I not live without father and mother." "The infants fell from the breasts. The dead body rolled over on the bed, crushing one infant and putting out its foot. I rose up above the village, in order to take up the soul to God, when a gust of wind caught my wings, they dropped, and the soul went up to God alone, but I fell by the way to the earth." meet us, and began to speak. The woman had a fearful look, more fearful than the man, and from her mouth there came forth a mortal spirit, the odor of death quite took away my breath. She wished to drive me out into the cold; I knew she would die if she did so. Suddenly her husband put her in mind of God, upon which a change came over the woman. She gave us to sup, and when she did so she looked on me. I looked on her also. There was now no death in her; she was alive, and in her I knew God. "Then I remembered the first word of God, You shall know what is in people.' I had learnt that in people is love. I was glad, because God had begun to make things clear to me, as he had promised, and I smiled for the first time. But this was all the knowledge I could gather. I had not yet understood what is not given to people, and what makes people to live. "I began to live with you. A whole year had passed by, when one day a man came to order boots, which should last a whole year without wearing down or wearing out. I looked upon him, and lo! I saw at his side my companion, the angel of death. I alone saw that angel, but I knew him, and knew that the sun would not set before he had taken the soul of the rich man. 'Man provides for himself for a whole year,' I thought to myself, but he does not know that he will not live on till the evening.' The second word of God came to my mind, You shall know what is not given to people.' "I had learnt already what is in people. Now I knew what is not given to people. It is not given to people to know what is needful for their body. And I smiled a second time. I was glad because I had seen my companion the angel, and because God had shown me the meaning of the second word. "I was left in the field naked and alone. I had never known human needs; I had never known hunger or cold before, and I became a man. Hungry and half frozen, I knew not what to do. I saw in the field a chapel made for the worship of God, went up to God's chapel, and thought to shelter myself there. The chapel was locked up; Í could not enter. So I sat down behind the chapel to find shelter from the wind. The evening drew on; nearly frozen and hungry, I had quite lost heart, when suddenly a sound caught my ear a man was passing along the road. He was carrying a pair of boots, and he talked to himself as he went. This was the first mortal face I had seen since I became a man; it filled me with fear, and I turned away my eyes. I heard the man talking to himself about how he should shelter his body from the cold in winter, and how he should feed his wife and children. I am perishing of cold and hunger,' I thought to myself, and a man passes along whose only thought it is how not yet learnt what makes people to to cover himself and his wife with a skin, live, so I lived on and waited till God and how to get bread for them both. He would show me the last word. In the cannot help me.' The man saw me, knit sixth year there came two little girls, with his brows, looked more fearful than be- a woman, and I knew the children, and fore, and passed by. I was in despair, knew how those little girls were left when suddenly I heard the man returning alive. I knew and thought to myself, on his steps. And when I looked on him The mother begged for her children, I did not know him again: before, I had and I believed her. I thought the chilseen death in his face, but now it had a dren could not live without father and bright look, and in his face I knew God. mother, but a strange woman fed them He came up to me, clothed me, took me and brought them up.' When the womwith him, and brought me to his home. Ian had pity on the strange children, and went to his house; a woman came to wept, I saw in her the living God, and "But I had more to learn still. I had understood what makes people to live. I knew, also, that God had declared to me the last word, and had forgiven me. And I smiled a third time." XII. THE whole of the angel's body was now clearly seen, and it was all clothed in dazzling light, too bright to look upon; and his voice had now a louder ring, and seemed to come from heaven, not from his own lips. "I have learnt," said the angel, "that every man lives, not by care for himself, but by love. It was not given to the mother to know what her children needed to live by. It was not given to the rich man to know what he himself was in need of. And it is not given to any man to know if boots for one living or slippers for one dead will be needed by him to wards evening. "I was left alive when I was a man, not because I thought about myself, but because there was love in the man who passed by, and in his wife, and because they pitied and loved me. The orphans were left alive, not because they thought about them, but because there was love in the heart of a strange woman, who pitied and loved them. And all people live, not because they think about themselves, but because there is in people love. "I knew already that God had given people life, and wished that they should live. But now I understood more than this. "I understood that God was not willing that people should live apart, and that for this reason he had not shown them what each stood in need of, but willed that they should live together, and for this reason had shown them what all needed for their own good and the good of all. "I understood now that people only seem to live by caring for themselves that they live by love alone. He who lives in love lives in God, and God in him, because God is love." Then the angel sang praises to God, and his voice made the cottage tremble. The ceiling opened, and a pillar of fire stretched upwards from earth to heaven. Simon and his wife and children fell to the ground. And the angel stretched the wings on his back and rose up to heaven. When Simon came to himself the cottage stood as before, and there was no one in the cottage but the members of his family. COUNT LEON TOLSTOY. From The Westminster Review. THE POETRY OF MRS. E. B. BROWNING. MORE than twenty years ago died the first great poetess whom England has produced. Whether it be that within this last century what she called the pressures of an alien tyranny With its dynastic reasons of larger bones And stronger sinews, have relaxed a little, and given more opportunity of development and more freedom of action to women, or whether it be from some other cause, it is certain that women have begun to take a place among writers of the first rank in more than one department of literature. Two years ago George Eliot had no living equal among novelists; and still to-day she has no successor, no one to take a place so high as hers, in whatever different school. Novelists of the first rank are as rare as poets; in our own time, perhaps, they are even rarer. A novelist differs from a poet in the fact that his books should be impersonal; his experiences should not reach us in their crude form, nor his thoughts simply as thoughts. His functions verge on those of the judge on the one hand, and on those of the artist the painter of pictures on the other. But a lyric poet resembles rather a prophet; he gives forth the words of inspiration in his own voice, he speaks of human life as he has found it himself, he teaches us by his own experience openly, he pours the vials of his own indignation into his denunciations of wrong, and he brings the tenderness of his own affections into his appeals for universal pity and love. We may there. fore expect to find in lyrical poetry written by a woman more distinctly feminine gifts than can be revealed in a high-class novel. We suppose that a lyric poet, who is also a woman, will tell us things that a man could not have known, will appeal to feelings of which he is hardly conscious, will suggest ideals beyond his imagination, or at least give us the inner working of those ideals, instead of merely the outside view. And this is what Mrs. Browning does. At last, after so many ages, in her writings a woman speaks to women as no man could have spoken. The poetesses who preceded Mrs. Browning, and who enjoyed a general popularity which she will perhaps never attain, were essentially feminine in their effusions. The conception of their subjects, the monotonous sweetness of their verse, the blameless insipidity of their ideas, marked them out for multitudinous of saving France, to the exclusion of all approbation, and also for swift oblivion. selfish considerations. She has never Mrs. Browning's poetry boasts none of thought that the reflection of her act on the feminine prettiness of theirs: the her own life may be glory or humiliation; vigor of her style and the range of her she has not even traced the act to its views are masculine enough; it is only in source, and discovered her own noble de the depth of her tenderness and the pas votion. She is so free from ideas of persion of her sympathy that her womanhood sonal greatness that, the act being done is revealed. Withal, she is not senti- and her mind left open to thoughts of self, mental, while Mrs. Hemans and Miss she is easily persuaded that she has been Landon overflow with sentiment. This prompted by unworthy motives, that she sentiment, at which so many would-be has been deceived and deceiving, that she poets stop half-way, never getting to that is an impostor after all. The conviction which lies beyond, is to true passion what of inspiration, to which she clung firmly moonlight is to sunlight, what reflections when it might save France, slips from her in a mirror are to a boundless landscape grasp when it can only justify herself. under open sky. It is the studio-light of While her country is in danger she has poetry, or something worse. It is a feel- no doubts; the call to help it is divine; ing about a feeling, rather than the feeling she would receive any suggestion of misitself; it is an emotion excited at the idea take as a temptation from the evil spirit: of emotion; something melancholy, some- but when there merely remains a question thing pleasing, and also something which of explaining her own motives, there is is necessarily shallow. The muse of sen nothing divine in such a need: she cantiment is no passion-fraught being indif- not appeal to inspiration to meet it: she ferent to her attitudes; she is but the is perplexed, troubled, and lost by her representation of a muse, conscientiously own humility. This sort of tragedy has posing before a mirror of consciousness. been repeated over and over again in great And this quality of consciousness or un- lives; it is a sublimity of despair which consciousness makes the difference be- has been reached many times in the histween sentiment and passion. Sentiment tory of the human race, but only by those explains, but passion speaks; sentiment who have given us the grandest examples reflects, but passion is. The highest in- of effort and self-abnegation. When there tensity of passionate unconsciousness is is work to be done for others, how strong what constitutes true tragedy - that, and the best souls are to do it! How certain not the heaping together of terrible cir- they feel that God is behind them in the cumstances. Death and disaster touch battle! But when the work is finished, or the lives of all of us, more or less, with their part in it, and they are set to search out giving to them any tragic dignity. out motives, to justify action instead of We can find greater horrors in many a producing it, they are lost; they cannot modern newspaper than those of which explain; they did their work, they cannot Macbeth supped full, but they are only tell how they came to do it; and so the horrors; and our lives for the most part, last faltering doubts of some true martyrs though linked with all wonderful changes and noble men are made comprehensible of death and life, are commonplace enough. to us. Is there not a touch of this subWe are instruments too poor for the di- lime despair in the supreme tragedy of vinest melodies to echo from divinely, the world, when the one whom proud except when now and then a master-hand touches the chords, and a poet shows us how many poetic possibilities lie dormant in our prosaic existences. kings have since been proud to call master was dying a criminal's death, after being betrayed, denied, and forsaken by his followers? The bitter cry from Cal very was not, "Why have these forsaken me?" but "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? so giving the completing touch to this picture of sublimely human weakness and suffering. Schiller's tragedy failed to end as nobly as it had begun, because he was not content to work out this splendid despair in conformity with the facts of history as well as the laws of human nature. He must bring in the vulgar expedient of miraculous interference to justify and to save his heroine. This leaves us to ask, | sympathies were too continuously strong wondering, "Was she lost then, without with the suffering and oppressed for her a miracle?" because many great souls ever to get free from their influence, and like hers have found themselves in some so to bask in that calm heaven of obsersimilar position, and will so find them-vation whence Shakespeare spoke. Thunselves again and again; yet no miracles derstorms are oftenest woven out of sunny will disperse their doubts, and come for- skies, and in summer weather, and true ward as their credentials before a scoffing tragedy cannot be created out of melanworld. Schiller's play might have closed choly thought. Mrs. Browning's lifeat a more tragic height if he had permit- experiences had been too sad; her heart ted his heroine to follow an example was, perhaps, always too tender, to permit which she would have acknowledged as her to stand aloof from the passions of all-sufficient, and, leaving herself unjusti- the world and to paint them passionlessly. fied, be content to die saying, "Father, What she lost thereby in one quality, she, into thy hands I commend my spirit." however, gained in another, and that other was precisely the one in which the world of poetry had been hitherto most barren, and at the same time the one in which all things about her life, both inward and outward, combined to make her excel. This distinguishing characteristic of her poetry is its passionate pathos. If passion differs from sentiment so widely in its action, it is not less distinct in its utterance. Although possessing its own eloquence, it inclines to no mere sweetness of sound. The dying Desdemona awakens the heart-broken pity of the whole world by no prettily turned speech. She says "Nobody, I myself," It is the quality of suffering transformed and adding only a message to her "kind into comprehensive, far-sighted compaslord" leaves us to make what we can of sion, in which Mrs. Browning surpasses these three disjointed words. Something, other poets. Into the profoundest depths indeed, we make of them far different of human sorrow, into the utmost tenderfrom the significance of the golden-col-ness of human pity, into the closest close. ored, reiterating syllables in which much ness of human sympathy, she brings the modern poetry chooses to disguise itself. Again, passion does not stay to explain itself; it is as careless of our comprehension as it is indifferent to its own smoothness of expression, and as it is unconscious of its own justifications. When Juliet has heard the perfidious advice of her nurse to give up Romeo for Paris, she does not trouble us with any confidential "asides;" she does not express any veiled indignation, that we may see, and the nurse may ignore. "Well, thou hast comforted me marvellous much," is her quiet answer; and its quietness stirs us with the knowledge of her despair and utter desolateness more than any explanation could have done; it stirs us so deeply that we can hardly read farther for trouble and compassion. This capability of expressing passion in the very language of passion itself, and without self-conscious analysis or extraneous hints to the audience, is one of the rarest of poetic gifts; being almost a necessity in every fine tragedy, it is what renders this literary production so uncommon. Mrs. Browning hardly attempted to deal with tragedy in its most impersonal and unconscious form. The dramatic faculty was by no means denied to her. We have only to read the "Drama of Exile," "Aurora Leigh,” and some of her ballads, to recognize this; but her inspiring light of poetry. At last she gives voice to the inarticulate yearnings of many generations of loving hearts, whose divinest feelings had never before found full expression. We have had for hundreds of years a variety of lyrical revelations of all the deeper sentiments and higher aspirations of half the human race, but the other half has been silent; it has spoken by no representative voice in poetic literature any more than it has been permitted a representative voice in government; and there can hardly be any doubt that, as intelligence grows with the growth of language, so also all noble emotion is fostered by the worthy expression of it. Has it not then been a loss to all the generations of women in the past that no poet has spoken from their ranks, putting into words their secret longings after high ideals, and finding fit expression for all those finer feelings which are apt to float hazily above the loudly vocal commoner cares and thoughts of life? These unembodied aspirations are too often dispersed when the first emotional enthusiasm of youth is over; and to be consolidated into definite form gives them a greater chance of survival amid the more tangible things by which they are surrounded. But Mrs. Browning has done more than this for her fellow-women; besides 419 giving lyrical expression to all noble wom- from bitter knowledge and been nouranly emotion from the child's simple ished by mournful experiences. She delight in a sunny garden, or a loving seems to tell us that if we drink deeply voice, to the sacred sorrow of a mother enough of the divine cup of sorrow, we who has given her sons to die for their shall find a sweetness at the end never country she has also put into their guessed at by those who only sip and hands what might be called a perfect dec- turn away. She will not have it that the alogue of womanly virtue, a treasury of case of Romney Leigh is hopeless beprecepts which have the plastic nature of cause he has met with disappointment, fine poetry, and are therefore applicable failure, and the maiming blow of blindto every circumstance and to all time; so that it is hardly too much to say that a woman who studies with love and constancy the teachings of this true and pure woman, is secured against all the meanest mistakes and temptations of her age, and cannot- so long as the constancy lasts - lead an ignoble life under any conditions. ness. He has come to hope for others when they lose, sweet. Her hero wins for himself, as Buddha is said to have done, peace in a suffering himself, and bringing from the ocean world by going deep down into suffering depths of it patience and hope. The one good thing which she teaches us to cling to in a life where few of us can at the same time live nobly and live at ease, is a tenderness allied to constancy. We are always to love, help, and forgive each other. To women especially she offers no ideal of self-indulgence and physical enjoyment when she bids them, Be satisfied: Something thou hast to bear through woman hood, Some pang paid down for each new human life, trust From those thou hast too well served, from It is sometimes said, not untruly, that we find what we seek in all earthly things, even in poetry; it may also be said that in the best poetry, as in the other best gifts of life, we find what we need. It is Certain that we cannot receive anything, however abundant the thing may be, with out some receptive or assimilating power in ourselves. It is possible, therefore, that men do not perceive, and never can perceive, the whole excellence of Mrs. Browning's poetry; they do not want, they have no need of, that sort of help and that power of expression which are her especial gifts, being those which she holds beyond and above the general gifts which must make all true poetry applicable and beautiful to the whole intelligent world. It is possible even that had she been less perfect in her own department she would have appeared more perfect in the eyes of the majority of these her critics. However that may be, she stands "But," she adds for consolation, alone as a pure and lofty exponent of all the deeper sympathetic emotions. Her thy love lyrics are unlike most lyrics in their ab- Shall chant itself its own beatitudes sence of egoism. Her "I" is no plain. After its own life-working. A child's kiss tive isolated being complaining to the Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad; universe; it is only a medium for the poor man served by thee, shall make thee comprehension of other beings to whom A sick man helped by thee, shall make thee is denied, for the most part, the gift of utterance. Her sadness is almost pity; her mourning is akin to comfort; her tenderness is self-abnegation. Out of the depths of her own griefs she digs consolation for others, from the fulness of her own losses she finds hope for those who have suffered likewise. And for this reason the pervading spirit of her writings may be said to be hope; not the joyful anticipation which is born out of high spirits and cheerful circumstances, but a hope which has sprung those beloved Too loyally some treason; feebleness rich; strong; Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense It is evident that no woman who adopts sincerely Eve's reply to these words, Noble work Shall hold me in the place of garden-rest, And in the place of Eden's lost delight Worthy endurance of permitted pain, can lead a life of trifling vanity, of selfish extravagance, or egoistical ease. And worse sins than these are common enough |