Adventures among Books

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"_All was done that men may do_,
_And all was done in vain_,"--

"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must." This is the
very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. For now all is vain:
courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias,
the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing of
that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death. No play
not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; no
modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravity
of this ancient history. Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more
wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must.
Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in
the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in
words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph,
hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in the
same round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments, and
failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.

One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the
friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's
application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.

I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind
and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and
"The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.
Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no
way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence. The
true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but
there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal
niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship.
Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being
"idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for which
there is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves--our
common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men
severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of
historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal. Then there
is to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the pleasure of
despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek." Doubtless in that
there is great consolation.

It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion of
people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to them,
and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern poets whom one
meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all. Byron's Murray
ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson and Browning were
striking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his generation.
But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are attached to
poetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary verse. How did the
passion come to them? How long did it stay? When did the Muse say good-
bye? To myself, as I have remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott,
for one read Shakespeare as a child, rather in a kind of dream of
fairyland and enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness that
one was occupied with poetry. Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow,
who pleased one as more reflective and tenderly sentimental, while the
reflections were not so deep as to be puzzling. I remember how
"Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy, and how delightful was the free
forest life, and Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did not
then know that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was to
meet one later, in the "Kalewala." But, at that time, one had no
conscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such ringing verse as
Scott's, and Campbell's in his patriotic pieces. The pleasure and
enchantment of style first appealed to me, at about the age of fifteen,
when one read for the first time--

"So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."

Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When a child I
was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands where we
chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. "Is he a poet like Sir Walter
Scott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not like Sir Walter
Scott." Hearing no more of him, I was prowling among the books in an
ancient house, a rambling old place with a ghost-room, where I found
Tupper, and could not get on with "Proverbial Philosophy." Next I tried
Tennyson, and instantly a new light of poetry dawned, a new music was
audible, a new god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to be
dethroned. "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," Shelley says. I
am convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson is; use
has made him too familiar. The same hand has "raised the Table Round
again," that has written the sacred book of friendship, that has lulled
us with the magic of the "Lotus Eaters," and the melody of "Tithonus." He
has made us move, like his own Prince--

"Among a world of ghosts,
And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."

He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut and
reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused our
patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion but
he has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of love." Truly, the
Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, the
most learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pity
the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.

Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. It was
not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self. But
those exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little while
in a memory which has lost them long ago. I do remember me that I tried
some of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to
"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which I
straightway acquiesced. For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite
another. A good deal of mortification would be avoided if young men and
maidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity
and their ambition.

In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and
religious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots of the
pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I remember
little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single
sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghast
at justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling. These,
apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life. But
we were not told what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that
we had not passed through them. From most children, one trusts,
Calvinism ran like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who first
absorbed, and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter
Catechism!"

One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young men,
especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of
reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for
books _read all of them_. There is no other course. Let this be a
reply. No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.



II


People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. One may
venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his, or her,
first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in books there can
be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest of all; after boyhood
the bloom is off the literary rye. The first parcel of these garrulities
ended when the author left school, at about the age of seventeen. One's
literary equipment seems to have been then almost as complete as it ever
will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen.
As long as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first
fine careless rapture." Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal.
My own first essays were composed at school--for other boys. Not long
ago the gentleman who was then our English master wrote to me, informing
me he was my earliest public, and that he had never credited my younger
brother with the essays which that unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but
brotherly") was accustomed to present for his consideration.

On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the
University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch universities,
and was founded by a papal bull. St. Leonard's Hall, after having been a
_hospitium_ for pilgrims, a home for old ladies (about 1500), and a
college in the University, was now a kind of cross between a master's
house at school, and, as before 1750, a college. We had more liberty
than schoolboys, less than English undergraduates. In the Scotch
universities the men live scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at
St. Andrews, have they begun to dine together in hall. We had a common
roof, common dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket
clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weekly magazine. It was only a
manuscript affair, and was profusely illustrated. For the only time in
my life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to my
work, and cut out my fine passages. The editor's duty was to write most
of the magazine--to write essays, reviews (of books by the professors,
very severe), novels, short stories, poems, translations, also to
illustrate these, and to "fag" his friends for "copy" and drawings. A
deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, to have been the
chief characteristic of the periodical--flippancy and an abundant use of
the supernatural. These were the days of Lord' Lytton's "Strange Story,"
which I continue to think a most satisfactory romance. Inspired by Lord
Lytton, and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa,
Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus
and Plotinus.

These are really but disappointing writers. It soon became evident
enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions, that
the philosopher's stone was beyond the reach of the amateur. Iamblichus
is particularly obscure and tedious. To any young beginner I would
recommend Petrus de Abano, as the most adequate and gruesome of the
school, for "real deevilry and pleesure," while in the wilderness of
Plotinus there are many beautiful passages and lofty speculations. Two
winters in the Northern University, with the seamy side of school life
left behind, among the kindest of professors--Mr. Sellar, Mr. Ferrier,
Mr. Shairp--in the society of the warden, Mr. Rhoades, and of many dear
old friends, are the happiest time in my life. This was true literary
leisure, even if it was not too well employed, and the _religio loci_
should be a liberal education in itself. We had debating societies--I
hope I am now forgiven for an attack on the character of Sir William
Wallace, _latro quidam_, as the chronicler calls him, "a certain
brigand." But I am for ever writing about St. Andrews--writing
inaccurately, too, the Scotch critics declare. "Farewell," we cried,
"dear city of youth and dream," eternally dear and sacred.

Here we first made acquaintance with Mr. Browning, guided to his works by
a parody which a lady wrote in our little magazine. Mr. Browning was not
a popular poet in 1861. His admirers were few, a little people, but they
were not then in the later mood of reverence, they did not awfully
question the oracles, as in after years. They read, they admired, they
applauded, on occasion they mocked, good-humouredly. The book by which
Mr. Browning was best known was the two green volumes of "Men and Women."
In these, I still think, is the heart of his genius beating most
strenuously and with an immortal vitality. Perhaps this, for its
compass, is the collection of poetry the most various and rich of modern
English times, almost of any English times. But just as Mr. Fitzgerald
cared little for what Lord Tennyson wrote after 1842, so I have never
been able to feel quite the same enthusiasm for Mr. Browning's work after
"Men and Women." He seems to have more influence, though that influence
is vague, on persons who chiefly care for thought, than on those who
chiefly care for poetry. I have met a lady who had read "The Ring and
the Book" often, the "Lotus Eaters" not once. Among such students are
Mr. Browning's disciples of the Inner Court: I dwell but in the Court of
the Gentiles. While we all--all who attempt rhyme--have more or less
consciously imitated the manner of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. Browning are uncommonly scarce. He is
lucky enough not to have had the seed of his flower stolen and sown
everywhere till--

"Once again the people
Called it but a weed."

The other new poet of these days was Mr. Clough, who has many
undergraduate qualities. But his peculiar wistful scepticism in religion
had then no influence on such of us as were still happily in the ages of
faith. Anything like doubt comes less of reading, perhaps, than of the
sudden necessity which, in almost every life, puts belief on her trial,
and cries for an examination of the creeds hitherto held upon authority,
and by dint of use and wont. In a different way one can hardly care for
Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a boy, till one has come under the influence of
Oxford. So Mr. Browning was the only poet added to my pantheon at St.
Andrews, though Macaulay then was admitted and appeared to be more the
true model of a prose writer than he seems in the light of later
reflection. Probably we all have a period of admiring Carlyle almost
exclusively. College essays, when the essayist cares for his work, are
generally based on one or the other. Then they recede into the
background. As for their thought, we cannot for ever remain disciples.
We begin to see how much that looks like thought is really the expression
of temperament, and how individual a thing temperament is, how each of us
must construct his world for himself, or be content to wait for an answer
and a synthesis "in that far-off divine event to which the whole creation
moves." So, for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a
"masterless man" swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial
Stoic of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

Perhaps nothing in education encourages this incredulity about "masters"
of thought like the history of philosophy. The professor of moral
philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar. His
lectures on "The History of Greek Philosophy" were an admirable
introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the original
authorities, at Oxford. Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men's ideas
so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had
discovered the secret. We were physicists with Thales and that
pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for whom Sydney Smith
confessed his lack of admiration. We were now Empedocleans, now
believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle.
In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently
disintegrated him in the next. "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," as Mr. T.
H. Green used to say at Oxford. He himself became an Amurath, a sultan
of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered
clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere. At Oxford, when one went there, one found
Mr. Green already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young
men. He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him
eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "_He knows_! _he knows_!"
What was it that Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret? To a mind
already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from
the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack
of translating St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we
then believed to be Hegelian. Hegel we knew, not in the original German,
but in lectures and in translations. Reasoning from these inadequate
premises, it seemed to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr.
Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in
evolution, the something within the wheels. But this was only a personal
impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations in
general, merely in the vague popular way. Mr. Green's pupils could
generally write in his own language, more or less, and could "envisage"
things, as we said then, from his point of view. To do this was
believed, probably without cause, to be useful in examinations. For one,
I could never take it much more seriously, never believed that "the
Absolute," as the _Oxford Spectator_ said, had really been "got into a
corner." The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often
has escaped from that situation. Somewhere in an old notebook I believe
I have a portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with
Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table. Perhaps he was the
last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun with Wycliffe,
among whom Newman's is a famous name, that were successively accepted at
Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd guess at the
secret.

"None the less
I still came out no wiser than I went."

All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won their
hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some peculiar
views of theology and philosophy. Doubtless it was the same with
Socrates, with Buddha. To be like them, not to believe with them, is the
thing needful. But the younger we are, the less, perhaps, we see this
clearly, and we persuade ourselves that there is some mystery in these
men's possession, some piece of knowledge, some method of thinking which
will lead us to certainty and to peace. Alas, their secret is
incommunicable, and there is no more a philosophic than there is a royal
road to the City.

This may seem a digression from Adventures among Books into the Book of
Human Life. But while much of education is still orally communicated by
lectures and conversations, many thoughts which are to be found in books,
Greek or German, reach us through the hearing. There are many pupils who
can best be taught in this way; but, for one, if there be aught that is
desirable in a book, I then, as now, preferred, if I could, to go to the
book for it.

Yet it is odd that one remembers so little of one's undergraduate
readings, apart from the constant study of the ancient classics, which
might not be escaped. Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle, in moral
thought and in politics, made perhaps the deepest impression. Probably
politicians are the last people who read Aristotle's "Politics." The
work is, indeed, apt to disenchant one with political life. It is
melancholy to see the little Greek states running the regular
round--monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy in all its degrees, the
"ultimate democracy" of plunder, lawlessness, license of women, children,
and slaves, and then tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power.
In politics, too, there is no secret of success, of the happy life for
all. There is no such road to the City, either democratic or royal. This
is the lesson which Aristotle's "Polities" impresses on us, this and the
impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on mankind.

"Whate'er is best administered is best." These are some of the
impressions made at Oxford by the studies of the schools, the more or
less inevitable "curricoolum," as the Scotch gentleman pronounced the
word. But at Oxford, for most men, the regular work of the schools is
only a small part of the literary education. People read, in different
degrees, according to their private tastes. There are always a few men,
at least, who love literary studies for their own sake, regardless of
lectures and of "classes." In my own time I really believe you could
know nothing which might not "pay" in the schools and prove serviceable
in examinations. But a good deal depended on being able to use your
knowledge by way of literary illustration. Perhaps the cleverest of my
own juniors, since very well known in letters, did not use his own
special vein, even when he had the chance, in writing answers to
questions in examinations. Hence his academic success was much below his
deserts. For my own part, I remember my tutor saying, "Don't write as if
you were writing for a penny paper." Alas, it was "a prediction, cruel,
smart." But, "as yet no sin was dreamed."

At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in English
and Latin. This might have been good literary training, but I fear the
essays were not taken very seriously. The chief object was to make the
late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes. But nobody ever
succeeded. He was experienced in trash. As for what may be called
unacademic literature, there were not many essays in that art. There
have been very literary generations, as when Corydon and Thyrsis "lived
in Oxford as if it had been a great country house;" so Corydon confessed.
Probably many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr.
Swinburne's early works were undergraduate poems. A later generation
produced "Love in Idleness," a very pleasing volume. But the gods had
not made us poetical. In those days I remember picking up, in the Union
Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, "Atalanta in Calydon," by A. C.
Swinburne. Only once had I seen Mr. Swinburne's name before, signing a
brief tale in _Once a Week_. "Atalanta" was a revelation; there was a
new and original poet here, a Balliol man, too. In my own mind
"Atalanta" remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr.
Swinburne's many poems. He instantly became the easily parodied model of
undergraduate versifiers.

Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success. As yet
we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold's verses. I fell in love with them,
one long vacation, and never fell out of love. He is not, and cannot be,
the poet of the wide world, but his charm is all the more powerful over
those whom he attracts and subdues. He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford,
and his "Scholar Gypsy" is our "Lycidas." At this time he was Professor
of Poetry; but, alas, he lectured just at the hour when wickets were
pitched on Cowley Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at
his humorous prophecies of England's fate, which are coming all too true.
So many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be "cut," that we
abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak. For the rest
there was no "literary movement" among contemporary undergraduates. They
read for the schools, and they rowed and played cricket. We had no
poets, except the stroke of the Corpus boat, Mr. Bridges, and he
concealed his courtship of the Muse. Corpus is a small college, but Mr.
Bridges pulled its boat to the proud place of second on the river. B. N.
C. was the head boat, and even B. N. C. did Corpus bump. But the triumph
was brief. B. N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new ship, drank the
foaming grape, and bumped Corpus back. I think they went head next year,
but not that year. Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was doing
noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.

There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse, but nobody knew
anybody who wrote in it. A comic journal was started; I remember the
pride with which when a freshman, I received an invitation to join its
councils as an artist. I was to do the caricatures of all things. Now,
methought, I shall meet the Oxford wits of whom I have read. But the
wits were unutterably disappointing, and the whole thing died early and
not lamented. Only one piece of academic literature obtained and
deserved success. This was _The Oxford Spectator_, a most humorous
little periodical, in shape and size like Addison's famous journal. The
authors were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr. Humphry
Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete, who died early. There have been
good periodicals since; many amusing things occur in the _Echoes from the
Oxford Magazine_, but the _Spectator_ was the flower of academic
journals. "When I look back to my own experience," says the _Spectator_,
"I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon 'the mindful
tablets of my soul.' And yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell
and sound, and sight and thought. The wonderful scent of the meadow air
just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty
boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set
the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of 'ten seconds more,' all down
from the green barge to the lasher. And yet that unrivalled moment is
only typical of all the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure
are concentrated there."