VOLTAIRE AND FREDERICK THE GREAT
At the present time,[6] when it is so difficult to think of anything but of what is and what will be, it may yet be worth while to cast occasionally a glance backward at what was. Such glances may at least prove to have the humble merit of being entertaining: they may even be instructive as well. Certainly it would be a mistake to forget that Frederick the Great once lived in Germany. Nor is it altogether useless to remember that a curious old gentleman, extremely thin, extremely active, and heavily bewigged, once decided that, on the whole, it would be as well for him _not_ to live in France. For, just as modern Germany dates from the accession of Frederick to the throne of Prussia, so modern France dates from the establishment of Voltaire on the banks of the Lake of Geneva. The intersection of those two momentous lives forms one of the most curious and one of the most celebrated incidents in history. To English readers it is probably best known through the few brilliant paragraphs devoted to it by Macaulay; though Carlyle’s masterly and far more elaborate narrative is familiar to every lover of _The History of Friedrich II_. Since Carlyle wrote, however, fifty years have passed. New points of view have arisen, and a certain amount of new material–including the valuable edition of the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick published from the original documents in the Archives at Berlin–has become available. It seems, therefore, in spite of the familiarity of the main outlines of the story, that another rapid review of it will not be out of place.
Voltaire was forty-two years of age, and already one of the most famous men of the day, when, in August 1736, he received a letter from the Crown Prince of Prussia. This letter was the first in a correspondence which was to last, with a few remarkable intervals, for a space of over forty years. It was written by a young man of twenty-four, of whose personal qualities very little was known, and whose importance seemed to lie simply in the fact that he was heir-apparent to one of the secondary European monarchies. Voltaire, however, was not the man to turn up his nose at royalty, in whatever form it might present itself; and it was moreover clear that the young prince had picked up at least a smattering of French culture, that he was genuinely anxious to become acquainted with the tendencies of modern thought, and, above all, that his admiration for the author of the _Henriade_ and _Zaire_ was unbounded.
La douceur et le support [wrote Frederick] que vous marquez pour tous ceux qui se vouent aux arts et aux sciences, me font esperer que vous ne m’exclurez pas du nombre de ceux que vous trouvez dignes de vos instructions. Je nomme ainsi votre commerce de lettres, qui ne peut etre que profitable a tout etre pensant. J’ose meme avancer, sans deroger au merite d’autrui, que dans l’univers entier il n’y aurait pas d’exception a faire de ceux dont vous ne pourriez etre le maitre.
The great man was accordingly delighted; he replied with all that graceful affability of which he was a master, declared that his correspondent was ‘un prince philosophe qui rendra les hommes heureux,’ and showed that he meant business by plunging at once into a discussion of the metaphysical doctrines of ‘le sieur Wolf,’ whom Frederick had commended as ‘le plus celebre philosophe de nos jours.’ For the next four years the correspondence continued on the lines thus laid down. It was a correspondence between a master and a pupil: Frederick, his passions divided between German philosophy and French poetry, poured out with equal copiousness disquisitions upon Free Will and _la raison suffisante_, odes _sur la Flatterie_, and epistles _sur l’Humanite_, while Voltaire kept the ball rolling with no less enormous philosophical replies, together with minute criticisms of His Royal Highness’s mistakes in French metre and French orthography. Thus, though the interest of these early letters must have been intense to the young Prince, they have far too little personal flavour to be anything but extremely tedious to the reader of to-day. Only very occasionally is it possible to detect, amid the long and careful periods, some faint signs of feeling or of character. Voltaire’s _empressement_ seems to take on, once or twice, the colours of something like a real enthusiasm; and one notices that, after two years, Frederick’s letters begin no longer with ‘Monsieur’ but with ‘Mon cher ami,’ which glides at last insensibly into ‘Mon cher Voltaire’; though the careful poet continues with his ‘Monseigneur’ throughout. Then, on one occasion, Frederick makes a little avowal, which reads oddly in the light of future events.
Souffrez [he says] que je vous fasse mon caractere, afin que vous ne vous y mepreniez plus … J’ai peu de merite et peu de savoir; mais j’ai beaucoup de bonne volonte, et un fonds inepuisable d’estime et d’amitie pour les personnes d’une vertu distinguee, et avec cela je suis capable de toute la constance que la vraie amitie exige. J’ai assez de jugement pour vous rendre toute la justice que vous meritez; mais je n’en ai pas assez pour m’empecher de faire de mauvais vers.
But this is exceptional; as a rule, elaborate compliments take the place of personal confessions; and, while Voltaire is never tired of comparing Frederick to Apollo, Alcibiades, and the youthful Marcus Aurelius, of proclaiming the rebirth of ‘les talents de Virgile et les vertus d’Auguste,’ or of declaring that ‘Socrate ne m’est rien, c’est Frederic que j’aime,’ the Crown Prince is on his side ready with an equal flow of protestations, which sometimes rise to singular heights. ‘Ne croyez pas,’ he says, ‘que je pousse mon scepticisime a outrance … Je crois, par exemple, qu’il n’y a qu’un Dieu et qu’un Voltaire dans le monde; je crois encore que ce Dieu avait besoin dans ce siecle d’un Voltaire pour le rendre aimable.’ Decidedly the Prince’s compliments were too emphatic, and the poet’s too ingenious; as Voltaire himself said afterwards, ‘les epithetes ne nous coutaient rien’; yet neither was without a little residue of sincerity. Frederick’s admiration bordered upon the sentimental; and Voltaire had begun to allow himself to hope that some day, in a provincial German court, there might be found a crowned head devoting his life to philosophy, good sense, and the love of letters. Both were to receive a curious awakening.
In 1740 Frederick became King of Prussia, and a new epoch in the relations between the two men began. The next ten years were, on both sides, years of growing disillusionment. Voltaire very soon discovered that his phrase about ‘un prince philosophe qui rendra les hommes heureux’ was indeed a phrase and nothing more. His _prince philosophe_ started out on a career of conquest, plunged all Europe into war, and turned Prussia into a great military power. Frederick, it appeared, was at once a far more important and a far more dangerous phenomenon than Voltaire had suspected. And, on the other hand, the matured mind of the King was not slow to perceive that the enthusiasm of the Prince needed a good deal of qualification. This change of view, was, indeed, remarkably rapid. Nothing is more striking than the alteration of the tone in Frederick’s correspondence during the few months which followed his accession: the voice of the raw and inexperienced youth is heard no more, and its place is taken–at once and for ever–by the self-contained caustic utterance of an embittered man of the world. In this transformation it was only natural that the wondrous figure of Voltaire should lose some of its glitter–especially since Frederick now began to have the opportunity of inspecting that figure in the flesh with his own sharp eyes. The friends met three or four times, and it is noticeable that after each meeting there is a distinct coolness on the part of Frederick. He writes with a sudden brusqueness to accuse Voltaire of showing about his manuscripts, which, he says, had only been sent him on the condition of _un secret inviolable_. He writes to Jordan complaining of Voltaire’s avarice in very stringent terms. ‘Ton avare boira la lie de son insatiable desir de s’enrichir … Son apparition de six jours me coutera par journee cinq cent cinquante ecus. C’est bien payer un fou; jamais bouffon de grand seigneur n’eut de pareils gages.’ He declares that ‘la cervelle du poete est aussi legere que le style de ses ouvrages,’ and remarks sarcastically that he is indeed a man _extraordinaire en tout_.
Yet, while his opinion of Voltaire’s character was rapidly growing more and more severe, his admiration of his talents remained undiminished. For, though he had dropped metaphysics when he came to the throne, Frederick could never drop his passion for French poetry; he recognised in Voltaire the unapproachable master of that absorbing art; and for years he had made up his mind that, some day or other, he would _posseder_–for so he put it–the author of the _Henriade_, would keep him at Berlin as the brightest ornament of his court, and, above all, would have him always ready at hand to put the final polish on his own verses. In the autumn of 1743 it seemed for a moment that his wish would be gratified. Voltaire spent a visit of several weeks in Berlin; he was dazzled by the graciousness of his reception and the splendour of his surroundings; and he began to listen to the honeyed overtures of the Prussian Majesty. The great obstacle to Frederick’s desire was Voltaire’s relationship with Madame du Chatelet. He had lived with her for more than ten years; he was attached to her by all the ties of friendship and gratitude; he had constantly declared that he would never leave her–no, not for all the seductions of princes. She would, it is true, have been willing to accompany Voltaire to Berlin; but such a solution would by no means have suited Frederick. He was not fond of ladies–even of ladies like Madame du Chatelet–learned enough to translate Newton and to discuss by the hour the niceties of the Leibnitzian philosophy; and he had determined to _posseder_ Voltaire either completely or not at all. Voltaire, in spite of repeated temptations, had remained faithful; but now, for the first time, poor Madame du Chatelet began to be seriously alarmed. His letters from Berlin grew fewer and fewer, and more and more ambiguous; she knew nothing of his plans; ‘il est ivre absolument’ she burst out in her distress to d’Argental, one of his oldest friends. By every post she dreaded to learn at last that he had deserted her for ever. But suddenly Voltaire returned. The spell of Berlin had been broken, and he was at her feet once more.
What had happened was highly characteristic both of the Poet and of the King. Each had tried to play a trick on the other, and each had found the other out. The French Government had been anxious to obtain an insight into the diplomatic intentions of Frederick, in an unofficial way; Voltaire had offered his services, and it had been agreed that he should write to Frederick declaring that he was obliged to leave France for a time owing to the hostility of a member of the Government, the Bishop of Mirepoix, and asking for Frederick’s hospitality. Frederick had not been taken in: though he had not disentangled the whole plot, he had perceived clearly enough that Voltaire’s visit was in reality that of an agent of the French Government; he also thought he saw an opportunity of securing the desire of his heart. Voltaire, to give verisimilitude to his story, had, in his letter to Frederick, loaded the Bishop of Mirepoix with ridicule and abuse; and Frederick now secretly sent this letter to Mirepoix himself. His calculation was that Mirepoix would be so outraged that he would make it impossible for Voltaire ever to return to France; and in that case–well, Voltaire would have no other course open to him but to stay where he was, in Berlin, and Madame du Chatelet would have to make the best of it. Of course, Frederick’s plan failed, and Voltaire was duly informed by Mirepoix of what had happened. He was naturally very angry. He had been almost induced to stay in Berlin of his own accord, and now he found that his host had been attempting, by means of treachery and intrigue, to force him to stay there whether he liked it or not. It was a long time before he forgave Frederick. But the King was most anxious to patch up the quarrel; he still could not abandon the hope of ultimately securing Voltaire; and besides, he was now possessed by another and a more immediate desire–to be allowed a glimpse of that famous and scandalous work which Voltaire kept locked in the innermost drawer of his cabinet and revealed to none but the most favoured of his intimates–_La Pucelle_.
Accordingly the royal letters became more frequent and more flattering than ever; the royal hand cajoled and implored. ‘Ne me faites point injustice sur mon caractere; d’ailleurs il vous est permis de badiner sur mon sujet comme il vous plaira.’ ‘_La Pucelle! La Pucelle! La Pucelle!_ et encore _La Pucelle_!’ he exclaims. ‘Pour l’amour de Dieu, ou plus encore pour l’amour de vous-meme, envoyez-la-moi.’ And at last Voltaire was softened. He sent off a few fragments of his _Pucelle_–just enough to whet Frederick’s appetite–and he declared himself reconciled, ‘Je vous ai aime tendrement,’ he wrote in March 1749; ‘j’ai ete fache contre vous, je vous ai pardonne, et actuellement je vous aime a la folie.’ Within a year of this date his situation had undergone a complete change. Madame du Chatelet was dead; and his position at Versailles, in spite of the friendship of Madame de Pompadour, had become almost as impossible as he had pretended it to have been in 1743. Frederick eagerly repeated his invitation; and this time Voltaire did not refuse. He was careful to make a very good bargain; obliged Frederick to pay for his journey; and arrived at Berlin in July 1750. He was given rooms in the royal palaces both at Berlin and Potsdam; he was made a Court Chamberlain, and received the Order of Merit, together with a pension of L800 a year. These arrangements caused considerable amusement in Paris; and for some days hawkers, carrying prints of Voltaire dressed in furs, and crying ‘Voltaire le prussien! Six sols le fameux prussien!’ were to be seen walking up and down the Quays.
The curious drama that followed, with its farcical [Greek: peripeteia] and its tragi-comic _denouement_, can hardly be understood without a brief consideration of the feelings and intentions of the two chief actors in it. The position of Frederick is comparatively plain. He had now completely thrown aside the last lingering remnants of any esteem which he may once have entertained for the character of Voltaire. He frankly thought him a scoundrel. In September 1749, less than a year before Voltaire’s arrival, and at the very period of Frederick’s most urgent invitations, we find him using the following language in a letter to Algarotti: ‘Voltaire vient de faire un tour qui est indigne.’ (He had been showing to all his friends a garbled copy of one of Frederick’s letters).
Il meriterait d’etre fleurdelise au Parnasse. C’est bien dommage qu’une ame aussi lache soit unie a un aussi beau genie. Il a les gentillesses et les malices d’un singe. Je vous conterai ce que c’est, lorsque je vous reverrai; cependant je ne ferai semblant de rien, car j’en ai besoin pour l’etude de l’elocution francaise. On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scelerat. Je veux savoir son francais; que m’importe sa morale? Cet homme a trouve le moyen de reunir tous les contraires. On admire son esprit, en meme temps qu’on meprise son caractere.
There is no ambiguity about this. Voltaire was a scoundrel; but he was a scoundrel of genius. He would make the best possible teacher of _l’elocution francaise_; therefore it was necessary that he should come and live in Berlin. But as for anything more–as for any real interchange of sympathies, any genuine feeling of friendliness, of respect, or even of regard–all that was utterly out of the question. The avowal is cynical, no doubt; but it is at any rate straightforward, and above all it is peculiarly devoid of any trace of self-deception. In the face of these trenchant sentences, the view of Frederick’s attitude which is suggested so assiduously by Carlyle–that he was the victim of an elevated misapprehension, that he was always hoping for the best, and that, when the explosion came he was very much surprised and profoundly disappointed–becomes obviously untenable. If any man ever acted with his eyes wide open, it was Frederick when he invited Voltaire to Berlin.
Yet, though that much is clear, the letter to Algarotti betrays, in more than one direction, a very singular state of mind. A warm devotion to _l’elocution francaise_ is easy enough to understand; but Frederick’s devotion was much more than warm; it was so absorbing and so intense that it left him no rest until, by hook or by crook, by supplication, or by trickery, or by paying down hard cash, he had obtained the close and constant proximity of–what?–of a man whom he himself described as a ‘singe’ and a ‘scelerat,’ a man of base soul and despicable character. And Frederick appears to see nothing surprising in this. He takes it quite as a matter of course that he should be, not merely willing, but delighted to run all the risks involved by Voltaire’s undoubted roguery, so long as he can be sure of benefiting from Voltaire’s no less undoubted mastery of French versification. This is certainly strange; but the explanation of it lies in the extraordinary vogue–a vogue, indeed, so extraordinary that it is very difficult for the modern reader to realise it–enjoyed throughout Europe by French culture and literature during the middle years of the eighteenth century. Frederick was merely an extreme instance of a universal fact. Like all Germans of any education, he habitually wrote and spoke in French; like every lady and gentleman from Naples to Edinburgh, his life was regulated by the social conventions of France; like every amateur of letters from Madrid to St. Petersburg, his whole conception of literary taste, his whole standard of literary values, was French. To him, as to the vast majority of his contemporaries, the very essence of civilisation was concentrated in French literature, and especially in French poetry; and French poetry meant to him, as to his contemporaries, that particular kind of French poetry which had come into fashion at the court of Louis XIV. For this curious creed was as narrow as it was all-pervading. The _Grand Siecle_ was the Church Infallible; and it was heresy to doubt the Gospel of Boileau.
Frederick’s library, still preserved at Potsdam, shows us what literature meant in those days to a cultivated man: it is composed entirely of the French Classics, of the works of Voltaire, and of the masterpieces of antiquity translated into eighteenth-century French. But Frederick was not content with mere appreciation; he too would create; he would write alexandrines on the model of Racine, and madrigals after the manner of Chaulieu; he would press in person into the sacred sanctuary, and burn incense with his own hands upon the inmost shrine. It was true that he was a foreigner; it was true that his knowledge of the French language was incomplete and incorrect; but his sense of his own ability urged him forward, and his indefatigable pertinacity kept him at his strange task throughout the whole of his life. He filled volumes, and the contents of those volumes afford probably the most complete illustration in literature of the very trite proverb–_Poeta nascitur, non fit_. The spectacle of that heavy German Muse, with her feet crammed into pointed slippers, executing, with incredible conscientiousness, now the stately measure of a Versailles minuet, and now the spritely steps of a Parisian jig, would be either ludicrous or pathetic–one hardly knows which–were it not so certainly neither the one nor the other, but simply dreary with an unutterable dreariness, from which the eyes of men avert themselves in shuddering dismay. Frederick himself felt that there was something wrong–something, but not really very much. All that was wanted was a little expert advice; and obviously Voltaire was the man to supply it–Voltaire, the one true heir of the Great Age, the dramatist who had revived the glories of Racine (did not Frederick’s tears flow almost as copiously over _Mahomet_ as over _Britannicus_?), the epic poet who had eclipsed Homer and Virgil (had not Frederick every right to judge, since he had read the ‘Iliad’ in French prose and the ‘Aeneid’ in French verse?), the lyric master whose odes and whose epistles occasionally even surpassed (Frederick Confessed it with amazement) those of the Marquis de la Fare. Voltaire, there could be no doubt, would do just what was needed; he would know how to squeeze in a little further the waist of the German Calliope, to apply with his deft fingers precisely the right dab of rouge to her cheeks, to instil into her movements the last _nuances_ of correct deportment. And, if he did that, of what consequence were the blemishes of his personal character? ‘On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scelerat.’
And, besides, though Voltaire might be a rogue, Frederick felt quite convinced that he could keep him in order. A crack or two of the master’s whip–a coldness in the royal demeanour, a hint at a stoppage of the pension–and the monkey would put an end to his tricks soon enough. It never seems to have occurred to Frederick that the possession of genius might imply a quality of spirit which was not that of an ordinary man. This was his great, his fundamental error. It was the ingenuous error of a cynic. He knew that he was under no delusion as to Voltaire’s faults, and so he supposed that he could be under no delusion as to his merits. He innocently imagined that the capacity for great writing was something that could be as easily separated from the owner of it as a hat or a glove. ‘C’est bien dommage qu’une ame aussi lache soit unie a un aussi beau genie.’ _C’est bien dommage_!–as if there was nothing more extraordinary in such a combination than that of a pretty woman and an ugly dress. And so Frederick held his whip a little tighter, and reminded himself once more that, in spite of that _beau genie_, it was a monkey that he had to deal with. But he was wrong: it was not a monkey; it was a devil, which is a very different thing.
A devil–or perhaps an angel? One cannot be quite sure. For, amid the complexities of that extraordinary spirit, where good and evil were so mysteriously interwoven, where the elements of darkness and the elements of light lay crowded together in such ever-deepening ambiguity, fold within fold, the clearer the vision the greater the bewilderment, the more impartial the judgment the profounder the doubt. But one thing at least is certain: that spirit, whether it was admirable or whether it was odious, was moved by a terrific force. Frederick had failed to realise this; and indeed, though Voltaire was fifty-six when he went to Berlin, and though his whole life had been spent in a blaze of publicity, there was still not one of his contemporaries who understood the true nature of his genius; it was perhaps hidden even from himself. He had reached the threshold of old age, and his life’s work was still before him; it was not as a writer of tragedies and epics that he was to take his place in the world. Was he, in the depths of his consciousness, aware that this was so? Did some obscure instinct urge him forward, at this late hour, to break with the ties of a lifetime, and rush forth into the unknown?
What his precise motives were in embarking upon the Berlin adventure it is very difficult to say. It is true that he was disgusted with Paris–he was ill-received at Court, and he was pestered by endless literary quarrels and jealousies; it would be very pleasant to show his countrymen that he had other strings to his bow, that, if they did not appreciate him, Frederick the Great did. It is true, too, that he admired Frederick’s intellect, and that he was flattered by his favour. ‘Il avait de l’esprit,’ he said afterwards, ‘des graces, et, de plus, il etait roi; ce qui fait toujours une grande seduction, attendu la faiblesse humaine.’ His vanity could not resist the prestige of a royal intimacy; and no doubt he relished to the full even the increased consequence which came to him with his Chamberlain’s key and his order–to say nothing of the addition of L800 to his income. Yet, on the other hand, he was very well aware that he was exchanging freedom for servitude, and that he was entering into a bargain with a man who would make quite sure that he was getting his money’s worth; and he knew in his heart that he had something better to do than to play, however successfully, the part of a courtier. Nor was he personally attached to Frederick; he was personally attached to no one on earth. Certainly he had never been a man of feeling, and now that he was old and hardened by the uses of the world he had grown to be completely what in essence he always was–a fighter, without tenderness, without scruples, and without remorse. No, he went to Berlin for his own purposes–however dubious those purposes may have been.
And it is curious to observe that in his correspondence with his niece, Madame Denis, whom he had left behind him at the head of his Paris establishment and in whom he confided–in so far as he can be said to have confided in anyone–he repeatedly states that there is nothing permanent about his visit to Berlin. At first he declares that he is only making a stay of a few weeks with Frederick, that he is going on to Italy to visit ‘sa Saintete’ and to inspect ‘la ville souterraine,’ that he will be back in Paris in the autumn. The autumn comes, and the roads are too muddy to travel by; he must wait till the winter, when they will be frozen hard. Winter comes, and it is too cold to move; but he will certainly return in the spring. Spring comes, and he is on the point of finishing his _Siecle de Louis XIV_.; he really must wait just a few weeks more. The book is published; but then how can he appear in Paris until he is quite sure of its success? And so he lingers on, delaying and prevaricating, until a whole year has passed, and still he lingers on, still he is on the point of going, and still he does not go. Meanwhile, to all appearances, he was definitely fixed, a salaried official, at Frederick’s court; and he was writing to all his other friends, to assure them that he had never been so happy, that he could see no reason why he should ever come away. What were his true intentions? Could he himself have said? Had he perhaps, in some secret corner of his brain, into which even he hardly dared to look, a premonition of the future? At times, in this Berlin adventure, he seems to resemble some great buzzing fly, shooting suddenly into a room through an open window and dashing frantically from side to side; when all at once, as suddenly, he swoops away and out through another window which opens in quite a different direction, towards wide and flowery fields; so that perhaps the reckless creature knew where he was going after all.
In any case, it is evident to the impartial observer that Voltaire’s visit could only have ended as it did–in an explosion. The elements of the situation were too combustible for any other conclusion. When two confirmed egotists decide, for purely selfish reasons, to set up house together, everyone knows what will happen. For some time their sense of mutual advantage may induce them to tolerate each other, but sooner or later human nature will assert itself, and the _menage_ will break up. And, with Voltaire and Frederick, the difficulties inherent in all such cases were intensified by the fact that the relationship between them was, in effect, that of servant and master; that Voltaire, under a very thin disguise, was a paid menial, while Frederick, condescend as he might, was an autocrat whose will was law. Thus the two famous and perhaps mythical sentences, invariably repeated by historians of the incident, about orange-skins and dirty linen, do in fact sum up the gist of the matter. ‘When one has sucked the orange, one throws away the skin,’ somebody told Voltaire that the King had said, on being asked how much longer he would put up with the poet’s vagaries. And Frederick, on his side, was informed that Voltaire, when a batch of the royal verses were brought to him for correction, had burst out with ‘Does the man expect me to go on washing his dirty linen for ever?’ Each knew well enough the weak spot in his position, and each was acutely and uncomfortably conscious that the other knew it too. Thus, but a very few weeks after Voltaire’s arrival, little clouds of discord become visible on the horizon; electrical discharges of irritability began to take place, growing more and more frequent and violent as time goes on; and one can overhear the pot and the kettle, in strictest privacy, calling each other black. ‘The monster,’ whispers Voltaire to Madame Denis, ‘he opens all our letters in the post’–Voltaire, whose light-handedness with other people’s correspondence was only too notorious. ‘The monkey,’ mutters Frederick, ‘he shows my private letters to his friends’–Frederick, who had thought nothing of betraying Voltaire’s letters to the Bishop of Mirepoix. ‘How happy I should be here,’ exclaims the callous old poet, ‘but for one thing–his Majesty is utterly heartless!’ And meanwhile Frederick, who had never let a farthing escape from his close fist without some very good reason, was busy concocting an epigram upon the avarice of Voltaire.
It was, indeed, Voltaire’s passion for money which brought on the first really serious storm. Three months after his arrival in Berlin, the temptation to increase his already considerable fortune by a stroke of illegal stock-jobbing proved too strong for him; he became involved in a series of shady financial transactions with a Jew; he quarrelled with the Jew; there was an acrimonious lawsuit, with charges and countercharges of the most discreditable kind; and, though the Jew lost his case on a technical point, the poet certainly did not leave the court without a stain upon his character. Among other misdemeanours, it is almost certain–the evidence is not quite conclusive–that he committed forgery in order to support a false oath. Frederick was furious, and for a moment was on the brink of dismissing Voltaire from Berlin. He would have been wise if he had done so. But he could not part with his _beau genie_ so soon. He cracked his whip, and, setting the monkey to stand in the corner, contented himself with a shrug of the shoulders and the exclamation ‘C’est l’affaire d’un fripon qui a voulu tromper un filou.’ A few weeks later the royal favour shone forth once more, and Voltaire, who had been hiding himself in a suburban villa, came out and basked again in those refulgent beams.
And the beams were decidedly refulgent–so much so, in fact, that they almost satisfied even the vanity of Voltaire. Almost, but not quite. For, though his glory was great, though he was the centre of all men’s admiration, courted by nobles, flattered by princesses–there is a letter from one of them, a sister of Frederick’s, still extant, wherein the trembling votaress ventures to praise the great man’s works, which, she says, ‘vous rendent si celebre et immortel’–though he had ample leisure for his private activities, though he enjoyed every day the brilliant conversation of the King, though he could often forget for weeks together that he was the paid servant of a jealous despot–yet, in spite of all, there was a crumpled rose-leaf amid the silken sheets, and he lay awake o’ nights. He was not the only Frenchman at Frederick’s court. That monarch had surrounded himself with a small group of persons–foreigners for the most part–whose business it was to instruct him when he wished to improve his mind, to flatter him when he was out of temper, and to entertain him when he was bored. There was hardly one of them that was not thoroughly second-rate. Algarotti was an elegant dabbler in scientific matters–he had written a book to explain Newton to the ladies; d’Argens was an amiable and erudite writer of a dull free-thinking turn; Chasot was a retired military man with too many debts, and Darget was a good-natured secretary with too many love affairs; La Mettrie was a doctor who had been exiled from France for atheism and bad manners; and Poellnitz was a decaying baron who, under stress of circumstances, had unfortunately been obliged to change his religion six times.
These were the boon companions among whom Frederick chose to spend his leisure hours. Whenever he had nothing better to do, he would exchange rhymed epigrams with Algarotti, or discuss the Jewish religion with d’Argens, or write long improper poems about Darget, in the style of _La Pucelle_. Or else he would summon La Mettrie, who would forthwith prove the irrefutability of materialism in a series of wild paradoxes, shout with laughter, suddenly shudder and cross himself on upsetting the salt, and eventually pursue his majesty with his buffooneries into a place where even royal persons are wont to be left alone. At other times Frederick would amuse himself by first cutting down the pension of Poellnitz, who was at the moment a Lutheran, and then writing long and serious letters to him suggesting that if he would only become a Catholic again he might be made a Silesian Abbot. Strangely enough, Frederick was not popular, and one or other of the inmates of his little menagerie was constantly escaping and running away. Darget and Chasot both succeeded in getting through the wires; they obtained leave to visit Paris, and stayed there. Poor d’Argens often tried to follow their example; more than once he set off for France, secretly vowing never to return; but he had no money, Frederick was blandishing, and the wretch was always lured back to captivity. As for La Mettrie, he made his escape in a different manner–by dying after supper one evening of a surfeit of pheasant pie. ‘Jesus! Marie!’ he gasped, as he felt the pains of death upon him. ‘Ah!’ said a priest who had been sent for, ‘vous voila enfin retourne a ces noms consolateurs.’ La Mettrie, with an oath, expired; and Frederick, on hearing of this unorthodox conclusion, remarked, ‘J’en suis bien aise, pour le repos de son ame.’
Among this circle of down-at-heel eccentrics there was a single figure whose distinction and respectability stood out in striking contrast from the rest–that of Maupertuis, who had been, since 1745, the President of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. Maupertuis has had an unfortunate fate: he was first annihilated by the ridicule of Voltaire, and then recreated by the humour of Carlyle; but he was an ambitious man, very anxious to be famous, and his desire has been gratified in over-flowing measure. During his life he was chiefly known for his voyage to Lapland, and his observations there, by which he was able to substantiate the Newtonian doctrine of the flatness of the earth at the poles. He possessed considerable scientific attainments, he was honest, he was energetic; he appeared to be just the man to revive the waning glories of Prussian science; and when Frederick succeeded in inducing him to come to Berlin as President of his Academy the choice seemed amply justified. Maupertuis had, moreover, some pretensions to wit; and in his earlier days his biting and elegant sarcasms had more than once overwhelmed his scientific adversaries. Such accomplishments suited Frederick admirably. Maupertuis, he declared, was an _homme d’esprit_, and the happy President became a constant guest at the royal supper-parties. It was the happy–the too happy–President who was the rose-leaf in the bed of Voltaire. The two men had known each other slightly for many years, and had always expressed the highest admiration for each other; but their mutual amiability was now to be put to a severe test. The sagacious Buffon observed the danger from afar: ‘ces deux hommes,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘ne sont pas faits pour demeurer ensemble dans la meme chambre.’ And indeed to the vain and sensitive poet, uncertain of Frederick’s cordiality, suspicious of hidden enemies, intensely jealous of possible rivals, the spectacle of Maupertuis at supper, radiant, at his ease, obviously protected, obviously superior to the shady mediocrities who sat around–that sight was gall and wormwood; and he looked closer, with a new malignity; and then those piercing eyes began to make discoveries, and that relentless brain began to do its work.
Maupertuis had very little judgment; so far from attempting to conciliate Voltaire, he was rash enough to provoke hostilities. It was very natural that he should have lost his temper. He had been for five years the dominating figure in the royal circle, and now suddenly he was deprived of his pre-eminence and thrown completely into the shade. Who could attend to Maupertuis while Voltaire was talking?–Voltaire, who as obviously outshone Maupertuis as Maupertuis outshone La Mettrie and Darget and the rest. In his exasperation the President went to the length of openly giving his protection to a disreputable literary man, La Beaumelle, who was a declared enemy of Voltaire. This meant war, and war was not long in coming.
Some years previously Maupertuis had, as he believed, discovered an important mathematical law–the ‘principle of least action.’ The law was, in fact, important, and has had a fruitful history in the development of mechanical theory; but, as Mr. Jourdain has shown in a recent monograph, Maupertuis enunciated it incorrectly without realising its true import, and a far more accurate and scientific statement of it was given, within a few months, by Euler. Maupertuis, however, was very proud of his discovery, which, he considered, embodied one of the principal reasons for believing in the existence of God; and he was therefore exceedingly angry when, shortly after Voltaire’s arrival in Berlin, a Swiss mathematician, Koenig, published a polite memoir attacking both its accuracy and its originality, and quoted in support of his contention an unpublished letter by Leibnitz, in which the law was more exactly expressed. Instead of arguing upon the merits of the case, Maupertuis declared that the letter of Leibnitz was a forgery, and that therefore Koenig’s remarks deserved no further consideration. When Koenig expostulated, Maupertuis decided upon a more drastic step. He summoned a meeting of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, of which Koenig was a member, laid the case before it, and moved that it should solemnly pronounce Koenig a forger, and the letter of Leibnitz supposititious and false. The members of the Academy were frightened; their pensions depended upon the President’s good will; and even the illustrious Euler was not ashamed to take part in this absurd and disgraceful condemnation.
Voltaire saw at once that his opportunity had come. Maupertuis had put himself utterly and irretrievably in the wrong. He was wrong in attributing to his discovery a value which it did not possess; he was wrong in denying the authenticity of the Leibnitz letter; above all he was wrong in treating a purely scientific question as the proper subject for the disciplinary jurisdiction of an Academy. If Voltaire struck now, he would have his enemy on the hip. There was only one consideration to give him pause, and that was a grave one: to attack Maupertuis upon this matter was, in effect, to attack the King. Not only was Frederick certainly privy to Maupertuis’ action, but he was extremely sensitive of the reputation of his Academy and of its President, and he would certainly consider any interference on the part of Voltaire, who himself drew his wages from the royal purse, as a flagrant act of disloyalty. But Voltaire decided to take the risk. He had now been more than two years in Berlin, and the atmosphere of a Court was beginning to weigh upon his spirit; he was restless, he was reckless, he was spoiling for a fight; he would take on Maupertuis singly or Maupertuis and Frederick combined–he did not much care which, and in any case he flattered himself that he would settle the hash of the President.
As a preparatory measure, he withdrew all his spare cash from Berlin, and invested it with the Duke of Wurtemberg. ‘Je mets tout doucement ordre a mes affaires,’ he told Madame Denis. Then, on September 18, 1752, there appeared in the papers a short article entitled ‘Reponse d’un Academicien de Berlin a un Academicien de Paris.’ It was a statement, deadly in its bald simplicity, its studied coldness, its concentrated force, of Koenig’s case against Maupertuis. The President must have turned pale as he read it; but the King turned crimson. The terrible indictment could, of course only have been written by one man, and that man was receiving a royal pension of L800 a year and carrying about a Chamberlain’s gold key in his pocket. Frederick flew to his writing-table, and composed an indignant pamphlet which he caused to be published with the Prussian arms on the title-page. It was a feeble work, full of exaggerated praises of Maupertuis, and of clumsy invectives against Voltaire: the President’s reputation was gravely compared to that of Homer; the author of the ‘Reponse d’un Academicien de Berlin’ was declared to be a ‘faiseur de libelles sans genie,’ an ‘imposteur effronte,’ a ‘malheureux ecrivain’ while the ‘Reponse’ itself was a ‘grossierete plate,’ whose publication was an ‘action malicieuse, lache, infame,’ a ‘brigandage affreux.’ The presence of the royal insignia only intensified the futility of the outburst. ‘L’aigle, le sceptre, et la couronne,’ wrote Voltaire to Madame Denis, ‘sont bien etonnes de se trouver la.’ But one thing was now certain: the King had joined the fray. Voltaire’s blood was up, and he was not sorry. A kind of exaltation seized him; from this moment his course was clear–he would do as much damage as he could, and then leave Prussia for ever. And it so happened that just then an unexpected opportunity occurred for one of those furious onslaughts so dear to his heart, with that weapon which he knew so well how to wield. ‘Je n’ai point de sceptre,’ he ominously shot out to Madame Denis, ‘mais j’ai une plume.’
Meanwhile the life of the Court–which passed for the most part at Potsdam, in the little palace of Sans Souci which Frederick had built for himself–proceeded on its accustomed course. It was a singular life, half military, half monastic, rigid, retired, from which all the ordinary pleasures of society were strictly excluded. ‘What do you do here?’ one of the royal princes was once asked. ‘We conjugate the verb _s’ennuyer_,’ was the reply. But, wherever he might be, that was a verb unknown to Voltaire. Shut up all day in the strange little room, still preserved for the eyes of the curious, with its windows opening on the formal garden, and its yellow walls thickly embossed with the brightly coloured shapes of fruits, flowers, birds, and apes, the indefatigable old man worked away at his histories, his tragedies, his _Pucelle_, and his enormous correspondence. He was, of course, ill–very ill; he was probably, in fact, upon the brink of death; but he had grown accustomed to that situation; and the worse he grew the more furiously he worked. He was a victim, he declared, of erysipelas, dysentery, and scurvy; he was constantly attacked by fever, and all his teeth had fallen out. But he continued to work. On one occasion a friend visited him, and found him in bed. ‘J’ai quatre maladies mortelles,’ he wailed. ‘Pourtant,’ remarked the friend, ‘vous avez l’oeil fort bon.’ Voltaire leapt up from the pillows: ‘Ne savez-vous pas,’ he shouted, ‘que les scorbutiques meurent l’oeil enflamme?’ When the evening came it was time to dress, and, in all the pomp of flowing wig and diamond order, to proceed to the little music-room, where his Majesty, after the business of the day, was preparing to relax himself upon the flute. The orchestra was gathered together; the audience was seated; the concerto began. And then the sounds of beauty flowed and trembled, and seemed, for a little space, to triumph over the pains of living and the hard hearts of men; and the royal master poured out his skill in some long and elaborate cadenza, and the adagio came, the marvellous adagio, and the conqueror of Rossbach drew tears from the author of _Candide_. But a moment later it was supper-time; and the night ended in the oval dining-room, amid laughter and champagne, the ejaculations of La Mettrie, the epigrams of Maupertuis, the sarcasms of Frederick, and the devastating coruscations of Voltaire.
Yet, in spite of all the jests and roses, everyone could hear the rumbling of the volcano under the ground. Everyone could hear, but nobody would listen; the little flames leapt up through the surface, but still the gay life went on; and then the irruption came. Voltaire’s enemy had written a book. In the intervals of his more serious labours, the President had put together a series of ‘Letters,’ in which a number of miscellaneous scientific subjects were treated in a mildly speculative and popular style. The volume was rather dull, and very unimportant; but it happened to appear at this particular moment, and Voltaire pounced upon it with the swift swoop of a hawk on a mouse. The famous _Diatribe du Docteur Akakia_ is still fresh with a fiendish gaiety after a hundred and fifty years; but to realise to the full the skill and malice which went to the making of it, one must at least have glanced at the flat insipid production which called it forth, and noted with what a diabolical art the latent absurdities in poor Maupertuis’ _reveries_ have been detected, dragged forth into the light of day, and nailed to the pillory of an immortal ridicule. The _Diatribe_, however, is not all mere laughter; there is a real criticism in it, too. For instance, it was not simply a farcical exaggeration to say that Maupertuis had set out to prove the existence of God by ‘A plus B divided by Z’; in substance, the charge was both important and well founded. ‘Lorsque la metaphysique entre dans la geometrie,’ Voltaire wrote in a private letter some months afterwards, ‘c’est Arimane qui entre dans le royaume d’Oromasde, et qui y apporte des tenebres’; and Maupertuis had in fact vitiated his treatment of the ‘principle of least action’ by his metaphysical pre-occupations. Indeed, all through Voltaire’s pamphlet, there is an implied appeal to true scientific principles, an underlying assertion of the paramount importance of the experimental method, a consistent attack upon _a priori_ reasoning, loose statement, and vague conjecture. But of course, mixed with all this, and covering it all, there is a bubbling, sparkling fountain of effervescent raillery–cruel, personal, insatiable–the raillery of a demon with a grudge. The manuscript was shown to Frederick, who laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. But, between his gasps, he forbade Voltaire to publish it on pain of his most terrible displeasure. Naturally Voltaire was profuse with promises, and a few days later, under a royal licence obtained for another work, the little book appeared in print. Frederick still managed to keep his wrath within bounds: he collected all the copies of the edition and had them privately destroyed; he gave a furious wigging to Voltaire; and he flattered himself that he had heard the last of the business.
Ne vous embarrassez de rien, mon cher Maupertuis [he wrote to the President in his singular orthography]; l’affaire des libelles est finie. J’ai parle si vrai a l’home, je lui ai lave si bien la tete que je ne crois pas qu’il y retourne, et je connais son ame lache, incapable de sentiments d’honneur. Je l’ai intimide du cote de la boursse, ce qui a fait tout l’effet que j’attendais. Je lui ai declare enfin nettement que ma maison devait etre un sanctuaire et non une retraite de brigands ou de celerats qui distillent des poissons.
Apparently it did not occur to Frederick that this declaration had come a little late in the day. Meanwhile Maupertuis, overcome by illness and by rage, had taken to his bed. ‘Un peu trop d’amour-propre,’ Frederick wrote to Darget, ‘l’a rendu trop sensible aux manoeuvres d’un singe qu’il devait mepriser apres qu’on l’avait fouette.’ But now the monkey _had_ been whipped, and doubtless all would be well. It seems strange that Frederick should still, after more than two years of close observation, have had no notion of the material he was dealing with. He might as well have supposed that he could stop a mountain torrent in spate with a wave of his hand, as have imagined that he could impose obedience upon Voltaire in such a crisis by means of a lecture and a threat ‘du cote de la boursse.’ Before the month was out all Germany was swarming with _Akakias_; thousands of copies were being printed in Holland; and editions were going off in Paris like hot cakes. It is difficult to withold one’s admiration from the audacious old spirit who thus, on the mere strength of his mother-wits, dared to defy the enraged master of a powerful state. ‘Votre effronterie m’etonne,’ fulminated Frederick in a furious note, when he suddenly discovered that all Europe was ringing with the absurdity of the man whom he had chosen to be the President of his favourite Academy, whose cause he had publicly espoused, and whom he had privately assured of his royal protection. ‘Ah! Mon Dieu, Sire,’ scribbled Voltaire on the same sheet of paper, ‘dans l’etat ou je suis!’ (He was, of course, once more dying.) ‘Quoi! vous me jugeriez sans entendre! Je demande justice et la mort.’ Frederick replied by having copies of _Akakia_ burnt by the common hangman in the streets of Berlin. Voltaire thereupon returned his Order, his gold key, and his pension. It might have been supposed that the final rupture had now really come at last. But three months elapsed before Frederick could bring himself to realise that all was over, and to agree to the departure of his extraordinary guest. Carlyle’s suggestion that this last delay arose from the unwillingness of Voltaire to go, rather than from Frederick’s desire to keep him, is plainly controverted by the facts. The King not only insisted on Voltaire’s accepting once again the honours which he had surrendered, but actually went so far as to write him a letter of forgiveness and reconciliation. But the poet would not relent; there was a last week of suppers at Potsdam–‘soupers de Damocles’ Voltaire called them; and then, on March 26, 1753, the two men parted for ever.
The storm seemed to be over; but the tail of it was still hanging in the wind. Voltaire, on his way to the waters of Plombieres, stopped at Leipzig, where he could not resist, in spite of his repeated promises to the contrary, the temptation to bring out a new and enlarged edition of _Akakia_. Upon this Maupertuis utterly lost his head: he wrote to Voltaire, threatening him with personal chastisement. Voltaire issued yet another edition of _Akakia_, appended a somewhat unauthorised version of the President’s letter, and added that if the dangerous and cruel man really persisted in his threat he would be received with a vigorous discharge from those instruments of intimate utility which figure so freely in the comedies of Moliere. This stroke was the _coup de grace_ of Maupertuis. Shattered in body and mind, he dragged himself from Berlin to die at last in Basle under the ministration of a couple of Capuchins and a Protestant valet reading aloud the Genevan Bible. In the meantime Frederick had decided on a violent measure. He had suddenly remembered that Voltaire had carried off with him one of the very few privately printed copies of those poetical works upon which he had spent so much devoted labour; it occurred to him that they contained several passages of a highly damaging kind; and he could feel no certainty that those passages would not be given to the world by the malicious Frenchman. Such, at any rate, were his own excuses for the step which he now took; but it seems possible that he was at least partly swayed by feelings of resentment and revenge which had been rendered uncontrollable by the last onslaught upon Maupertuis. Whatever may have been his motives, it is certain that he ordered the Prussian Resident in Frankfort, which was Voltaire’s next stopping-place, to hold the poet in arrest until he delivered over the royal volume. A multitude of strange blunders and ludicrous incidents followed, upon which much controversial and patriotic ink has been spilt by a succession of French and German biographers. To an English reader it is clear that in this little comedy of errors none of the parties concerned can escape from blame–that Voltaire was hysterical, undignified, and untruthful, that the Prussian Resident was stupid and domineering, that Frederick was careless in his orders and cynical as to their results. Nor, it is to be hoped, need any Englishman be reminded that the consequences of a system of government in which the arbitrary will of an individual takes the place of the rule of law are apt to be disgraceful and absurd.
After five weeks’ detention at Frankfort, Voltaire was free–free in every sense of the word–free from the service of Kings and the clutches of Residents, free in his own mind, free to shape his own destiny. He hesitated for several months, and then settled down by the Lake of Geneva. There the fires, which had lain smouldering so long in the profundities of his spirit, flared up, and flamed over Europe, towering and inextinguishable. In a few years letters began to flow once more to and from Berlin. At first the old grievances still rankled; but in time even the wrongs of Maupertuis and the misadventures of Frankfort were almost forgotten. Twenty years passed, and the King of Prussia was submitting his verses as anxiously as ever to Voltaire, whose compliments and cajoleries were pouring out in their accustomed stream. But their relationship was no longer that of master and pupil, courtier and King; it was that of two independent and equal powers. Even Frederick the Great was forced to see at last in the Patriarch of Ferney something more than a monkey with a genius for French versification. He actually came to respect the author of _Akakia_, and to cherish his memory. ‘Je lui fais tous les matins ma priere,’ he told d’Alembert, when Voltaire had been two years in the grave; ‘je lui dis, Divin Voltaire, _ora pro nobis_.’
1915.
NOTES:
[Footnote 6: October 1915.]
THE ROUSSEAU AFFAIR
No one who has made the slightest expedition into that curious and fascinating country, Eighteenth-Century France, can have come away from it without at least _one_ impression strong upon him–that in no other place and at no other time have people ever squabbled so much. France in the eighteenth century, whatever else it may have been–however splendid in genius, in vitality, in noble accomplishment and high endeavour–was certainly not a quiet place to live in. One could never have been certain, when one woke up in the morning, whether, before the day was out, one would not be in the Bastille for something one had said at dinner, or have quarrelled with half one’s friends for something one had never said at all.
Of all the disputes and agitations of that agitated age none is more remarkable than the famous quarrel between Rousseau and his friends, which disturbed French society for so many years, and profoundly affected the life and the character of the most strange and perhaps the most potent of the precursors of the Revolution. The affair is constantly cropping up in the literature of the time; it occupies a prominent place in the later books of the _Confessions_; and there is an account of its earlier phases–an account written from the anti-Rousseau point of view–in the _Memoires_ of Madame d’Epinay. The whole story is an exceedingly complex one, and all the details of it have never been satisfactorily explained; but the general verdict of subsequent writers has been decidedly hostile to Rousseau, though it has not subscribed to all the virulent abuse poured upon him by his enemies at the time of the quarrel. This, indeed, is precisely the conclusion which an unprejudiced reader of the _Confessions_ would naturally come to. Rousseau’s story, even as he himself tells it, does not carry conviction. He would have us believe that he was the victim of a vast and diabolical conspiracy, of which Grimm and Diderot were the moving spirits, which succeeded in alienating from him his dearest friends, and which eventually included all the ablest and most distinguished persons of the age. Not only does such a conspiracy appear, upon the face of it, highly improbable, but the evidence which Rousseau adduces to prove its existence seems totally insufficient; and the reader is left under the impression that the unfortunate Jean-Jacques was the victim, not of a plot contrived by rancorous enemies, but of his own perplexed, suspicious, and deluded mind. This conclusion is supported by the account of the affair given by contemporaries, and it is still further strengthened by Rousseau’s own writings subsequent to the _Confessions_, where his endless recriminations, his elaborate hypotheses, and his wild inferences bear all the appearance of mania. Here the matter has rested for many years; and it seemed improbable that any fresh reasons would arise for reopening the question. Mrs. F. Macdonald, however, in a recently-published work[7], has produced some new and important evidence, which throws entirely fresh light upon certain obscure parts of this doubtful history; and is possibly of even greater interest. For it is Mrs. Macdonald’s contention that her new discovery completely overturns the orthodox theory, establishes the guilt of Grimm, Diderot, and the rest of the anti-Rousseau party, and proves that the story told in the _Confessions_ is simply the truth.
If these conclusions really do follow from Mrs. Macdonald’s newly-discovered data, it would be difficult to over-estimate the value of her work, for the result of it would be nothing less than a revolution in our judgments upon some of the principal characters of the eighteenth century. To make it certain that Diderot was a cad and a cheat, that d’Alembert was a dupe, and Hume a liar–that, surely, were no small achievement. And, even if these conclusions do not follow from Mrs. Macdonald’s data, her work will still be valuable, owing to the data themselves. Her discoveries are important, whatever inferences may be drawn from them; and for this reason her book, ‘which represents,’ as she tells us, ‘twenty years of research,’ will be welcome to all students of that remarkable age.
Mrs. Macdonald’s principal revelations relate to the _Memoires_ of Madame d’Epinay. This work was first printed in 1818, and the concluding quarter of it contains an account of the Rousseau quarrel, the most detailed of all those written from the anti-Rousseau point of view. It has, however, always been doubtful how far the _Memoires_ were to be trusted as accurate records of historical fact. The manuscript disappeared; but it was known that the characters who, in the printed book, appear under the names of real persons, were given pseudonyms in the original document; and many of the minor statements contradicted known events. Had Madame d’Epinay merely intended to write a _roman a clef_? What seemed, so far as concerned the Rousseau narrative, to put this hypothesis out of court was the fact that the story of the quarrel as it appears in the _Memoires_ is, in its main outlines, substantiated both by Grimm’s references to Rousseau in his _Correspondance Litteraire_, and by a brief memorandum of Rousseau’s misconduct, drawn up by Diderot for his private use, and not published until many years after Madame d’Epinay’s death. Accordingly most writers on the subject have taken the accuracy of the _Memoires_ for granted; Sainte-Beuve, for instance, prefers the word of Madame d’Epinay to that of Rousseau, when there is a direct conflict of testimony; and Lord Morley, in his well-known biography, uses the _Memoires_ as an authority for many of the incidents which he relates. Mrs. Macdonald’s researches, however, have put an entirely different complexion on the case. She has discovered the manuscript from which the _Memoires_ were printed, and she has examined the original draft of this manuscript, which had been unearthed some years ago, but whose full import had been unaccountably neglected by previous scholars. From these researches, two facts have come to light. In the first place, the manuscript differs in many respects from the printed book, and, in particular, contains a conclusion of two hundred sheets, which has never been printed at all; the alterations were clearly made in order to conceal the inaccuracies of the manuscript; and the omitted conclusion is frankly and palpably a fiction. And in the second place, the original draft of the manuscript turns out to be the work of several hands; it contains, especially in those portions which concern Rousseau, many erasures, corrections, and notes, while several pages have been altogether cut out; most of the corrections were made by Madame d’Epinay herself; but in nearly every case these corrections carry out the instructions in the notes; and the notes themselves are in the handwriting of Diderot and Grimm. Mrs. Macdonald gives several facsimiles of pages in the original draft, which amply support her description of it; but it is to be hoped that before long she will be able to produce a new and complete edition of the _Memoires_, with all the manuscript alterations clearly indicated; for until then it will be difficult to realise the exact condition of the text. However, it is now beyond dispute both that Madame d’Epinay’s narrative cannot be regarded as historically accurate, and that its agreement with the statements of Grimm and Diderot is by no means an independent confirmation of its truth, for Grimm and Diderot themselves had a hand in its compilation.
Thus far we are on firm ground. But what are the conclusions which Mrs. Macdonald builds up from these foundations? The account, she says, of Rousseau’s conduct and character, as it appears in the printed version, is hostile to him, but it was not the account which Madame d’Epinay herself originally wrote. The hostile narrative was, in effect, composed by Grimm and Diderot, who induced Madame d’Epinay to substitute it for her own story; and thus her own story could not have agreed with theirs. Madame d’Epinay knew the truth; she knew that Rousseau’s conduct had been honourable and wise; and so she had described it in her book; until, falling completely under the influence of Grimm and Diderot, she had allowed herself to become the instrument for blackening the reputation of her old friend. Mrs. Macdonald paints a lurid picture of the conspirators at work–of Diderot penning his false and malignant instructions, of Madame d’Epinay’s half-unwilling hand putting the last touches to the fraud, of Grimm, rushing back to Paris at the time of the Revolution, and risking his life in order to make quite certain that the result of all these efforts should reach posterity. Well! it would be difficult–perhaps it would be impossible–to prove conclusively that none of these things ever took place. The facts upon which Mrs. Macdonald lays so much stress–the mutilations, the additions, the instructing notes, the proved inaccuracy of the story the manuscripts tell–these facts, no doubt, may be explained by Mrs. Macdonald’s theories; but there are other facts–no less important, and no less certain–which are in direct contradiction to Mrs. Macdonald’s view, and over which she passes as lightly as she can. Putting aside the question of the _Memoires_, we know nothing of Diderot which would lead us to entertain for a moment the supposition that he was a dishonourable and badhearted man; we do know that his writings bear the imprint of a singularly candid, noble, and fearless mind; we do know that he devoted his life, unflinchingly and unsparingly, to a great cause. We know less of Grimm; but it is at least certain that he was the intimate friend of Diderot, and of many more of the distinguished men of the time. Is all this evidence to be put on one side as of no account? Are we to dismiss it, as Mrs. Macdonald dismisses it, as merely ‘psychological’? Surely Diderot’s reputation as an honest man is as much a fact as his notes in the draft of the _Memoires_. It is quite true that his reputation _may_ have been ill-founded, that d’Alembert, and Turgot, and Hume _may_ have been deluded, or _may_ have been bribed, into admitting him to their friendship; but is it not clear that we ought not to believe any such hypotheses as these until we have before us such convincing proof of Diderot’s guilt that we _must_ believe them? Mrs. Macdonald declares that she has produced such proof; and she points triumphantly to her garbled and concocted manuscripts. If there is indeed no explanation of these garblings and concoctions other than that which Mrs. Macdonald puts forward–that they were the outcome of a false and malicious conspiracy to blast the reputation of Rousseau–then we must admit that she is right, and that all our general ‘psychological’ considerations as to Diderot’s reputation in the world must be disregarded. But, before we come to this conclusion, how careful must we be to examine every other possible explanation of Mrs. Macdonald’s facts, how rigorously must we sift her own explanation of them, how eagerly must we seize upon every loophole of escape!
It is, I believe, possible to explain the condition of the d’Epinay manuscript without having recourse to the iconoclastic theory of Mrs. Macdonald. To explain everything, indeed, would be out of the question, owing to our insufficient data, and the extreme complexity of the events; all that we can hope to do is to suggest an explanation which will account for the most important of the known facts. Not the least interesting of Mrs. Macdonald’s discoveries went to show that the _Memoires_, so far from being historically accurate, were in reality full of unfounded statements, that they concluded with an entirely imaginary narrative, and that, in short, they might be described, almost without exaggeration, in the very words with which Grimm himself actually did describe them in his _Correspondance Litteraire_, as ‘l’ebauche d’un long roman.’ Mrs. Macdonald eagerly lays emphasis upon this discovery, because she is, of course, anxious to prove that the most damning of all the accounts of Rousseau’s conduct is an untrue one. But she has proved too much. The _Memoires_, she says, are a fiction; therefore the writers of them were liars. The answer is obvious: why should we not suppose that the writers were not liars at all, but simply novelists? Will not this hypothesis fit into the facts just as well as Mrs. Macdonald’s? Madame d’Epinay, let us suppose, wrote a narrative, partly imaginary and partly true, based upon her own experiences, but without any strict adherence to the actual course of events, and filled with personages whose actions were, in many cases, fictitious, but whose characters were, on the whole, moulded upon the actual characters of her friends. Let us suppose that when she had finished her work–a work full of subtle observation and delightful writing–she showed it to Grimm and Diderot. They had only one criticism to make: it related to her treatment of the character which had been moulded upon that of Rousseau. ‘Your Rousseau, chere Madame, is a very poor affair indeed! The most salient points in his character seem to have escaped you. We know what that man really was. We know how he behaved at that time. _C’etait un homme a faire peur_. You have missed a great opportunity of drawing a fine picture of a hypocritical rascal.’ Whereupon they gave her their own impressions of Rousseau’s conduct, they showed her the letters that had passed between them, and they jotted down some notes for her guidance. She rewrote the story in accordance with their notes and their anecdotes; but she rearranged the incidents, she condensed or amplified the letters, as she thought fit–for she was not writing a history, but ‘l’ebauche d’un long roman.’ If we suppose that this, or something like this, was what occurred, shall we not have avoided the necessity for a theory so repugnant to common-sense as that which would impute to a man of recognised integrity the meanest of frauds?
To follow Mrs. Macdonald into the inner recesses and elaborations of her argument would be a difficult and tedious task. The circumstances with which she is principally concerned–the suspicions, the accusations, the anonymous letters, the intrigues, the endless problems as to whether Madame d’Epinay was jealous of Madame d’Houdetot, whether Therese told fibs, whether, on the 14th of the month, Grimm was grossly impertinent, and whether, on the 15th, Rousseau was outrageously rude, whether Rousseau revealed a secret to Diderot, which Diderot revealed to Saint-Lambert, and whether, if Diderot revealed it, he believed that Rousseau had revealed it before–these circumstances form, as Lord Morley says, ‘a tale of labyrinthine nightmares,’ and Mrs. Macdonald has done very little to mitigate either the contortions of the labyrinths or the horror of the dreams. Her book is exceedingly ill-arranged; it is enormously long, filling two large volumes, with an immense apparatus of appendices and notes; it is full of repetitions and of irrelevant matter; and the argument is so indistinctly set forth that even an instructed reader finds great difficulty in following its drift. Without, however, plunging into the abyss of complications which yawns for us in Mrs. Macdonald’s pages, it may be worth while to touch upon one point with which she has dealt (perhaps wisely for her own case!) only very slightly–the question of the motives which could have induced Grimm and Diderot to perpetuate a series of malignant lies.
It is, doubtless, conceivable that Grimm, who was Madame d’Epinay’s lover, was jealous of Rousseau, who was Madame d’Epinay’s friend. We know very little of Grimm’s character, but what we do know seems to show that he was a jealous man and an ambitious man; it is possible that a close alliance with Madame d’Epinay may have seemed to him a necessary step in his career; and it is conceivable that he may have determined not to rest until his most serious rival in Madame d’Epinay’s affections was utterly cast out. He was probably prejudiced against Rousseau from the beginning, and he may have allowed his prejudices to colour his view of Rousseau’s character and acts. The violence of the abuse which Grimm and the rest of the Encyclopaedists hurled against the miserable Jean-Jacques was certainly quite out of proportion to the real facts of the case. Whenever he is mentioned one is sure of hearing something about _traitre_ and _mensonge_ and _sceleratesse_. He is referred to as often as not as if he were some dangerous kind of wild beast. This was Grimm’s habitual language with regard to him; and this was the view of his character which Madame d’Epinay finally expressed in her book. The important question is–did Grimm know that Rousseau was in reality an honourable man, and, knowing this, did he deliberately defame him in order to drive him out of Madame d’Epinay’s affections? The answer, I think, must be in the negative, for the following reason. If Grimm had known that there was something to be ashamed of in the notes with which he had supplied Madame d’Epinay, and which led to the alteration of her _Memoires_, he certainly would have destroyed the draft of the manuscript, which was the only record of those notes having ever been made. As it happens, we know that he had the opportunity of destroying the draft, and he did not do so. He came to Paris at the risk of his life in 1791, and stayed there for four months, with the object, according to his own account, of collecting papers belonging to the Empress Catherine, or, according to Mrs. Macdonald’s account, of having the rough draft of the _Memoires_ copied out by his secretary. Whatever his object, it is certain that the copy–that from which ultimately the _Memoires_ were printed–was made either at that time, or earlier; and that there was nothing on earth to prevent him, during the four months of his stay in Paris, from destroying the draft. Mrs. Macdonald’s explanation of this difficulty is lamentably weak. Grimm, she says, must have wished to get away from Paris ‘without arousing suspicion by destroying papers.’ This is indeed an ‘exquisite reason,’ which would have delighted that good knight Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Grimm had four months at his disposal; he was undisturbed in his own house; why should he not have burnt the draft page by page as it was copied out? There can be only one reply: Why _should_ he?
If it is possible to suggest some fairly plausible motives which might conceivably have induced Grimm to blacken Rousseau’s character, the case of Diderot presents difficulties which are quite insurmountable. Mrs. Macdonald asserts that Diderot was jealous of Rousseau. Why? Because he was tired of hearing Rousseau described as ‘the virtuous’; that is all. Surely Mrs. Macdonald should have been the first to recognise that such an argument is a little too ‘psychological.’ The truth is that Diderot had nothing to gain by attacking Rousseau. He was not, like Grimm, in love with Madame d’Epinay; he was not a newcomer who had still to win for himself a position in the Parisian world. His acquaintance with Madame d’Epinay was slight; and, if there were any advances, they were from her side, for he was one of the most distinguished men of the day. In fact, the only reason that he could have had for abusing Rousseau was that he believed Rousseau deserved abuse. Whether he was right in believing so is a very different question. Most readers, at the present day, now that the whole noisy controversy has long taken its quiet place in the perspective of Time, would, I think, agree that Diderot and the rest of the Encyclopaedists were mistaken. As we see him now, in that long vista, Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex, creature; and, above all else, he possessed one quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was modern. Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world–to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart. Who can wonder that he was misunderstood, and buffeted, and driven mad? Who can wonder that, in his agitations, his perplexities, his writhings, he seemed, to the pupils of Voltaire, little less than a frenzied fiend? ‘Cet homme est un forcene!’ Diderot exclaims. ‘Je tache en vain de faire de la poesie, mais cet homme me revient tout a travers mon travail; il me trouble, et je suis comme si j’avais a cote de moi un damne: il est damne, cela est sur. … J’avoue que je n’ai jamais eprouve un trouble d’ame si terrible que celui que j’ai … Que je ne revoie plus cet homme-la, il me ferait croire au diable et a l’enfer. Si je suis jamais force de retourner chez lui, je suis sur que je fremirai tout le long du chemin: j’avais la fievre en revenant … On entendait ses cris jusqu’au bout du jardin; et je le voyais!… Les poetes ont bien fait de mettre un intervalle immense entre le ciel et les enfers. En verite, la main me tremble.’ Every word of that is stamped with sincerity; Diderot was writing from his heart. But he was wrong; the ‘intervalle immense,’ across which, so strangely and so horribly, he had caught glimpses of what he had never seen before, was not the abyss between heaven and hell, but between the old world and the new.
1907.
NOTES:
[Footnote 7: _Jean Jacques Rousseau: a New Criticism_, by Frederika Macdonald. In two volumes. Chapman and Hall. 1906.]
THE POETRY OF BLAKE[8]
The new edition of Blake’s poetical works, published by the Clarendon Press, will be welcomed by every lover of English poetry. The volume is worthy of the great university under whose auspices it has been produced, and of the great artist whose words it will help to perpetuate. Blake has been, hitherto, singularly unfortunate in his editors. With a single exception, every edition of his poems up to the present time has contained a multitude of textual errors which, in the case of any other writer of equal eminence, would have been well-nigh inconceivable. The great majority of these errors were not the result of accident: they were the result of deliberate falsification. Blake’s text has been emended and corrected and ‘improved,’ so largely and so habitually, that there was a very real danger of its becoming permanently corrupted; and this danger was all the more serious, since the work of mutilation was carried on to an accompaniment of fervent admiration of the poet. ‘It is not a little bewildering,’ says Mr. Sampson, the present editor, ‘to find one great poet and critic extolling Blake for the “glory of metre” and “the sonorous beauty of lyrical work” in the two opening lyrics of the _Songs of Experience_, while he introduces into the five short stanzas quoted no less than seven emendations of his own, involving additions of syllables and important changes of meaning.’ This is Procrustes admiring the exquisite proportions of his victim. As one observes the countless instances accumulated in Mr. Sampson’s notes, of the clippings and filings to which the free and spontaneous expression of Blake’s genius has been subjected, one is reminded of a verse in one of his own lyrics, where he speaks of the beautiful garden in which–
Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briers my joys and desires;
and one cannot help hazarding the conjecture, that Blake’s prophetic vision recognised, in the lineaments of the ‘priests in black gowns,’ most of his future editors. Perhaps, though, if Blake’s prescience had extended so far as this, he would have taken a more drastic measure; and we shudder to think of the sort of epigram with which the editorial efforts of his worshippers might have been rewarded. The present edition, however, amply compensates for the past. Mr. Sampson gives us, in the first place, the correct and entire text of the poems, so printed as to afford easy reading to those who desire access to the text and nothing more. At the same time, in a series of notes and prefaces, he has provided an elaborate commentary, containing, besides all the variorum readings, a great mass of bibliographical and critical matter; and, in addition, he has enabled the reader to obtain a clue through the labyrinth of Blake’s mythology, by means of ample quotations from those passages in the _Prophetic Books_, which throw light upon the obscurities of the poems. The most important Blake document–the Rossetti MS.–has been freshly collated, with the generous aid of the owner, Mr. W.A. White, to whom the gratitude of the public is due in no common measure; and the long-lost Pickering MS.–the sole authority for some of the most mystical and absorbing of the poems–was, with deserved good fortune, discovered by Mr. Sampson in time for collation in the present edition. Thus there is hardly a line in the volume which has not been reproduced from an original, either written or engraved by the hand of Blake. Mr. Sampson’s minute and ungrudging care, his high critical acumen, and the skill with which he has brought his wide knowledge of the subject to bear upon the difficulties of the text, combine to make his edition a noble and splendid monument of English scholarship. It will be long indeed before the poems of Blake cease to afford matter for fresh discussions and commentaries and interpretations; but it is safe to predict that, so far as their form is concerned, they will henceforward remain unchanged. There will be no room for further editing. The work has been done by Mr. Sampson, once and for all.
In the case of Blake, a minute exactitude of text is particularly important, for more than one reason. Many of his effects depend upon subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling, which are too easily lost in reproduction. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’ is the ordinary version of one of his most celebrated lines. But in Blake’s original engraving the words appear thus–‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’; and who can fail to perceive the difference? Even more remarkable is the change which the omission of a single stop has produced in the last line of one of the succeeding stanzas of the same poem.
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
So Blake engraved the verse; and, as Mr. Sampson points out,’the terrible, compressed force’ of the final line vanishes to nothing in the ‘languid punctuation’ of subsequent editions:–‘What dread hand and what dread feet?’ It is hardly an exaggeration to say, that the re-discovery of this line alone would have justified the appearance of the present edition.
But these considerations of what may be called the mechanics of Blake’s poetry are not–important as they are–the only justification for a scrupulous adherence to his autograph text. Blake’s use of language was not guided by the ordinarily accepted rules of writing; he allowed himself to be trammelled neither by prosody nor by grammar; he wrote, with an extraordinary audacity, according to the mysterious dictates of his own strange and intimate conception of the beautiful and the just. Thus his compositions, amenable to no other laws than those of his own making, fill a unique place in the poetry of the world. They are the rebels and atheists of literature, or rather, they are the sanctuaries of an Unknown God; and to invoke that deity by means of orthodox incantations is to run the risk of hell fire. Editors may punctuate afresh the text of Shakespeare with impunity, and perhaps even with advantage; but add a comma to the text of Blake, and you put all Heaven in a rage. You have laid your hands upon the Ark of the Covenant. Nor is this all. When once, in the case of Blake, the slightest deviation has been made from the authoritative version, it is hardly possible to stop there. The emendator is on an inclined plane which leads him inevitably from readjustments of punctuation to corrections of grammar, and from corrections of grammar to alterations of rhythm; if he is in for a penny, he is in for a pound. The first poem in the Rossetti MS. may be adduced as one instance–out of the enormous number which fill Mr. Sampson’s notes–of the dangers of editorial laxity.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears, Ah! she doth depart.
This is the first half of the poem; and editors have been contented with an alteration of stops, and the change of ‘doth’ into ‘did.’ But their work was not over; they had, as it were, tasted blood; and their version of the last four lines of the poem is as follows:
Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
Reference to the MS., however, shows that the last line had been struck out by Blake, and another substituted in its place–a line which is now printed for the first time by Mr. Sampson. So that the true reading of the verse is:
Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly–
O! was no deny.
After these exertions, it must have seemed natural enough to Rossetti and his successors to print four other expunged lines as part of the poem, and to complete the business by clapping a title to their concoction–‘Love’s Secret’–a title which there is no reason to suppose had ever entered the poet’s mind.
Besides illustrating the shortcomings of his editors, this little poem is an admirable instance of Blake’s most persistent quality–his triumphant freedom from conventional restraints. His most characteristic passages are at once so unexpected and so complete in their effect, that the reader is moved by them, spontaneously, to some conjecture of ‘inspiration.’ Sir Walter Raleigh, indeed, in his interesting Introduction to a smaller edition of the poems, protests against such attributions of peculiar powers to Blake, or indeed to any other poet. ‘No man,’ he says, ‘destitute of genius, could live for a day.’ But even if we all agree to be inspired together, we must still admit that there are degrees of inspiration; if Mr. F’s Aunt was a woman of genius, what are we to say of Hamlet? And Blake, in the hierarchy of the inspired, stands very high indeed. If one could strike an average among poets, it would probably be true to say that, so far as inspiration is concerned, Blake is to the average poet, as the average poet is to the man in the street. All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making one, now and then, involuntarily ejaculate: ‘What made him think of that?’ With Blake, one is asking the question all the time.
Blake’s originality of manner was not, as has sometimes been the case, a cloak for platitude. What he has to say belongs no less distinctly to a mind of astonishing self-dependence than his way of saying it. In English literature, as Sir Walter Raleigh observes, he ‘stands outside the regular line of succession.’ All that he had in common with the great leaders of the Romantic Movement was an abhorrence of the conventionality and the rationalism of the eighteenth century; for the eighteenth century itself was hardly more alien to his spirit than that exaltation of Nature–the ‘Vegetable Universe,’ as he called it–from which sprang the pantheism of Wordsworth and the paganism of Keats. ‘Nature is the work of the Devil,’ he exclaimed one day; ‘the Devil is in us as far as we are Nature.’ There was no part of the sensible world which, in his philosophy, was not impregnated with vileness. Even the ‘ancient heavens’ were not, to his uncompromising vision, ‘fresh and strong’; they were ‘writ with Curses from Pole to Pole,’ and destined to vanish into nothingness with the triumph of the Everlasting Gospel.
There are doubtless many to whom Blake is known simply as a charming and splendid lyrist, as the author of _Infant Joy_, and _The Tyger_, and the rest of the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_. These poems show but faint traces of any system of philosophy; but, to a reader of the Rossetti and Pickering MSS., the presence of a hidden and symbolic meaning in Blake’s words becomes obvious enough–a meaning which receives its fullest expression in the _Prophetic Books_. It was only natural that the extraordinary nature of Blake’s utterance in these latter works should have given rise to the belief that he was merely an inspired idiot–a madman who happened to be able to write good verses. That belief, made finally impossible by Mr. Swinburne’s elaborate Essay, is now, happily, nothing more than a curiosity of literary history; and indeed signs are not wanting that the whirligig of Time, which left Blake for so long in the Paradise of Fools, is now about to place him among the Prophets. Anarchy is the most fashionable of creeds; and Blake’s writings, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, contain a complete exposition of its doctrines. The same critic asserts that Blake was ‘one of the most consistent of English poets and thinkers.’ This is high praise indeed; but there seems to be some ambiguity in it. It is one thing to give Blake credit for that sort of consistency which lies in the repeated enunciation of the same body of beliefs throughout a large mass of compositions and over a long period of time, and which could never be possessed by a, madman or an incoherent charlatan. It is quite another thing to assert that his doctrines form in themselves a consistent whole, in the sense in which that quality would be ordinarily attributed to a system of philosophy. Does Sir Walter mean to assert that Blake is, in this sense too, ‘consistent’? It is a little difficult to discover. Referring, in his Introduction, to Blake’s abusive notes on Bacon’s _Essays_, he speaks of–
The sentimental enthusiast, who worships all great men indifferently, [and who] finds himself in a distressful position when his gods fall out among themselves. His case [Sir Walter wittily adds] is not much unlike that of Terah, the father of Abraham, who (if the legend be true) was a dealer in idols among the Chaldees, and, coming home to his shop one day, after a brief absence, found that the idols had quarrelled, and the biggest of them had smashed the rest to atoms. Blake is a dangerous idol for any man to keep in his shop.
We wonder very much whether he is kept in Sir Walter Raleigh’s.
It seems clear, at any rate, that no claim for a ‘consistency’ which would imply freedom from self-contradiction can be validly made for Blake. His treatment of the problem of evil is enough to show how very far he was from that clarity of thought without which even prophets are liable, when the time comes, to fall into disrepute. ‘Plato,’ said Blake, ‘knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God’s eyes.’ And this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. ‘Satan’s empire is the empire of nothing’; there is no such thing as evil–it is a mere ‘negation.’ And the ‘moral virtues,’ which attempt to discriminate between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely ‘allegories and dissimulations,’ they ‘do not exist.’ Such was one of the most fundamental of Blake’s doctrines; but it requires only a superficial acquaintance with his writings to recognise that their whole tenour is an implicit contradiction of this very belief. Every page he wrote contains a moral exhortation; bad thoughts and bad feelings raised in him a fury of rage and indignation which the bitterest of satirists never surpassed. His epigrams on Reynolds are masterpieces of virulent abuse; the punishment which he devised for Klopstock–his impersonation of ‘flaccid fluency and devout sentiment’–is unprintable; as for those who attempt to enforce moral laws, they shall be ‘cast out,’ for they ‘crucify Christ with the head downwards.’ The contradiction is indeed glaring. ‘There is no such thing as wickedness,’ Blake says in effect, ‘and you are wicked if you think there is.’ If it is true that evil does not exist, all Blake’s denunciations are so much empty chatter; and, on the other hand, if there is a real distinction between good and bad, if everything, in fact, is _not_ good in God’s eyes–then why not say so? Really Blake, as politicians say, ‘cannot have it both ways.’
But of course, his answer to all this is simple enough. To judge him according to the light of reason is to make an appeal to a tribunal whose jurisdiction he had always refused to recognise as binding. In fact, to Blake’s mind, the laws of reason were nothing but a horrible phantasm deluding and perplexing mankind, from whose clutches it is the business of every human soul to free itself as speedily as possible. Reason is the ‘Spectre’ of Blake’s mythology, that Spectre, which, he says,
Around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way.
It is a malignant spirit, for ever struggling with the ‘Emanation,’ or imaginative side of man, whose triumph is the supreme end of the universe. Ever since the day when, in his childhood, Blake had seen God’s forehead at the window, he had found in imaginative vision the only reality and the only good. He beheld the things of this world ‘not with, but through, the eye’:
With my inward Eye, ’tis an old Man grey, With my outward, a Thistle across my way.
It was to the imagination, and the imagination alone, that Blake yielded the allegiance of his spirit. His attitude towards reason was the attitude of the mystic; and it involved an inevitable dilemma. He never could, in truth, quite shake himself free of his ‘Spectre’; struggle as he would, he could not escape altogether from the employment of the ordinary forms of thought and speech; he is constantly arguing, as if argument were really a means of approaching the truth; he was subdued to what he worked in. As in his own poem, he had, somehow or other, been locked into a crystal cabinet–the world of the senses and of reason–a gilded, artificial, gimcrack dwelling, after ‘the wild’ where he had danced so merrily before.
I strove to seize the inmost Form
With ardour fierce and hands of flame, But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
And like a Weeping Babe became–
A weeping Babe upon the wild….
To be able to lay hands upon ‘the inmost form,’ one must achieve the impossible; one must be inside and outside the crystal cabinet at the same time. But Blake was not to be turned aside by such considerations. He would have it both ways; and whoever demurred was crucifying Christ with the head downwards.
Besides its unreasonableness, there is an even more serious objection to Blake’s mysticism–and indeed to all mysticism: its lack of humanity. The mystic’s creed–even when arrayed in the wondrous and ecstatic beauty of Blake’s verse–comes upon the ordinary man, in the rigidity of its uncompromising elevation, with a shock which is terrible, and almost cruel. The sacrifices which it demands are too vast, in spite of the divinity of what it has to offer. What shall it profit a man, one is tempted to exclaim, if he gain his own soul, and lose the whole world? The mystic ideal is the highest of all; but it has no breadth. The following lines express, with a simplicity and an intensity of inspiration which he never surpassed, Blake’s conception of that ideal:
And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
‘This the Wine, & this the Bread.’
It is easy to imagine the sort of comments to which Voltaire, for instance, with his ‘wracking wheel’ of sarcasm and common-sense, would have subjected such lines as these. His criticism would have been irrelevant, because it would never have reached the heart of the matter at issue; it would have been based upon no true understanding of Blake’s words. But that they do admit of a real, an unanswerable criticism, it is difficult to doubt. Charles Lamb, perhaps, might have made it; incidentally, indeed, he has. ‘Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_’–do these things form no part of your Eternity?
The truth is plain: Blake was an intellectual drunkard. His words come down to us in a rapture of broken fluency from impossible intoxicated heights. His spirit soared above the empyrean; and, even as it soared, it stumbled in the gutter of Felpham. His lips brought forth, in the same breath, in the same inspired utterance, the _Auguries of Innocence_ and the epigrams on Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was in no condition to chop logic, or to take heed of the existing forms of things. In the imaginary portrait of himself, prefixed to Sir Walter Raleigh’s volume, we can see him, as he appeared to his own ‘inward eye,’ staggering between the abyss and the star of Heaven, his limbs cast abroad, his head thrown back in an ecstasy of intoxication, so that, to the frenzy of his rolling vision, the whole universe is upside down. We look, and, as we gaze at the strange image and listen to the marvellous melody, we are almost tempted to go and do likewise.
But it is not as a prophet, it is as an artist, that Blake deserves the highest honours and the most enduring fame. In spite of his hatred of the ‘vegetable universe,’ his poems possess the inexplicable and spontaneous quality of natural objects; they are more like the works of Heaven than the works of man. They have, besides, the two most obvious characteristics of Nature–loveliness and power. In some of his lyrics there is an exquisite simplicity, which seems, like a flower or a child, to be unconscious of itself. In his poem of _The Birds_–to mention, out of many, perhaps a less known instance–it is not the poet that one hears, it is the birds themselves.
O thou summer’s harmony,
I have lived and mourned for thee; Each day I mourn along the wood,
And night hath heard my sorrows loud.
In his other mood–the mood of elemental force–Blake produces effects which are unique in literature. His mastery of the mysterious suggestions which lie concealed in words is complete.
He who torments the Chafer’s Sprite Weaves a Bower in endless Night.
What dark and terrible visions the last line calls up! And, with the aid of this control over the secret springs of language, he is able to produce in poetry those vast and vague effects of gloom, of foreboding, and of terror, which seem to be proper to music alone. Sometimes his words are heavy with the doubtful horror of an approaching thunderstorm:
The Guests are scattered thro’ the land, For the Eye altering alters all;
The Senses roll themselves in fear, And the flat Earth becomes a Ball;
The Stars, Sun, Moon, all shrink away, A desart vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink, And a dark desart all around.
And sometimes Blake invests his verses with a sense of nameless and infinite ruin, such as one feels when the drum and the violin mysteriously come together, in one of Beethoven’s Symphonies, to predict the annihilation of worlds:
On the shadows of the Moon,
Climbing through Night’s highest noon: In Time’s Ocean falling, drowned:
In Aged Ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp’d the Wings Of all Sublunary Things:
But when once I did descry
The Immortal Man that cannot Die, Thro’ evening shades I haste away
To close the Labours of my Day.
The Door of Death I open found,
And the Worm Weaving in the Ground; Thou’rt my Mother, from the Womb;
Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the Tomb: Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife,
And weeping over the Web of Life.
Such music is not to be lightly mouthed by mortals; for us, in our weakness, a few strains of it, now and then, amid the murmur of ordinary converse, are enough. For Blake’s words will always be strangers on this earth; they could only fall with familiarity from the lips of his own Gods:
above Time’s troubled fountains, On the great Atlantic Mountains,
In my Golden House on high.
They belong to the language of Los and Rahab and Enitharmon; and their mystery is revealed for ever in the land of the Sunflower’s desire.
1906.
NOTES:
[Footnote 8: _The Poetical Works of William Blake. A new and verbatim text from the manuscript, engraved, and letter-press originals, with variorum readings and bibliographical notes and prefaces._ By John Sampson, Librarian in the University of Liverpool. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1905.
_The Lyrical Poems of William Blake._ Text by John Sampson, with an Introduction by Walter Raleigh. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1905.]
THE LAST ELIZABETHAN
The shrine of Poetry is a secret one; and it is fortunate that this should be the case; for it gives a sense of security. The cult is too mysterious and intimate to figure upon census papers; there are no turnstiles at the temple gates; and so, as all inquiries must be fruitless, the obvious plan is to take for granted a good attendance of worshippers, and to pass on. Yet, if Apollo were to come down (after the manner of deities) and put questions–must we suppose to the Laureate?–as to the number of the elect, would we be quite sure of escaping wrath and destruction? Let us hope for the best; and perhaps, if we were bent upon finding out the truth, the simplest way would be to watch the sales of the new edition of the poems of Beddoes, which Messrs. Routledge have lately added to the ‘Muses’ Library.’ How many among Apollo’s pew-renters, one wonders, have ever read Beddoes, or, indeed, have ever heard of him? For some reason or another, this extraordinary poet has not only never received the recognition which is his due, but has failed almost entirely to receive any recognition whatever. If his name is known at all, it is known in virtue of the one or two of his lyrics which have crept into some of the current anthologies. But Beddoes’ highest claim to distinction does not rest upon his lyrical achievements, consummate as those achievements are; it rests upon his extraordinary eminence as a master of dramatic blank verse. Perhaps his greatest misfortune was that he was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and not at the end of the sixteenth. His proper place was among that noble band of Elizabethans, whose strong and splendid spirit gave to England, in one miraculous generation, the most glorious heritage of drama that the world has known. If Charles Lamb had discovered his tragedies among the folios of the British Museum, and had given extracts from them in the _Specimens of Dramatic Poets_, Beddoes’ name would doubtless be as familiar to us now as those of Marlowe and Webster, Fletcher and Ford. As it happened, however, he came as a strange and isolated phenomenon, a star which had wandered from its constellation, and was lost among alien lights. It is to very little purpose that Mr. Ramsay Colles, his latest editor, assures us that ‘Beddoes is interesting as marking the transition from Shelley to Browning’; it is to still less purpose that he points out to us a passage in _Death’s Jest Book_ which anticipates the doctrines of _The Descent of Man._ For Beddoes cannot be hoisted into line with his contemporaries by such methods as these; nor is it in the light of such after-considerations that the value of his work must be judged. We must take him on his own merits, ‘unmixed with seconds’; we must discover and appraise his peculiar quality for its own sake.
He hath skill in language;
And knowledge is in him, root, flower, and fruit, A palm with winged imagination in it,
Whose roots stretch even underneath the grave; And on them hangs a lamp of magic science In his soul’s deepest mine, where folded thoughts Lie sleeping on the tombs of magi dead.
If the neglect suffered by Beddoes’ poetry may be accounted for in more ways than one, it is not so easy to understand why more curiosity has never been aroused by the circumstances of his life. For one reader who cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the history of the writer; and all that we know both of the life and the character of Beddoes possesses those very qualities of peculiarity, mystery, and adventure, which are so dear to the hearts of subscribers to circulating libraries. Yet only one account of his career has ever been given to the public; and that account, fragmentary and incorrect as it is, has long been out of print. It was supplemented some years ago by Mr. Gosse, who was able to throw additional light upon one important circumstance, and who has also published a small collection of Beddoes’ letters. The main biographical facts, gathered from these sources, have been put together by Mr. Ramsay Colles, in his introduction to the new edition; but he has added nothing fresh; and we are still in almost complete ignorance as to the details of the last twenty years of Beddoes’ existence–full as those years certainly were of interest and even excitement. Nor has the veil been altogether withdrawn from that strange tragedy which, for the strange tragedian, was the last of all.
Readers of Miss Edgeworth’s letters may remember that her younger sister Anne, married a distinguished Clifton physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes. Their eldest son, born in 1803, was named Thomas Lovell, after his father and grandfather, and grew up to be the author of _The Brides’ Tragedy_ and _Death’s Jest Book_. Dr. Beddoes was a remarkable man, endowed with high and varied intellectual capacities and a rare independence of character. His scientific attainments were recognised by the University of Oxford, where he held the post of Lecturer in Chemistry, until the time of the French Revolution, when he was obliged to resign it, owing to the scandal caused by the unconcealed intensity of his liberal opinions. He then settled at Clifton as a physician, established a flourishing practice, and devoted his leisure to politics and scientific research. Sir Humphry Davy, who was his pupil, and whose merit he was the first to bring to light, declared that ‘he had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion.’ The words are curiously suggestive of the history of his son; and indeed the poet affords a striking instance of the hereditary transmission of mental qualities. Not only did Beddoes inherit his father’s talents and his father’s inability to make the best use of them; he possessed in a no less remarkable degree his father’s independence of mind. In both cases, this quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something very near insanity. Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of Dr. Beddoes. One day he astonished the ladies of Clifton by appearing at a tea-party with a packet of sugar in his hand; he explained that it was East Indian sugar, and that nothing would induce him to eat the usual kind, which came from Jamaica and was made by slaves. More extraordinary were his medical prescriptions; for he was in the habit of ordering cows to be conveyed into his patients’ bedrooms, in order, as he said, that they might ‘inhale the animals’ breath.’ It is easy to imagine the delight which the singular spectacle of a cow climbing upstairs into an invalid’s bedroom must have given to the future author of _Harpagus_ and _The Oviparous Tailor_. But ‘little Tom,’ as Miss Edgeworth calls him, was not destined to enjoy for long the benefit of parental example; for Dr. Beddoes died in the prime of life, when the child was not yet six years old.
The genius at school is usually a disappointing figure, for, as a rule, one must be commonplace to be a successful boy. In that preposterous world, to be remarkable is to be overlooked; and nothing less vivid than the white-hot blaze of a Shelley will bring with it even a distinguished martyrdom. But Beddoes was an exception, though he was not a martyr. On the contrary, he dominated his fellows as absolutely as if he had been a dullard and a dunce. He was at Charterhouse; and an entertaining account of his existence there has been preserved to us in a paper of school reminiscences, written by Mr. C.D. Bevan, who had been his fag. Though his place in the school was high, Beddoes’ interests were devoted not so much to classical scholarship as to the literature of his own tongue. Cowley, he afterwards told a friend, had been the first poet he had understood; but no doubt he had begun to understand poetry many years before he went to Charterhouse; and, while he was there, the reading which he chiefly delighted in was the Elizabethan drama. ‘He liked acting,’ says Mr. Bevan, ‘and was a good judge of it, and used to give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular actors, particularly Kean and Macready. Though his voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively conceited, he read with so much propriety of expression and manner, that I was always glad to listen: even when I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, his enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation required. One play in particular, Marlowe’s _Tragedy of Dr. Faustus_, excited my admiration in this way; and a liking for the old English drama, which I still retain, was created and strengthened by such recitations.’ But Beddoes’ dramatic performances were not limited to the works of others; when the occasion arose he was able to supply the necessary material himself. A locksmith had incurred his displeasure by putting a bad lock on his bookcase; Beddoes vowed vengeance; and when next the man appeared he was received by a dramatic interlude, representing his last moments, his horror and remorse, his death, and the funeral procession, which was interrupted by fiends, who carried off body and soul to eternal torments. Such was the realistic vigour of the performance that the locksmith, according to Mr. Bevan, ‘departed in a storm of wrath and execrations, and could not be persuaded, for some time, to resume his work.’
Besides the interlude of the wicked locksmith, Beddoes’ school compositions included a novel in the style of Fielding (which has unfortunately disappeared), the beginnings of an Elizabethan tragedy, and much miscellaneous verse. In 1820 he left Charterhouse, and went to Pembroke College, Oxford, where, in the following year, while still a freshman, he published his first volume, _The Improvisatore_, a series of short narratives in verse. The book had been written in part while he was at school; and its immaturity is obvious. It contains no trace of the nervous vigour of his later style; the verse is weak, and the sentiment, to use his own expression, ‘Moorish.’ Indeed, the only interest of the little work lies in the evidence which it affords that the singular pre-occupation which eventually dominated Beddoes’ mind had, even in these early days, made its appearance. The book is full of death. The poems begin on battle-fields and end in charnel-houses; old men are slaughtered in cold blood, and lovers are struck by lightning into mouldering heaps of corruption. The boy, with his elaborate exhibitions of physical horror, was doing his best to make his readers’ flesh creep. But the attempt was far too crude; and in after years, when Beddoes had become a past-master of that difficult art, he was very much ashamed of his first publication. So eager was he to destroy every trace of its existence, that he did not spare even the finely bound copies of his friends. The story goes that he amused himself by visiting their libraries with a penknife, so that, when next they took out the precious volume, they found the pages gone.
Beddoes, however, had no reason to be ashamed of his next publication, _The Brides’ Tragedy_, which appeared in 1822. In a single bound, he had reached the threshold of poetry, and was knocking at the door. The line which divides the best and most accomplished verse from poetry itself–that subtle and momentous line which every one can draw, and no one can explain–Beddoes had not yet crossed. But he had gone as far as it was possible to go by the aid of mere skill in the art of writing, and he was still in his twentieth year. Many passages in _The Brides’ Tragedy_ seem only to be waiting for the breath of inspiration which will bring them into life; and indeed, here and there, the breath has come, the warm, the true, the vital breath of Apollo. No one, surely, whose lips had not tasted of the waters of Helicon, could have uttered such words as these:
Here’s the blue violet, like Pandora’s eye, When first it darkened with immortal life
or a line of such intense imaginative force as this:
I’ve huddled her into the wormy earth;
or this splendid description of a stormy sunrise:
The day is in its shroud while yet an infant; And Night with giant strides stalks o’er the world, Like a swart Cyclops, on its hideous front One round, red, thunder-swollen eye ablaze.
The play was written on the Elizabethan model, and, as a play, it is disfigured by Beddoes’ most characteristic faults: the construction is weak, the interest fluctuates from character to character, and the motives and actions of the characters themselves are for the most part curiously remote from the realities of life. Yet, though the merit of the tragedy depends almost entirely upon the verse, there are signs in it that, while Beddoes lacked the gift of construction, he nevertheless possessed one important dramatic faculty–the power of creating detached scenes of interest and beauty. The scene in which the half-crazed Leonora imagines to herself, beside the couch on which her dead daughter lies, that the child is really living after all, is dramatic in the highest sense of the word; the situation, with all its capabilities of pathetic irony, is conceived and developed with consummate art and absolute restraint. Leonora’s speech ends thus:
… Speak, I pray thee, Floribel, Speak to thy mother; do but whisper ‘aye’; Well, well, I will not press her; I am sure She has the welcome news of some good fortune, And hoards the telling till her father comes; … Ah! She half laughed. I’ve guessed it then; Come tell me, I’ll be secret. Nay, if you mock me, I must be very angry till you speak.
Now this is silly; some of these young boys Have dressed the cushions with her clothes in sport. ‘Tis very like her. I could make this image Act all her greetings; she shall bow her head: ‘Good-morrow, mother’; and her smiling face Falls on my neck.–Oh, heaven, ’tis she indeed! I know it all–don’t tell me.
The last seven words are a summary of anguish, horror, and despair, such as Webster himself might have been proud to write.
_The Brides’ Tragedy_ was well received by critics; and a laudatory notice of Beddoes in the _Edinburgh_, written by Bryan Waller Procter–better known then than now under his pseudonym of Barry Cornwall–led to a lasting friendship between the two poets. The connection had an important result, for it was through Procter that Beddoes became acquainted with the most intimate of all his friends–Thomas Forbes Kelsall, then a young lawyer at Southampton. In the summer of 1823 Beddoes stayed at Southampton for several months, and, while ostensibly studying for his Oxford degree, gave up most of his time to conversations with Kelsall and to dramatic composition. It was a culminating point in his life: one of those moments which come, even to the most fortunate, once and once only–when youth, and hope, and the high exuberance of genius combine with circumstance and opportunity to crown the marvellous hour. The spade-work of _The Brides’ Tragedy_ had been accomplished; the seed had been sown; and now the harvest was beginning. Beddoes, ‘with the delicious sense,’ as Kelsall wrote long afterwards, ‘of the laurel freshly twined around his head,’ poured out, in these Southampton evenings, an eager stream of song. ‘His poetic composition,’ says his friend, ‘was then exceedingly facile: more than once or twice has he taken home with him at night some unfinished act of a drama, in which the editor [Kelsall] had found much to admire, and, at the next meeting, has produced a new one, similar in design, but filled with other thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from any feeling, right or fastidious, of unworthiness in its predecessor. Of several of these very striking fragments, large and grand in their aspect as they each started into form,
Like the red outline of beginning Adam,
… the only trace remaining is literally the impression thus deeply cut into their one observer’s mind. The fine verse just quoted is the sole remnant, indelibly stamped on the editor’s memory, of one of these extinct creations.’ Fragments survive of at least four dramas, projected, and brought to various stages of completion, at about this time. Beddoes was impatient of the common restraints; he was dashing forward in the spirit of his own advice to another poet:
Creep not nor climb,
As they who place their topmost of sublime On some peak of this planet, pitifully. Dart eaglewise with open wings, and fly Until you meet the gods!
Eighteen months after his Southampton visit, Beddoes took his degree at Oxford, and, almost immediately, made up his mind to a course of action which had the profoundest effect upon his future life. He determined to take up the study of medicine; and with that end in view established himself, in 1825, at the University at Goettingen. It is very clear, however, that he had no intention of giving up his poetical work. He took with him to Germany the beginnings of a new play–‘a very Gothic-styled tragedy,’ he calls it, ‘for which I have a jewel of a name–DEATH’S JEST-BOOK; of course,’ he adds, ‘no one will ever read it’; and, during his four years at Goettingen, he devoted most of his leisure to the completion of this work. He was young; he was rich; he was interested in medical science; and no doubt it seemed to him that he could well afford to amuse himself for half-a-dozen years, before he settled down to the poetical work which was to be the serious occupation of his life. But, as time passed, he became more and more engrossed in the study of medicine, for which he gradually discovered he had not only a taste but a gift; so that at last he came to doubt whether it might not be his true vocation to be a physician, and not a poet after all. Engulfed among the students of Goettingen, England and English ways of life, and even English poetry, became dim to him; ‘dir, dem Anbeter der seligen Gottheiten der Musen, u.s.w.,’ he wrote to Kelsall, ‘was Unterhaltendes kann der Liebhaber von Knochen, der fleissige Botaniker und Phisiolog mittheilen?’ In 1830 he was still hesitating between the two alternatives. ‘I sometimes wish,’ he told the same friend, ‘to devote myself exclusively to the study of anatomy and physiology in science, of languages, and dramatic poetry’; his pen had run away with him; and his ‘exclusive’ devotion turned out to be a double one, directed towards widely different ends. While he was still in this state of mind, a new interest took possession of him–an interest which worked havoc with his dreams of dramatic authorship and scientific research: he became involved in the revolutionary movement which was at that time beginning to agitate Europe. The details of his adventures are unhappily lost to us, for we know nothing more of them than can be learnt from a few scanty references in his rare letters to English friends; but it is certain that the part he played was an active, and even a dangerous one. He was turned out of Wuerzburg by ‘that ingenious Jackanapes,’ the King of Bavaria; he was an intimate friend of Hegetschweiler, one of the leaders of liberalism in Switzerland; and he was present in Zurich when a body of six thousand peasants, ‘half unarmed, and the other half armed with scythes, dungforks and poles, entered the town and overturned the liberal government.’ In the tumult Hegetschweiler was killed, and Beddoes was soon afterwards forced to fly the canton. During the following years we catch glimpses of him, flitting mysteriously over Germany and Switzerland, at Berlin, at Baden, at Giessen, a strange solitary figure, with tangled hair and meerschaum pipe, scribbling lampoons upon the King of Prussia, translating Grainger’s _Spinal Cord_ into German, and Schoenlein’s _Diseases of Europeans_ into English, exploring Pilatus and the Titlis, evolving now and then some ghostly lyric or some rabelaisian tale, or brooding over the scenes of his ‘Gothic-styled tragedy,’ wondering if it were worthless or inspired, and giving it–as had been his wont for the last twenty years–just one more touch before he sent it to the press. He appeared in England once or twice, and in 1846 made a stay of several months, visiting the Procters in London, and going down to Southampton to be with Kelsall once again. Eccentricity had grown on him; he would shut himself for days in his bedroom, smoking furiously; he would fall into fits of long and deep depression. He shocked some of his relatives by arriving at their country house astride a donkey; and he amazed the Procters by starting out one evening to set fire to Drury Lane Theatre with a lighted five-pound note. After this last visit to England, his history becomes even more obscure than before. It is known that in 1847 he was in Frankfort, where he lived for six months in close companionship with a young baker called Degen–‘a nice-looking young man, nineteen years of age,’ we are told, ‘dressed in a blue blouse, fine in expression, and of a natural dignity of manner’; and that, in the spring of the following year, the two friends went off to Zurich, where Beddoes hired the theatre for a night in order that Degen might appear on the stage in the part of Hotspur. At Basel, however, for some unexplained reason, the friends parted, and Beddoes fell immediately into the profoundest gloom. ‘Il a ete miserable,’ said the waiter at the Cigogne Hotel, where he was staying, ‘il a voulu se tuer.’ It was true. He inflicted a deep wound in his leg with a razor, in the hope, apparently, of bleeding to death. He was taken to the hospital, where he constantly tore off the bandages, until at last it was necessary to amputate the leg below the knee. The operation was successful, Beddoes began to recover, and, in the autumn, Degen came back to Basel. It seemed as if all were going well; for the poet, with his books around him, and the blue-bloused Degen by his bedside, talked happily of politics and literature, and of an Italian journey in the spring. He walked out twice; was he still happy? Who can tell? Was it happiness, or misery, or what strange impulse, that drove him, on his third walk, to go to a chemist’s shop in the town, and to obtain there a phial of deadly poison? On the evening of that day–the 26th of January, 1849–Dr. Ecklin, his physician, was hastily summoned, to find Beddoes lying insensible upon the bed. He never recovered consciousness, and died that night. Upon his breast was found a pencil note, addressed to one of his English friends. ‘My dear Philips,’ it began, ‘I am food for what I am good for–worms.’ A few testamentary wishes followed. Kelsall was to have the manuscripts; and–‘W. Beddoes must have a case (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet, 1847 growth, to drink my death in … I ought to have been, among other things,’ the gruesome document concluded, ‘a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg, and that a bad one. Buy for Dr. Ecklin one of Reade’s best stomach-pumps.’ It was the last of his additions to Death’s Jest Book, and the most _macabre_ of all.