the only question is, whether we shall have the tampering spirit of the poet or of the chronicler, or of the historian literary or scientific. Go whither we will, we cannot escape this spirit of men. If we climb up into poetry it is there, if we go down to scientific history it is there also: to say nothing of taking the wings of the morning and flying with the "delightful" historians. And of this be sure, it is not all gain to exchange poetic for prosaic fancy. For again let us ask, what precisely is meant by the mere facts of history? Mere antiquarian research, disdaining or suspecting the creative spirit of the imagination, can at best but unearth a skeleton of the living truth, ay, and but a fragment of a skeleton; a blank form of facts, a mere series of such abstract statements as that so and so killed so and so in such a time and place. Everything beyond this, everything which fills the blank form with living reality, every thing which gives to historical facts their value and interest, comes of the personalities of the actors, and the nexus of motives, aims, beliefs and principles which go to make up the action. Now these things are beyond the reach of mere research. These things demand the quickening spirit, an effort of ideal reconstruction. This ideal reconstruction-poetic fancy about facts, if the "Athenæum" will have it so--is as essential to the historian as to the poet; and if it be a sin, the historian too, who is worth his salt, must cry, Peccavi! The facts of history, when they were not yet history but actual facts, were something_very different from the valley of Dry Bones of the scientific historian. They were the meeting points of far-radiating spiritual issues and had boundless spiritual significance. Is it not manifest that no amount of rigorously organized research can be in itself a virtue to breathe again through these bones the breath of life? How much ideal reconstruction of personalities and principles is needful, before any attempt can be made to present the mere

facts of the deed of Charlotte Corday or the execution of Mary Stuart? In what scales shall the scientific investigator weigh the conflicting motives, in what glass shall he catch the cross lights of policy and passion? How long, think you, would it take all the students of the Birmingham Historical Society, however rigorously organized, to construct a catalogue of mere facts which would exhaust the difference, to take examples at random, between the stroke for freedom and a sister's honour of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and the stroke of the Amalekite, not afraid to stretch forth his hand against the Lord's Anointed, who put a merciful end to the anguish of Saul? Is it not clear that a dull soul may be a still more fatal obstacle than a luxuriant imagination even to the attainment of literal accuracy? The truth of the matter is that in the simplest fact of history, in the most seemingly transparent historical character, there is more than the intellect of one mau, perhaps more than the combined intellects of all men, can exhaust and interpret. If the world desires to know something of the truth of the hero and his deed, or a nation and its history, it should discourage neither poet nor plodder, but rather encourage men of the most diverse talents to present each such aspect thereof as he has eyes to see or heart to understand. Let the seer utter his vision and the man of science collate his chronicles and decipher his inscriptions; and when we have looked upon this picture and upon that, and have fitted the facts into a thousand theories, we may at length begin to get a glimpse into the real significance of the thing itself. Which of us would entrust his own life and character finally and absolutely to the Historical Society of Birmingham? If the "Athenæum's" reviewer could in another sphere read an account of himself in the pages of future scientific histories, would he not, think you, long and justly long, to figure as the hero of novels and poems; nay, perhaps to be parleyed

with by a future Mr. Browning (as having been himself a person of importance in his day), in order that the meagre outlines might be filled out to something like the fulness of his real spiritual stature? For the most vital part of the historian's task, the dramatic poet has the most essential qualifications even in the realm of mere knowledge. He has the loving insight into human nature and quick communion with the purpose of the ages that can read a character from a gesture, a policy from a stray recorded word.

It was on this that Carlyle was always insisting. The gist of his exhortation was the exact contrary of that which the "Athenæum" suggests. He was for ever saying to the poet and novelist, not "Please, confine yourselves to your own pleasing fictions", but " Why waste your great gifts on unrealities?

Use all the faculties God has given you to find and interpret the facts. Give us the real men and the real deeds that have made the world what it is".

It cannot, I am afraid, be denied that poetry has bequeathed to the world many a deluding portrait. But poetry has had no monopoly of error. And even here, I think the advantage is with the poet. He does not hold himself out as an historian in the strict sense. There is no rivalry, and there should be no deception. Poetry frankly offers itself as ideal reconstruction, and can therefore mislead none but the wilfully or culpably blind. Whereas the last historian is always for giving us absolute truth. His predecessor may have been igno rant, careless, or prejudiced; too many, not to mince matters, have palmed off a pack of lies upon a credulous world. But with the rising of this sun the mists of error are to scatter, and we are to have at last "the pure serenity of perfect light". The sagacious reader however does not take the historians nearly so seriously as they take themselves. He knows very well that in their pages he has got

not the very men as they lived and breathed, but the best idea of them that they could piece together from surviving clues. He knows that it is after all Mr. Freeman's "Cnut" or Professor Seeley's Napoleon as much as it is Shakespeare's Richard the Third or Mr. Browning's Paracelsus. But this is due to no warning from the historian; he tenders his narrative as gospel truth; and so sometimes the unwary may be deceived and led astray. That however is Mr. Birrell's business, and not mine. No man in his right senses can be misled by the Wolsey and Cromwell, whom he loves so well in his "Henry the Eighth ". These are Shakespeare's Wolsey and Cromwell, and no lesser man's.

But I think we may take higher ground still on behalf of the poets. If Shakespeare's Richard the Third is not the real, he is at any rate an ideal Richard the Third. If the gallery of historical portraits with which poetry has enriched the world be not of a photographic accuracy, they none the less are possessions for ever, more precious than the great work of Thucydides itself. Nay, the mere literary historians too, when they err, at least enrich us with " delightful' histories, which are a joy for the moment if not a possession for ever. The scientific historian perhaps does not often fall; but if he falls, he falls like Lucifer. What historian has given us men and women, whom we could think of taking in exchange for Shakespeare's Coriolanus or Brutus, for Richard the Third or Wolsey, for Cleopatra or Queen Katharine or Constance the mother of Prince Arthur, even if it be that these characters do not commend themselves to the latest historical criticism? Or what accuracy of information about the tactics at Agincourt would we accept in place of a single line like "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers"? Is there not truth here too, ay and the highest kind of truth, the truth of patriotic feeling, the truth of the brotherhood begotten of the common

peril, the truth of true warrior kingship Poetry is really truer than the literal truth. It is so with all art. I wonder whether the reader remembers a collection of drawings of Prout and Hunt in 1879-80, for which Mr. Ruskin contributed some characteristic notes. About a drawing by Prout of a well at Nuremberg Mr. Ruskin wrote: "All the projecting windows and all the dormers in this square are of wood. But Prout could not stand the inconsistency, and deliberately petrified all the wood. Very naughty of him! I have nothing to say in extenuation of this offence; and, alas! secondly, the houses have, in reality, only three stories, and he has put a fourth on, out of his inner consciousness! I never knew him do such a thing before or since: but the end of it is, that this drawing of Nuremberg is immensely more Nurembergy than the town itself, and a quite glorious piece of medieval character". Or, since Mr. Ruskin is not precisely a witness to convince the scientific, let us call Thucydides. Admirably scientific as was his method, Thucydides had no slavish superstition about literal accuracy, but, in his celebrated speeches, he too dared to be truer than the literal truth, "to consider principally what might be pertinently said upon every occasion to the points in debate". The actual speakers of Corcyra or Platæa we may be certain never grasped the whole import of the situ ation with the grip of the great historian they never had the philosophic insight with which he endows them. Yet these speeches are the kernel of the history and contain much of its most important truth. Poetry and romance and art distil the very spirit of truth out of the facts. It is to them, after all, that we owe the most vital and fruitful ideas of history. Never in the work-day world was there an historical Age of Chivalry; never on the sinful earth was there an historical Age of Faith. Be sure that

these too are but an "added gleam", a "light that never was on land or sea", that here too we have "the consecration and the poet's dream". The medieval Catholic Church of devout imaginations is historically as unreal as Arthur's Round Table. But in another sense both Round Table and Medieval Church were real with the highest kind of reality. Such ideals, and such ideals alone, it is which give any permanent reality to the fleeting generations of men, who, save in so far as they embody them in their lives, are but as the beasts that perish. The real spirit of an age only comes at last to its proper expression in the spirit of its secular poet. Shakespeare is the highest truth of feudal England, as Dante was the truth of Catholic Italy or Homer of heroic Greece. Shakespeare's England is what England had aspired to be, had striven to be, had attained to being in certain moments and in certain

men:

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,
this England,-"

66

All honour then to the earnest scientific investigator; but honour likewise to the delightful historians", to Herodotus and Livy, to Clarendon and Macaulay, to Michelet and Carlyle; and glory in the highest to Shakespeare and the poets. For, as Wordsworth finely said: "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge-it is as immortal as the heart of man".

W. P. J.

own

Ar the present day men are prone to love not Nature, but their own feelings projected upon Nature; they refuse to receive her beauty simply, and rather choose to analyse the impressions which it produces. Those who carry this mental habit to excess contradict her great purpose, which is to lift us out of ourselves to the contemplation of a diviner loveliness. And Nature revenges herself. Rocks and peaks and stony slopes, the cataract and the thunder, mock us with distorted images of our passions; they echo back the wrath, the envy, the despair with which our own souls are distracted. We become the victims of Nature and of ourselves. Men who assiduously cultivate this extreme sensibility, who receive nothing but what they give, who think of natural objects only as mirrors for their own thoughts, men in fact who claim as their own vesture the wedding garment or the shroud of Nature, learn at the last to love her only because she is a silent listener. She ceases to be their teacher at the moment when they most need her searching lessons. There is no more prolific parent of religious doubt than this self-concentrated morbidity of feeling.

In spite of an introduction which seems to condemn both question and answer, the purport of the following pages is to inquire wherein lies the secret of the different charms which seas and rivers exercise upon mankind. Does it not consist in this that a river is always man's familiar friend, while the sea disdains human companionship?

The sea is a wild creature among the caged, a free spirit among the bound. Men of high intellect, tempestuous character, or stormy passion, may find among the waves a society which

nothing human will replace; and even ordinary mortals are sometimes lifted by gusts of feeling to wind-swept summits where the confused roar of ocean becomes distinct and articulate music. But "Rule Britannia" and patriotism apart, the habitual playmate and fellow of the sea is wild Nature. Man is always an interloper; the sea is Nature's solitary and lone enthusiast.

At sunset the sea, like a loyal servitor, squanders all the treasures of its wine-dark depths upon the obsequies of the dethroned monarch; on the broad bosom of the sea the moon sheds her tears for her secret fault in heaven; no other space than that of the sea is vast enough to be the camping-ground of the starry hosts; to the music of its waves the legions of the winds sweep on in rapid rushing march, in its waters the eagle renews his strength and lustiness, and in them at his hundredth year he perishes. But from man the sea holds haughtily aloof. As it mocks his thirst, so it never craves his sympathy, nor mingles with the trifles of his life. It may accord with, but it never reciprocates, human feelings; man seeks the sea, the sea seeks not man.

The sea is the highway of nations, but for individuals it is pathless. It speaks with the voice not of one man but of countless thousands; its. moan resembles not the sob of human anguish, but the muttered cry of great wild beasts, or the sound of the storm. as it sweeps through a forest of pines. Even the birds seems to breathe the spirit of their playmate; their note is wild, strange and desolate. We cannot endow the vast solitudes and silent spaces of the sea with human interest; they are too immeasurable for conscious poetising, too wide for formal handling: their effect can only be rendered by those who are absorbed

in the spirits of their pervasive influence. The "many twinkling smile" with which ocean greets "the sun's uprise majestical" does not beam for us; it may brighten our mirth, but we form no element in its gladness. We play no part in the sullen fury of the sea when it flings itself in reckless rage upon an ironbound coast; we have no share in its hopeless melancholy as it beats itself upon the beach with the monotonous persistency of despair.

"Man's steps are not upon thy paths, thy fields

Are not a spoil for him: thou dost arise
And shake him from thee!"

Even a long voyage breeds no friendship, though it may foster familiarity, between ourselves and the sea. What

a relief it is from the proud solitude of Nature when a sail or a smoke-stack breaks the level sweep of the horizon! How gladly do seafarers recognise in the clouds some familiar shape which recalls mother earth, or welcome some tired land-bird which, like themselves, is a waif borne by the winds from the wished for shore!

Even in repose the chief feeling which the sea creates is that of sleeping strength. In the nameless peace of its calm, it is treacherous; in the power of its storm it is terrible. Its waters are brackish with the salt of human tears; its surges ring the knell and its foam weaves the shroud of its victims. Life in fishing-villages is grim and sombre in its colour; the inhabitants are, as it were, pensioners on the fitful moods of an element which has death as well as riches in its gift. It is the chilling thought of this mercilessness which stirs a female poet like Mrs. Hemans to long for the day when, in Scriptural phrase, "there shall be no more sea", and to heap upon the ruthless element indignant epithets as the spoiler of the earth. Even Byron, in his great hymn of praise to the ocean, claims the wrecks as adjuncts of the sea's magnificence. He glorifies the

sea by humbling the earth and man

by contrasting its imperishable, unchanging might with the impotence of finite, mortal man, by opposing the free play of its gigantic will to the fate of earth doomed to be the bondslave of human destinies. There is the bitterness of exile, but there is also poetic truth in Victor Hugo's treatment of the sea as one of those elemental forces, irresponsible, untamable, without power or will to spare, deaf to entreaty and blind to tears, which wages against mankind an unending war.

It is true that the sea has civilised the earth, and that, even now, with creeks and coves, bays, inlets, and harbours it stoops to play a part in common human life. In these, its gentler moods, it seems to assume the more stable and peaceful nature of the earth to which it ministers. Such was the guise it chiefly wore to the Greeks, when they peopled its untrampled floors and translucent depths with gods and goddesses. On our own southern coasts land-locked waters, veined in varying tints with currents, deeps, and shallows, seem thus to mimic on their smooth surface the soft beauties of the downs, those many-armed inland seas which are the playground of fleecy cloud-shadows as, chased by the wind, they roll round the islands of gorse and pine. But this is not the true province of the Only in boundless wastes of water, which no horizon but its own determines, is it seen in its essential character of mystery and space; only then does it appear as the ring of inscrutable inexorable fate that encircles the earth,

sea.

"The image of Eternity, the throne
Of the Invisible."

It is perhaps because the sea thus symbolises the end, rather than the course of life, the bourne towards which the traveller voyages, not the journey itself, that it has in common speech such melancholy associations. If we are hopelessly parted from an