Man is a moral animal, and can, and ought to, arrive at great natural beauty of character. But this is simply to obey the law of his nature--the law of his flesh; and no progress along that line can project him into the spiritual sphere. Natural Law, p. 382.
There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which renders the hypothesis that the course of sentient nature is dictated by malevolence quite untenable. A vast multitude of pleasures, and these among the purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good which are to all appearance unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who experience them, few delights can be more entrancing than such as are afforded by natural beauty, or by the arts, and especially by music; but they are products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is probable that they are known, in any considerable degree, to but a very small proportion of mankind.
What prompts thee, O man, to abandon thy habitations in the city, to leave thy parents and friends, and to seek rural spots in the mountains and valleys, if it be not the natural beauty of the world, which, if thou reflectest, thou dost enjoy solely by means of the sense of sight? And if the poet wishes to be called a painter in this connection also, why didst thou not take the descriptions of places made by the poet and remain at home without exposing thyself to the heat of the sun? Oh! would not this have been more profitable and less fatiguing to thee, since this can be done in the cool without motion and danger of illness? But the soul could not enjoy the benefit of the eyes, the windows of its dwelling, and it could not note the character of joyous {76} places; it could not see the shady valleys watered by the sportiveness of the winding rivers; it could not see the various flowers, which with their colours make a harmony for the eye, and all the other objects which the eye can apprehend. But if the painter in the cold and rigorous season of winter can evoke for thee the landscapes, variegated and otherwise, in which thou didst experience thy happiness; if near some fountain thou canst see thyself, a lover with thy beloved, in the flowery fields, under the soft shadow of the budding boughs, wilt thou not experience a greater pleasure than in hearing the same effect described by the poet?
The distinctions drawn between men are commonly based on the outward appearance of goodness or badness, on the ground of moral beauty or moral deformity--is this classification scientific? Or is there a deeper distinction between the Christian and the not-a-Christian as fundamental as that between the organic and the inorganic? Natural Law, p. 374.
October 10th What is the essential difference between the Christian and the not-a-Christian, between the spiritual beauty and the moral beauty? It is the distinction between the Organic and the Inorganic. Moral beauty is the product of the natural man, spiritual beauty of the spiritual man. Natural Law, p. 380.
If any one choose to claim that the mineral beauty, the fleshly beauty, the natural moral beauty, is all he covets, he is entitled to his claim. To be good and true, pure and benevolent in the moral sphere, are high and, so far, legitimate objects in life. If he deliberately stop here, he is at liberty to do so. But what he is not entitled to do is to call himself a Christian, or to claim to discharge the functions peculiar to the Christian life. Natural Law, p. 382.
"You asked me about your faces, and what I could read in them; I will tell you with the greatest pleasure. You, Adelaida Ivanovna, have a very happy face; it is the most sympathetic of the three. Not to speak of your natural beauty, one can look at your face and say to one's self, 'She has the face of a kind sister.' You are simple and merry, but you can see into another's heart very quickly. That's what I read in your
Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half-a-mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!
Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.
Painting manifests its essence to thee in an instant of time,--its essence by the visual faculty, the very means by which the perception apprehends natural objects, and in the same duration of time,--and in this space of time the sense-satisfying harmony of the proportion of the parts composing the whole is formed. And poetry apprehends the same things, but by a sense inferior to that of the eyesight, which bears the images of the objects named to the perception with greater confusion and less speed. Not in such wise acts the eye (the true intermediary between the object and the perception), for it immediately communicates the true semblance and image of what is represented before it with the greatest accuracy; whence that proportion arises called harmony, which with sweet concord delights the sense in the same way as the harmony of diverse voices delights the ear; and this harmony is less worthy than that which delights the eye, because for every part of it that is born a part dies, and it dies as fast as it is born. This {74} cannot occur in the case of the eye; because if thou presentest a beautiful living mortal to the eye, composed of a harmony of fair limbs, its beauty is not so transient nor so quickly destroyed as that of music; on the contrary it has permanent duration, and allows thee to behold and consider it; and it is not reborn as in the case of music which is played many times over, nor will it weary thee: on the contrary, thou becomest enamoured with it, and the result it produces is that all the senses, together with the eye, would wish to possess it, and it seems that they would wish to compete with the eye: it appears that the mouth desires it for itself, if the mouth can be considered as a sense; the ear takes pleasure in hearing its beauty; the sense of touch would like to penetrate into all its pores; the nose also would like to receive the air it exhales.
With Nature as the symbol of all of harmony and beauty that is known to man, must we still talk of the supernatural, not as a convenient word, but as a different order of world, . . . where the Reign of Mystery supersedes the Reign of Law? Natural Law, Introduction, p. 6.
Our efforts after Christian growth seem only a succession of failures, and, instead of rising into the beauty of holiness, our life is a daily heart-break and humiliation. Natural Law, Growth, p. 125.
Keats has been promoted by modern criticism to a place beside Shakespeare. The faultless force and the profound subtlety of his deep and cunning instinct for the absolute expression of absolute natural beauty can hardly be questioned or overlooked; and this is doubtless the one main distinctive gift or power which denotes him as a poet among all his equals, and gives him a right to rank for ever beside Coleridge and Shelley. As a man, the two admirers who did best service to his memory were Lord Houghton and Matthew Arnold. These alone, among all of their day who have written of him without the disadvantage or advantage of a personal acquaintance, have clearly seen and shown us the manhood of the man. That ridiculous and degrading legend which imposed so strangely on the generous tenderness of Shelley, while evoking the very natural and allowable laughter of Byron, fell to dust at once for ever on the appearance of Lord Houghton's biography, which gave perfect proof to all time that "men have died and worms have eaten them" but not for fear of critics or through suffering inflicted by reviews. Somewhat too sensually sensitive Keats may have been in either capacity, but the nature of the man was as far as was the quality of the poet above the pitiful level of a creature whose soul could "let itself be snuffed out by an article"; and, in fact, owing doubtless to the accident of a death which followed so fast on his early appearance and his dubious reception as a poet, the insolence and injustice of his reviewers in general have been comparatively and even considerably exaggerated. Except from the chief fountain-head of professional ribaldry then open in the world of literary journalism, no reek of personal insult arose to offend his nostrils; and the tactics of such unwashed malignants were inevitably suicidal; the references to his brief experiment of apprenticeship to a surgeon which are quoted from _Blackwood_, in the shorter as well as in the longer memoir by Lord Houghton, could leave no bad odour behind them save what might hang about men's yet briefer recollection of his assailant's unmemorable existence. The false Keats, therefore, whom Shelley pitied and Byron despised would have been, had he ever existed, a thing beneath compassion or contempt. That such a man could have had such a genius is almost evidently impossible; and yet more evident is the proof which remains on everlasting record that none was ever further from the chance of decline to such degradation than the real and actual man who made that name immortal. (A. C. S.) Entry: KEATS
DE TABLEY, JOHN BYRNE LEICESTER WARREN, 3rd BARON (1835-1895), English poet, eldest son of George Fleming Leicester (afterwards Warren), 2nd Baron De Tabley, was born on the 26th of April 1835. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1856 with second classes in classics and in law and modern history. In the autumn of 1858 he went to Turkey as unpaid attaché to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and two years later was called to the bar. He became an officer in the Cheshire Yeomanry, and unsuccessfully contested Mid-Cheshire in 1868 as a Liberal. After his father's second marriage in 1871 he removed to London, where he became a close friend of Tennyson for several years. From 1877 till his succession to the title in 1887 he was lost to his friends, assuming the life of a recluse. It was not till 1892 that he returned to London life, and enjoyed a sort of renaissance of reputation and friendship. During the later years of his life Lord De Tabley made many new friends, besides reopening old associations, and he almost seemed to be gathering around him a small literary company when his health broke, and he died on the 22nd of November 1895 at Ryde, in his sixty-first year. He was buried at Little Peover in Cheshire. Although his reputation will live almost exclusively as that of a poet, De Tabley was a man of many studious tastes. He was at one time an authority on numismatics; he wrote two novels; published _A Guide to the Study of Book Plates_ (1880); and the fruit of his careful researches in botany was printed posthumously in his elaborate _Flora of Cheshire_ (1899). Poetry, however, was his first and last passion, and to that he devoted the best energies of his life. De Tabley's first impulse towards poetry came from his friend George Fortescue, with whom he shared a close companionship during his Oxford days, and whom he lost, as Tennyson lost Hallam, within a few years of their taking their degrees. Fortescue was killed by falling from the mast of Lord Drogheda's yacht in November 1859, and this gloomy event plunged De Tabley into deep depression. Between 1859 and 1862 De Tabley issued four little volumes of pseudonymous verse (by G. F. Preston), in the production of which he had been greatly stimulated by the sympathy of Fortescue. Once more he assumed a pseudonym--his _Praeterita_ (1863) bearing the name of William Lancaster. In the next year he published _Eclogues and Monodramas_, followed in 1865 by _Studies in Verse_. These volumes all displayed technical grace and much natural beauty; but it was not till the publication of _Philoctetes_ in 1866 that De Tabley met with any wide recognition. _Philoctetes_ bore the initials "M.A.," which, to the author's dismay, were interpreted as meaning Matthew Arnold. He at once disclosed his identity, and received the congratulations of his friends, among whom were Tennyson, Browning and Gladstone. In 1867 he published _Orestes_, in 1870 _Rehearsals_ and in 1873 _Searching the Net_. These last two bore his own name, John Leicester Warren. He was somewhat disappointed by their lukewarm reception, and when in 1876 _The Soldier of Fortune_, a drama on which he had bestowed much careful labour, proved a complete failure, he retired altogether from the literary arena. It was not until 1893 that he was persuaded to return, and the immediate success in that year of his _Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical_, encouraged him to publish a second series in 1895, the year of his death. The genuine interest with which these volumes were welcomed did much to lighten the last years of a somewhat sombre and solitary life. His posthumous poems were collected in 1902. The characteristics of De Tabley's poetry are pre-eminently magnificence of style, derived from close study of Milton, sonority, dignity, weight and colour. His passion for detail was both a strength and a weakness: it lent a loving fidelity to his description of natural objects, but it sometimes involved him in a loss of simple effect from over-elaboration of treatment. He was always a student of the classic poets, and drew much of his inspiration directly from them. He was a true and a whole-hearted artist, who, as a brother poet well said, "still climbed the clear cold altitudes of song." His ambition was always for the heights, a region naturally ice-bound at periods, but always a country of clear atmosphere and bright, vivid outlines. Entry: DE
HERVEY, JAMES (1714-1758), English divine, was born at Hardingstone, near Northampton, on the 26th of February 1714, and was educated at the grammar school of Northampton, and at Lincoln College, Oxford. Here he came under the influence of John Wesley and the Oxford methodists; ultimately, however, while retaining his regard for the men and his sympathy with their religious aims, he adopted a thoroughly Calvinistic creed, and resolved to remain in the Anglican Church. Having taken orders in 1737, he held several curacies, and in 1752 succeeded his father in the family livings of Weston Favell and Collingtree. He was never robust, but was a good parish priest and a zealous writer. His style is often bombastic, but he displays a rare appreciation of natural beauty, and his simple piety made him many friends. His earliest work, _Meditations and Contemplations_, said to have been modelled on Robert Boyle's _Occasional Reflexions on various Subjects_, within fourteen years passed through as many editions. _Theron and Aspasio, or a series of Letters upon the most important and interesting Subjects_, which appeared in 1755, and was equally well received, called forth some adverse criticism even from Calvinists, on account of tendencies which were considered to lead to antinomianism, and was strongly objected to by Wesley in his _Preservative against unsettled Notions in Religion_. Besides carrying into England the theological disputes to which the _Marrow of Modern Divinity_ had given rise in Scotland, it also led to what is known as the Sandemanian controversy as to the nature of saving faith. Hervey died on the 25th of December 1758. Entry: HERVEY
LAUNCESTON, the second city of Tasmania, in the county of Cornwall, on the river Tamar, 40 m. from the N. coast of the island, and 133 m. by rail N. by W. of Hobart. The city lies amid surroundings of great natural beauty in a valley enclosed by lofty hills. Cora Linn, about 6 m. distant, a deep gorge of the North Esk river, the Punch Bowl and Cataract Gorge, over which the South Esk falls in a magnificent cascade, joining the North Esk to form the Tamar, are spots famed throughout the Australian commonwealth for their romantic beauty. The city is the commercial capital of northern Tasmania, the river Tamar being navigable up to the town for vessels of 4000 tons. The larger ships lie in midstream and discharge into lighters, while vessels of 2000 tons can berth alongside the wharves on to which the railway runs. Launceston is a well-planned, pleasant town, lighted by electricity, with numerous parks and squares and many fine buildings. The post office, the custom house, the post office savings bank and the Launceston bank form an attractive group; the town hall is used exclusively for civic purposes, public meetings and social functions being held in an elegant building called the Albert hall. There are also a good art gallery, a theatre and a number of fine churches, one of which, the Anglican church of St John, dates from 1824. The city, which attained that rank in 1889, has two attractive suburbs, Invermay and Trevallyn; it has a racecourse at Mowbray 2 m. distant, and is the centre and port of an important fruit-growing district. Pop. of the city proper (1901) 18,022, of the city and suburbs 21,180. Entry: LAUNCESTON
SOCIETIES OF SPECIAL STUDY, PRACTICE AND PROTECTION.--Under this head should be placed those associations which affect a cult, or are composed of particular workers, or which protect public or private interests. Perhaps the chief of the first kind is the Japan Society, which, since its inception in 1892, has been joined by over 1350 members interested in matters relating to Japanese art and industries. The Dürer Society, formed in 1897, has for its main object the reproduction of works by Albrecht Dürer, and his German and Italian contemporaries. The Vasari Society, founded in 1905, works in harmony with the Arundel Club and the Dürer Society, reproducing drawings by the Old Masters. In this category of special study may also be placed the Society for the Encouragement and Preservation of Indian Art, the Egypt Exploration Fund, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Of the societies of special practice it has already been noticed that some are purely exhibiting associations, such as the Portrait Painters, the Pastel Society, and the two miniature bodies. The formation of the Society of Mezzotint Engravers in 1898 is an example of the leaguing together of particular workers to call attention to their interests. Original and translator engravers, together with collectors and connoisseurs, comprise the membership. The decaying art of wood engraving is also fostered by the International Society of Wood Engravers, and the Society of Designers, founded in 1896, safeguards the interests of professional designers for applied art, without holding exhibitions. Special practice and protection are also considered by the Society of Illustrators, composed of artists who work in black and white for the illustrated press. This society was inaugurated in 1894, and fifteen of the members of the committee must be active workers in illustration. As an instance of the tendency of art workers to combine, the Society of Art Masters is a good illustration. This is an association of teachers of art schools, controlled by the art branch of the Board of Education, and has a membership of over 300. Good work of another kind occupies the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. The council of the Trust includes representatives of such bodies as the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Universities, Kyrle Society, Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Selborne Society. Entry: SOCIETIES
From 1660 to 1760 the English mind was still much occupied in shaking off the last traces of feudality. The crown, the parliament, the manor and the old penal code were left, it is true: but the old tenures and gild-brotherhoods, the old social habits, miracles, arts, faith, religion and letters were irrevocably gone. The attempt of the young Chevalier in 1745 was a complete anachronism, and no sooner was this generally felt to be so than men began to regret that it should so be. Men began to describe as "grand" and "picturesque" scenery hitherto summarized as "barren mountains covered in mist"; while Voltaire and Pope were at their height, the world began to realize that the Augustan age, in its zeal for rationality, civism and trim parterres, had neglected the wild freshness of an age when literature was a wild flower that grew on the common. Rousseau laid the axe to the root of this over-sophistication of life; Goldsmith, half understanding, echoed some of his ideas in "The Deserted Village." Back from books to men was now the prescription--from the crowded town to the spacious country. From plains and valleys to peaks and pinewoods. From cities, where men were rich and corrupt, to the earlier and more primitive moods of earth. The breath had scarcely left the body of the Grand Monarque before an intrigue was set on foot to dispute the provisions of his will. So with the critical testament of Pope. Within a few years of his death we find Gray, Warton, Hurd and other disciples of the new age denying to Pope the highest kind of poetic excellence, and exalting imagination and fancy into a sphere far above the Augustan qualities of correct taste and good judgment. Decentralization and revolt were the new watchwords in literature. We must eschew France and Italy and go rather to Iceland or the Hebrides for fresh poetic emotions: we must shun academies and classic coffee-houses and go into the street-corners or the hedge-lanes in search of Volkspoesie. An old muniment chest and a roll of yellow parchment were the finest incentives to the new spirit of the picturesque. How else are we to explain the enthusiasm that welcomed the sham Ossianic poems of James Macpherson in 1760; Percy's patched-up ballads of 1765 (_Reliques of Ancient Poetry_); the new enthusiasm for Chaucer; the "black letter" school of Ritson, Tyrrwhitt, George Ellis, Steevens, Ireland and Malone; above all, the spurious 15th-century poems poured forth in 1768-1769 with such a wild gusto of archaic imagination by a prodigy not quite seventeen years of age? Chatterton's precocious fantasy cast a wonderful spell upon the romantic imagination of other times. It does not prepare us for the change that was coming over the poetic spirit of the last two decades of the century, but it does at least help us to explain it. The great masters of verse in Britain during this period were the three very disparate figures of William Cowper, William Blake and Robert Burns. Cowper was not a poet of vivid and rapturous visions. There is always something of the rusticating city-scholar about his humour. The ungovernable impulse and imaginative passion of the great masters of poesy were not his to claim. His motives to express himself in verse came very largely from the outside. The greater part, nearly all his best poetry is of the occasional order. To touch and retouch, he says, in one of his letters--among the most delightful in English--is the secret of almost all good writing, especially verse. Whatever is short should be nervous, masculine and compact. In all the arts that raise the best occasional poetry to the level of greatness Cowper is supreme. In phrase-moulding, verbal gymnastic and prosodical marquetry he has scarcely a rival, and the fruits of his poetic industry are enshrined in the filigree of a most delicate fancy and a highly cultivated intelligence, purified and thrice refined in the fire of mental affliction. His work expresses the rapid civilization of his time, its humanitarian feeling and growing sensitiveness to natural beauty, home comfort, the claims of animals and the charms of light literature. In many of his short poems, such as "The Royal George," artistic simplicity is indistinguishable from the stern reticence of genius. William Blake had no immediate literary descendants, for he worked alone, and Lamb was practically alone in recognizing what he wrote as poetry. But he was by far the most original of the reactionaries who preceded the Romantic Revival, and he caught far more of the Elizabethan air in his lyric verse than any one else before Coleridge. The _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of Experience_, in 1789 and 1794, sing themselves, and have a bird-like spontaneity that has been the despair of all song-writers from that day to this. After 1800 he winged his flight farther and farther into strange and unknown regions. In the finest of these earlier lyrics, which owe so little to his contemporaries, the ripple of the stream of romance that began to gush forth in 1798 is distinctly heard. But the first poetic genius of the century was unmistakably Robert Burns. In song and satire alike Burns is racy, in the highest degree, of the poets of North Britain, who since Robert Sempill, Willy Hamilton of Gilbertfield, douce Allan Ramsay, the Edinburgh periwig-maker and miscellanist, and Robert Fergusson, "the writer-chiel, a deathless name," had kept alive the old native poetic tradition, had provided the strolling fiddlers with merry and wanton staves, and had perpetuated the daintiest shreds of national music, the broadest colloquialisms, and the warmest hues of patriotic or local sentiment. Burns immortalizes these old staves by means of his keener vision, his more fiery spirit, his stronger passion and his richer volume of sound. Burns's fate was a pathetic one. Brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete, his poems wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, sustained effort, length of life. Yet occasional, fragmentary, extemporary as most of them are, they bear the guinea stamp of true genius. His eye is unerring, his humour of the ripest, his wit both fine and abundant. His ear is less subtle, except when dialect is concerned. There he is infallible. Landscape he understands in subordination to life. For abstract ideas about Liberty and 1789 he cares little. But he is a patriot and an insurgent, a hater of social distinction and of the rich. Of the divine right or eternal merit of the system under which the poor man sweats to put money into the rich man's pocket and fights to keep it there, and is despised in proportion to the amount of his perspiration, he had a low opinion. His work has inspired the meek, has made the poor feel themselves less of ciphers in the world and given courage to the down-trodden. His love of women has inspired some of the most ardently beautiful lyrics in the world. Among modern folk-poets such as Jókai and Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is the best assured. Entry: V