of Positivism, and is even expressed in the very language used by Comte in all his writings, and notably in his Appeal to Conservatives (1855). How pleasantly we can fancy Culture now meeting the Founder of Positivism in some Elysian Fields, and accosting him in that inimitably genial way: Ah, well! I see now that we are not so far apart, but I never had patience to read your rather dry French, you know!'

Of his Theology, or his anti-Theology, even less need be said here. It was most interesting and pregnant, and was certainly the source of his great popularity and vogue. Here indeed he touched to the quick the Hebraism of our middle classes, the thought of our cultured classes, the insurgent instincts of the People. It was a singular mixture-Anglican divinity adjusted to the Pantheism of Spinoza; to parody a famous definition of Huxley's, it was Anglicanism minus Christianity, and even Theism. It is difficult for the poor Philistine to grasp the notion that all this devotional sympathy with the Psalmists, Prophets, and Evangelists, this beautiful enthusiasm for 'the secret of Jesus' and the 'profound originality' of Paul, were possible to a man whose intellect rejected the belief that there was even any probable evidence for the personality of God, or for the celestial immortality of the soul, who flatly denied the existence of miracle, and treated the entire fabric of dogmatic theology as a figment. Yet this is the truth; and what is more, this startling, and somewhat paradoxical, transformation-scene of the Anglican creeds and formularies sank deep into the reflective minds of many thinking men and women, who could neither abandon the spiritual poetry of the Bible nor resist the demonstrations of science. The combination, amongst many combina

tions, is one that, in a different form, was taught by Comte, which has earned for Positivism the title of Catholicism plus Science. Matthew Arnold, who but for his father's too early death might have been the son of a bishop, and who, in the last century, would himself have been a classical dean, made an analogous and somewhat restricted combination that is properly described as Anglicanism plus Pantheism.

Let us think no more of his philosophy-the philosophy of an ardent reader of Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe: of his politics-the politics of an Oxford don who lived much at the Athenæum Club: nor of his theology-the theology of an English clergyman who had resigned his orders on conscientious grounds. We will think only of the subtle poet, the consummate critic, the generous spirit, the radiant intelligence, whose over-ambitious fancies are even now fading into oblivion —whose rare imaginings in stately verse have yet to find a wider and a more discerning audience.

CHAPTER VI

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

MORE than six years have come and gone since, amongst April blossoms, an English master in the literature of Italy was laid in his premature grave, within that most pathetic and most sacred spot of Rome where lie so many famous Englishmen. 'They gave us,' wrote his daughter in a beautiful record of the last scene, 'they gave us a little piece of ground close to the spot where Shelley lies buried. In all the world. there surely is no place more penetrated with the powers of poetry and natural beauty.' All travellers know how true is this: few spots on earth possess so weird a power over the imagination. It is described by Horatio Brown in the volume from which I have been quoting,' 'the grave is within a pace of Trelawny's and a hand-touch of Shelley's Cor Cordium, in the embrasure of the ancient city walls.' Fit resting-place for one who of all the men of our generation best knew, loved, and understood the Italian genius in literature !

There are not wanting signs that the reputation of J. Addington Symonds had been growing in his latest years, it has been growing since his too early death. His later work is stronger, richer, and more permanent than his earlier work-excellent as is almost all his prose. 1 John Addington Symonds: a Biography. By Horatio F. Brown. With portraits and other illustrations, in two vols. 8vo. London, 1895.

Even the learning and brilliancy of the Renaissance in Italy do not impress me with the same sense of his powers as his Benvenuto Cellini, his Michelangelo, his last two volumes of Essays, Speculative and Suggestive (1890), and some passages in the posthumous Autobiography embodied in the Life by H. F. Brown. For grasp of thought, directness, sureness of judgment, the Essays of 1890 seem to me the most solid things that Symonds has left. He grew immensely after middle age in force, simplicity, depth of interest and of insight. He pruned his early exuberance; he boldly grasped the great problems of life and thought; he spoke forth his mind with a noble courage and signal frankness. He was lost to us too early: he died at fifty-two, after a life of incessant suffering, constantly on the brink of death; a life maintained, in spite of all trials, with rare tenacity of purpose. And as we look back now, we may wonder that his barely twenty years of labour under such cruel obstacles produced so much. For I reckon some forty works of his, great and small, including at least some ten important books of prose in some twenty solid volumes. That is a great achievement for one who was a permanent invalid and was cut off before old age.

The publication of his Life by his friend H. F. Brown, embodying his own Autobiography and his Letters, has now revealed to the public what even his friends only partly understood, how stern a battle for life was waged by Symonds from his childhood. His inherited delicacy of constitution drove him to pass the larger part of his life abroad, and at last compelled him to make his home in an Alpine retreat. The pathetic motto and preface he prefixed to his Essays (1890) shows how deeply he felt his compulsory exile-ευρετικὸν εἶναί

paoi Thu épnuíav, 'solitude,' they say, 'favours the search after truth.'-' The Essays,' he declares, 'written in the isolation of this Alpine retreat (Davos-Platz, 1890), express the opinions and surmisings of one who long has watched in solitude, "as from a ruined tower," the world of thought, and circumstance, and action.' And he goes on to speak of his 'prolonged seclusion from populous cities and the society of intellectual equals' a seclusion which lasted, with some interruptions, for more than fifteen years. And during a large part of his life of active literary production, a period of scarcely more than twenty years, he was continually incapacitated by pain and physical prostration, as we now may learn from his Autobiography and Letters. They give us a fine picture of intellectual energy overcoming bodily distress. How few of the readers who delighted in his sketches of the columbines and asphodels on the Monte Generoso, and the vision of the Propylæa in moonlight, understood the physical strain on him whose spirit bounded at these sights and who painted them for us with so radiant a brush.

Symonds, I have said, grew and deepened immensely in his later years, and it was only perhaps in the very last decade of his life that he reached the full maturity of his powers. His beautiful style, which was in early years somewhat too luscious, too continuously florid, too redolent of the elaborated and glorified prize-essay, grew stronger, simpler, more direct in his later pieces, though to the last it had still some savour of the fastidious literary recluse. In the Catholic Reaction

(1886), in the Essays (1890), in the posthumous Autobiography (begun in 1889), he grapples with the central problems of modern society and philosophic thought, and has left the somewhat dilettante tourist of the