Letters to Dead Authors Part 7

(1) Lord Napier and Ettrick points out to me that, unluckily, the tradition is erroneous. Piers was not executed at all. William c.o.c.kburn suffered in Edinburgh. But the _Border Minstrelsy_ overrides history.

_Criminal Trials in Scotland_ by Robert Pitcairn, Esq. Vol. i. part I.

p. 144, A. D. 1530. 17 Jac. V.

May 16. William c.o.kburne of Henderland, convicted (in presence of the King) of high treason committed by him in bringing Alexander Forestare and his son, Englishmen, to the plundering of Archibald Somervile; and for treasunably bringing certain Englishmen to the lands of Glenquhome; and for common theft, common reset of theft, out-putting and in-putting thereof. Sentence. For which causes and crimes he has forfeited his life, lands, and goods, movable and immovable; which shall be escheated to the King. Beheaded.

Words, empty and unavailing--for what words of ours can speak our thoughts or interpret our affections! From you first, as we followed the deer with King James, or rode with William of Deloraine on his midnight errand, did we learn what Poetry means and ali the happiness that is in the gift of song. This and more than may be told you gave us, that are not forgetful, not ungrateful, though our praise be unequal to our grat.i.tude. _Fungor inani munere!_

XVI. To Eusebius of Caesarea.

(Concerning the G.o.ds of the Heathen.)

Touching the G.o.ds of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of men's hands, are no longer wors.h.i.+pped thou knowest; neither do men eat meat offered to idols. Even as spoke that last Oracle which murmured forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so 'the fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the sweet-voiced water is silent.' The fane is ruinous, and the images of men's idolatry are dust.

Nevertheless, most wors.h.i.+pful, men do still dispute about the beginnings of those sinful G.o.ds: such as Zeus, Athene, and Dionysus: and marvel how first they won their dominion over the souls of the foolish peoples.

Now, concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit, there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers believes--as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly persuade--that the G.o.ds were the inventions of wild and b.e.s.t.i.a.l folk, who, long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained, fas.h.i.+oned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I am, do give my consent. But on the other side are many and learned men, chiefly of the tribes of the Alemanni, who have almost conquered the whole inhabited world. These, being unwilling to suppose that the h.e.l.lenes were in bondage to superst.i.tions handed down from times of utter darkness and a b.e.s.t.i.a.l life, do chiefly hold with the heathen philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords of thy wit.

Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the G.o.ds of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural creatures as the blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and the fire; but, as time went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their own speech and no longer understanding the tongue of their own fathers, were misled and beguiled into fas.h.i.+oning all those lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of mortal women, took the shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an eagle, and sinned in such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.

Behold, then, most wors.h.i.+pful, how these doctors and learned men argue, even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst confound. For they declare the G.o.ds to have been natural elements, sun and sky and storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as thou saidst, 'they are nowise at one with each other in their explanations.' For of old some boasted that Hera was the Air; and some that she signified the love of woman and man; and some that she was the waters above the Earth; and others that she was the Earth beneath the waters; and yet others that she was the Night, for that Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth, the men who first wors.h.i.+pped Hera had understanding of these things! And when Hera and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant (said the learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of the elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.

To all which, most wors.h.i.+pful, thou didst answer wisely: saying that Hera could not be both night, and earth, and water, and air, and the love of s.e.xes, and the confusion of the elements; but that all these opinions were vain dreams, and the guesses of the learned. And why--thou saidst--even if the G.o.ds were pure natural creatures, are such foul things told of them in the Mysteries as it is not fitting for me to declare. 'These wanderings, and drinkings, and loves, and corruptions, that would be shameful in men, why,' thou saidst, 'were they attributed to the natural elements; and wherefore did the G.o.ds constantly show themselves, like the sorcerers called were-wolves, in the shape of the perishable beasts?' But, mainly, thou didst argue that, till the philosophers of the heathen were agreed among themselves, not all contradicting each the other, they had no semblance of a sure foundation for their doctrine.

To all this and more, most wors.h.i.+pful Father, I know not what the heathen answered thee. But, in our time, the learned men who stand to it that the heathen G.o.ds were in the beginning the pure elements, and that the nations, forgetting their first love and the significance of their own speech, became confused and were betrayed into foul stories about the pure G.o.ds--these learned men, I say, agree no whit among themselves.

Nay, they differ one from another, not less than did Plutarch and Porphyry and Theagenes, and the rest whom thou didst laugh to scorn.

Bear with me, Father, while I tell thee how the new Plutarchs and Porphyrys do contend among themselves; and yet these differences of theirs they call 'Science'!

Consider the G.o.ddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even as--among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never knewest--G.o.ddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the 'Cratylus,' made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For, when they wish to explain the nature of any G.o.d, they first examine his name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their turn. How saith Socrates? 'I bethink me of a very new and ingenious idea that occurs to me; and, if I do not mind, I shall be wiser than I should be by to-morrow's dawn. My notion is that we may put in and pull out letters at pleasure and alter the accents.' Even so do our learned--not at pleasure, maybe, but according to certain fixed laws (so they declare); yet none the more do they agree among themselves. And I deny not that they discover many things true and good to be known; but, as touching the names of the G.o.ds, their learning, as it standeth, is confusion. Look, then, at the G.o.ddess Athene: taking one example out of hundreds. We have dwelling in our coasts Muellerus, the most erudite of the doctors of the Alemanni, and the most golden-mouthed. Concerning Athene, he saith that her name is none other than, in the ancient tongue of the Brachmanae, _Ahana'_, which, being interpreted, means the Dawn.

'And that the morning light,' saith he, 'offers the best starting-point; for the later growth of Athene has been proved, I believe, beyond the reach of doubt or even cavil.' (1)

(1) 'The Lesson of Jupiter.'--_Nineteenth Century_, October, 1885.

Yet this same doctor candidly lets us know that another of his nation, the witty Benfeius, hath devised another sense and origin of Athene, taken from the speech of the old Medes. But Muellerus declares to us that whosoever shall examine the contention of Benfeius 'will be bound, in common honesty, to confess that it is untenable.' This, Father, is one for Benfeius, as the saying goes. And as Muellerus holds that these matters 'admit of almost mathematical precision,' it would seem that Benfeius is but a _Dummkopf_, as the Alemanni say, in their own language, when they would be pleasant among themselves.

Now, wouldst thou credit it? despite the mathematical plainness of the facts, other Alemanni agree neither with Muellerus, nor yet with Benfeius, and will neither hear that Athene was the Dawn, nor yet that she is 'the feminine of the Zend _Thra'eta'na athwya'na_.' Lo, you! how Prellerus goes about to show that her name is drawn not from _Ahana'_ and the old Brachmanae, nor _athwya'na_ and the old Medes, but from 'the root _aith_*, whence _aither_*, the air, or _ath_*, whence _anthos_*, a flower.' Yea, and Prellerus will have it that no man knows the verity of this matter. None the less he is very bold, and will none of the Dawn; but holds to it that Athene was, from the first, 'the clear pure height of the Air, which is exceeding pure in Attica.'

Now, Father, as if all this were not enough, comes one Roscherus in, with a mighty great volume on the G.o.ds, and Furtwaenglerus, among others, for his ally. And these doctors will neither with Rueckertus and Hermannus, take Athene for 'wisdom in person;' nor with Welckerus and Prellerus, for 'the G.o.ddess of air;' nor even, with Muellerus and mathematical certainty, for 'the Morning-Red:' but they say that Athene is the 'black thunder-cloud, and the lightning that leapeth therefrom'!

I make no doubt that other Alemanni are of other minds: _quot Alemanni tot sententiae_.

Yea, as thou saidst of the learned heathen, _Oude gar allelois symphona_ _physiologousis_. Yet these disputes of theirs they call 'Science'!

But if any man says to the learned: 'Best of men, you are erudite, and laborious and witty; but, till you are more of the same mind, your opinions cannot be styled knowledge. Nay, they are at present of no avail whereon to found any doctrine concerning the G.o.ds'--that man is railed at for his 'mean' and 'weak' arguments.

* Transliterated from Greek.

Was it thus, Father, that the heathen railed against thee? But I must still believe, with thee, that these evil tales of the G.o.ds were invented 'when man's life was yet brutish and wandering' (as is the life of many tribes that even now tell like tales), and were maintained in honour of the later Greeks 'because none dared alter the ancient beliefs of his ancestors.' Farewell, Father; and all good be with thee, wishes thy well-wisher and thy disciple.

XVII. To Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley.

Sir,--In your lifetime on earth you were not more than commonly curious as to what was said by 'the herd of mankind,' if I may quote your own phrase. It was that of one who loved his fellow-men, but did not in his less enthusiastic moments overestimate their virtues and their discretion. Removed so far away from our hubbub, and that world where, as you say, we 'pursue our serious folly as of old,' you are, one may guess, but moderately concerned about the fate of your writings and your reputation. As to the first, you have somewhere said, in one of your letters, that the final judgment on your merits as a poet is in the hands of posterity, and that you fear the verdict will be 'Guilty,'

and the sentence 'Death.' Such apprehensions cannot have been fixed or frequent in the mind of one whose genius burned always with a clearer and steadier flame to the last. The jury of which you spoke has met: a mixed jury and a merciful. The verdict is 'Well done,' and the sentence Immortality of Fame. There have been, there are, dissenters; yet probably they will be less and less heard as the years go on.

One judge, or juryman, has made up his mind that prose was your true province, and that your letters will outlive your lays. I know not whether it was the same or an equally well-inspired critic, who spoke of your most perfect lyrics (so Beau Brummell spoke of his ill-tied cravats) as 'a gallery of your failures.' But the general voice does not echo these utterances of a too subtle intellect. At a famous University (not your own) once existed a band of men known as 'The Trinity Sniffers.' Perhaps the spirit of the sniffer may still inspire some of the jurors who from time to time make themselves heard in your case.

The 'Quarterly Review', I fear, is still unreconciled. It regards your attempts as tainted by the spirit of 'The Liberal Movement in English Literature;' and it is impossible, alas! to maintain with any success that you were a Throne and Altar Tory. At Oxford you are forgiven; and the old rooms where you let the oysters burn (was not your founder, King Alfred, once guilty of similar negligence?) are now shown to pious pilgrims.

But Conservatives, 't is rumoured, are still averse to your opinions, and are believed to prefer to yours the works of the Reverend Mr. Keble, and, indeed, of the clergy in general. But, in spite of all this, your poems, like the affections of the true lovers in Theocritus, are still 'in the mouths of all, and chiefly on the lips of the young.' It is in your lyrics that you live, and I do not mean that every one could pa.s.s an examination in the plot of "Prometheus Unbound" Talking of this piece, by the way, a Cambridge critic finds that it reveals in you a hankering after life in a cave--doubtless an unconsciously inherited memory from cave-man. Speaking of cave-man reminds me that you once spoke of deserting song for prose, and of producing a history of the moral, intellectual, and political elements in human society, which, we now agree, began, as Asia would fain have ended, in a cave.

Fortunately you gave us 'Adonai, and 'h.e.l.las' instead of this treatise, and we have now successfully written the natural history of Man for ourselves. Science tells us that before becoming cave-dweller he was a brute; Experience daily proclaims that he constantly reverts to his original condition. _L'homme est un mechant animal_, in spite of your boyish efforts to add pretty girls 'to the list of the good, the disinterested, and the free.'

Ah, not in the wastes of Speculation, nor the sterile din of Politics, were 'the haunts meet for thee.' Watching the yellow bees in the ivy bloom, and the reflected pine forest in the water-pools, watching the sunset as it faded, and the dawn as it fired, and weaving all fair and fleeting things into a tissue where light and music were at one, that was the task of Sh.e.l.ley! 'To ask you for anything human,' you said, 'was like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop.' Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, out of all the mult.i.tudes of singers, one is spiritual and strange, one has seen Artemis unveiled? One, like Anchises, has been beloved of the G.o.ddess, and his eyes, when he looks on the common works of common men, are, like the eyes of Anchises, blind with excess of light. Let Sh.e.l.ley sing of what he saw, what none saw but Sh.e.l.ley!

Notwithstanding the popularity of your poems (the most romantic of things didactic), our world is no better than the world you knew. This will disappoint you, who had 'a pa.s.sion for reforming it.' Kings and priests are very much where you left them. True, we have a poet who a.s.sails them, at large, frequently and fearlessly; yet Mr. Swinburne has never, like 'kind Hunt,' been in prison, nor do we fear for him a charge of treason. Moreover, chemical science has discovered new and ingenious ways of destroying princ.i.p.alities and powers. You would be interested in the methods, but your peaceful Revolutionism, which disdained physical force, would regret their application.

Our foreign affairs are not in a state which even you would consider satisfactory; for we have just had to contend with a Revolt of Islam, and we still find in Russia exactly the qualities which you recognised and described. We have a great statesman whose methods and eloquence somewhat resemble those you attribute to Laon and Prince Athanase. Alas!

he is a youth of more than seventy summers; and not in his time will Prometheus retire to a cavern and pa.s.s a peaceful millennium in twining buds and beams.

In domestic affairs most of the Reforms you desired to see have been carried. Ireland has received Emanc.i.p.ation, and almost everything else she can ask for. I regret to say that she is still unhappy; her wounds unstanched, her wrongs unforgiven. At home we have enfranchised the paupers, and expect the most happy results. Paupers (as Mr. Gladstone says) are 'our own flesh and blood,' and, as we compel them to be vaccinated, so we should permit them to vote. Is it a dream that Mr.

Jesse Collings (how you would have loved that man!) has a Bill for extending the priceless boon of the vote to inmates of Pauper Lunatic Asylums? This may prove that last element in the Elixir of political happiness which we have sought in vain. Atheists, you will regret to hear, are still unpopular; but the new Parliament has done something for Mr. Bradlaugh. You should have known our Charles while you were in the 'Queen Mab' stage. I fear you wandered, later, from his robust condition of intellectual development.

As to your private life, many biographers contrive to make public as much of it as possible. Your name, even in life, was, alas! a kind of _ducdame_ to bring people of no very great sense into your circle. This curious fascination has attracted round your memory a feeble folk of commentators, biographers, anecdotists, and others of the tribe.

They swarm round you like carrion-flies round a sensitive plant, like night-birds bewildered by the sun. Men of sense and taste have written on you, indeed; but your weaker admirers are now disputing as to whether it was your heart, or a less dignified and most troublesome organ, which escaped the flames of the funeral pyre. These biographers fight terribly among themselves, and vainly prolong the memory of 'old unhappy far-off things, and _sorrows_ long ago.' Let us leave them and their squabbles over what is unessential, their raking up of old letters and old stories.

The town has lately yawned a weary laugh over an enemy of yours, who has produced two heavy volumes, styled by him 'The Real Sh.e.l.ley.' The real Sh.e.l.ley, it appears, was Sh.e.l.ley as conceived of by a worthy gentleman so prejudiced and so skilled in taking up things by the wrong handle that I wonder he has not made a name in the exact science of Comparative Mythology. He criticises you in the spirit of that Christian Apologist, the Englishman who called you 'a d.a.m.ned Atheist' in the post-office at Pisa. He finds that you had 'a little turned-up nose,' a feature no less important in his system than was the nose of Cleopatra (according to Pascal) in the history of the world. To be in harmony with your nose, you were a 'phenomenal' liar, an ill-bred, ill-born, profligate, partly insane, an evil-tempered monster, a self-righteous person, full of self-approbation--in fact you were the Beast of this pious Apocalypse.

Your friend Dr. Lind was an embittered and scurrilous apothecary, 'a bad old man.' But enough of this inopportune brawler. For Humanity, of which you hoped such great things, Science predicts extinction in a night of Frost. The sun will grow cold, slowly--as slowly as doom came on Jupiter in your 'Prometheus,' but as surely. If this nightmare be fulfilled, perhaps the Last Man, in some fetid hut on the ice-bound Equator, will read. by a fading lamp charged with the dregs of the oil in his cruse, the poetry of Sh.e.l.ley. So reading, he, the latest of his race, will not wholly be deprived of those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life worth enduring. In your verse he will have sight of sky, and sea, and cloud, the gold of dawn and the gloom of earthquake and eclipse, he will be face to face, in fancy, with the great powers that are dead, sun, and ocean, and the illimitable azure of the heavens. In Sh.e.l.ley's poetry, while Man endures, all those will survive; for your 'voice is as the voice of winds and tides,' and perhaps more deathless than all of these, and only perishable with the peris.h.i.+ng of the human spirit.

XVIII. To Monsieur de Moliere, Valet de Chambre du Roi.

Monsieur,--With what awe does a writer venture into the presence of the great Moliere! As a courtier in your time would scratch humbly (with his comb!) at the door of the Grand Monarch, so I presume to draw near your dwelling among the Immortals. You, like the king who, among all his t.i.tles, has now none so proud as that of the friend of Moliere--you found your dominions small, humble, and distracted; you raised them to the dignity of an empire: what Louis XIV. did for France you achieved for French comedy; and the ba'ton of Scapin still wields its sway though the sword of Louis was broken at Blenheim. For the King the Pyrenees, or so he fancied, ceased to exist; by a more magnificent conquest you overcame the Channel. If England vanquished your country's arms, it was through you that France _ferum victorem cepit_, and restored the dynasty of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden borrowed 'L'Etourdi,' our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters theatrical) on the spoils of the wits of France.

In one respect, to be sure, times and manners have altered. While you lived, taste kept the French drama pure; and it was the congenial business of English playwrights to foist their rustic grossness and their large Fescennine jests into the urban page of Moliere. Now they are diversely occupied; and it is their affair to lend modesty where they borrow wit, and to spare a blush to the cheek of the Lord Chamberlain. But still, as has ever been our wont since Etherege saw, and envied, and imitated your successes--still we pilfer the plays of France, and take our _bien_, as you said in your lordly manner, wherever we can find it. We are the privateers of the stage; and it is rarely, to be sure, that a comedy pleases the town which has not first been 'cut out' from the countrymen of Moliere. Why this should be, and what 'tenebriferous star' (as Paracelsus, your companion in the 'Dialogues des Morts,' would have believed) thus darkens the sun of English humour, we know not; but certainly our dependence on France is the sincerest tribute to you. Without you, neither Rotrou, nor Corneille, nor 'a wilderness of monkeys' like Scarron, could ever have given Comedy to France and restored her to Europe.

While we owe to you, Monsieur, the beautiful advent of Comedy, fair and beneficent as Peace in the play of Aristophanes, it is still to you that we must turn when of comedies we desire the best. If you studied with daily and nightly care the works of Plautus and Terence, if you 'let no musty _bouquin_ escape you' (so your enemies declared), it was to some purpose that you laboured. Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan: and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron and Lab.i.+.c.he, to that crowded world of your creations. 'Creations' one may well say, for you antic.i.p.ated Nature herself: you gave us, before she did, in Alceste a Rousseau who was a gentleman not a lacquey; in a _mot_ of Don Juan's, the secret of the new Religion and the watchword of Comte, _l'amour de l'humanite_.

Before you where can we find, save in Rabelais, a Frenchman with humour; and where, unless it be in Montaigne, the wise philosophy of a secular civilisalion? With a heart the most tender, delicate, loving, and generous, a heart often in agony and torment, you had to make life endurable (we cannot doubt it) without any whisper of promise, or hope, or warning from Religion. Yes, in an age when the greatest mind of all, the mind of Pascal, proclaimed that the only help was in voluntary blindness, that the only chance was to hazard all on a bet at evens, you, Monsieur, refused to be blinded, or to pretend to see what you found invisible.

In Religion you beheld no promise of help. When the Jesuits and Jansenists of your time saw, each of them, in Tartufe the portrait of their rivals (as each of the laughable Marquises in your play conceived that you were girding at his neighbour), you all the while were mocking every credulous excess of Faith. In the sermons preached to Agnes we surely hear your private laughter; in the arguments for credulity which are presented to Don Juan by his valet we listen to the eternal self-defence of superst.i.tion. Thus, desolate of belief, you sought for the permanent element of life--precisely where Pascal recognised all that was most fleeting and unsubstantial--in _divertiss.e.m.e.nt_; in the pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies of mankind. Like the G.o.ds of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his b.u.t.ts, and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors.

Sganarelle, M. de Pourceaugnac, George Dandin, and the rest--our sympathy, somehow, is with them, after all; and M. de Pourceaugnac is a gentleman, despite his misadventures.