from the stigma of unworthiness. But to neither of these authors has been given the power to emancipate womanhood from the tyranny of her affections. In a darkened room of a cottage by the banks of the rising Floss, we see the battle fought out in the soul of a passionate girl; and we thrill with an exultation that we have not felt before, when out of the depths of her anguished soul, rise the old beloved words that A Kempis wrote with much striving of spirit in a far off age, now once again to bring forth the fruits of self-conquest, and abandonment to the lesson of the cross. Perhaps we have again, as in the case of Dickens, reached at once the source of Thackeray's weakness, and of his power. I glance at the pages of a late number of this Magazine; and in the words of another it seems to me that the answer stands revealed.* "How came error to invade a heart. and mind so perfect? It was through melancholy. I am not inventing this moral it is clearly expressed in the play itself, "O hateful Error, melancholy's child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? Because Brutus in his melancholy took to solitary brooding. . therefore he saw all things through a distorted medium of prejudice and of suspicion.' Whether Thackeray's nature was or was not in itself a sad one, we can at least believe that his faculty of attentive reflection was a source of sadness. You cannot search deeply into human motives and not feel sad. This earth, cursed for our sakes, has produced weeds other than the material ones. If we will not "lift our eyes towards the mountains, whence cometh help," how hopeless with melancholy must we grow at sight of the garbage by the wayside! 'Tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in sense possess it merely. And the brother beside us! this beauty of the world, this paragon of animals! What to us is this quintessence of dust? Man delights us not-no, nor woman neither! It is the soulsickness of Hamlet that finds but two things to love; one, a sad memory, haunting him from the grave; the other a man rare in one quality—that he is not passion's slave. As for the rest, the world See Father Kolbe's masterly analysis of the character of Brutus in his second paper on Shakspere's Julius Cæsar, in this Magazine, October, 1896, words quoted p. 507. VOL. XXV. No. 284 6 is a graveyard wherein shall one day lie buried all our best hopes and highest aspirations. Love! It does not exist, save in the phantoms begot of fever-what are we men that we should be loved? We are knaves all! believe none of us! And you delicate women, to whom, in a benighted age of monkish falsehoods and superstitions, so much nobility surrendered itself, when an idolatrous medieval church exalted you in worshipping one of your sex as the stainless Mother of the Eternal-what have we, pagan, enlightened, Protestant England, discovered you to be? Well, we have heard of your paintings too well enough; God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You are mere masses of nerves, instincts, moods: your beauty and grace, of which poets have sung-why yes! we know them too: you jig, you amble, and you lisp! Your kind and gentle natures, on whose breasts we would lay our weary heads, what are they? Amongst yourselves and in the fast seclusion of your boudoirs, how you nickname God's creatures, and point the finger at an erring sister! Go to! we will have no more of it! You are discovered, unmasked-and it hath made us mad! Do not let us deceive ourselves. If we read a book at all, as the good John Ruskin has taught us, let us so read it that we may obtain from it whatever is best, or whatever will help us to better our characters. Do not let us content ourselves merely with being amused-there is laughter down in hell. And if, having read Thackeray, we laugh because we see the blows rain thick on weak natures and delicate flesh, the laughter may well die on the lips and give us pause. Let us ask ourselves, is it well with us that we shall smile when he depreciates our whole human nature in the novel, as Hobbes has done in philosophy? It is easy to rail at the ill; it is hard to fight for the good. But some time, once and for all, we must determine which we shall do. If there are no ideals left us to fight for, we know our course: a philosopher is near at hand to supply us with full store of denial and of darkness out of the nethermost abyss. We may, if we choose, "clink the cannakin" to the ghoul-like mirth of Iago, whose highest function of pure womanhood as he sees it is "to suckle fools and chronicle small beer; " we may laugh with Thackeray at the stupidity of his favourite Amelia Sedley, whose highest virtue is blind worship of a coarse and selfish husband; or we may smile at Helen Pendennis the model mother, with her country prudery, narrow education, bitter jealousies, and harsh puritanism. These are his high types of womanhood; yet he invites you to laugh at them. Or we may on the other hand let our souls thrill to the wild sob of Imogen, as she flings herself on her husband's breast in a supreme sacrifice of love and forgiveness for the man who has wronged her so deeply in his inmost thought. The choice is given to us which we shall do. It would not be fair to emphasize this so much, did not Thackeray do so: he has left us no choice amongst his popular novels. Whatever we hold as most sacred in manhood or womanhood, with subtle touch or cynical laughter Thackeray too often refers to some ugly source. It is well that we should recognise this in the works of an author so often given to us to read when our minds are impressionable and delicate in moral structure, rather than resistent with the fibre of mature experience. Whatever his intentions were-and they may have been of the best -yet throughout the whole of his works where he himself stands revealed and takes on himself the office of lay preacher, the nature of the task which he set himself to do warped the nature of the true artist within him. His hand became "subdued to what it worked in," the follies, weaknesses, and vices of our nature, and his mind became coarsened by the garbage on which it preyed. No man can pry and probe for evil or weakness of motive underlying the everyday commonplace decencies of life as Thackeray has done, and hold his intellect free from the taint that comes on all those who judge, where judgment is unlawful. Nothing can be truer than that saying of Oliver Wendell Holmes, that "thoughts of a certain character seem to stain the very fibre of the thinking organ and affect in some degree the hue of every thought that passes through the discoloured tissue." And so, the calamity that befel this great writer may in a lesser degree befall those who, carried away by the supreme brilliance of his style, so terse and vivid, the scintillating flash of his wit, and the keen lash of his scorn, may in their turn become infected by the malignity of that psychical disease, of which, to speak in medical phrase, these powers of his are but the symptoms and the physical signs. MONTAGU GRIFFIN, B.A., M.B. (To be continued). GARNERED. THE wheaten stalks together bend, together pipe, My days grow ripe for mower's scythe, they say-grow ripe For reaper's hand, for sheaf and band, and miller's stone, My birds are hatched, and some are dead, and some have flown, My nests are cold and empty now, are damp with dew, I sing and sigh the livelong day, my corn-flowers blue My poppies died, the light winds sighed at morn, at eve The moon smiles down, the stars shine out, the night winds grieve, I bend and weave, I surge and heave, as heaves the tide, The sun hath turned my gold to rust, the mildew tried The spider spanned my slender stems in June days sweet, But once aware, I broke his snare, and at my feet I wore a silken hose in March spun by the sun, But now my shroud is in the loom, my days are done, My slender hyacinth flowers are dead, their stained leaves lie My head hangs low, my hour is come, and by and by The wasps came past and killed my bees, my honied bees A hawk flew by-a piteous cry!-and in the trees A linnet's heart he tore. The lambs moaned long, drawn from their dams, round field and fold Their mothers bleating sore, Now bring the scythe and bind the sheaf, my joys are old- ALICE ESMONDE. "We must have the place as nice as possible before Harry Moore and his grand wife come, mother; though I suppose we won't see much of them. But Philip Moore seems inclined to be very friendly." I “His brother Harry was agreeable too," said the Madam. thought both nice lads, not like the father; he had a bad manner, I think." "He would be agreeable if he thought it worth his while," said Ethna. "We were not grand enough for him." "Well, my dear, of course we are in a different class; so 'twas quite natural he should think us not grand enough." "I don't see why we should not be as good as they," said Ethna hotly. "We are the same blood. Because we are poorer, must they look down on us?" "My dear, have sense," replied the Madam, "and do not talk of looking up and looking down. One person is as respectable as another in the position in which God has placed him. I think there is a great want of independence in longing to get beyond ourselves. It is nobler to try and make the place we are in beautiful than to seek to get into a beautiful place." "Well, I suppose I am ambitious, and you are not, mother; and I want to climb up to where my grandfather stood; on the same level as the Moores of Moorescourt. I suppose it is not as easy for an eagle to be satisfied as a barn-door fowl." "But, my dear, why not take after your maternal lines ?" said the Madam smiling. "They did not roost upon the cliffs, but in very comfortable farm-yards." "I have the wings." said the girl laughing," and I long to spread them. And this is a lovely morning for taking flight," she |