the higher human interest of character and action. However this be
(and I think it is an objection that does apply, for instance, to
“The Princess”), here in this poem picturesqueness must be counted
as a merit, because congenial to the semi-mythical, ideal, and
parabolic nature of Arthurian legend, full of portent and supernatural
suggestion. Such Ossianic hero-forms are nearly as much akin to the
elements as to man. And the same answer holds largely in the case of
the other Arthurian Idylls. It has been noted how well-chosen is the
epithet “water” applied to a lake in the lines, “On one side lay the
ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full.” Why is
this so happy? For as a rule the concrete rather than the abstract
is poetical, because the former brings with it an image, and the
former involves no vision. But now in the night all Sir Bedevere could
observe, or care to observe, was that there was “some great water.” We
do not—he did not—want to know exactly what it was. Other thoughts,
other cares, preoccupy him and us. Again, of dying Arthur we are told
that “all his greaves and caisses were dashed with drops of onset.”
“Onset” is a very generic term, poetic because removed from all vulgar
associations of common parlance, and vaguely suggestive not only of
war’s pomp and circumstance, but of high deeds also, and heroic hearts,
since onset belongs to mettle and daring; the word for vast and shadowy
connotation is akin to Milton’s grand abstraction, “Far off _His
coming_ shone” or Shelley’s, “Where the Earthquake Demon taught her
young _Ruin_.”

It has been noted also how cunningly Tennyson can gild and furbish up
the most commonplace detail—as when he calls Arthur’s mustache “the
knightly growth that fringed his lips,” or condescends to glorify a
pigeon-pie, or paints the clown’s astonishment by this detail, “the
brawny spearman let his cheek Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and
turning stared;” or thus characterizes a pun, “and took the word, and
play’d upon it, and made it of two colors.” This kind of ingenuity,
indeed, belongs rather to talent than to genius; it is exercised
in cold blood; but talent may be a valuable auxiliary of genius,
perfecting skill in the technical departments of art. Yet such a gift
is not without danger to the possessor. It may tempt him to make his
work too much like a delicate mosaic of costly stone, too hard and
unblended, from excessive elaboration of detail. One may even prefer
to art thus highly wrought a more glowing and careless strain, that
lifts us off our feet, and carries us away as on a more rapid, if more
turbid torrent of inspiration, such as we find in Byron, Shelley,
or Victor Hugo. Here you are compelled to pause at every step, and
admire the design of the costly tesselated pavement under your feet.
Perhaps there is a jewelled glitter, a Pre-Raphaelite or Japanese
minuteness of finish here and there in Tennyson, that takes away
from the feeling of aërial perspective and remote distance, leaving
little to the imagination; not suggesting and whetting the appetite,
but rather satiating it; his loving observation of minute particulars
is so faithful, his knowledge of what others, even men of science,
have observed so accurate, his fancy so nimble in the detection of
similitudes. But every master has his own manner, and his reverent
disciples would be sorry if he could be without it. We love the little
idiosyncracies of our friends.

I have said the objection in question does seem to lie against “The
Princess.” It contains some of the most beautiful poetic pearls the
poet has ever dropped; but the manner appears rather disproportionate
to the matter, at least to the subject as he has chosen to regard
it. For it is regarded by him only semi-seriously; so lightly and
sportively is the whole topic viewed at the outset, that the effect
is almost that of burlesque; yet there is a very serious conclusion,
and a very weighty moral is drawn from the story, the workmanship
being labored to a degree, and almost encumbered with ornamentation.
But the poet himself admits the ingrained incongruity of the poem.
The fine comparison of the Princess Ida in the battle to a beacon
glaring ruin over raging seas, for instance, seems too grand for the
occasion. How differently, and in what burning earnest has a great
poet-woman, Mrs. Browning, treated this grave modern question of the
civil and political position of women in “Aurora Leigh!” Tennyson’s is
essentially a man’s view, and the frequent talk about women’s beauty
must be very aggravating to the “Blues.” It is this poem especially
that gives people with a limited knowledge of Tennyson the idea of
a “pretty” poet; the prettiness, though very genuine, seems to play
too patronizingly with a momentous theme. The Princess herself, and
the other figures are indeed dramatically realized, but the splendor
of invention, and the dainty detail, rather dazzle the eye away from
their humanity. Here, however, are some of the loveliest songs that
this poet, one of our supreme lyrists, ever sung: “Tears, idle tears!”
“The splendor falls,” “Sweet and low,” “Home they brought,” “Ask me no
more,” and the exquisite melody, “For Love is of the valley.” Moreover,
the grand lines toward the close are full of wisdom—

    “For woman is not undeveloped man,
    But diverse: could we make her as the man
    Sweet love were slain,” &c.

I feel myself a somewhat similar incongruity in the poet’s treatment of
his more homely, modern, half-humorous themes, such as the introduction
to the “Morte d’Arthur,” and “Will Waterproof;” not at all in the
humorous poems, like the “Northern Farmer,” which are all of a piece,
and perfect in their own vein. In this introduction we have “The host
and I sat round the wassail bowl, then half-way ebb’d;” but this
metaphorical style is not (fortunately) sustained, and so, as good luck
would have it, a metaphor not being ready to hand, we have the honester
and homelier line, “Till I tired out with cutting eights that day upon
the pond;” yet this homespun hardly agrees with the above stage-king’s
costume. And so again I often venture to wish that the Poet-Laureate
would not say “flowed” when he only means “said.” Still, this may be
hypercriticism. For I did not personally agree with the critic who
objected to Enoch Arden’s fish-basket being called “ocean-smelling
osier.” There is no doubt, however, that “Stokes, and Nokes, and Vokes”
have exaggerated the poet’s manner, till the “murex fished up” by Keats
and Tennyson has become one universal flare of purple. Beautiful as
some of Mr. Rossetti’s work is, his expression in the sonnets surely
became obscure from over-involution, and excessive _fioriture_ of
diction. But then Rossetti’s style is no doubt formed considerably upon
that of the Italian poets. One is glad, however, that, this time, at
all events, the right man has “got the porridge!”

In connection with “Morte d’Arthur,” I may draw attention again to Lord
Tennyson’s singular skill in producing a rhythmical response to the
sense.

                            “The great brand
    Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon,
    And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch.”

Here the anapest instead of the iambic in the last place happily
imitates the sword Excalibur’s own gyration in the air. Then what
admirable wisdom does the legend, opening out into parable, disclose
toward the end! When Sir Bedevere laments the passing away of the
Round Table, and Arthur’s noble peerage, gone down in doubt, distrust,
treachery, and blood, after that last great battle in the West, when,
amid the death-white mist, “confusion fell even upon Arthur,” and
“friend slew friend, now knowing whom he slew,” how grandly comes
the answer of Arthur from the mystic barge, that bears him from the
visible world to “some far island valley of Avilion,” “The old order
changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world!” The new commencement
of this poem, called in the idyls “The Passing of Arthur,” is well
worthy of the conclusion. How weirdly expressive is that last battle in
the mist of those hours of spiritual perplexity, which overcloud even
strongest natures and firmest faith, overshadowing whole communities,
when we know not friend from foe, the holiest hope seems doomed to
disappointment, all the great aim and work of life have failed; even
loyalty to the highest is no more; the fair polity built laboriously
by some god-like spirit dissolves, and “all his realm reels back into
the beast;” while men “falling down in death” look up to heaven only
to find cloud, and the great-voiced ocean, as it were Destiny without
love and without mind, with voice of days of old and days to be, shakes
the world, wastes the narrow kingdom, yea, beats upon the faces of
our dead! The world-sorrow pierces here through the strain of a poet
usually calm and contented. Yet “Arthur shall come again, aye, twice as
fair;” for the spirit of man is young immortally.

Who, moreover, has moulded for us phrases of more transcendent dignity,
of more felicitous grace and import, phrases, epithets, and lines
that have already become memorable household words? More magnificent
expression I cannot conceive than that of such poems as “Lucretius,”
“Tithonus,” “Ulysses.” These all for versification, language, luminous
picture, harmony of structure have never been surpassed. What pregnant
brevity, weight, and majesty of expression in the lines where Lucretius
characterizes the death of his namesake Lucretia, ending “and from it
sprang the commonwealth, which breaks, as I am breaking now!” What
masterly power in poetically embodying a materialistic philosophy,
congenial to modern science, yet in absolute dramatic keeping with the
actual thought of the Roman poet! And at the same time, what tremendous
grasp of the terrible conflict of passion with reason, two natures
in one, significant for all epochs! In “Tithonus” and “Ulysses” we
find embodiments in high-born verse and illustrious phrase of ideal
moods, adventurous peril-affronting Enterprise contemptuously tolerant
of tame household virtues in “Ulysses,” and the bane of a burdensome
immortality, become incapable even of love, in “Tithonus.” Any
personification more exquisite than that of Aurora in the latter were
inconceivable.

M. Taine, in his _Litterature Anglaise_, represents Tennyson as
an idyllic poet (a charming one), comfortably settled among his
rhododendrons on an English lawn, and viewing the world through the
somewhat insular medium of a prosperous, domestic and virtuous member
of the English comfortable classes, as also of a man of letters who
has fully succeeded. Again, either M. Taine, M. Scherer, or some other
writer in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, pictures him, like his own
Lady of Shalott, viewing life not as it really is, but reflected in
the magic mirror of his own recluse fantasy. Now, whatever measure
of truth there may formerly have been in such conceptions, they have
assuredly now proved quite one-sided and inadequate. We have only to
remember “Maud,” the stormier poems of the “Idylls,” “Lucretius,”
“Rizpah,” the “Vision of Sin.” The recent poem “Rizpah” perhaps marks
the high-water mark of the Laureate’s genius, and proves henceforward
beyond all dispute his wide range, his command over the deeper-toned
and stormier themes of human music, as well as over the gentler and
more serene. It proves also that the venerable master’s hand has not
lost its cunning, rather that he has been even growing until now,
having become more profoundly sympathetic with the world of action,
and the common growth of human sorrows. “Rizpah” is certainly one of
the strongest, most intensely felt, and graphically realized dramatic
poems in the language; its pathos is almost overwhelming. There is
nothing more tragic in Œdipus, Antigone, or Lear. And what a strong
Saxon homespun language has the veteran poet found for these terrible
lamentations of half-demented agony, “My Baby! the bones that had
sucked me, the bones that had laughed and had cried, Theirs! O no! They
are mine not theirs—they had moved in my side.” Then the heart-gripping
phrase breaking forth ever and anon in the imaginative metaphorical
utterance of wild emotion, to which the sons and daughters of the
people are often moved, eloquent beyond all eloquence, white-hot from
the heart! “Dust to dust low down! let us hide! but they set him so
high, that all the ships of the world could stare at him passing by.”
In this last book of ballads the style bears the same relation to the
earlier and daintier that the style of “Samson Agonistes” bears to that
of “Comus.” “The Revenge” is equally masculine, simple, and sinewy in
appropriate strength of expression, a most spirited rendering of a
heroic naval action—worthy of a place, as is also the grand ode on the
death of Wellington, beside the war odes of Campbell, the “Agincourt”
of Drayton, and the “Rule Britannia” of Thomson. The irregular metre
of the “Ballad of the Fleet” is most remarkable as a vehicle of the
sense, resonant with din of battle, full-voiced with rising and
bursting storm toward the close, like the equally spirited concluding
scenes of “Harold,” that depict the battle of Senlac. The dramatic
characterizations in “Harold” and “Queen Mary” are excellent—Mary,
Harold, the Conqueror, the Confessor, Pole, Edith, Stigand, and other
subordinate sketches, being striking and successful portraits; while
“Harold” is full also of incident and action—a really memorable modern
play; but the main motive of “Queen Mary” fails in tragic dignity and
interest, though there is about it a certain grim subdued pathos, as of
still life, and there are some notable scenes. Tennyson is admirably
dramatic in the portrayal of individual moods, of men or women in
certain given situations. His plays are fine, and of real historic
interest, but not nearly so remarkable as the dramatic poems I have
named, as the earlier “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” or
as the “Northern Farmer,” “Cobblers,” and “Village Wife,” among his
later works. These last are perfectly marvellous in their fidelity
and humorous photographic realism. That the poet of “Œnone,” “The
Lotus-eaters,” and the Arthur cycle should have done these also is
wonderful. The humor of them is delightful, and the rough homely
diction perfect. One wishes indeed that the “dramatic fragments”
collected by Lamb, like gold-dust out of the rather dreary sand-expanse
of Elizabethan playwrights, were so little fragmentary as these.
Tennyson’s short dramatic poems are quintessential; in a brief glimpse
he contrives to reveal the whole man or woman. You would know the old
“Northern Farmer,” with his reproach to “God Amoighty” for not “letting
him aloan,” and the odious farmer of the new style, with his “Proputty!
Proputty!” wherever you met them. But “Dora,” the “Grand-mother,” “Lady
Clare,” “Edward Gray,” “Lord of Burleigh,” had long since proved that
Tennyson had more than one style at command; that he was master not
only of a flamboyant, a Corinthian, but also of a sweet, simple, limpid
English, worthy of Goldsmith or Cowper at their best.

Reverting, however, to the question of Tennyson’s ability to fathom
the darker recesses of our nature, what shall be said of the “Vision
of Sin?” For myself I can only avow that, whenever I read it, I feel
as if some horrible gray fungus of the grave were growing over my
heart, and over all the world around me. As for passion, I know few
more profoundly passionate poems than “Love and Duty.” It paints
with glowing concentrated power the conflict of duty with yearning
passionate love, stronger than death. The “Sisters,” and “Fatima,”
too, are fiercely passionate, as also is “Maud.” I should be surprised
to hear that a lover could read “Maud,” and not feel the spring and
mid-noon of passionate affection in it to the very core of him, so
profoundly felt and gloriously expressed is it by the poet. Much of its
power, again, is derived from that peculiarly Tennysonian ability to
make Nature herself reflect, redouble, and interpret the human feeling.
That is the power also of such supreme lyrics as “Break, break!” and
“In the Valley of Cauterets;” of such chaste and consummate rendering
of a noble woman’s self-sacrifice as “Godiva,” wherein “shameless
gargoyles” stare, but “the still air scarcely breathes for fear;” and
likewise of “Come into the garden, Maud,” an invocation that palpitates
with rapture of young love, in which the sweet choir of flowers bear
their part, and sing antiphony. The same feeling pervades the delicious
passage commencing, “Is that enchanted moon?” and “Go not, happy day.”
All this may be what Mr. Ruskin condemns as “pathetic” fallacy, but it
is inevitable and right. For “in our life doth nature live, ours is
her wedding garment, ours her shroud.” The same Divine Spirit pervades
man and nature; she, like ourselves, has her transient moods, as well
as her tranquil immovable deeps. In her, too, is a passing as well as
an eternal, while we apprehend either according to our own capacity,
together with the emotional bias that dominates us at the moment. The
vital and permanent in us holds the vital and permanent in her, while
the temporary in us mirrors the transitory in her. I cannot think
indeed that the more troubled and jarring moods of disharmony and fury
are touched with quite the same degree of mastery in “Maud” as are the
sunnier and happier. Tennyson hitherto had basked by preference in
the brighter regions of his art, and the turbid Byronic vein appeared
rather unexpectedly in him. The tame, sleek, daintily-feeding gourmêts
of criticism yelped indeed their displeasure at these “hysterics,” as
they termed the “Sturm und Drang” elements that appeared in “Maud,”
especially since the poet dared appropriately to body these forth in
somewhat harsh, abrupt language, and irregular metres. Such elements,
in truth, hardly seemed so congenial to him as to Byron or Hugo. Yet
they were welcome, as proving that our chief poet was not altogether
irresponsive to the terrible social problems around him, to the
corruptions, and ever-festering vices of the body politic, to the
doubt, denial, and grim symptoms of upheaval at his very doors. For
on the whole some of us had felt that the Poet-Laureate was almost
too well contented with the general framework of things, with the
prescriptive rights of long-unchallenged rule, and hoar comfortable
custom, especially in England, as though these were in very deed
divine, and no subterranean thunder were ever heard, even in this
favored isle, threatening Church and State, and the very fabric of
society. But the temper of his class and time spoke through him. Did
not all men rejoice greatly when Prince Albert opened the Exhibition
of 1851; when Cobden and the Manchester school won the battle of
free-trade; when steam-engines and the electric telegraph were
invented; when Wordsworth’s “glorious time” came, and the Revised Code
passed into law; when science first told her enchanting fairy tales?
Yet the Millennium tarries, and there is an exceeding “bitter cry.”

But in “Maud,” as indeed before in that fine sonorous chaunt,
“Locksley Hall,” and later in “Aylmer’s Field,” the poet’s emphasis
of appreciation is certainly reserved for the heroes, men who have
inherited a strain of gloom, or ancestral disharmony moral and
physical, within whom the morbific social humors break forth inevitably
into plague-spots; the injustice and irony of circumstance lash them
into revolt, wrath, and madness. Mr. R. H. Hutton, a critic who often
writes with ability, but who seems to find a little difficulty in
stepping outside the circle of his perhaps rather rigid misconceptions
and predilections, makes the surely somewhat strange remark that
“‘Maud’ was written to reprobate hysterics.” But I fear—nay, I hope
and believe—that we cannot credit the poet with any such virtuous
or didactic intention in the present instance, though of course the
pregnant lines beginning “Of old sat Freedom on the heights,” the royal
verses, the recent play so forcibly objected to by Lord Queensberry,
together with various allusions to the “red fool-fury of the Seine,”
and “blind hysterics of the Celt,” do indicate a very Conservative and
law-abiding attitude. But other lines prove that after all what he
mostly deprecates is “the falsehood of extremes,” the blind and hasty
plunge into measures of mere destruction; for he praises the statesmen
who “take occasion by the hand,” and make “the bounds of freedom wider
yet,” and even gracefully anticipates “the golden year.”

The same principle on which I have throughout insisted as the key
to most of Tennyson’s best poetry is the key also to the moving
tale “Enoch Arden,” where the tropical island around the solitary
shipwrecked mariner is gorgeously depicted, the picture being as
full-Venetian, and resplendent in color, as those of the “Day-Dream”
and “Arabian Nights.” But the conclusion of the tale is profoundly
moving and pathetic, and relates a noble act of self-renouncement.
Parts of “Aylmer’s Field,” too, are powerful.

And now we come to the “Idylls,” around which no little critical
controversy has raged. It has been charged against them that they are
more picturesque, scenic, and daintily-wrought than human in their
interest. But though assuredly the poet’s love for the picturesque is
in this noble epic—for epic the Idylls in their completed state may be
accounted—amply indulged, I think it is seldom to the detriment of the
human interest, and the remark I made about one of them, the “Morte
d’Arthur,” really applies to all. The Arthur cycle is not historical,
as “Harold” or “Queen Mary” is, where the style is often simple
almost to baldness; the whole of it belongs to the reign of myth,
legend, fairy story, and parable. Ornament, image, and picture are as
much appropriate here as in Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” of which indeed
Tennyson’s poem often reminds me. But “the light that never was on sea
or land, the consecration and the poet’s dream,” are a new revelation,
made peculiarly in modern poetry, of true spiritual insight. And this
not only throws fresh illuminating light into nature, but deepens
also and enlarges our comprehension of man. If nature be known for a
symbol and embodiment of the soul’s life, by means of their analogies
in nature the human heart and mind may be more profoundly understood;
while human emotions win a double clearness, or an added sorrow,
from their fellowship and association with outward scenes. Nature
can only be fathomed through her consanguinity with our own desires,
aspirations, and fears, while these again become defined and articulate
by means of her related appearances. A poet, then, who is sensitive to
such analogies confers a two-fold benefit upon us.

I cannot at all assent to the criticism passed upon the Idylls by Mr.
John Morley, who has indeed, as it appears to me, somewhat imperilled
his critical reputation by the observation that they are “such little
pictures as might adorn a lady’s school.” When we think of “Guinevere,”
“Vivien,” the “Holy Grail,” the “Passing of Arthur,” this dictum seems
to lack point and penetration. Indeed, had it proceeded only from
some rhyming criticaster, alternating with the feeble puncture of his
sting the worrying iteration of his own doleful drone, it might have
been passed over as simply an impertinence.[2] But while the poem
is in part purely a fairy romance tinctured with humanity, Tennyson
has certainly intended to treat the subject in part also as a grave
spiritual parable. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Elaine, Galahad,
Vivien, are types, gracious or hateful. My own feeling, therefore,
would rather be that there is too much human nature in the Idylls, than
that there is too little; or at any rate that, while Arthur remains a
mighty Shadow, whose coming and going are attended with supernatural
portents, a worthy symbol of the Spirit of divine humanity, Vivien, for
instance, is a too real and unlovely harlot, too gross and veritably
breathing, to be in proportionate harmony with the general design.
Lancelot and Guinevere, again, being far fuller of life and color than
Arthur, the situation between these three, as invented, or at least
as recast from the old legends in his own fashion by the poet, does
not seem artistically felicitous, if regarded as a representation of
an actual occurrence in human life. But so vivid and human are many
of the stories that we can hardly fail so to regard them. And if the
common facts of life are made the vehicle of a parable, they must
not be distorted. It is chiefly, I think, because Arthur and Merlin
are only seen, as it were, through the luminous haze appropriate to
romance and myth, that the main motive of the epic, the loves of
Lancelot and Guinevere, appears scarcely strong enough to bear the
weight of momentous consequence imposed on it, which is no less than
the retributive ruin of Arthur’s commonwealth. Now, if Art elects to
appeal to ethical instinct, as great, human, undegraded Art continually
must, she is even more bound, in pursuance of her own proper end, to
satisfy the demand for moral beauty, than to gratify the taste for
beauty intellectual or æsthetic. And of course, while you might flatter
a poetaster, you would only insult a poet by refusing to consider what
he says, and only professing a concern for how he says it. Therefore
if the poet choose to lay all the blame of the dissolution and failure
of Arthur’s polity upon the illicit loves of Lancelot and Guinevere,
it seems to me that he committed a serious error in his invention of
the early circumstances of their meeting; nothing of the kind being
discoverable either in Mallory, or the old chronicle of Merlin. Great
stress, no doubt, is laid by Sir Thomas Mallory on this illicit love
as the fruitful source of much calamity; but then Mallory relates that
Arthur had met and loved Guinevere long before he asked for her in
marriage; whereas, according to Tennyson, he sent Lancelot to meet the
betrothed maiden, and she, never having seen Arthur, loved Lancelot,
as Lancelot Guinevere, at first sight. That circumstance, gratuitously
invented, surely makes the degree of the lovers’ guilt a problem
somewhat needlessly difficult to determine, if it was intended to brand
their guilt as heinous enough to deserve the ruin of a realm, and the
failure of Arthur’s humane life-purpose. Guinevere, seeing Lancelot
before Arthur, and recognizing in him (as the sweet and pure Elaine,
remember, did after her), the type of all that is noble and knightly
in man, loves the messenger, and continues to love him after she has
met her destined husband, whom she judges (and the reader of the
Idylls can hardly fail to coincide with her judgment) somewhat cold,
colorless, and aloof, however impeccable and grave; a kind of moral
phantom, or imaginative symbol of the conscience, whom Guinevere, as
typifying the human soul, ought indeed to love best (“not Lancelot,
nor another”), but whom, as a particular living man, Arthur, one quite
fails to see why Guinevere, a living woman with her own idiosyncracies,
should be bound to love rather than Lancelot. For if Guinevere, as
woman, ought to love “the highest” man “when she sees him,” it does
not appear why that obligation should not equally bind all the women
of her Court also! If the whole burden of the catastrophe was to be
laid upon the conception of a punishment deserved by the great guilt
of particular persons, that guilt ought certainly to have been so
described as to appear heinous and inexcusable to all beyond question.
The story need not have been thus moralized; but the Poet-Laureate
chose to emphasize the breach of a definite moral obligation as
unpardonable, and pregnant with evil issues. That being so, I submit
that the moral sense is left hesitating and bewildered, rather than
satisfied and acquiescent, which interferes with a thorough enjoyment
of the work even as art. The sacrament of marriage is high and holy;
yet we feel disposed to demand whether here it may not be rather the
letter and mere convention than the spirit of constant affection and
true marriage that is magnified. And if so, though popularity with the
English public may be secured by this vindication of their domestic
ideal, higher interests are hardly so well subserved. Doubtless the
treachery to husband and friend on the part of the lovers was black
and detestable. Doubtless their indulged love was far from innocent.
But then why invent so complicated a problem, and yet write as if
it were perfectly simple and easy of solution? What I complain of
is, that this love has a certain air of grievous fatality and excuse
about it, while yet the poet treats it as mere unmitigated guilt,
fully justifying all the disaster entailed thereby, not only on the
sinners themselves, but on the State, and the cause of human welfare.
Nor can we feel quite sure, as the subject is here envisaged, that,
justice apart, it is quite according to probability for the knowledge
of this constant illicit affection to engender a universal infidelity
of the Round Table Knights to vows which not only their lips, as in
the case of Guinevere, but also their hearts have sworn; infidelity
to their own true affection, and disloyalty to their own genuine
aspiration after the fulfilment of chivalrous duty in championing the
oppressed—all because a rich-natured woman like Guinevere proves
faithful to her affection for a rich kindred humanity in Lancelot!
How this comes about is at any rate not sufficiently explained in the
poet’s narrative; and if so, he must be held to have failed both as
artist and as ethical teacher, which in these Idylls he has certainly
aspired to be. Then comes the further question, not altogether an
easy one to answer, whether it is really true that even widespread
sexual excess inevitably entails deterioration in other respects, a
lowered standard of integrity and honor? The chivalry of the Middle
Ages was _sans peur_, but seldom _sans reproche_. History, on being
interrogated, gives an answer ambiguous as a Greek oracle. Was England,
for instance, less great under the Regency than under Cromwell? But
at all events, the old legends make the process of disintegration in
Arthur’s kingdom much clearer than it is made by Tennyson. In Mallory,
for instance, Arthur is by no means the sinless being depicted by
Tennyson. Rightly or wrongly, he is resolved to punish Guinevere for
her infidelity by burning, and Lancelot is equally resolved to rescue
her, which accordingly he does from the very stake, carrying her off
with him to his castle of Joyous Gard. Then Arthur and Sir Gawain make
war upon him; and thus, the great knightly heads of the Round Table
at variance; the fellowship is inevitably dissolved, for Modred takes
advantage of their dissension to seize upon the throne. But in the old
legends, who is Modred? The son of Arthur and his sister. According to
them, assuredly the origin of the doom or curse upon the kingdom is
the unwitting incest, yet deliberate adultery of Arthur, or perhaps
the still earlier and deeply-dyed sin of his father, Uther. Yet, Mr.
Swinburne’s contention, that Lord Tennyson should have emphasized the
sin of Arthur as responsible for the doom that came upon himself and
his kingdom, although plausible, appears to me hardly to meet all
the exigencies of the case. Mr. Hutton says in reply that then the
supernatural elements of the story could have found no place in the
poem; no strange portents could have been described as accompanying
the birth and death of Arthur. A Greek tragedian, he adds, would
never have dreamt of surrounding Œdipus with such portents. But surely
the latter remark demonstrates the unsoundness of the former. Has
Mr. Hutton forgotten what is perhaps one of the sublimest scenes in
any literature, the supernatural passing of this very deeply-dyed
sinner Œdipus to his divine repose at Colonos, in the grove of
those very ladies of divine vengeance, by whose awful ministry he
had been at length assoiled of sin? the mysterious stairs; Antigone
and Ismene expectant above; he “shading his eyes before a sight
intolerable;” after drinking to the dregs the cup of sin and sorrow,
rapt from the world, even he, to be tutelary deity of that land?
Neither Elijah nor Moses was a sinless man; yet Moses, after enduring
righteous punishment, was not, for God took him, and angels buried
him; it was he who led Israel out of Egypt, communed with Jehovah
on Sinai; he appeared with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.
But I would suggest that the poet might have represented suffering
and disappointment, not as penalty apportioned to particular
transgressions, rather as integral elements in that mysterious destiny
which determines the lot of man in his present condition of defect,
moral, physical, and intellectual, involved in his “Hamartia,” or
failure to realize that fulness of being which yet ideally belongs to
him as divine. Both these ideas—the idea of Doom or destiny, and that
of Nemesis on account of voluntary transgression—are alike present
in due equipoise in the great conceptions of Greek drama, as Mr. J.
A. Symonds has conclusively proved in his brilliant, philosophic and
poetic work on the Greek poetry, against the more one-sided contention
of Schlegel. I feel throughout Shakspeare this same idea of mystic
inevitable destiny dominating the lives of men: you may call it, if
you please, the will of God. Yet if it dooms us to error, ignorance,
and crime, at all events this will cannot resemble the wills of men
as they appear to us now. Othello expiates his foolish credulity, and
jealous readiness to suspect her who had given him no cause to doubt
her love. But there was the old fool Brabantio, and the devil Iago;
there were his race, his temperament, his circumstances in general,
and the circumstances of the hour,—all these were toils woven about
him by Fate. Now, if the idea of Destiny be the more accentuated (and
a tragedian surely should make us feel both this, and the free-will of
man), then, as it seems to me, in the interests of Art, which loves
life and harmony, not pure pain, loss, discord, or negation, there
ought to be a purifying or idealizing process manifest in the ordeal
to which the victims are subjected, if not for the protagonists, at
all events for some of those concerned in the action. We must at least
be permitted to behold the spectacle of constancy and fortitude, or
devotion, as we do in Desdemona, Cordelia, Antigone, Iphigenia, Romeo
and Juliet. But the ethical element of free-will is almost exclusively
accentuated by Tennyson; and in such a case we desire to be fully
persuaded that the “poetical justice” dealt out by the poet is really
and radically justice, not a mere provincial or conventional semblance
thereof.

Yet if you confine your attention to the individual Idylls themselves,
they are undoubtedly most beautiful models of sinewy strength,
touched to consummate grace. There can be nothing more exquisite than
the tender flower-like humanity of dear Elaine, nor more perfect
in pathetic dignity than the Idyll of Guinevere. Vivien is very
powerful; but, as I said, the courtesan appears to me too coarsely and
graphically realized for perfect keeping with the general tone of this
faëry epic. The “Holy Grail” is a wonderful creation in the realm of
the supernatural; all instinct with high spiritual significance, though
some of the invention in this, as in the other Idylls, belongs to Sir
Thomas Mallory. The adventures of the knights, notably of Galahad,
Percivale, and Lancelot, in their quest for the Grail, are splendidly
described. What, again, can be nobler than the parting of Arthur and
Guinevere at Almesbury, where the King forgives and blesses her, she
grovelling repentant before him, the gleaming “dragon of the great
Pendragonship” making a vaporous halo in the night, as Arthur leaves
her, “moving ghost-like to his doom?” Here the scenic element blends
incorporate with the human, but assuredly does not overpower it, as has
been pretended. Then how excellent dramatically are the subordinate
figures of the little nun at Almesbury, and the rustic old monk, with
whom Percivale converses in the Holy Grail; while, if we were to notice
such similes (Homeric in their elaboration, though modern in their
minute fidelity to nature) as that in Enid, which concerns the man
startling the fish in clear water by holding up “a shining hand against
the sun,” or the happy comparison of standing muscle on an arm to a
brook “running too vehemently” over a stone “to break upon it,” our
task would be interminable. The Arthur Idylls are full too of elevating
exemplars for the conduct of life, of such chivalrous traits as
courage, generosity, courtesy, forbearance, consecration, devotion of
life for loyalty and love, service of the weak and oppressed; abounding
also with excellent gnomic sayings inculcating these virtues. What
admirable and delightful ladies are Enid, Elaine, Guinevere! Of the
Laureate’s longer works, this poem and “In Memoriam” are his greatest,
though both of these are composed of many brief song-flights.

It may not be unprofitable to inquire what idea Tennyson probably
intended to symbolize by the “Holy Grail,” and the quest for it. Is it
that of mere supernatural portent? Certainly not. The whole treatment
suggests far more. I used to think it signified the mystical blood of
Christ, the spirit of self-devotion, or, as Mallory defines it, “the
secret of Jesus.” But it scarcely seems possible that Tennyson means
precisely that, for then his ideal man Arthur would not discourage the
quest. Does it not rather stand for that secret of the higher life as
sought in any form of supernatural religion, involving acts of worship
or asceticism, and religious contemplation? Yet Arthur deprecates
not the religious life as such—rather that life in so far as it is
not the auxiliary of human service. It is while pursuing the quest
that Percivale (in the “Holy Grail”) finds all common life, even the
most sacred relations of it, as well as the most ordinary and vulgar,
turn to dust when he touches them; and to a religious fanatic that is
indeed the issue—this life is less than dust to him; he exists for the
future and “supernatural” only; his soul is already in another region
than this homely work-a-day world of ours; and because it is another,
he is only too ready to think it must be higher. What to him are our
politics, our bewilderments, our fair humanities, our art and science,
or schemes of social amelioration? Less than nothing. What he has to
do is to save first his own soul, and then some few souls of others,
if he can. But while, as Arthur himself complained, such an one waits
for the beatific vision, or follows “wandering fires” of superstition,
how often, for men with strength to right the wronged, will “the
chance of noble deeds come and go unchallenged!” Arthur even dares to
call the Holy Grail “a sign to maim this order which I made.” “Many
of you, yea most, return no more.” But, as the Queen laments, “this
madness has come on us for our sins.” Percivale turns monk, Galahad
passes away to the spiritual city, Sir Bors meets Lancelot riding madly
all abroad, and shouting, “Stay me not; I have been the sluggard,
and I ride apace, for now there is a lion in the path!” Lancelot
rides on the quest in order that, through the vision of the Grail,
the sin of which his conscience accuses him may be rooted out of his
heart. And so it was partly the sin—the infidelity to their vows—that
had crept in amongst the knights, which drove the best of them to
expiation, to religious fervors, whereby their sin might be purged,
thus completing the disintegration of that holy human brotherhood,
which had been welded together by Arthur for activities of righteous
and loving endeavor after human welfare. Magnificent is the picture
of the terrible, difficult quest of Lancelot, whose ineradicable sin
hinders him from full enjoyment of the spiritual vision after which he
longs. Nor will Arthur unduly discourage those who have thus in mortal
peril half attained. “Blessed are Bors, Lancelot, and Percivale, for
these have seen according to their sight.” Into his mouth the poet
also puts some beautiful lines on prayer. More indeed may be wrought
for the world by the silent spiritual life, by the truth-seeking
student, by the beauty-loving artist, than is commonly believed.
In worshipping the ideal they bless men. Arthur rebukes Gawain for
light infidel profanity, born only of blind contented immersion in
the slime of sense; while for the others, there was little indeed
of the true religious spirit in their quest. “They followed but the
leader’s bell, for one hath seen, and all the blind will see.” With
them it is mere fashion, and hollow lip-service, or superstitious
fear; a very devil-worship indeed, standing to them too often in the
place of justice, mercy, and plain human duty. Nay, what terrible
crimes have been committed against humanity in the name of this very
religion! Even Percivale only attained to spiritual vision through
the vision of Galahad, whose power of strong faith came upon him, for
he lacked humility, a heavenly virtue too often lacking in the _unco
guid_, as likewise in those raised above their fellows through any
uncommon gifts, whether of body or mind. In the old legends, the sin
of Lancelot himself is represented as consisting quite as much in
personal ambition, over-self-confidence, and pride on the score of his
prowess, as in his adultery with the Queen. Yet the “pure religion and
undefiled” of Galahad and St. Agnes had been long since celebrated
by our poet in two of his loveliest poems. But these sweet children
were not left long to battle for goodness and truth upon the earth;
heaven was waiting for them; though, while he remained, Galahad, who
saw the vision because he was pure in heart, “rode shattering evil
customs everywhere” in the strength of that purity and that vision.
Arthur, however, avers he could not himself have joined in the quest,
because his mission was to mould and guard his kingdom, although, that
done, “let visions come and welcome;” nay, to him the common earth and
air are all vision; and yet he knows himself no vision, nor God, nor
the divine man. To the spiritual, indeed, all is religious, sacred,
sacramental, for they look through the appearance to the reality,
half hidden and half revealed under it. This avowal reminds me of
Wordsworth’s grand passage in the “Ode on Immortality” concerning
“creatures moving about in worlds not realized.” But for men not so far
advanced revelations of the Holy Grail, sacramental observances, and
stated acts of worship, are indeed of highest import and utility. Yet
good, straightforward, modest Sir Bors, who is not over-anxious about
the vision, to him it is for a moment vouchsafed, though Lancelot and
Percivale attain to it with difficulty, and selfish, superstitious
worldlings, with their worse than profitless head-knowledge, bad
hearts, hollow worship of Convention and the Dead Letter, get no
inkling of it at all. This wholesome conviction I trace through many of
the Laureate’s writings. Stylites is not intended to be a flattering,
though it is certainly a veracious portrait of the sanctimonious,
self-depreciating, yet self-worshipping ascetic. The same feeling runs
through “Queen Mary;” and Harold, the honest warrior of unpretending
virtue, is well contrasted with the devout, yet un-English and only
half-kingly confessor, upon whose piety Stigand passes no very
complimentary remarks. So that the recent play which Lord Queensberry
objected to surprises me; for in “Despair” it is theological caricature
of the divine character which is made responsible for the catastrophe
quite as much as Agnosticism, a mere reaction from false belief.
Besides, has not Tennyson sung “There lives more faith in honest doubt,
believe me, than in half the creeds,” and “Power was with him in the
night, which makes the darkness and the light, and dwells not in the
light alone”?

Turning now to the philosophical and elegiac poetry of Tennyson,
one would pronounce the poet to be in the best sense a religious
mystic of deep insight, though fully alive to the claims of activity,
culture, science, and art. It would not be easy to find more
striking philosophical poetry than the lines on “Will,” the “Higher
Pantheism,” “Wages,” “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” the “Two Voices,”
and especially “In Memoriam.” As to “Wages,” it is surely true that
Virtue, even if she seek no rest (and that is a hard saying), does
seek the “wages of going on and still to be.” An able writer in
“To-day” objects to this doctrine. And of course an Agnostic may be,
often is, a much more human person—larger, kinder, sounder—than a
believer. But the truth is, the very feeling that Love and Virtue are
noblest and best involves the implicit intuition of their permanence,
however the understanding may doubt or deny. Again, I find myself
thoroughly at one with the profound teaching of the “Higher Pantheism,”
As for “In Memoriam,” where is the elegiac poetry equal to it in our
language? Gravely the solemn verse confronts problems which, mournful
or ghastly, yet with some far-away light in their eyes, look us men
of this generation in the face, visiting us with dread misgiving or
pathetic hope. From the conference, from the agony, from the battle,
Faith emerges, aged, maimed, and scarred, yet triumphing and serene.
Like every greater poet, Tennyson wears the prophet’s mantle, as he
wears the singer’s bay. Mourners will ever thank him for such words as,
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all;”
and, “Let love clasp grief, lest both be drowned;” and, “Our wills are
ours, we know not how; our wills are ours, to make them Thine;” as for
the lines that distinguish Wisdom and Knowledge, commending Wisdom as
mistress, and Knowledge but as handmaid. Every mourner has his favorite
section or particular chapel of the temple-poem, where he prefers to
kneel for worship of the Invisible. Yes, for into the furnace men may
be cast bound and come forth free, having found for companion One whose
form was like the Son of God. Our poet’s conclusion may be foolish and
superstitious, as some would now persuade us; but if he errs, it is in
good company, for he errs with him who sang, “In la sua voluntade e
nostra pace” and with Him who prayed, “Father, not My will, but Thine.”

The range, then, of this poet in all the achievements of his long life
is vast—lyrical, dramatic,[3] narrative, allegoric, philosophical.
Even strong and barbed satire is not wanting, as in “Sea-Dreams,” the
fierce verses to Bulwer, “The Spiteful Letter.” Of the most varied
measures he is master, as of the richest and most copious vocabulary.
Only in the sonnet form, perhaps, does his genius not move with so
royal a port, so assured a superiority over all rivals. I have seen
sonnets even by other living English writers that appeared to me more
striking; notably, fine sonnets by Mr. J. A. Symonds, Mr. Theodore
Watts, Mrs. Pfeiffer, Miss Blind. But surely Tennyson must have written
very little indifferent poetry when you think of the fuss made by his
detractors over the rather poor verses beginning “I stood on a tower in
the wet,” and the somewhat insignificant series entitled “The Window.”
For “The Victim” appears to me exceedingly good. Talk of daintiness
and prettiness! Yes; but it is the lambent, water-waved damascening
on a Saladin’s blade; it is the rich enchasement on a Cœur de Lion’s
armor. Amid the soul-subduing spaces, and tall forested piers of that
cathedral by Rhine, there are long jewelled flames for window, and
embalmed kings lie shrined in gold, with gems all over it like eyes.
While Tennyson must loyally be recognized as the Arthur or Lancelot
of modern English verse, even by those among us who believe that
their own work in poetry cannot fairly be damned as “minor,” while he
need fear the enthronement of no younger rival near him, the poetic
standard he has established is in all respects so high that poets who
love their art must needs glory in such a leader and such an example,
though pretenders may verily be shamed into silence, and Marsyas cease
henceforward to contend with Apollo.—_Contemporary Review._

ON AN OLD SONG.

BY W. E. H. LECKY.

    Little snatch of ancient song
    What has made thee live so long?
    Flying on thy wings of rhyme
    Lightly down the depths of time,
    Telling nothing strange or rare,
    Scarce a thought or image there,
    Nothing but the old, old tale
    Of a hapless lover’s wail;
    Offspring of some idle hour,
    Whence has come thy lasting power?
    By what turn of rhythm or phrase,
    By what subtle, careless grace
    Can thy music charm our ears
    After full three hundred years?

    Little song, since thou wert born
    In the Reformation morn,
    How much great has past away,
    Shattered or by slow decay!
    Stately piles in ruins crumbled,
    Lordly houses lost or humbled.
    Thrones and realms in darkness hurled,
    Noble flags forever furled,
    Wisest schemes by statesmen spun,
    Time has seen them one by one
    Like the leaves of autumn fall—
    A little song outlives them all.

    There were mighty scholars then
    With the slow, laborious pen
    Piling up their works of learning,
    Men of solid, deep discerning,
    Widely famous as they taught
    Systems of connected thought,
    Destined for all future ages;
    Now the cobweb binds their pages,
    All unread their volumes lie
    Mouldering so peaceably,
    Coffined thoughts of coffined men.
    Never more to stir again
    In the passion and the strife,
    In the fleeting forms of life;
    All their force and meaning gone
    As the stream of thought flows on.

    Art thou weary, little song,
    Flying through the world so long?
    Canst thou on thy fairy pinions
    Cleave the future’s dark dominions?
    And with music soft and clear
    Charm the yet unfashioned ear,
    Mingling with the things unborn
    When perchance another morn
    Great as that which gave thee birth
    Dawns upon the changing earth?
    It may be so, for all around
    With a heavy crashing sound
    Like the ice of polar seas
    Melting in the summer breeze,
    Signs of change are gathering fast,
    Nations breaking with their past.

    The pulse of thought is beating quicker,
    The lamp of faith begins to flicker,
    The ancient reverence decays
    With forms and types of other days;
    And old beliefs grow faint and few
    As knowledge moulds the world anew,
    And scatters far and wide the seeds
    Of other hopes and other creeds;
    And all in vain we seek to trace
    The fortunes of the coming race,
    Some with fear and some with hope,
    None can cast its horoscope.
    Vap’rous lamp or rising star,
    Many a light is seen afar,
    And dim shapeless figures loom
    All around us in the gloom—
    Forces that may rise and reign
    As the old ideals wane.

    Landmarks of the human mind,
    One by one are left behind,
    And a subtle change is wrought
    In the mould and cast of thought,
    Modes of reasoning pass away,
    Types of beauty lose their sway,
    Creeds and causes that have made
    Many noble lives, must fade;
    And the words that thrilled of old
    Now seem hueless, dead, and cold;
    Fancy’s rainbow tints are flying,
    Thoughts, like men, are slowly dying;
    All things perish, and the strongest
    Often do not last the longest;
    The stately ship is seen no more,
    The fragile skiff attains the shore;
    And while the great and wise decay,
    And all their trophies pass away,
    Some sudden thought, some careless rhyme
    Still floats above the wrecks of time.

                     _Macmillan’s Magazine._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] But the loveliest lyrics of Tennyson do not suggest labor. I do not
say that, like Beethoven’s music, or Heine’s songs, they may not be the
result of it. But they, like all supreme artistic work, “conceal,” not
obtrude Art; if they are not spontaneous, they produce the effect of
spontaneity, not artifice. They impress the reader also with the power,
for which no technical skill can be a substitute, of sincere feeling,
and profound realization of their subject-matter.

[2] Mr. Alfred Austin, himself a true poet and critic, has long ago
repented of _his_ juvenile escapade in criticism, and made ample amends
to the Poet-Laureate in a very able article published not long since in
_Macmillan’s Magazine_.

[3] I have just read the Laureate’s new plays. They are, like all his
best things, brief: “dramatic fragments,” one may even call them.
“The Cup” was admirably interpreted, and scenically rendered under
the auspices of Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry; but it is itself a
precious addition to the stores of English tragedy—all movement and
action, intense, heroic, steadily rising to a most impressive climax,
that makes a memorable picture on the stage. Camma, though painted only
with a few telling strokes, is a splendid heroine of antique virtue,
fortitude, and self-devotion. “The Falcon” is a truly graceful and
charming acquisition to the repertory of lighter English drama.

THE AMERICAN AUDIENCE.

BY HENRY IRVING.

What is the difference between an English and an American audience?
That is a question which has frequently been put to me, and which I
have always found it difficult to answer. The points of dissimilarity
are simply those arising from people of a common origin living under
conditions often widely different. It is, therefore, only possible for
me to indicate such traits in the bearing of the American playgoer as
have come under my own personal notice, and impressed me with a sense
of unfamiliarity.

Every American town, great or small, has—I believe, without
exception—its theatre and its church, and when a new town is about to
be built, the sites for a place of amusement and a place of worship are
invariably those first selected. As an instance, take Pullman, which
lies some sixteen miles from Chicago, pleasantly situated on the banks
of the Calumet Lake. The original design of this little city, which is
almost ideal in its organization, and has the enviable reputation of
being absolutely perfect in its sanitation, was conceived on the lines
just mentioned. Denver City, which is a growth almost abnormal even in
an age and country of abnormal progress, has a theatre, which is said
to be one of the finest in America. Boston, with its old civilization,
boasts seventeen theatres, or buildings in which plays are given; New
York possesses no less than twenty-eight regular theatres, besides a
host of smaller ones; and Chicago, whose very foundations are younger
than the beards of some men of thirty, has, according to a printed
list, over twenty theatres, all of which seem to flourish. The number
of theatres in America and the influence they exercise constitute
important elements in the national life. This great multiplication of
dramatic possibilities renders it necessary to take a very wide and
general view, if one wishes to get a distinct impression as to how
audiences here differ from those at home. So at least it must seem to a
player, who can only find comparison possible when points of difference
suggest themselves. For a proper understanding of such difference in
audiences, we must ascertain wherein consist the differences of the
theatres which they frequent, both in architectural construction,
social arrangement, and that habit of management which is a natural
growth.

By the enactments of the various States regulating the structure and
conduct of places of amusement, full provision for the comfort and
safety of the audience is insisted on. It is directed that the back
of the auditorium should open by adequate doors directly upon the main
passage or vestibule, and that through the centre of the floor should
run an aisle right down to the orchestra rail. Thus the floor of the
house is easy of access and exit, is generally of large expanse, and
capable of containing half, or more than half, of the entire audience.
It is usually divided into two parts—the orchestra or parquet, and the
orchestra or parquet circle—the latter being a zone running around the
former and covered by the projection of the first gallery. The floor
of an American theatre is, as a rule, on a more inclined plane than is
customary in English theatres, and there is a good view of the stage
from every part. Outside the parquet circle, and within the inner wall
of the building, is usually a wide passage where many persons can
stand. Thus in most houses there is a great elasticity in the holding
power, which at times adds not a little to the managerial success.
I cannot but think that in several respects we have much to learn
from our American cousins in the construction and arrangement of the
auditorium of the theatre; on the other hand, they might study with
advantage our equipment behind the proscenium.

It is perhaps due to the sentiment and tradition of personal equality
in the nation, that the entire stream often turns to one portion of
the house, in a way somewhat odd to those accustomed as we are in
England to the separating force of social grades. To the great majority
of persons, only one part of the theatre is eminently eligible, and
other portions are mainly sought when the floor is occupied. The very
willingness with which the public acquiesce in certain discomforts
or annoyances attendant on visiting the theatre, would seem to
show that the drama is an integral portion of their daily life. It
cannot be denied by any one cognizant of the working of American
theatres that there are certain facts or customs which must discount
enjoyment. Before a visitor is in a position to settle comfortably
to the reception of a play, he must, as a rule, experience many
inconveniences. In the first place he has in some States to submit to
the exactions of the ticket speculator or “scalper,” who, through
defective State laws, is generally able to buy tickets in bulk, and
to retail them at an exorbitant rate. I have known of instances where
tickets of the full value of three dollars were paid for by the public
at the average rate of ten or twelve dollars. Then, through the high
price of labor, which in most American institutions causes employers
to so dispose of their forces as to minimize service, the attendance
in the front of the house is, I am told, often inadequate. Were it not
for the orderly disposition and habit of the public, trained by the
custom of equal rights to stand, and move _en queue_, it would not be
possible to admit and seat the audience in the interval between the
opening of the doors and the commencement of the performance. Thus the
public are somewhat “hustled,” and from one cause or another too often
reach their seats after having endured much annoyance with a patient
submission which speaks volumes for their law-abiding nature; but which
must sorely disturb that reposeful spirit which the actor may consider
essential to a due enjoyment of the play.

Once in his seat the American playgoer does not, as a rule, leave it
until the performance is at an end. The percentage of persons who
move about during the _entr’acte_ is, when compared with that in
England, exceedingly small, and sinks into complete insignificance when
contrasted with the exodus to the _foyer_ customary in continental
theatres. In the equipment of the American theatre there is one
omission which will surprise us at home—that of the bar, or refreshment
room. In not a single theatre that I can call to mind in America have
I found provision made for drinking. It is not by any means that the
average playgoer is a teetotaler, but that, if he wishes or needs to
drink during the evening, he does it as he does during the hours of
his working life, and not as a necessary concomitant to the enjoyment
of his leisure hours. Two other things are noticeable: first, that the
audiences are sometimes very unpunctual, and to suit the audiences
the managers sometimes delay beginning. The audience depend on this
delay, and the consequence frequently is, that a first act is entirely
disturbed by their entry; secondly, that, after the play, it is a
custom, in a degree unknown in any European capital, to adjourn to
various restaurants for supper.

As the audience _en bloc_ remain seated, so the length of the
performance must be taken into account by managers; and commonly
two hours and a half is considered the maximum length to which a
performance should run, though I must say that we have at times
sinned by keeping our audiences seated until eleven o’clock, and it
has been even later. Of course in this branch of the subject must be
also considered the difficulty of reaching their homes experienced by
audiences in cities whose liberal arrangements of space, and absence
of cheap cabs, renders necessary a due regard to time. In matter of
duration, however, the audience is not to be trifled with or imposed
on. I have heard of a case in a city of Colorado where the manager of
a travelling company, on the last night of an engagement, in order to
catch a through train, hurried the ordinary performance of his play
into an hour and a half. When next the company were coming to the city
they were met _en route_, some fifty miles out, by the sheriff, who
warned them to pass on by some other way, as their coming was awaited
by a large section of the able-bodied male population armed with shot
guns. The company did not, I am informed, on that occasion visit the
city. I may here mention that in America the dramatic season lasts
about eight months—from the beginning of the “fall” in September till
the hot weather commences in April. During this period the theatres are
kept busy, as there are performances on the evenings of every week day,
and in the South and West on Sunday evening also, whilst matinées are
given every Saturday, and in a large number of cases every Wednesday.
In certain places even the afternoon of Sunday sees a performance.
It is a fact, somewhat amusing at first, that in nearly all towns of
comparatively minor importance the theatre is known as the Opera House.

I have dwelt on the external condition of the American audiences in
order to explain the condition antecedent to the actor’s appearance.
The differences between various audiences are so minute that some such
insight seems necessary to enable one to recognise and understand them.
An actor in the ordinary course of his work can only partially at best
realise such differences as there may be, much less attempt to state
them explicitly. His first experience before a strange audience is the
discovery whether or not he is _en rapport_ with them. This, however,
he can most surely feel, though he cannot always give a reason for the
feeling. As there is, in the occurrences of daily life, a conveyance
other than by words of meaning, of sentiment, or of understanding
between different individuals, so there is a carriage of mutual
understanding or reciprocity of sentiment between the stage and the
auditorium. The emotion which an actor may feel, or which his art may
empower him successfully to simulate, can be conveyed over the floats
in some way which neither actor nor audience may be able to explain;
and the reciprocation of such emotion can be as surely manifested by
the audience by more subtle and unconscious ways than overt applause or
otherwise. It must be remembered that the opportunities which I have
had of observing audiences have been almost entirely from my own stage.
Little facility of wider observation is afforded to a man who plays
seven performances each week and fills up most of the blank mornings
with rehearsal or travel. I only put forward what I feel or believe.
Such belief is based on the opportunities I have had of observation or
of following out the experience of others.

The dominant characteristic of the American audience seems to be
impartiality. They do not sit in judgment, resenting as positive
offences lack of power to convey meanings or divergence of
interpretation of particular character or scene. I understand that
when they do not like a performance they simply go away, so that at
the close of the evening the silence of a deserted house gives to the
management a verdict more potent than audible condemnation. This does
not apply to questions of morals, which can be, and are, as quickly
judged here as elsewhere. On this subject I give entirely the evidence
of others, for it has been my good fortune to see our audiences seated
till the final falling of the curtain. Again, there is a kindly
feeling on the part of the audience towards the actor as an individual,
especially if he be not a complete stranger, which is, I presume,
a part of that recognition of individuality which is so striking a
characteristic in American life and customs. Many an actor draws
habitually a portion of his audience, not in consequence of artistic
merit, not from capacity to arouse or excite emotion, but simply
because there is something in his personality which they like. This
spirit forcibly reminds me of the story told of the manager of one of
the old “Circuits,” who gave as a reason for the continued engagement
of an impossibly bad actor, that “he was kind to his mother.” The
thorough enjoyment of the audience is another point to be noticed. Not
only are they quick to understand and appreciate, but there seems to be
a genuine pleasure in the expression of approval. American audiences
are not surpassed in quickness and completeness of comprehension by any
that I have yet seen, and no actor need fear to make his strongest or
his most subtle effort, for such is sure to receive instant and full
acknowledgment at their hands.

There is little more than this to be said of the American audience.
But short though the record is, the impression upon the player himself
is profound and abiding. To describe what one sees and hears over the
footlights is infinitely easier than to convey an idea of the mental
disposition and feeling of the spectators. The house is ample and
comfortable, and the audience is well-disposed to be pleased. Ladies
and gentlemen alike are mostly in morning dress, distinguished in
appearance, and guided in every respect by a refined decorum. The
sight is generally picturesque. Even in winter flowers abound, and the
majority of ladies have bouquets either carried in the hand or fastened
on the shoulder or corsage. At matinée performances especially, where
the larger proportion of the audience is composed of ladies, the
effect is not less pleasing to the olfactory senses than to the eye.
Courteous, patient, enthusiastic, the American audience is worthy of
any effort which the actor can make on its behalf, and he who has had
experience of them would be an untrustworthy chronicler if he failed,
or even hesitated, to bear witness to their intelligence, their taste
and their generosity.—_Fortnightly Review._

STIMULANTS AND NARCOTICS.

BY PERCY GREG.

Among all the signal inventions, discoveries, and improvements of the
age, social and material, scientific and mechanical, few, perhaps,
are fraught with graver possibilities for good and evil than the
great achievement of recent medicine—the development, if it should
not more properly be called the discovery, of anæsthetics. Steam has
revolutionized mechanics; the locomotive, the steam-hammer, and the
power-loom, the creation of the railway and the factory system, have
essentially modified social as well as material civilization; and it
is possible at least that electric lights and motors, telegraphs and
telephones, may produce yet greater consequences. This last century
has been signalized by greater mechanical achievements than the
whole historic period since the discovery of iron. But in obvious,
immediate influence on human happiness, it is quite conceivable that
the discovery of chloroform, ether, and other anæsthetics—the diffusion
of chloral, opium, and other narcotics, putting them within the reach
of every individual, at the command of men and women, almost of
children, independently of medical advice or sanction—may be, for a
time at least, more important than those inventions which have changed
the fundamental conditions of industry, or those which may yet change
them once more. It is difficult for the rising generation to realize
that state of medicine, and especially of surgery, which old men can
well remember; when every operation, from the extraction of a bad
tooth to the removal of a limb, must be performed upon patients in
full possession of their senses. In those days the horror with which
men and women, uninfluenced by scientific enthusiasm, now regard the
alleged tortures of vivisection was hardly possible. Thousands of
human beings had yearly to undergo—every man, woman, and child might
have to undergo—agonies quite as terrible as any that the most ardent
advocate of the rights of animals, the most vivid imagination excited
by fear for dearly loved dumb companions, ascribes to the vivisector’s
knife. It may well be doubted whether the highest brutes are capable
of suffering any pain comparable with that of hardy soldiers or
seamen—much less with that of sensitive, nervous men, and delicate
women—when the surgeon’s blade cut through living, often inflamed
tissues, generally rendered infinitely more sensitive by previous
disease or injury, while the brain was fully, intensely conscious;
every nerve quivering with even exaggerated sensibility. The brutes, at
any rate, are spared the long agony of anticipation, and at least half
the tortures of memory. They may fear for a few minutes; our fathers
and mothers lay in terror for hours and days, nay, persons of vivid
imagination must have suffered acutely through half a lifetime, in the
expectation that, soon or late, their only choice might lie between
excruciating temporary torture and a death of lingering hopeless
anguish. No gift of God, perhaps, has been so precious, no effort of
human intellect has done more to lessen human suffering and fear, to
take from life much of its darkest evil and horror, than anæsthesia
as developed during the last fifty years. True that in the case of
severe operations it is as yet beyond the power of medicine to give
complete relief. If spared the torture of the operation, the patient
has yet to endure the cruel smart that the knife leaves behind. But the
relief of previous terror, of the awful, unspeakable, and, to those who
never felt it, almost inconceivable agony endured while the flesh was
carved, and the bone sawn, have disappeared from the sick room and the
hospital.

Narcotics should be carefully distinguished from anæsthetics. Their
use is different, not in degree only, but in character and purpose.
Their legitimate object is two-fold: primarily, in a limited number
of cases, to relieve or mitigate pain temporarily or permanently
incurable; but secondarily and principally to cure what to a large
and constantly increasing class in every civilized country is among
the severest trials attendant on sickness, over-work, or nervous
excitement—that loss of sleep which is a terrible affliction in itself,
and aggravates, much more than inexperience would suppose, every form
of suffering with which it is connected. Nature mercifully intended
that prolonged intolerable pain should of itself bring the relief of
sleep or swooning; and primitive races like the Red Indian, living in
the open air, with dull imagination and insensible nerves, still find
such relief. The victims of Mohawk and Huron tortures have been known,
during a brief intermission of agony, to sleep at the stake till fire
was used to awaken them. But among the many drawbacks of civilized
life must be counted the tendency of artificial conditions to defeat
some of Nature’s most merciful provisions. The nerves of civilized
men are too sensitive, the brains developed by hereditary culture and
constant exercise are too restless, to obtain from sleep that relief
in pain, especially prolonged pain, that nature apparently intended.
Many of us, even in sleep, are keenly sensitive to suffering, at least
to chronic as distinguished from acute pain, to dull protracted pangs
like those of rheumatism, ear-ache, or tooth-ache. A little sharper
pain, and sleep becomes impossible. The sufferer is not only deprived
of the respite that slumber should afford, but insomnia itself enhances
his sensibility, besides adding a new and terrible torment of its own.
Artificial prevention of sleep was notoriously among the most cruel
and the most certainly mortal of mediæval or barbaric tortures. The
sensations of one who has not slept for several nights, beginning with
a restless, unnatural, constantly increasing consciousness of the
brain, its existence and its action, passing by degrees into an acute,
unendurably distressing irritation of that organ—generally unconscious
or insensible, probably because its habitual sensibility would be
intolerable—are indescribable, unimaginable by those who have not felt
them; and seem to be proportionate to the activity of the intellect,
the susceptibility of nerve and vitality of temperament—the capacity
for pain and pleasure. In a word, the finer the physical and nervous
character, the more terrible the torment of sleeplessness. A little
more and the patient is confronted with one of the most frightful
forms of pain and terror, the consciousness of incipient insanity. But
long before reaching this stage, sleeplessness exaggerates pain and
weakens the power of endurance, quickens the sensibility of the nerves,
enfeebles the will, exacerbates the temper, produces a physical and
nervous irritability which to an observer unacquainted with the cause
seems irrational, unaccountable, extravagant, even frantic, but which
afflicts the patient incomparably more than those, however near and
however sensitive, on whom it is vented. Drugs, then, which enable the
physician in most cases to check insomnia at an early stage—to secure,
for example, in a case of chronic pain, six or seven hours of complete
repose out of the twenty-four, to arrest a mischief which leads by
the shortest and most painful route directly to insanity—are simply
invaluable.

It may seem a paradox, it is a truism, to say that in their value
lies their peril. Because they have such power for good, because the
suffering they relieve is in its lighter forms so common, because
neuralgia and sleeplessness are ailments as familiar to the present
generation as gout, rheumatism, catarrh to our grandfathers, therefore
the medicines which immediately relieve sleeplessness and neuralgic
pain are among the most dangerous possessions, the most subtle
temptations, of civilized and especially of intellectual life. Every
one of these drugs has, besides its immediate and beneficial effect,
other and injurious tendencies. The relief which it gives is purchased
at a certain price; and in every instance the relief is lessened
or rendered uncertain, the mischievous influence is enhanced and
aggravated by repetition; till, when the use has become habitual, it
has become pure abuse, when the drug has become a necessity of life
it has lost the greater part if not the whole of its value, and serves
only to satisfy the need which itself alone has created. Contrary
to popular tradition, we believe that of popular narcotics opium is
on the whole, if the most seductive, the least injurious; chloral,
which at first passed for being almost harmless, is probably the most
noxious of all, having both chemical and vital effects which approach
if they do not amount to blood-poisoning. It is said (we do not
affirm with what truth) that the subsequent administration of half a
teaspoonful of a common alkali operates as an antidote to some of these
specific effects. The bromide of potash, another favorite, especially
with women, is less, perhaps, a narcotic proper than a sedative. It
is said not to produce sleep directly, like chloral or opium, by
stupefaction, but at least in small doses simply to allay the nervous
irritability which is often the sole cause of sleeplessness. But in
larger quantities and in its ultimate effects it is scarcely less to
be dreaded than chloral. It has been recommended as a potent, indeed
a specific and the only specific, remedy for sea-sickness. But the
state to which, as its advocate allows, the patient must be reduced, a
state of complete nervous subjection to the power of the drug, seems
worse than the disease, save in its most cruel and dangerous forms.
Such points, however, may be left to the chemist, the physician, or
the physiologist; our purpose is rather to indicate briefly the social
aspects of the subject, the social causes, conditions, and consequences
of that narcotism which is, if not yet a prevalent, certainly a
rapidly-spreading habit.

The desire or craving for stimulants in the most general sense of the
word—for drugs acting upon the nerves whether as excitant or sedative
agents—is an almost if not absolutely universal human appetite; so
general, so early developed, that we might almost call it an instinct.
Alcohol, of course, is the most popular, under ordinary circumstances
the most seductive, and by far the most widely diffused of all
stimulant substances. From the Euphrates to the Straits of Dover, the
vine has been from the earliest ages second only to corn in popular
estimation; wine, next to bread, the most prized and most universal
article of human food. The connection between _Ceres_ and _Bacchus_
is found in almost every language as in the social life of every
nation, from the warlike Assyrian monarchy, the stable hierocratic
despotism of Egypt, to the modern French Republic and German Empire.
Corn itself has furnished stimulant second in popularity to wine alone;
the spirit which delighted the fiercer, sterner races of Northern
Europe—Swede, Norwegian, and Dane, St. Olaf, and Harold Hardrada,
as their descendants of to-day; and the ale of our own Saxon and
Scandinavian ancestry, which neither spirit, cider, nor Spanish wine
has superseded among ourselves. The vine, again, seems to have been
native to America; but the civilized or semi-civilized races of the
southern and central part of the Western Continent had other more
popular and more peculiar stimulants, also for the most part alcoholic.
The palm, again, has furnished to African and Asiatic tribes a spirit
not less potent or less noxious, not less popular and probably not
less primitive, than whiskey or beer. But where alcohol has been
unknown, among races to whose habits and temperament it was alien, or
in climates where so powerful an excitant produced effects too palpably
alarming to be tolerated by rulers or law-givers royal or priestly,
other and milder stimulants or sedatives are found in equally universal
use. Till the white man introduced among them his own destructive
beverages, till the “fire-water” spread demoralization and disease,
tobacco was the favorite indulgence of the Red Indian of North America,
and very probably of that mighty race which preceded them and seems to
have disappeared before they came upon the scene—the Mound-builders,
whose gigantic works bear testimony to the existence of an agriculture
scarcely less advanced or less prolific, a despotism probably not less
absolute than that of Egypt. Coffee has for ages been almost equally
dear to the Arabs; tea has been to China all that wine is and was to
Europe, probably from a still earlier period, and has taken hold on
the Northern, as coffee and tobacco upon the Southern, branches of
the Tartar race. Opium, or drugs resembling opium in character, have
been found as well suited to the temper, as delightful to the taste,
of the quieter and more passive Oriental races as wine to the Aryan
and Semitic nations. The Malays, the Vikings of the East Indies, found
in _bhang_ a drug the most exciting and maddening in its effects of
any known to civilized or uncivilized man; a substitute for opium or
haschisch bearing much the same relation to those sedatives as brandy
or whiskey to the light wines of Southern Europe.

The craving, then, is not artificial but natural; is not, as
teetotalers fancy, for alcohol alone or primarily, but for some form
of nervous excitement or sedative _specially_ suited to climate or
race. Tea, coffee, and tobacco, opium, haschisch and bhang, _mata_ and
_tembe_, are probably as old as wine, older than beer, and take just
as strong a hold upon the national taste. The desire testifies to a
felt and almost universal want; and the attempt to put down a habit
proved by universal and immemorial practice to answer to a need, real
and absolute—or if artificial easily created and permanent, if not
ineradicable, beyond any other artificial craving or habit—seems doomed
to failure; the desire not being for this or that stimulant, for wine
or alcohol, but for some agent that gives a special satisfaction to the
nerves, some stimulant, sedative or astringent. The discouragement of
one form of indulgence, especially if that discouragement be artificial
or forcible, not moral and voluntary, can hardly have any other result
than to drive the votaries of alcohol, for example, upon opium, or
those of opium upon some form of alcohol. Tea, coffee, and tobacco have
done infinitely more than teetotal and temperance preaching of every
kind to diminish the European consumption of wine, beer, and spirits.
Men and even women never have been and never will be content with water
or milk, or even with the unfermented juices of fruits; to say nothing
of the extreme difficulty of preserving unfermented juices in those
warmer climates to which they are best adapted.

It seems, however, that the natural craving, especially among women,
or men not subject to the fiercer excitements of war, hunting, and
open air life in general, is not for the stronger but for the milder
stimulants. Ale was the favorite beverage of England, light wine of
Southern Europe, till the Saracen invasion, the crusades, and finally
the extension of commerce, familiarised the Western Aryans with the
non-intoxicant stimulants of the East, and the discovery of America
introduced tobacco. But the use of tea and coffee is not less, we might
say, is more distinctly artificial than that of beer or wine. The taste
for tobacco, as its confinement in so many countries and to so great an
extent to one sex proves, is the most artificial of all.

It is plain, both from the climates and the character of the races
among whom the sedative drugs or slightly-stimulant beverages have
first and most widely taken root, that the preference for sedatives or
gentle excitants is not accidental, but to a large extent dependent
upon the temperament and habits of races or nations. Alcohol suits
the higher, more energetic, active, militant races; and the fiercer
and more militant the temper or habits, the stronger the intoxicant
employed. It is not improbable that the first and strongest incitement
to the use of alcohol, as of bhang, was the desire for that which a
very unfair and ungenerous national taunt describes as Dutch courage.
No race, probably, except their nearest kinsmen of England, was ever
less dependent on the artificial boldness produced by stimulants than
the stubborn soldiers and seamen of Holland. The beer-loving Teutons
have never been, like the wine-drinkers of France, Italy, and Spain,
a military, or even, like the Scandinavians, a thoroughly martial
race. They will fight: none, Scandinavians, Soudanese, and Turks
perhaps excepted, fight better or more stubbornly. It may well be that
the adventurous, enterprising spirit of Englishmen and Scotchmen,
displayed at sea rather than on land, and in semi-pacific quite as
much as in warlike enterprise, is derived in large measure from the
strong Scandinavian element in our national blood. The tea-drinking
Chinamen, the Oriental lovers of haschisch and opium, have mostly been
industrious rather than energetic, agricultural or pastoral rather
than predatory. The coffee-drinking Arabs were not, till the days of
Mahomet, a specially warlike race. Bandits or guerillas they were
perforce; like every people which inhabits a country whose mountains
or deserts afford a safe refuge to robbers but promise no reward to
peaceful industry. No race, no class living in the open air, save in
the warmer climates, no people given to energetic muscular labor or
devoted to war, would be prompt to abandon alcohol in any of its forms
for its milder Oriental equivalents. Tea and coffee were introduced
at a time when manufactures and in-door-life were gaining ground in
Western Europe and found favor first, as is still the case, with the
indoor-living sex. It is still among indoor workers that they are most
in vogue. But if, as seems likely, alcohol was first adopted by the
warriors of savage or semi-savage races as an inspiring or hardening
force, it early lost this character with the introduction of strict
military discipline on the one hand or of chivalry on the other.
Neither the trained soldier of the phalanx and the legion, nor the
knight with whom reckless but also intelligent courage was a point of
honor, could find any help in intoxication, partial or total; nay, he
soon found that while the first excitement of alcohol was fatal to
discipline, its subsequent effects were almost as injurious to the
persevering, steadfast kind of courage in which he put his pride.
Wine or brandy, then, came to be the indulgence of peace and triumph,
not of war; wassail followed on victory, sobriety was necessary till
the victory was won. But still it has always been on the sterner,
fiercer, more energetic races that alcohol, and especially the stronger
forms of alcohol, retained their hold. It is to the passive, quiet,
reflective temperaments—national or individual, peculiar to classes or
to crafts—that tea or coffee, opium or haschisch, substances that calm
rather than excite the nerves, have always proved strongly and often
dangerously attractive.

Now it may be urged with plausibility, and perhaps with truth, that
civilization and intellectual culture, the exchange of out-door for
in-door life, the influences that have rendered intelligence and
dexterity of more practical value than corporeal strength, tend in some
sense and in some measure to Orientalize the most advanced European
races. We are not, perhaps, less daring or less enterprising than
our fathers; but there is a large and ever increasing class to which
strenuous physical exertion is neither habitual nor agreeable. We are
unquestionably becoming sedentary; we work much more with our brains,
much less with our muscles, than heretofore. With this change has come
a decided change of feeling and tastes. We shrink from the fierce
excitement, the violent moral stimulants that delighted ruder and
less sensitive races and generations. The gladiatorial shows of Rome,
the savage sports and public punishments of the Middle Ages, would be
simply revolting to the great majority of almost every European nation
of to-day; not primarily because as thoughtful Christians we deem them
wicked, but because, instinctively, as sensitive men and women in whom
imagination and sympathy are strong, we shudder at them as brutal.
Prize-fights, bear-baiting, bull-fights have become too rough, too
coarse, but above all too exciting; the hideous tragedies of old have
ceased to suit the taste at least of our cultivated classes. In one
word, our nerves are far too sensitive to crave for strong and violent
excitement, moral or physical; it is painful rather than pleasurable.
The sobriety of the educated classes is due much less to moral than
to social causes. It is not that strong wines and spirits are so much
more injurious to us than to our grandsires, nor that we have learned
in fifty years to think intoxication sinful; rather we have come to
despise it, and to dislike its means, because we have ceased to feel or
understand the craving for such violent stimulation, because not merely
the reaction but the excitement itself gives more pain than pleasure.

In the case of our American kinsmen climate has very much to do
with the matter. A dry, keen, exhilarating air as well as an
intense nervous sensibility renders powerful alcoholic stimulants
unnecessary, over-exciting, unpleasant as well as injurious. Partly
from temperament, a temperament which in itself must be largely the
result of climate, partly from the direct influence of their drier,
keener atmosphere, American women feel no need of alcohol; American men
who do indulge in it, rather as a relief from brain excitement than as
an excitant itself, suffer far more than we do from the indulgence.
The number of drunkards or hard-drinkers in the older States is, we
believe, very much smaller than in England, even at the present day.
But the proportion of lunatics made by drink seems to be much larger.
In America alone teetotalism has been the serious object of social and
legislative coercion. The Maine Liquor Law failed; but it is enforced
in garrisons and colleges, while in many States social feeling and
sectarian discipline forbid wine and spirits to women and clergymen,
and habitual indulgence therein, however moderate, is hardly compatible
with a high reputation for religious principle or strict morality.
But this case, like that of the early Mahometans, is the case of a
people whose climate is unsuited to alcohol; whose very atmosphere is a
stimulant.

In a word, the craving of to-day, moral and physical, especially among
the cultivated classes, among the brain-workers, among those of the
softer sex and of the _fruges consumere nati_, who are almost entirely
relieved from physical labor, is for mild prolonged stimulation, and
for stimulation which does not produce a strong reaction; or else
for sedatives which will allay the sleepless excitement produced by
over-work, or yet oftener, perhaps, by reckless pursuit of pleasure.

It seems, then, not unnatural or improbable that, as tea and coffee
have so largely taken the place of beer or light wine as beverages, so
narcotics should take the place of stronger alcoholic stimulants. That
this has been the case in certain quarters is well known to physicians,
and to most of those who have that experience of life in virtue of
which it is said, “every man of forty must be a physician or a fool.”
Nay, it is difficult to read the newspapers and remain ignorant or
doubtful of the fact. We read weekly of men and women poisoned by an
over-dose of some favorite sedative, burnt to death, or otherwise
fatally injured while insensible from self-administered ether or
chloroform. For one fatal case that finds its way into the newspapers
there are, of course, twenty fatal in a different sense—fatal, not
to life, but to life’s use and happiness—that are never known beyond
the family circle, into which they have introduced unspeakable and
often almost unlimited sorrow and evil; unlimited, for no one can be
sure, few can reasonably hope, that the mischief will be confined to
the individual victim of a dangerous craving. That the children of
drunkards are often pre-disposed to insanity is notorious; that the
children of habitual opium-eaters or narcotists inherit an unmistakable
taint, whether in a diseased brain, in diseased cravings, or simply in
a will too weak to resist temptation of any kind, is less notorious but
equally certain. Of these secondary victims of chloral or opium there
are not as yet many; but many fathers and mothers—fathers, perhaps,
who for the sake of wives and children have overtaxed their brains
till nothing but either the rest which circumstances and family claims
forbid, or drugs, will give them the sleep necessary to the continuance
of their work; mothers, too commonly, who begin by neglecting their
children in the pursuit of pleasure, to end by poisoning their
unborn offspring in the struggle to escape the consequences of
that pursuit—are preparing untold misery and mischief for a future
generation. Happily, narcotism is not the temptation of the young or
energetic. It is later in life, when the effect of years of brain
excitement of whatever nature begins to tell, and generally after the
period in which the greater number of children are born, that men and
women give way to this peculiar temptation of the present age.

The immediate danger to themselves is sufficiently alarming, if only
it were ever realized in time. The narcotist keeps chloroform or
chloral always at hand, forgetful or ignorant that one sure effect of
the first dose is to produce a semi-stupor more dangerous than actual
somnolence. In that semi-stupor the patient is aware, or fancies
that the dose has failed. The pain that has induced a lady to hold a
chloroformed handkerchief under her nostrils returns while her will
and her judgment are half paralysed. She takes the bottle from the
table beside her bed, intending to pour an additional supply on the
handkerchief. The unsteady hand perhaps spills a quantity on the sheet,
perhaps sinks with the unstoppered bottle under her nostrils; and in a
few moments she has inhaled enough utterly to stupefy if not to kill.
The vapor, moreover, is inflammable; perhaps it catches the candle
by her side; and she is burnt to death while powerless to move. The
sleepless brain-worker also feels that his usual dose of chloral has
failed to bring sleep; he is not aware how completely it has stupefied
the brain, to which it has not given rest. His judgment is gone, so is
his steadiness of hand; and, whether intentionally or not, at any rate
unconsciously, so far as reasoning and judgment are concerned, he pours
out a second and too often a fatal dose. Any one who knows how great is
the stupefying power of these drugs, how often they produce a sort of
moral coma without paralysing the lower functions of animal or even of
mental life, would, one might suppose, at least take care to be in bed
before the drug takes effect, and if possible to put it out of reach
till next morning. But experience shows how seldom even this obvious
and essential precaution is taken.

The cases that end in a death terrible to the family, but probably
involving little or no suffering to the victim himself, are by no
means the worst. A life poisoned, paralysed, rendered worthless for
all the uses of intellectual, rational, we might almost say of human
existence, is worse for the sufferer himself and for all around him
than a quick and painless death; and for one such death there must
be twenty if not a hundred instances of this worst death in life. In
nine cases out of ten, probably, the narcotist has been entangled
almost insensibly, but incurably, without intention and almost without
consciousness of danger. With alcohol this could hardly be the case. No
woman, at any rate, could reach the point at which secret indulgence
in wine or spirits became a habit and a necessity without warnings,
evidences of excess palpable to herself if not to others, that should
have terrified and shamed her into self-control, while self-control was
yet possible. The hold that opium and other narcotics acquire is at
once swifter, more gradual, less revolting and incomparably stronger
than that of alcohol. The first indulgence is in some sense legitimate;
is almost enforced, either by acute pain or by chronic insomnia. The
latter is perhaps the more dangerous. The pain, if it last for weeks,
forces recourse to the doctor before the habit has become incurable.
Sleeplessness is a more persistent, and to most people a much less
alarming thing; and it is moreover one with which the doctors can
seldom deal save through the very agents of mischief. Neuralgia,
relieved for a time by chloroform or morphia, may be cured by quinine;
sleeplessness admits of hardly any cure but such complete change of
life as is rarely possible, at least to its working victims. And the
narcotist habit once formed, neither pain nor sleeplessness is all that
its renunciation would involve. The drunkard, it must be remembered,
gets drunk, as a rule, but occasionally. Save in the last stages of
dipsomania, he can do, if not without drink, yet without intoxicating
quantities of drink, for days together. The narcotist who attempts to
go for a whole day without his accustomed dose, suffers in twenty-four
hours far more cruelly than the drunkard deprived of alcohol in as many
days. The effect upon the stomach and other organs, upon the nerves as
well as on the brain, is one of indescribable, unspeakable discomfort
amounting to torture; a disorder of the digestive system more trying
than sea-sickness, a disorganization of the nerves which after some
hours of unspeakable misery culminates in convulsive twitchings, in
mental and physical distress, simply indescribable to those who have
not felt it. Where attempts have been made forcibly and suddenly to
withhold the accustomed sedative, they have not unfrequently ended
within a few days in madness or death. In other cases the victim has
sought and obtained relief by efforts and through hardships which, in
his or her best days, would have seemed impossible or unendurable.
One woman thus restrained escaped in a _déshabille_ from her bed-room
on a winter night of Arctic severity; ran for miles through the snow,
and was fortunate enough to find a chemist who knew something of the
fearful effect of such privation, and had the sense and courage to give
in adequate quantity the poison that had now become the first necessary
of life. In a word, narcotics, one and all, are, to those who have once
fallen under their power, tyrants whose hold can hardly ever be shaken
off, which punish rebellion with the rack, and with all those devices
of torture which mediæval and ecclesiastical cruelty found even more
terrible than the rack itself; while the most absolute submission is
rewarded with sufferings only less unendurable than the punishment of
revolt. De Quincey’s dreams under the influence of opium were to the
tortures of resistance what the highest circle of purgatory may be to
the lowest pit of the Inferno. But any reader who knows what nightmare
is would think such tortures of the imagination, so vividly realized by
a consciousness apparently intensified rather than impaired by slumber,
a sufficient penalty for almost any human sin.

Chloral, bromide of potash, chloroform, henbane, and their various
combinations and substitutes are, however, by their very natures
medicines and no more. They are taken in the first instance as such;
at worst as medicinal equivalents for a quantity of alcohol which
women are afraid to take or unable to obtain, much more commonly as
medicines originally useful, mischievous only because the system has
been accustomed to depend on and cannot dispense with them. Their
effects at best are negatively, not actively, pleasurable. They relieve
pain or insomnia, or the craving which they themselves have created;
but their victims would, if they could, gladly be released from their
tyranny. Their character, moreover, is if not immediately yet very
rapidly perceptible. Very few can have used them for six months without
becoming more or less alarmed by the consequences. The minority,
for whom they are mere substitutes for alcohol, resort to them only
when the system has already been poisoned, the habits incurably
vitiated. With opium the case is different. In those which may be
called its native countries, it is not a medicine but a stimulant or
sedative, used for the most part in much greater moderation but in
the same manner as wine or spirits among ourselves; as an indulgence
pleasurable and innocent, if not actually desirable in itself. It suits
the climates and temperaments to which the heating, exciting influence
of alcohol is wholly unsuitable. It is, moreover, incompatible with
the free use of the latter, a thing which may be said in some sense of
most narcotics. Taken up by persons not yet addicted to intemperance,
chloral and similar drugs operate to discourage the use, or at least
the free use, of wine or spirits by intensifying their effect to a
serious and generally an unpleasant degree. But it does not appear
that they act, like opium, to indispose the system for alcohol. To the
opium-eater, as a rule, the exciting stimulus of alcohol, counteracting
the quiet, dreamy influence of his favorite drug, is decidedly
obnoxious; the action of chloral much more resembles that of the more
stupefying and powerful spirits. A drunkard desirous to abandon his
favorite vice, and reckless or incredulous of the possibility that the
remedy may be worse than the disease, would probably find in opium
the most powerful and effectual assistance and support to which he
could have recourse. It has moreover a strong tendency to diminish
the appetite for food, so much so that both in the East and in Europe
severe privation tends to encourage and diffuse its use.

Its peculiar danger, however, lies in the nature of the pleasure, and
the remoteness of the pain and mischief which attend its use. Its
effect on different constitutions and at different periods of life is
exceedingly different. As De Quincey remarks, it is not essentially
and primarily narcotic. It does not necessarily, immediately, or
always produce sleep. Some fortunate temperaments reject it in all
forms whatever. With these it produces immediate or speedy nausea, and
consequent repugnance. But its most universal effect is the diffusion
of comfort, quiet, calm, conscious repose, a general sensation
of physical and mental ease throughout the system; not followed
necessarily or generally by acute reaction, or even by depression. De
Quincey’s earlier experience accords with that of most of those to whom
opium is in some sense suited, to whom alone it is likely to become a
dangerous temptation. Used once in a fortnight, or even once a week,
it gives several hours of placid enjoyment, and if taken with some
mild aperient and followed next morning by a cup of strong coffee, it
generally gives a quiet night’s rest, entailing no further penalty
than a certain not unpleasant lassitude on the morrow. A working-man,
for instance, might take it every Saturday night for twenty years
without other effect than a decided aversion to the public-house on
Sunday, if he could but resist the temptation to take it oftener.
Again, till it loses its power by constant use it is in many cases the
surest and pleasantest of all anæsthetics; it relieves all neuralgic
pains, tooth-ache and ear-ache for example, and puts, especially in
combination with brandy, a quick and sure if by no means a wholesome
check on the milder forms of diarrhœa.

In this connection one danger peculiar to itself deserves especial
notice. Other narcotics are seldom given or sold save under their
own names; and if administered in combination, in quack medicine or
unexplained prescriptions, their effect betrays itself. Opium forms the
basis of innumerable remedies and very effective remedies, sold under
titles altogether reassuring and misleading. Nearly all soothing-syrups
and powders for example—“mother’s blessings” and infant’s curses—are
really opiates. These are known or suspected by most well-informed
people. What is less generally known is that nine in ten of the popular
remedies for catarrh, bronchitis, cough, cold and asthma are also
opiates. So powerful indeed is the effect of opium upon the lining
membrane of the lungs and air passages, so difficult is it to find
an effective substitute, that the efficacy, at least the certain and
rapid efficacy, of any specific remedy for cold whose exact nature is
not known affords strong ground for suspecting the presence of opium.
Many chemists are culpably, almost criminally, reckless; and not a
few culpably ignorant in this matter. An experienced man bought from
a fashionable West-end shop a box of cough lozenges, pleasant to the
taste and relieving a severe cough with wonderful rapidity. Familiar
with the influence of opium on the stomach and spirits, he was sure
before he had sucked half-a-dozen of the lozenges that he had taken a
dose powerful enough to affect his accustomed system, and strong enough
to poison a child, and do serious harm to a sensitive adult. Yet the
lozenges were sold without warning or indication of their character;
few people would have taken any special precaution to keep them out of
the way of children, and the box, falling into the hands of a heedless
or disobedient child, might have poisoned a whole nursery.

Another personal experience may serve to dispel the popular delusion
that opium is necessarily or generally a stupefying agent. A mismanaged
minor operation exposed two sensitive nerves, producing an intolerable
hyperæsthesia and a nervous terror which rendered surgical relief for
the time impossible, and endurance utterly beyond human power. For a
fortnight or more the patient was never free from agony save when the
nerves of sensation were practically paralysed by opium. During that
fortnight he took up for the first time, and thoroughly mastered, as
a college examination shortly afterwards proved, Mill’s _Principles
of Political Economy_, a work not merely taxing to the uttermost the
natural faculties of nineteen, but demanding beyond any other steady
persistent coherence and lucidity of thought. The patient affirmed that
never had his mind been clearer, his power of concentration greater,
his receptive faculties more perfect or his memory more tenacious.
That the drug had in no wise impaired the intellectual, however it
might have quelled the muscular or nervous energies, seems obvious.
Yet at that time the patient was ignorant of the two antidotes above
mentioned; and neither coffee nor aperient medicine qualified or
mitigated the influence of the opiates; an influence strong enough to
quell for some twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four an acute and
terrible nervous torture.

After the use of a fortnight or a month—especially when used
legitimately to relieve pain and not to procure pleasure—the entire
abandonment of opium may be easily accomplished in the course of two
or three days. The pain or the disease it is used to overcome carries
off, so to speak, or diverts in great measure the injurious influence
of the drug; as a person suffering from diarrhœa, snakebite, or other
cause of intense lowering of physical and nervous power, may take with
impunity a dose of brandy which in health would certainly intoxicate
him. But after six months’ or a year’s daily use or abuse, only the
strongest and sternest resolution can overcome or shake off the tyranny
of opium, and then only at a price of suffering and misery, of physical
and mental torture such as only those who have known it can conceive.

It would be as foolish to depreciate the value as to underrate the
danger of this, the most powerful and in many respects the safest of
anæsthetics. Nothing else can do what opium can to relieve chronic,
persistent, incurable nervous pain, to give sleep when sleeplessness is
produced by suffering. The more potent anæsthetics, like chloroform,
are applicable only to brief intense tortures, whose period can be
foreseen or determined—to produce insensibility during an operation,
or to mitigate the pangs of child-birth. Opium can relieve incurable
chronic pain that would otherwise render life intolerable, and perhaps
drive the sufferer to suicide; and this, if moderation be observed,
and the necessary correctives employed, without impairing, as other
narcotics would, the intellectual faculties. It is, moreover, as
aforesaid, the quickest and surest cure for bronchial affections of
every kind, and might not impossibly, as De Quincey thought, if used in
time and with sufficient decision, prolong a life otherwise doomed, if
it could not actually cure phthisis or consumption after the formation
of tubercle has once begun. But its legitimate use is limited to
three cases. It can relieve temporary neuralgic pain when cure would
be slow, or while awaiting a curative operation. One peculiarity
of neuralgic pain is its tendency to perpetuate itself. The nerves
continue to thrill and throb because worn out by pain. Give them,
through whatever agency, a brief period of rest, and it may well happen
that, the temporary cause removed, the pain will not return. Secondly,
opium is the one anæsthetic agency available to mitigate incurable
and intolerable suffering. Not only can it render endurable a life
that must otherwise be one continuous torture, till torture hastens
death; but it may in many cases render that life serviceable as well as
endurable. De Quincey gives the instance of a surgeon, suffering under
incurable disease of an intolerably painful kind, who owed the power
of steady professional work for more than twenty years to the constant
use of opium in enormous quantities. Finally, when a working life
draws near its natural close, when old age is harassed by the nervous
consequences of protracted over-work or over-strain such as is often
almost inseparable from the anxieties of business—the severe taxation
of the mental powers by professional or literary labor—opium, given
habitually in small quantities and under careful medical direction,
often does what wine effects with less certainty and safety; gives
rest and repose, calms an irritability of nerve and temper more trying
to the patient himself than to those around him, and renders the last
decade of a useful and honorable life much more comfortable, and no wit
less useful or honorable, than it might otherwise have been.

But except as a relief in incurable disease, or in that most incurable
of all diseases, old age, the continual or prolonged use of opium
is always dangerous and nearly always fatal. It impairs the will;
not infrequently it exercises a directly, visibly, unmistakably
deteriorating influence upon the moral nature. There is nothing strange
in this to those who know how an accidental injury to the skull may
impair or pervert the moral no less than the intellectual powers.
That moral is hardly a less common or less distinctive disease than
mental insanity, that the conscience as well as the intellect of the
drunkard is distorted and weakened, no physiologist doubts. Opium has
a similar power, but exerts it with characteristic slowness of action.
The demoralization of the narcotist is not, like that of the drunkard,
rapid, violent, and palpable; but gradual, insidious, perceptible only
to close observers or near and intimate friends. In nine cases out of
ten, moreover, opium ultimately and certainly poisons the whole vital
system. The patient loses physical and mental energy, courage, and
enterprise; shrinks from exertion of every kind, dreads the labor of a
walk, the trouble of writing a letter, dreads still more intensely any
effort that calls for moral courage, flinches from a scene, a quarrel,
a social or domestic conflict, becomes at last selfish, shameless,
weak, useless, miserable to the last degree.

But this, like every other effect of opium, is in some measure
uncertain; and hence arises one of its subtlest dangers. De Quincey
would seem to have been less susceptible than most men to the worst
influences of his favorite drug, seeing what work, excellent in
quality as well as considerable in quantity he achieved after he had
become a confirmed opium-eater. It took, no doubt, a tenfold greater
amount of opium to reduce him to intellectual impotence than would
suffice to destroy the minds of nine brain-workers in ten. But his
own story clearly reveals how completely the enormous doses to which
he had recourse at last overpowered a mind exceptionally energetic,
and a temperament exceptionally capable of assimilating, perhaps,
rather than resisting the power of opium. Here and there we find a
constitution upon which it exerts few or none of its characteristic
effects. As a few cannot take it at all, so a few can take it with
apparent impunity. With them it will relieve pain and will not paralyse
the nerves, will quell excitement without affecting mental energy;
nay, while leaving physical activity little more impaired than age and
temperament alone might have impaired it. Here and there we may find a
confirmed opium-eater capable of taking and enjoying active exercise—a
fairly fearless rider, a lover of nature tempted by taste, or it may
be by restlessness, to walks beyond his muscular strength; with vivid
imagination well under his own control; in whom even the will seems but
little weakened, whose dread of pain and flinching from danger are not
more marked after twenty years spent under the influence of opium than
when they first drove him to its use. Such cases are, of course, wholly
exceptional; but their very existence is a danger to others, misleads
them into the idea that they may dally with the tempter, may profit by
its pleasure-giving and pain-quelling powers without falling under its
yoke, or may fall under that yoke and find it a light one. I doubt,
however, whether the most fortunate of its victims would encourage the
latter idea; whether there be any opium-eater who would not give a
limb never to have known what opium can do to spare suffering, to give
strength for protracted exertion, if he had never known what slavery to
its influence means.

Dread of pain, dislike of excitement and worry, impatience of suffering
and discomfort, of irritation, and sleeplessness, are all strong and
increasingly-marked characteristics of our highly artificial life and
perhaps almost overstrained civilization. Nature knows no influence
that can relieve worry, mitigate pain, charm away restlessness,
discomfort, and even sleeplessness, as opium can. Alcohol is at once
too stupefying and too exciting for the tastes and temperaments that
belong to cultivated natures and highly-developed brains. Beer suits
the sluggish laborer, or the energetic navvy when his work is done,
and his system, like that of a Scandinavian Viking or Scythian warrior
in his hours of repose, craves first exhilaration and then stupid,
thoughtless contentment. Wine suits less active and more passionate
races, to whom excitement is an unmixed pleasure; brandy those who
crave for stronger excitement to stimulate less susceptible nerves. But
the physical stimulants of our fathers and grandfathers, as the moral
excitements of remoter times, are far too violent for our generation.
Champagne has succeeded port and sherry as the favorite wine of those
who can afford it, being the lightest of all; and time was, not so
long ago, when medical men were accused of recommending champagne with
somewhat careless facility to those whose nerves, worn out by unhealthy
pursuit of pleasure, by unnatural hours and unwholesome excitement,
might have been effectually though more gradually restored by a change
which to most of them at least was possible; by life in the country
rather than in London, by the fresh air of the early morning instead
of that of midnight in over-heated gas-lighted rooms and a poisoned
atmosphere. There is a danger lest, as even champagne has proved too
much of a stimulant and too little of a sedative, narcotics should
take its place. The doctors will hardly recommend opium, but their
patients, obliged for one reason or another to forego wine, might be
driven upon it.

As aforesaid, the craving for stimulation or tranquillization of the
brain—in one word, for that whole class of nerve-agents to which tea,
opium, and brandy alike belong—is so universal, has so prevailed in all
ages, races and climates, that it must be considered, if not originally
natural, yet as by this time an ingrained, all but ineradicable,
human appetite. To baffle such an appetite by any coercive means, by
domestic, social or legislative penalties, has ever proved impossible.
Deprive it of its gratification in one form, and it is impelled or
forced to find a substitute; and finds it, as all strong human cravings
have ever found some kind of satisfaction. And here lies one of the
worst, most certain and yet least considered dangers of the legislation
eagerly demanded by a constantly increasing party. Maine liquor laws,
prohibition, local option, every measure that threatens to deprive of
their favorite stimulant those who are not willing or have not the
resolve to abandon it, would probably fail in their primary object.
If they succeeded in that, they would, in a majority of instances,
force the drinker, not to be content with water or even with tea, but
to find a subtler substitute of lesser bulk, more easily obtained and
concealed. Opium is the most obvious, and, among sedatives powerful
enough to be substituted for wine or spirits, the least mischievous
resource. And opium, once adopted as a substitute for alcohol, would
take hold with far greater tenacity, and its use would spread with
terrible rapidity, because its evil influence is so subtle, so slowly
perceptible; and because, if used in moderation and with fitting
precautions, its worst effects may not be felt for many years;
because women could use it without detection, and men without alarm
or discredit. This peril is one of which wiser men than Sir Wilfrid
Lawson will not make light, but which too many comparatively rational
advocates of total abstinence seem to have totally overlooked. Without
underrating the frightful evils of intoxication, its baneful influence
upon the individual, upon large classes, and upon the country as a
whole, no one who knows them both can doubt that narcotism is the more
dangerous and more destructive habit. The opiatist will not brawl in
the street, will not beat his wife or maltreat his children; but he is
rendered as a rule, even more rapidly and certainly than the drunkard,
a useless member of society, a worthless citizen, an indifferent
husband, helpless as the bread-winner, impotent as the master and
ruler of a household. And opium, to the same temperaments and to many
others, is quite as seductive as alcohol; far more poisonous, and
incomparably more difficult to shake off when once its tyranny has been
established. To forbid it, as some have proposed to forbid the sale or
manufacture of beer, wine, and spirits, is impossible; to exclude it
from the country is out of the question; its legitimate uses are too
important, and no restrictions whatever can put it out of the reach of
those who desire it. Silks, spirits, tobacco were smuggled as long as
it paid to smuggle them; opium, an article of incomparably less bulk
and incomparably greater value, would bring still larger profit to the
importer; while the customer would not merely be attracted by cheapness
or fashion, but impelled by the most imperious and irresistible of
acquired cravings. Any man could smuggle through any barriers enough to
satisfy his appetite for a year, enough to poison a whole battalion.
That opium can become the favorite indulgence with numerous classes,
and apparently with a whole people, the experience of more than one
Eastern nation clearly shows. As the Oriental tea and coffee have to so
large an extent superseded beer as the daily drink of men as well as
women and children, so opium is calculated under favoring circumstances
to replace wine and spirits as a stimulant. It might well do so even
while the competition was open. Every penalty placed on the use of wine
or brandy is a premium on that of opium.

De Quincey is not the only opium-eater who has given his experience to
the world. It is evident that the practice is spreading in America,
and the records published by its victims are as terrible as the
worst descriptions of the drunkard’s misery or even as the horrors
of _delirium tremens_. It is noteworthy, however, how little any of
these seem to know of other experiences than their own—for instance,
of the numerous forms and methods in which the drug can be and is
administered. Opium—the solidified juice of the poppy—is the natural
product from which laudanum, the spirituous tincture of opium, and
all the various forms of morphia, which may be called the chemical
extract, the essential principle of opium, are obtained. Morphia,
again, is sold by chemists and exhibited by doctors in many forms,
the principal of which are the acetate, the sulphate and the muriate
of morphia—the substance itself combined with acetic, sulphuric, or
hydrochloric acid. Of these last the muriate is, we believe, the
safest, the acetate and in a lesser degree the sulphate having more of
the pleasurable, sedative, seductive influence of opium in proportion
to their pain-quelling power. They act, in some way, more powerfully
upon the spirits while exerting the same anæsthetic influence, and
the injurious effects of each dose are more marked and less easily
counteracted. Laudanum, containing proof spirit as well as morphine,
and through the proof spirit diffusing the narcotic influence more
rapidly and affecting the brain more quickly and decidedly, is perhaps
the worst vehicle through which the essential drug can be taken. Again,
morphine, in its liquid forms can be injected under the skin; as
solid opium it can be smoked or eaten, as morphia it can be swallowed
or injected. Of all modes of administration—speaking, of course, of
the self-administered abuse, not of the strict medical use of the
drug—subcutaneous injection is the worst. It acts the most speedily
and apparently the most pleasurably; it passes off the most rapidly,
and tempts, therefore the most frequent, re-application. Apart,
moreover, from the poisonous influence itself, this mode of application
has injurious effects of its own; produces callosities and sores
of a painful and revolting character. Smoking seems to be the most
stupefying manner in which solid opium can be consumed, the one which
acts most powerfully and injuriously upon the brain. But opium-smoking
is hardly likely to take a strong hold on English or European taste.
A piece of opium no larger than a pea, chopped up and mixed with a
large bowlful of tobacco, produces on the veteran tobacco-smoker a
nauseating effect powerfully recalling that of the first pipe of his
boyhood; while its flavor is incomparably more disagreeable to the
palate accustomed to the best havanas or the worst shag or bird’s-eye
than these were to the unvitiated taste. It is probable that the
Englishman who makes his first acquaintance with opium in this form
will be revolted rather than tempted, unless indeed the pipe be used
to relieve a pain so intolerable that the nauseousness of the remedy
is disregarded. Morphia in all its forms, liquid or solid, has a
thoroughly unpleasant bitterness, but neither the nauseous taste of
the pipe nor the intensely disgusting flavor of laudanum, a flavor so
revolting to the unaccustomed palate that only when largely diluted
by water can it possibly be swallowed. On the whole, the muriate,
dissolved in a quantity of water large enough to render each drop the
equivalent of a drop of laudanum, is probably the safest, and should be
swallowed rather than injected. But rather than swallow even this, a
wise man, unless more confident in his own constancy and self-command
than wise men are wont to be, had better endure any temporary pain
that nature may inflict or any remedial operation that surgery can
offer.—_Contemporary Review._

FOLK-LORE FOR SWEETHEARTS.

BY REV. M. G. WATKINS, M.A.

As marriage and death are the chief events in human life, an enormous
mass of popular beliefs has in all nations crystallised round them.
Perhaps the sterner and more gloomy character of Kelts, Saxons, and
Northmen generally found vent in the greater prominence they have
given to omens of death, second-sight, ghosts, and the like; whereas
the lighter and sunnier disposition of Southern Europe has delighted
more in love-spells, methods of divining a future partner, the whole
pomp and circumstance attending Venus and her doves. The writhing of
the wryneck so graphically portrayed in Theocritus, or the spells of
the lover in his Latin imitator, with their refrain—

    Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim,[4]

may thus be profitably compared with the darker superstitions of St.
Mark’s Eve, the Baal fires, and compacts with the evil one, which so
constantly recur throughout the Northern mythologies. But there are
times and festivities when the serious Northern temperament relaxes;
and any one who has the least acquaintance with the wealth of folk-lore
which recent years have shown the natives of Great Britain that
they possess, well knows that the times of courtship and marriage
are two occasions when this lighter vein of our composite nature is
conspicuous. The collection of these old-world beliefs amongst our
peasantry did not begin a moment too soon. Day by day the remnants of
them are fast fading from the national memory. The disenchanting wand
of the modern schoolmaster, the rationalistic influences of the press,
the Procrustes-like system of standards in our parish schools—these
act like the breath of morn or the crowing of a cock upon ghosts, and
at once put charms, spells, and the like to flight. Before the nation
assumes the sober hues of pure reason and unpitying logic, in lieu of
the picturesque scraps of folk-lore and old-wifish beliefs in which
imagination was wont to clothe it, no office can be more grateful to
posterity than for enthusiastic inquirers to search out and put on
record these notes of fairy music which our villagers used to listen
to with such content. By way of giving a sample of their linked
sweetnesses long drawn out through so many generations of country
dwellers—of which the echoes still vibrate, especially in the north
and west of the country—it is our purpose to quote something of the
legendary lore connected with love and marriage. This must interest
everybody. Even the most determined old bachelor probably fell once, at
least, in love to enable him to discover the hollowness of the passion;
and as for the other sex, they may very conveniently, if illogically,
be classed here as they used to be at the Oxford Commemoration, the
married, the unmarried, and those who wish to be married. Some of these
spells and charms possess associations for each of these divisions, and
we are consequently sure of the suffrages of the fair sex.

Folk-lore, like Venus herself, has indeed specially flung her cestus
over “the palmer in love’s eye.” She has more charms to soothe his
melancholy than were ever prescribed by Burton. She is not above
dabbling in spells and the unholy mysteries of the black art to
inform him who shall be his partner for life. When sleep at length
seals his eyes, she waits at his bedside next morning to tell him the
meaning of his dreams. And most certainly the weaker sex has not been
forgotten by folk-lore, which, in proportion to their easier powers of
belief, provides them with infinite store of solace and prediction.
Milkmaids, country lasses, and secluded dwellers in whitewashed farm or
thick-walled ancestral grange are her particular charge. The Juliets
and Amandas of higher rank already possess enough nurses, confidantes,
and bosom friends, to say nothing of the poets and novelists. Perhaps
it would be well for them if they never resorted to more dangerous
mentors than do their rustic sisters when they listen to old wives’
wisdom at the chimney corner. Yet an exception must be made in favor
of some lovers of rank, when we recall the ludicrously simple wooing
of Mr. Carteret and Lady Jemima Montagu, and how mightily they were
indebted to the good offices of the more skilled Samuel Pepys, who