and never be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they must have been feeble fellowscreatures made of putty and packthread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in their composition; we may sympathize with their parents, but there is not much cause to go into mourning for themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of mankind. When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I thought when I was your age," he has proved the youth's case. Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous generations and riveting another link to the chain of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives. By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the following little tale. A child who A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without any abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen; already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the prison-house were clos ing about him with a vengeance. There is nothing more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be wiser; I shall conform for a while to the ways of their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Fréjus, he remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into effect. There was a worm in the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor. You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel. In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last. entirely right. Mankind, after centuries. of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the center, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental water. How if there were no center at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth. without end or issue? I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation which I take the liberty to reproduce. "What I advance is true," said one. "But not the whole truth," answered the other. "Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir, there is no such thing as the whole. truth!" Indeed there is nothing so evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is one long illustration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into. our backward intelligences. We never pause for a moment's consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into our ears that this or that question has only 1 one possible solution; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other side and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody exactly right in his Institutes, and hot-headed Knox 2 is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side in his library in Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in the Church. Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps 1 A famous Swiss the A Scotch theologian and logian. reformer. that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference? I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no center to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its center is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices. VICTORIAN LYRICS THE poets who wrote after the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 were conscious of new influences that were making themselves felt in the social life of England. Most significant of these was the rise of the scientific spirit. Science brought inventions that revolutionized industry, but it went still further into the life of man by considering the relation of the individual to his environment and by questioning the very foundations upon which religious faith had been built. The age became more reflective and speculative and the poets grew more concerned with the significance of life. This was particularly true of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, the two greatest of the poetic spokesmen for this period, and of Matthew Arnold as well. Tennyson was a conservative by training and valued highly the greatness of England's past. To him the poet was a seer, an interpreter of life who might wield great influence. He believed in traditional morality and although the skepticism of his day challenged him, he fought his way to a belief in God and in the necessity of faith in matters that are beyond human knowledge. Artistically his verse is in the line of tradition from Spenser and Keats, beautiful in detail, rich in diction, and melodious. Browning's interest is always in the individual. To him the great poet was one who "chronicled the stages of all life." Himself a liberal, he went his individual way in poetry and developed a new form, the dramatic lyric. He lets some clearly imagined character reveal the secrets of his soul through the narration of some emotional or dramatic climax of his life. There is the same emotional intensity, the same unity of effect that is to be found in the lyric; the difference lies in the fact that the poet. has followed the method of the dramatist in putting the emotion into the mouth of another. From these lyrics, however, one can get a realization of Browning's zest for life, his liberalism, his optimism, and his triumphant belief in immortality. Matthew Arnold, keen student of life, never reached Tennyson's faith. To him the world was full of disillusionment; man must find compensation in self-mastery and in the development of character. Dignity and poise are evident in his manner of poetic expression. There were some Victorian poets to whom the present was not alluring and for whom the realities lay only in the imagination of man. William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were among them, artists who sought to create beauty for its own sake. Algernon Charles Swinburne was a pure lyrist. He sang with enthusiasm of the elemental things in Nature and in man, of Fate, of romantic passion, of the love of children, and, most inspiringly of all, of freedom. It is the soul of the poet, not thought and reflection, that he gives us, poured forth in a melody that is individually his own. George Meredith, poet and novelist, was a man of great intellectual and imaginative power. With flashes of insight he reveals what is below the surface, in poems that show a fine sense of form. Modern Love is a sonnet-like sequence largely autobiographical; each of the lyrics here given, however, is complete in itself. |