predilection
for great whales; to the which he was most probably incited by
the stories of his father, Pliny the elder, who had been a mighty
harpooner in his day. When about three years old, one of these
monsters of the deep was driven ashore in a storm at Nan-
tucket, where he perished, to the great joy of the inhabitants,
who flocked from all parts to claim a share in his spoil. On the
morning of that memorable day, which is still recorded in the
annals of Nantucket, Pliny the younger was missing, and dili-
gent search being made for him, he was not to be found in the
whole island; to the grief of his mother, who was a very stout
woman, and had killed three Indians with her own fair hand.
But look ye: while the people were gathered about the body of
the whale, discussing the mysterious disappearance of the child,
what was their astonishment to behold him coming forth from
the stomach of the huge fish, laughing right merrily at the prank
he had played!
But the truth must be confessed: he took his learning after
the manner that people, more especially doctors, take physic,-
with many wry faces and much tribulation of spirit. In fact he
never learned a lesson in his whole life until, arriving at his fifth
year, by good fortune a primer was put into his hand wherein.
was the picture of a whale; with the which he was so utterly
delighted that he mastered the whole distich under it in the
course of the day. The teacher aptly took the hint, and by
means of pasting the likeness of a whale at the head of his les-
sons, carried him famously along in the career of knowledge. In
process of time he came to be of the order of deacons, and was
appointed to preach his first sermon; whereby a great calamity
befell him, which drove him forth a wanderer on the face of the
earth. Unfortunately the meeting-house where he was to make
his first essay stood in full view of the sea, which was distinctly
visible from the pulpit; and just as Pliny the younger had
divided his text into sixteen parts, behold! a mighty ship ap-
peared, with a bone in her teeth, ploughing her way towards the
island with clouds of canvas swelling in the wind. Whereupon


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JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
the conviction came across his mind that this must be the Alba-
tross, returning from a whaling voyage in the great South Sea;
and sad to relate, his boyish instincts got the better of his better
self. Delirious with eager curiosity, he rushed from the pulpit,
and ran violently down to the seaside, like one possessed, leav-
ing Deacon Mayhew and the rest of the expectant congregation
astonished nigh on to dismay. The deacon was wroth, and forth-
with disinherited him. The people said he was possessed of a
devil, and talked of putting him to the ordeal; whereupon the
unfortunate youth exiled himself from the land of his nativity,
and went to seek his fortune among the heathen, who had
steeples to their churches, and dealt in the abomination of white
sleeves. Of his wanderings, and of the accidents of his pilgrim-
age, I know nothing, until his stars directed him to the Flats,
where there were no salt-water temptations to mislead him.
As one of the contemplated improvements of Madam Vancour
was the introduction of the English language among her pupils,
instead of the barbarous Dutch dialect, she eagerly caught at the
first offer of Pliny, and engaged him forthwith to take charge of
her seminary. In this situation he was found by Catalina, who,
as we have before stated, in the desolation of her spirit, resolved
to attempt the relief of her depression by entering upon the dif-
ficult task of being useful to others. She accordingly occasionally
associated herself with Master Pliny in the labors of his mission,
greatly to the consolation of his inward man.
He took great
pains to initiate her into the mysteries of his new philosophical,
practical, elementary, and scientific system of education, on which
he prided himself exceedingly-and with justice, for it hath been.
lately revised and administered among us with singular success,
by divers ungenerous pedagogues, who have not had the con-
science to acknowledge whence it was derived.
As Newton took the hint of the theory of gravitation from
seeing an apple fall to the ground, and as the illustrious Marquis
of Worcester deduced the first idea of the application of steam
from the risings and sinkings of a pot-lid, so did Master Pliny
model and graduate his whole system of education from the
incident of the whale in the primer. Remembering with what
eagerness he himself had been attracted towards learning by a
picture, he resolved to make similar illustrations the great means
of drawing forth what he called the "latent energies of the in-
fant genius, spurring on the march of intellect, and accelerating
the development of mind. " But as woodcuts were scarce articles


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JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
11199
in those times, he devoted one day in the week to sallying forth
with all his scholars, in order to collect materials for their studies;
that is, to gather acorns, pebbles, leaves, briers, bugs, ants, cater-
pillars, and what not. When he wanted an urchin to spell "bug,"
he placed one of these specimens directly above the word; and
great was his exultation at seeing how the child was assisted in
cementing B-U-G together, by the presence of the creature itself.
In this way he taught everything by sensible objects; boasting
at the same time of the originality of his method, little suspect-
ing that he had only got hold of the fag-end of Chinese emblems
and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
But pride will have a fall. One day, at Catalina's suggestion,
Master Pliny put his scholars to the test, by setting them to
spell without the aid of sensible objects, and by the mere instru-
mentality of the letters. They made sad work of it: hardly one
could spell «< ant" without the presence of the insect to act as
prompter. They had become so accustomed to the assistance of
the thing, that they paid little or no attention to the letters
which represented it; and Catalina ventured to hint to Master
Pliny that the children had learned little or nothing. They knew
what an ant was before, and that seemed to be the extent of
their knowledge now.
"Yes," answered he, "but it makes the acquisition of learning
so easy. "
"To the teacher, certainly," replied the young lady. In fact,
when she came to analyze the improvements in Master Pliny's
system, she found that they all tended to one point,—namely,
diminishing not the labor of the scholar in learning, but that of
the master in teaching.
I forbear to touch on all the other various plans of Master
Pliny for accelerating the march of mind. Suffice it to say, they
were all, one after another, abandoned, being found desperately
out at the elbows when subjected to the test of wear and tear.
Yet have they been revived with wonderful success by divers
illustrious and philosophical pedagogues abroad and at home,
who have brought the system to such perfection that they have
not the least trouble in teaching, nor the children anything but
downright pleasure in learning. Happy age! and happy Pliny,
had he lived to this day to behold the lamp which he lighted
shining over the whole universe. He however abandoned his
system at the instance of a silly girl, and soon after deserted the


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II 200
JAMES KIRKE PAULDING
Flats: the same cause being at the bottom of both issues,— a
woman.
The evil spirit which influenced Master Pliny to run out of the
pulpit now prompted him to run his head into the fire. Pliny
was a rosy-cheeked, curly-headed, fresh-looking man, exceedingly
admired by the Dutch damsels thereabout, and still more by a
certain person who shall be nameless. He thought himself an
Adonis; and argued inwardly that no young lady in her senses
would turn schoolmistress without some powerful incitement. The
said demon whispered that this could be nothing but admiration
for his person, and love of his company. Upon this hint he began,
first to ogle the young lady, then to take every opportunity to
touch her hand or press against her elbow, until she could not
but notice the peculiarity of his conduct. Finally he wrote her
a love epistle, of such transcendent phraseology that it frightened
Catalina out of school forever. She did not wish to injure the
simple fellow, and took this method of letting him know his
fate. Poor Pliny the younger pined in thought, and soon after
took his departure for the land of his nativity, where on arrival
he was kindly forgiven by his uncle the deacon, and received
into the bosom of the meeting-house. Here he preached power-
fully many years, never ran after whale-ships more, and in good
time, by the death of his father, came to be called Pliny the
elder.
A WOMAN'S PRIVILEGE: AND THE CHARMS OF SNUFF-COLOR
From The Dutchman's Fireside. Copyright 1868, by William I. Paulding.
Published by Charles Scribner & Co.