ical biography.

Time, who has a way of arranging all things for good, has the skill to obliterate the man who ate and drank and slept and quarrelled, and ran short of money, and beat his wife or neglected his children, and who died miserably, and is buried by the side of a pork-butcher, and leaves us only the only figure we want-namely, the poet in his pomps. There is Chaucer. Who is concerned with, say, "the struggles of his early days," or with, say again, his "fight for recognition." Such phrases put by the side of such a lucent name have an air bordering on the preposterous. It is so with Shakespeare, for whom, thank Heaven, as William Shakespeare, human man, we have but the slightest acquaintance. What we may really learn for a surety of Milton in his capacity as a man who lived in a house and took his meals and bickered with his daughters, we must always dissociate and fend-off, and keep far away from the mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies. And so we might continue. Even Tennyson and Browning and Mr. Swinburne are nothing to us as men. For the best that we can hope for them out of such a consideration is that they have been good men, and as we all know, though good men be rare, poets are the rarer. In the case of Mr. Swinburne we have an instance of a great poet and a great man of letters achieving what one might consider almost impossible in a newsmongering, paragraph-peddling, gossipchewing age-namely, the keeping of his private man's affairs to himself. Nobody can put his finger on lines of Swinburne and say, Here we have evidence of this, that, or t'other condition of the physical man or this, that, or t'other condition of the physical man's aches and pains or finances, or friendships or hatreds, and so on and so forth.

is

And we say, further, that this excellent for Mr. Swinburne the

poet, and excellent for us and for all time, and that if any poet or other artist can keep the peepers and botanizers and straw-raking biographers out of his back garden he is doing what is proper to his dignity as a poet or artist and what is essential to his proper poetical or artistic reputation. And if we bear these important facts in mind in our approach of the work of almost any writer it does not require in us any extraordinary critical gifts to discover and make sure of a just and wellnigh exact view of his work, or to say of it with more or less certitude what posterity will say of it. We have it on the authority of Burns that the man's the gold. But the man is gold or dross only to himself. The poet is gold to us, or dross, ultimately and only out of his poetry. If we are to know all that is to be known about poetry, and if it is to have its just and right effect upon us, we must give up weeping and wailing and breaking our hearts over the private sorrows of poets. It is no more terrible a thing that Chatterton should have committed suicide than that the late Mr. Whittaker Wright should have so dreadfully taken his own life. The only matter for us is, What did Chatterton leave us, and do we know it and use it for what it is worth? Chatterton was a human being, Mr. Whittaker Wright was a human being. The death of the one was as dreary an affair as the death of the other. Humanly speaking, it is as terrible that one Flute, a bellows-maker, or one Bottom, a weaver, should die for the lack of bread, as it is terrible that the finest poet of them all should die for the same lack. We are therefore pleased to find that, broadly speaking, the introduction, which we were bound to have with the present volume, is a reticent and detailless introduction. The writer of it, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, is probably in as good a position to offer us the whole facts about Francis

Thompson's life as a man as anybody is ever likely to be. Yet he has refrained, and it is to his credit that he has refrained, even though he may have refrained only out of a sort of instinct. But in Mr. Meynell's introduction we find a striking example of the inadvisability of biographical knowledge, and of the destructive and dangerous effect of that knowledge when criticism or elucidation is toward. On p. 9 of Mr. Meynell's biographical note we discover these words:

A definite reminiscence of the dissecting-room at Manchester may certainly be discovered in his [Thompson's] allusion (in An Anthem of Earth) to the heart as

Arras'd in purple like the house of kings,

the regal heart that comes at last To stall the gray rat, and the carrion

worm

Statelily lodge.

Which remind us of the American critic-surely he must have been an American-who said that he believed that Shakespeare's father must have been a butcher, and that

There is a destiny which shapes our ends

was a reminiscence of the days when the young William was employed in the uncongenial business of sharpening skewers. Mr. Meynell must not be offended with us. He has performed a difficult and delicate task with discretion and sympathy, and he knows that it is Thompson's poetry which is Thompson's greatness, and that Thompson's private affairs are no concern of anybody's. Yet how woefully he goes wrong in the matter of this passage:

His heart is builded

For pride, for potency, infinity, All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,

Arrased with purple like the house of kings,

To stall the gray rat and the carrion

worm

Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!

There is no harm in Mr. Meynell's knowledege that Thompson had seen the inside of dissecting-rooms. It is no reflection upon Thompson himself or upon anybody else that he began life as a medical student. On the other hand, when one finds those who loved him and who had personal ties with him, reading dissecting-rooms into such writing, the danger and harmfulness of biographical detail become plainly apparent. It is equally so in all kindred matters. For example, there is a poem in this collection called "Daisy." We should hesitate to call it a considerable poem for a poet of Thompson's attainments, but we should be content to read it for what it is worth. Its value, to say the least, is not enhanced by Mr. Meynell's statement that Daisy was a village girl who lived at a place called Storington and the rest of it. It is the poem which is our concern for better or worse, and not information about Daisy. We shall not elaborate this theory of ours in the present place, because we believe that Mr. Meynell has been really thinking only for his poet and endeavoring to do for him such kindly service as he might. But as Thompson is in effect a comparatively unknown poet, and the beauty and greatness of him are as yet only partially appreciated even by lovers of poetry, we shall take this opportunity of recommending to our readers the perusal and study of the poems contained in the volume prior to the perusal of Mr. Meynell's note. The work of selection has been admirably done, and, premising that very few of Thompson's real poems lend themselves to adequate representation by extract, we may say that Mr. Meynell's choice includes the bulk of Thompson's finer passages and complete shorter poems.

The book is one to possess and to keep at hand, and on the whole Thompson is fortunate in that practically the first The Academy.

volume of selections from his work should have been prepared by so competent and loving a critic.

Lichfield has at last discharged its debt to Boswell by erecting a statue of him opposite to that of Johnson. If England owes Garrick and Johnson to Lichfield, that city owes the fame of her two greatest sons to Boswell. I have advisedly bracketed the greatest actor with the greatest moralist and man of letters of the eighteenth century; for had it not been for Boswell how little would the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have known of either! Garrick would have become a mere name like Betterton, or Kemble, or Kean; while Johnson would probably have secured no more than the reputation of Hume. I do not suppose that Garrick was a better actor than Sir Henry Irving or Mr. Forbes-Robertson; does anyone imagine that either of these players will be a familiar figure a hundred and fifty years hence? It was Garrick's luck to be born in the same town and educated at the same school as Johnson; and it was Johnson's luck to pick up Boswell. Therefore Lichfield does well to "raise the tardy bust" to the buried merit of the Scotsman, whom her inhabitants welcomed in 1776 with "great civility." In the whole range of literature there is no grosser instance of the failure of one man of genius to appreciate another than Macaulay's caricature of Boswell. The "bêtise" is the more inexplicable as Macaulay was more than half Scottish, and could not have been animated by the racial prejudice which was still current in London seventy years ago. Carlyle did something by his essay, and Jowett did something by

his conversation, to correct Macaulay's injustice: but it is Boswell himself who has finally triumphed over his critic. There is always, to be sure, a considerable number of people who gather their knowledge of literature from critical essays rather than from the books criticized; and with that class Macaulay's word will always be law. The genuine lovers of letters and of real history do now, I believe, without exception owe their immeasurable debt to the man who sacrificed everything, profession, family, friends, personal comfort, to the worship of intellect, and to the faithful record of its sayings and doings. In the abandonment of Boswell's devotion to a high and spiritual object, and in the rigor of his self-discipline (tempered, "bien entendu," by occasional orgies) there are genius and heroism, if in any man those qualities reside. Consider who James Boswell was, and what his prospects were. He was the son of a living Scottish judge, who was also the laird of a considerable estate, and he was a member of the Scotch and English Bars. He was married to a young wife, and had a son and two daughters. He had some practice as an advocate in Edinburgh, and appeared before the House of Lords in more than one celebrated cause, notably the Douglas peerage case. As a rising lawyer and the heir of Auchinleck, Boswell would be furnished with letters of introduction to the small but powerful Scottish set in London, which included Bute, Argyll, Wedderburn, and Dundas. A young man of good social position and bril

liant professional prospects has many interests to draw him away from the worship of another's intellect. Besides, those who were nearest and dearest to Boswell did everything in their power to detach him from Johnson. Mrs. Boswell hated Johnson, as an untidy man, who dropped wax upon her bedroom carpets by holding the candles upside down to make them burn, and as a loud-talking bear, who took her husband up to London. The old judge had the most perfect contempt for his son's heroes. "That Boswell was a hunter after spiritual Notabilities, that he loved such, and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near them; that he first (in old Touchwood Auchinleck's phraseology) 'took on with Paoli,' and then being off with the Corsican lanlouper' took on with a schoolmaster, 'ane that keeped a schule, and ca'd it an academy'; that he did all this, and could not help doing it, we account a very singular merit." So writes Carlyle: and a very singular merit indeed it is for a man to neglect opportunities in his profession and in society, to face the ridicule and jealousy of his wife, and to incur the contempt of his father, all for the sake of improving himself and posterity by conversation with the greatest mind of his day. And then (perhaps in youth the hardest of all things to bear) there was the chaff of friends and acquaintances! Boswell is often represented as a worldly sycophant, a lick-spittle, a toad-eater, in short a snob. As Carlyle points out, the reverse is the truth: Boswell had, from a worldly point of view, everything to lose and nothing to gain by sticking to Johnson. "Bozzy, even among Johnson's friends and special admirers, seems rather to have been laughed at than envied; his officious, whisking, consequential ways, the daily reproofs and rebuffs he underwent, could gain from the world no golden but only leaden opinions. His

devout Discipleship seemed nothing more than a mean Spanielship, in the general eye."

Is it not always so with the Disciple? To the superficial and scornful of his own day he is a mean Spaniel; posterity immortalizes him in bronze or marble. A young spark, with lodgings in St. James's, and the entrée at Almacks, who "dives into Bolt Court, to sip muddy coffee" (was it not tea?) "with a cynical old man, and a sourtempered blind old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full, with her finger); and patiently endures contradictions without end; too happy so he may but be allowed to listen and live," deserves a statue, if ever man did.

There are some who allow Boswell's moral qualities of self-effacement and devotion, but who put him down as a fool, a mere corkscrew of Johnson's bottle of brains. No greater mistake can be made, as those who will take the trouble to read Boswell's notes, and will attend to what Boswell says to Johnson as well as to what Johnson says to Boswell, must admit. Boswell's literary judgments were just and acute; while in their ethical discussions he was as often in the right as his mentor; for instance, in the argument about the effect of vice upon reputation, when Dr. Johnson cynically and paradoxically maintained that nobody thought the worse of a public man for having debauched his neighbor's wife, or for having robbed, like Clive. Both men were Tories in politics; but with regard to the great question of the day, the war with the American colonies, Boswell was on the side of Chatham and Burke, while Johnson was all for "twenty years of resolute government." Most people would say now that Boswell was right. Johnson was quite aware of the social sacrifices which Boswell made, for no one had a shrewder appreciation of the value of rank. On Boswell's admission that if

he were asked on the same day to dine with the first Duke in England, and with the first man in Britain for genius, he should hesitate which to prefer, Johnson observed, "To be sure, sir, if you were to dine only once, and it were never to be known where you dined, you would choose rather to dine with the first man for genius; but to gain most respect, you should dine with the first Duke in England. For nine people in ten that you meet with would have a higher opinion of you for having dined with a Duke; and the great genius himself would receive you better, because you had been with the great Duke." Johnson was conscious of his own unpopularity in London society, for, as he said, "great lords and Jadies do not love to have their mouths stopped." "Mrs. Montagu has dropped me," he smilingly exclaimed: "now there are people whom one would like to drop, but by whom one does not like to be dropped." Another sign of this was his constantly telling Boswell that he was a good-humored man, a wellbred man of the world, and constantly asking why people should mind his frankness. The Master repaid the sacrifices made by his Disciple in the only coin he had, his love and his conversation. To say that he teased and bullied his admirer is to say that he was human, and his humanness is Johnson's greatest charm. Boswell had called on Lord Marchmont to ask him if he would supply Johnson with materials for the Life of Pope. The peer was of course delighted, and said that as he was going into the City next day he would on his return call on Johnson in the Temple. Elated by the success of his negotiation (which he had undertaken without Johnson's knowledge), Boswell hurried down to Streatham, where the following colloquy ensued: "Boswell: 'I have been at work for you to-day, sir. I have been with Lord Marchmont. He bade me tell

you he has a great respect for you, and will call on you to-morrow, and communicate all he knows about Pope.' Johnson: 'I shall not be in town tomorrow. I don't care to know about Pope.' Mrs. Thrale (surprised as I was, and a little angry): 'I suppose, sir, Mr. Boswell thought, that as you are to write Pope's Life, you would wish to know about him.' Johnson: 'Wish! why, yes. If it rained knowledge I'd hold out my hand; but I would not give myself the trouble to go in quest of it.'" Can anything be more delightfully human? Sir Joshua Reynolds gave a dinner-party, at which "there were several people by no means of the Johnsonian school, so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humor," and he attacked Boswell with so much ferocity that the Disciple kept away from the Master for a whole week. This is how they made it up at Langton's table:-"Boswell: 'But why treat me so before people who love neither you nor me?' Johnson: 'Well, I am sorry for it. I'll make it up to you twenty different ways, as you please.' Boswell: 'I said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you tossed me sometimes-I don't care how often or how high he tosses me when only friends are present, for then I fall on soft ground; but I do not like falling on stones, which is the case when enemies are present-I think this is a pretty good image, sir.' Johnson: 'Sir, it is one of the happiest I have ever heard.'" Dr. Johnson's knowledge of human nature was unrivalled. tale of Johnson's belaboring his confessor is as good as that of Gil Blas and the Archbishp of Granada. Being ill, Johnson asked Langton to tell him sincerely in what he thought his life was faulty. Langton brought a sheet of paper to the bedside and began reading several texts of Scripture, beginning with "Blessed

The