"Oh, you hev, hev yew? Then yew hevn't a done it well, for her it is that wants to know when yew'm goin' to begin." "The men can begin at any time, so far as I'm concerned: but you'll want to raise the carpet and cover up some of the furniture first. You'd better have it ready by to-morrow morning." "Oh, very well. The men's yew, I s'pose and a nasty sooty job yew'm likely to hev. I say, if yew find it thirsty work yew may step out towards the pantry, and p'raps there'll be a horn o' ale there." Benjamin would not, at that moment, have objected to the use of a little personal violence towards this unpleasant domestic. He refrained himself, however, and in stately silence left the house, and relieved John Bray, who had been holding the animal all this time, of the charge of his horse. "I've explained what is necessary The admiral was a near neighbour, to Miss Fulford," replied Benjamin, and the owner of a small property, with some hauteur. to which he conceived that the lands of Colkatton would form an appropriate addition. He was rather an agreeable old gentleman than otherwise; and, as long as his gallantries appeared aimless, Gertrude rather liked him, and the two lone ladies were wont to consult him and lean upon him. But of late his admiration had been marked; and his pointed attentions Miss Fulford would probably at no time have appreciated: now that she was agitated by an affection whose requital was somewhat doubtful, they were distasteful in a high degree. I have often reflected upon this poor girl's lot, apparently so cruel and undeserved. Here were her friends busying themselves to create in her an attachment to a young man about whom they knew very little, and who might for a variety of reasons be unwilling to return such affection: here were two aspirants, an elderly gentleman who might have been a grandfather, and a presuming vulgar tradesman, each entertaining designs upon herself and fortune and here was the swain who could have made her happy by his love, and to whose desert she and her fortune were far more than equal, just letting things go wrong from sheer insensibility; for I firmly believe that if he had been brought to seriously consider the advantages which might have been his, he would not have been such a fool as to decline them. If he, now, had dreamed what Mr Benjamin Saunders dreamed about her, I think things would have turned out differently. I can't help believing that the dream was sent by some power friendly to Gertrude, and that, out of carelessness, or out of spite, it missed its way. "It seems to have been fated," Gertrude said to herself, "that I should be troubled by somebody this afternoon. It cost me some pains to escape that stupid old admiral, and then I must fall into the way of this vulgar fellow!" the meaning of which soliloquy was, that Admiral Tautbrace and his two daughters had been calling at Colkatton that afternoon; and that the old gentleman, who said he never could have enough of Miss Fulford's company, had proposed that her mother and she should accompany their visitors some way through the grounds, making that their afternoon stroll. Mrs Fulford had assented, much to the annoyance of her daughter; and the latter, after retiring with the elder lady, as if to prepare for the walk, had excused herself. (To be continued.) : SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. THERE are doubts and doubts. Not so many, perhaps, as is generally supposed, of those "honest" ones in which there lives-according to Tennyson-"more faith than half the creeds." It has, in fact, become the fashion in certain quarters to over-compassionate the doubter, to accredit him with a greater depth, and even with a more thorough conscientiousness, than the man convinced. But with every desire to find the reasonableness of such a view, we have entirely failed to discover why the holding of a creed should imply a smaller share either of intelligence or honesty than the holding of a doubt. Credulity has its negative side as well as its positive one, and there is as much room to slip on the one side as on the other. Clough-himself the most conscientious of poetical sceptics-admits, that if on the one hand "hopes are dupes," on the other, "fears may be liars;" and, in short, there is no good reason, other things being equal, for supposing that the man who rejects evidence may not be quite as great a fool as the man who accepts it. Creeds, no doubt, are easily adopted. We in a sense fall heirs to them. They lie about us from our very infancy, and as soon as we are able to think, they are recommended to us by those whom we very naturally respect. In this way, it is not to be denied that we are apt to creep into them with only too little inquiry. But on the other hand, are the great majority of doubts not only equally weak at the root and held with infinitely more self-complacency, not to say conceit? Search faith for its foundations, and in too many cases we daresay they will be found loose and flimsy enough but subject doubt to a like scrutiny-strip it of all the mystical generalities it seeks to clothe itself in, and the pensive poetical sadness it so frequently affects-and in all but the rare exceptions, you will find that it is neither more nor less than our old friend Sir Oracle in a new disguise. The philosophy that questions everything with a regretfully necessitous air, and a sorrowful shake of the head, passes with too many for originality, and even profundity, until the trick is found out. That there are honest doubts, however, and honest doubters, we do not mean to question- godly doubters even doubters of the order of "that white soul," as a living poet so beautifully says of Socrates "Which sat beneath the laurels day by day, And, fired with burning faith in God and Right, Doubted men's doubts away' doubters whose doubts ultimately tend to broaden and deepen the foundations of faith rather than undermine them. Doubt of this description. is but faith's handmaid, and to whom faith is perpetually indebted, whether it has the candour to acknowledge the debt or not. In a certain sense it is the test of truth itself, and no faith is worth the name that cannot pass through its fires unscathed. Perhaps there has been nothing more suicidal to the real interests of religion than the shallow theology which without distinction, and without a hearing, bundles all scepticism into that too convenient limbo of certain minds to which are relegated the works of the devil. The easiness of the process might itself cast a doubt on its efficiency. For on the supposition even that the classification is correct, and that scepticism without discrimination might be put down in the diabolical category, those who know the devil best or at least the spiritual difficulty his name is made to represent --know well, that he is not to be balked in this way by a mere wave of the hand. In fact there is no question as to whether we shall be troubled with doubt or not: we must. In a mixed world of good and evil, a state of things is not even conceivable that would afford "no hinge or loop to hang a doubt on." The world where it is not, must be one either altogether sacred to truth, or wholly abandoned to lies. Doubt and faith live under the same imperfect conditions, and the point at which one dies, the other also and consequently dies. And if the necessity of the case could only teach the impossible purist who wishes to ignore the existence of doubt altogether, to look it more steadily and honestly and thoughtfully in the face, where he has found only the devil before, he might possibly discover the presence of God as well, in the periodical recurrence of the doubter in the history of all living faith. The damage that "honest" doubt can do to the real supports of faith must ever be trivial; while its use in knocking away the conventional props of it is inestimable. The common and easy acceptance by the many of that rather vulgar personage-the regulation Mephistopheles of poetry and the drama-has probably done a good deal in modern times to instruct that prevailing incapacity to disassociate the questioning spirit from the diabolical. in order to see that such a conclusion is the shallowest of generalities, the weakest of confusions, it is only necessary to fall back on the history of Christianity itself. The most But important of truths were doubts once. Those soul certainties which men can plant their feet upon, and feel with Milton that "If this fail The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble”. were nearly all dangerous heresies at one period of their history. The strength of the Christian religion in our day is as much indebted to her heretics as to her saints; or rather, should we say the maturer verdict of time in many cases has pronounced these two titles to be one? But, however gladly men may acknowledge the existence of these honest doubts, which, closely looked into, are but the transitional phases of faith, they must also admit that these are few compared to the unnumbered host of doubts which have little or no root in conscience, and which appear rather to proceed from a self-satisfied indifference to any faith at all. This kind of doubt has none of the troubles that afflict the genuine and honest article. Its deepest pains seem to be readily assuaged in a kind of sentimental and quasi-philosophical regret. It is mostly this half-hearted and half-affected variety of doubt that has taken a poetical form in modern times, and the fact to us affords a perfectly sufficient reason why a great deal of the poetry produced under such conditions has never risen above mediocrity. There are perhaps few things in themselves more irrecoverably prosaic than doubt. Few, on the other hand, more evocative of the poetic faculty, or more susceptible of poetical treatment, than faith. Doubt disintegrates, disperses, repels. Faith attracts and knits together. It acts as a kind of centre of gravitation in the planetary system of things ideal, controlling the most erratic of orbits: standing as if she had declared, once for all, thy God shall be my God, and thy people my people. The poetical scepticism of the present day has of course retired from the gloomy atheism of the beginning of the century. The old controversies, deistical and theistical, have nearly died out in literature. The world at length seems to have lost patience with the philosophy that does not at least postulate a god of some kind or another to begin with; at all events, any such philosophy has been left high and dry by the poetical tide of the present generation. And, to tell the truth, there was no choice. One or other must perish: they could not live together. The dewless desert of blank and barren denial was no place for the gentle muse. Imagination cannot breathe its atmosphere and live. And yet, though not present themselves, these old controversies have left us an inheritance. The times have changed, and we have changed with them. The gloomy, not to say stagey atheism that had a certain fascination for the youth of thirty or forty years ago, has given place in our day to a refined and vaguely idealistic pantheism, which, without any of the old obtrusion of unbelief (it has even a kind of niggardly recognition of a personal God about it), still exercises a limiting influence on poetry Faith is the tonic of the poetical scale, the key-note to which the most wildly discursive imagination must return in the end before the ear can rest satisfied. Hence we have absolutely no poetry in which doubt is anything like the central or dominant interest; while we have, as in the Hebrew poetry, as gorgeous palaces as imagination ever sanctified, whose material is supplied and whose genius is inspired from faith alone. When doubt is made use of at all in poetry, as in that highest quotable example, the Book of Job, it is introduced more as a foil to faith-the intense shadow of an intenser light-a wrestler brought into the arena only to be overthrown by his mightier opponent. Doubt can command no prolonged sympathy, and consequently can find no permanent footing in any of the higher places of poetry. Faith, on the contrary, seems to clothe itself with poetry without effort; attracts all poetry to it as a seemingly natural consequence; interwinds and interweaves its life with it, until-to use the strong Shakespearian phrase-the-a weaker solution of the strong two have "grown together," and their parting would be "a tortured body." They are the dermis and the epidermis of the ideal anatomy, and their severance means mutilation. Poetry can find no more than a partial and passing attraction in anything that is doubtful; she is at best but a stranger and a pilgrim in the debatable land. Her final election and abiding home is faith. She clings to faith as a child to a mother, and will not be shaken off, as plainly waters of atheism, not so objectionable as the old form, on account of what it admits of evil, as of what it excludes of good. Without attempting any hard-church definition of its influence- and indeed we question much if many of its poetical exponents themselves could give a perfectly lucid account of what they believe and what they do not believe-we are yet of opinion that it puts a limitation on genius, and especially on poetical genius, in nearly the same proportion that it falls short of a definite faith. Leaving all moral considerations out of sight as not within our province, it seems to be necessary, for æsthetical reasons alone, that the poet, of all other artists, should possess a belief that shall at least be clear to himself. Above all other men it behoves him, in the words of one of the greatest of his brotherhood, to be "One in whom persuasion and belief Has ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition." There is a certain degree of heat at which language fuses, and becomes the possible vehicle of poetical feeling, and the point of liquefaction is never registered below conviction, but above it. We do not say conviction is all that is necessary. Oxygen itself would quickly consume life, yet a man must consume oxygen to live. Conviction alone will not produce poetry, but it is an essential component of the atmosphere in which alone poetry can be sustained. At the degree in the mental thermometer which chronicles conviction, the possibility of poetry begins. Anything below that lacks one of the first conditions of its existence. The poetry that has been produced without due regard to this essential quality, has seldom out lived its own generation; and, in fact, any attempt to get the materials of poetry out of half belief, argues a defective poetical perception at the outset. It is possible indeed, leaping to the opposite extreme, to get something like poetry out of the gigantic and passionate denial of Satan himself, as Milton has abundantly proved; or even, to a certain degree, out of the pagan abhorrence to the God of Christianity, as illustrated by a living poet. For, waiving altogether any question as to the moral fitness of rehabilitating even under an im personal or dramatic mask that which, in the hearing of the majority of his audience, can only be regarded as flat blasphemy, there can be no doubt that Mr Swinburne has reached his highest poetical possibility in what we may classify as his ethnical poems. Without troubling ourselves about whether the inspiration comes from above or below, there is a force about his audacious profanity that we do not so readily find in his other efforts. Good or bad, Mr Swinburne's capacity for blasphemy is unquestionably une qualité, as the French would say, with their subtle substratum of meaning. In the hands of a poet like Milton, the Titanic war against heaven is capable of a certain amount of diabolical picturesqueness; but the merely human unbelief, the distracting doubt, and the shuffling ingenuity that nibbles at this creed and that without arriving at any definite conviction of its own, is the most unpoetical thing in the world. Seek No amount of artistic skill can make its effusions pleasing. ing sympathy and finding none, they seem to be all conceived in the melancholy minor, without any of the natural plaintiveness of that key, and with a double share of its hopeless dejection. There appears to be a place in the realms of the imagination for either God or devil; but upon the Laodicean lukewarmness, upon the apathetic neutrality that is neither cold nor hot, poetry turns her back. To trace the effects of scepticism, and the stern limitation put upon poetical genius by the want of that faith which ripens into Wordsworth's "passionate intuition," would open up too wide a field, extending as it does through all the infinite phases and degrees of doubt, from the first shadowy suggestion down to the ultimate utter denial. But that |
