mantle, the last garment which a poet respects, he makes a rag to stamp upon, to wring, to make holes in, out of sheer wantonness. At the most touching moment of Haidée's love, he vents a buffoonery. He concludes an ode with caricatures. He is Faust in the first verse, and Mephistopheles in the second. He employs, in the midst of tenderness or of murder, penny-print witticisms, trivialities, gossip, with a pamphleteer's vilification and a buffoon's whimsicalities. He lays bare the poetic method, asks himself where he has got to, counts the stanzas already done, jokes the Muse, Pegasus, and the whole epic stud, as though he wouldn't give twopence for them. Again, what remains? Himself, he alone, standing amidst all this ruin. It is he who speaks here; his characters are but screens; half the time even he pushes them aside, to occupy the stage. He lavishes upon us his opinions, recollections, angers, tastes; his poem is a conversation, a confidence, with the ups and downs, the rudeness and freedom of a conversation and a confidence, almost like the olographic journal, in which, by night, at his writing-table, he opened his heart and discharged his feelings. Never was seen in such a clear glass the birth of a lively thought, the tumult of a great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, always impassioned, inexhaustibly fertile and creative, in whom suddenly, successively, finished and adorned, bloomed all human emotions and ideas,—sad, gay, lofty, low, hustling one another, mutually impeded like swarms of insects who go humming and feeding on flowers and in the mud. He may say what he will; willingly or unwillingly we listen to him; let him leap from sublime to burlesque, we leap then with him. He has so much wit, so fresh a wit, so sudden, so biting, such a prodigality of knowledge, ideas, images picked up from the four corners of the horizon, in heaps and masses, that we are captivated, transported beyond limits; we cannot dream of resisting. Too vigorous, and hence unbridled,—that is the word which ever recurs when we speak of Byron; too vigorous against others and himself, and so unbridled, that after spending his life in braving the world, and his poetry in depicting revolt, he can only find the fulfilment of his talent and the satisfaction of his heart, in a poem in arms against all human and poetic conventions. To live so, a man must be great, but he must also become deranged. There is a derangement of heart and mind in the style of Don Juan, as in Swift. When a man jests amidst his tears, it is because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm, and you see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness; in another, excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was exhausted in him. The last cantos of Don Juan drag: the gaiety became forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored. A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his hands in the drama he only attained to powerful declamation, his characters had no life; when he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him; he went to Greece in search of action, and only found death. VI. So lived and so ended this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey. Around him, like a hecatomb, lie the rest, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties and their immoderate desires,-some extinguished in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work; these driven to madness or suicide; those beaten down by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their too acute or aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their age, and we stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. We were sad like them, and like them inclined to revolt. The institution of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them; the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without contenting it. In this wideopen career, the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity, and the sceptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the sceptic, attacked by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, delivered his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea sprang, the centre of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age,-that there is, namely, a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement. What advice have they given us for its remedy? They were great; were they wise? . 'Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you; if your machine breaks, so much the worse!' Cultivate your garden, bury yourself in a little circle, re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden.' 'Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and your conduct to handbooks.' 'Make your way; aspire to power, honours, wealth.' Such are the various replies of artists and citizens, Christians, and men of the world. Are they replies? And what do they propose but to satiate one's self, to become beasts, to turn out of the way, to forget? There is another and a deeper answer, which Goethe was the first to give, which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the labour and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the subject-matter of future literature: Try to understand yourself, and things in general.' A strange reply, seeming barely new, whose scope we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet men will feel their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets. For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For a long time they will bear like fetters the necessities which they must embrace as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half be quit of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at calm. All we can heal at present is our intellect; we have no hold upon our sentiments. But we have a right to conceive for others the hopes which we no longer entertain for ourselves, and to prepare for our descendants the happiness which we shall never enjoy. Brought up in a more wholesome air, they mayhap will have a wholesomer heart. The reformation of ideas ends by reforming the rest, and the light of the mind produces serenity of heart. Hitherto, in our judgments on men, we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for certain truths the noble dreams of our imagination and the imperious suggestions of our heart. We have bound ourselves to the partiality of religious divinations, and the inexactness of literary divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines by our instincts and our vexations. Science at last approaches, and approaches man; it has gone beyond the visible and palpable world of stars, stones, plants, amongst which man disdainfully confined her. It reaches the heart, provided with exact and penetrating implements, whose justness has been proved, and their reach measured by three hundred years of experience. Thought, with its development and rank, its structure and relations, its deep material roots, its infinite growth through history, its lofty bloom at the summit of things, becomes the object of science, an object which, sixty years ago, it foresaw in Germany, and which, slowly and surely probed, by the same methods as the physical world, will be transformed before our eyes, as the physical world has been transformed. It is already being transformed, and we have left behind us the point of view of Byron and our poets. No, man is not an abortion or a monster; no, the business of poetry is not to revolt or defame him. He is in his place, and completes a chain. Let us watch him grow and increase, and we shall cease to rail at or curse him. He, like everything else, is a product, and as such it is right he should be what he is. His innate imperfection is in order, like the constant abortion of a stamen in a plant, like the fundamental irregularity of four facets in a crystal. What we took for a deformity, is a form; what seemed to us the contradiction, is the accomplishment of a law. Human reason and virtue have as their elements animal instincts and images, as living forms have for theirs physical laws, as organic matters have for theirs mineral substances. What wonder if virtue or reason, like living form or organic matter, sometimes fails or decomposes, since like them, and like every superior and complex existence, they have for support and control inferior and simple forces, which, according to circumstances, now maintain it by their harmony, now mar it by their discord? What wonder if the elements of existence, like those of quantity, receive, from their very nature, the irresistible laws which constrain and reduce them to a certain species and order of formation? Who will rise up against geometry? Who, especially, will rise up against a living geometry? Who will not, on the other hand, feel moved with admiration at the sight of those grand powers which, situated at the heart of things, incessantly urge the blood through the limbs of the old world, disperse the showers in the infinite network of arteries, and spread over the whole surface the eternal flower of youth and beauty? Who, in short, will not feel himself ennobled, when he finds that this pile of laws results in a regular series of forms, that matter has thought for its goal, and that this ideal from which, through so many errors, all the aspirations of men depend, is also the centre whereto converge, through so many obstacles, all the forces of the universe? In this employment of science, and in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to discover them. CHAPTER III. The Past and the Present. I. The past-The Saxon invasion-How it established the race and determined the character-The Norman Conquest-How it modified the character and established the Constitution-The Renaissance-How it manifested the national mind-The Reformation-How it fixed the ideal-The Restoration-How it imported classical culture and diverted the national mind -The Revolution-How it developed classical culture and restored the national mind-The modern age-How European ideas widened the national mould. II. The present-Concordances of observation and history-Sky-Soil-Products-Man-Commerce-Industry — Agriculture-Society-FamilyArts-Philosophy-Religion- What forces have produced the present civilisation, and are working out the future civilisation. H $ 1. AVING reached the limits of this long review, we can now embrace in one prospect the aggregate of English civilisation: everything is connected there: a few powers and a few primitive circumstances have produced the rest, and we have only to pursue their continuous action in order to comprehend the nation and its history, its past and its present. At the beginning, and furthest removed in the region of causes, comes the race. A whole people, Angles and Saxons, destroyed, hunted out, or enslaved the old inhabitants, wiped out the Roman culture, settled themselves alone and pure, and, amongst the later Danish ravagers, only encountered a new reinforcement of the same blood. This is the primitive stock of its substance and innate properties is to spring almost the whole future growth. At this time, and as they then were, alone in their island, the Angles and Saxons attained a development such as it was, defaced, brutal, and yet solid. They ate and drank, built and cleared ground, and, in particular, multiplied the scattered tribes who crossed the sea in leather boats, became a strong compact nation,-three hundred thousand families, rich, with store of cattle, abundantly provided with corporal subsistence, partly at rest in the security of social life, with a king, respected and frequent : |