Some little while ago the battered and shattered remains of an old bookcase with the sedimentary deposit of my own books, reached me after a journey of many hundred miles from its former resting place. The front of the bookcase is twisted wirework, which, when I remember it first, was lined with pink silk. Not a vestige, not a shred of the silk remains and the half dozen shelves now depend for preservation in position on a frame as crazy as Her Majesty’s ship Victory, and certainly older. The bookcase had belonged to my grandfather before Trafalgar, and some of the books I found in it among the sediment were printed before the Great Fire of London. In all there were about a couple or three hundred books, none of which would be highly valued by a bibliophile. Owing to my being in a very modest way a wanderer on the face of the realm, these books had been out of my possession for nearly twenty years, and dusty and dilapidated as they were when they reached me I took them in my arms as long-lost friends. I had finished the last sentence with the word children, but that would not do for two reasons. These books were not mine as this one I am now writing is, and long-lost children change more than they have changed, or more than friends change. Children grow and outpace us and leave us behind and are not so full of companionable memories as friends. There is hardly time to make friends of our adult children before we are beckoned away. The friends we make and keep when we are young have always twenty years’ start of our children in friendship. A man may be friendly with his son of five but a father and son cannot be full friends until the son is twenty years older.

Again, as to the impropriety of speaking of the books as long-lost children I have another scruple. I am in great doubt as to whether the recovery of a long-lost child is at all desirable. A long-lost child means a young girl or boy of our own who is lost when under ten years of age and recovered years afterwards. I do not know that the recovery of the missing one is a cause of gratitude. Remember it is not at all the child we lost. It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again. Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of memory. He is not wholly our child. There is an interregnum in our reign over him and we do not know what manner of king has held sway in our stead, or, if knowing the usurper, we cannot measure the extent or force of his influence. How much of this young person is really our very own? how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs to us?

With books no such question arises. They are our very own. They have suffered no increment, but rather loss. What we remember of them and find again in them fills us with joy; what we have forgotten and recall excites a surprise which makes us feel rich. We reproach ourselves with not having loved them sufficiently well, and swear upon them to endow them with warmer affection henceforth. In turning over the books in the old case I lighted upon one which I believe to be the volume that came earliest into my possession. It is Cobbett’s Spelling-Book, and by the writing on the title page I see it was given to me by my father on the second of February, 1854. It is in a very battered and tattered condition. I find a youthful autograph of my own on the fly-leaf, the Christian name occupying one line, the surname the second; on a third line is the name of the town, and on a fourth the number of the street and part of the name of the street, the last being, I blush to say, ill-spelt. Surely there never was a book hated as I hated this one! At that time I had declared my unalterable determination of never learning to read. I possessed, until recently, a copy of Valpy’s Latin Grammar of about the same date, and I remember I worshipped the Latin Grammar compared with the Spelling-Book. I knew rosa before I could read words of two syllables, and at this moment I do not know much more Latin than I did then. The Spelling-Book was published by Anne Cobbett, at 137, Strand, in 1849. It is almost incredible that so short a time ago the atrocious woodcuts could be got in England for love or money. There is no attempt whatever at overlaying in the printing; the cut pages are all what are called “flat pulls.” Here and there through the pages of chilling columns of words of one, two, three or more syllables are pencil marks indicating the limits of a day’s lesson. What a ruthless way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality, discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality, impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary, recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to keep their reason and become useful citizens when their time of punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters where they “wallowing unwieldy in their gait tempest the ocean.”

I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett’s writings laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett’s, and I dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book, and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness. He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in the Spelling-Book, intended for young children, his “Stepping-Stone to Cobbett’s English Grammar” takes the form of a dialogue, in which he, the “Teacher,” smashes the unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day, and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with evil dreams.

Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In the vigour of all lives there must be lacunæ of intense indolence, backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and take the things that come as though they were good things rather than work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say they like a book because other people say they like it. These good people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy. But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions of morals) can with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all. It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.

The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as an artist. In the Spelling-Book I do not feel myself at liberty to select the fables as I choose. I will take only one, the first that comes. It is about the swallow and the sparrow. It is a very bad specimen for my contention, but as I am the challenger I have not the choice of weapons, and I accept the first presented by Cobbett.

A swallow coming back to her old nest in the spring finds it occupied by a sparrow and his brood of young ones. The swallow demands possession on the grounds of having built the nest and brought up three broods in it. The sparrow will not budge. The swallow summons a number of swallows, and they wall up the sparrow and he and his brood die of hunger.

The first notice of bias the reader gets is that the swallow is called she, and the sparrow he. Why? For the dishonest purpose of enlisting sympathy with the swallow. There is no evidence or statement the sparrow was aware when taking possession of the nest that it would be reclaimed by the swallow. How was the sparrow to know that the swallow was not dead and buried by the mole? The nest was derelict. Again, when the swallow returned the sparrow had young ones, which it would be dangerous to remove from the nest. How was the sparrow to know the swallow was telling the truth, and that the nest was hers? Then, even supposing the sparrow to be all in the wrong, the punishment was out of all proportion to the offence. The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead? The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian. I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. Why did he put this odious vengeful story in the forefront of his exemplars of righteous doing?

But the worst part of the story is in the Moral. “Thus it always is with the unjust,” says the Chorus of the fabulist. He means that the unjust are always nailed up in their houses with their blameless children and starved to death. Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the “unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine, sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist – in poetry. Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably from their cradles to their graves. It is only the fools, the men of ungovernable passions and impulses and the blunderers who suffer. Man is at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently desperate. The crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is abominable. When the child to whom Cobbett lied grows up, he will know the lie, despise the liar, and have nothing left of the precious fable but a shaken faith in the words of all men, whether they be liars like Cobbett and the other moralists, or truth-tellers like the ordinary everyday folk, who do not pose as teachers and latter-day prophets. It is very improving to reflect on the freedom these teachers give themselves in act when enforcing their theories in writing. In order that Cobbett might exemplify his principles against the credit system, he signed his name across the face of acceptances for seventy thousand pounds!

Cobbett’s Grammar was written for sailors and soldiers and such men. I gave the only copy of it I ever had to a sailor who had abandoned living on the sea to live by the sea, who had eschewed the paint-pot and the stage aboard the merchant service for the palette and stool of the studio. It is years since I have seen the book, but I remember the contemptuous way in which the ex-soldier disposes of prosody. He says to his pupil in effect: You need pay no attention to this branch of grammar, as it deals only with the noise made by words. Cobbett’s treatment of prosody does not occupy more than one line or one line and a half of print. It is briefer than Dr. Johnson’s Syntax:

“The established practice of grammarians requires that I should here treat of the Syntax; but our language has so little inflexion, or variety of terminations, that its construction neither requires nor admits many rules. Wallis, therefore, has totally neglected it; and Jonson, whose desire of following the writers upon the learned languages made him think a syntax indispensably necessary, has published such petty observations as were better omitted.

“The verb, as in other languages, agrees with the nominative in number and person; as Thou fliest from good; He runs to death.

“Our adjectives are invariable.

“Of two substantives the noun possessive is the genitive; as His father’s glory; the sun’s heat.

“Verbs transitive require an oblique case; as He loves me; You fear him.

“All prepositions require an oblique case: He gave this to me; He took this from me; He says this of me; He came with me.”

That is all the merciful Dr. Samuel Johnson has to say about syntax. Oh, Lindley Murray! Oh, memories of youth! Does it seem possible that Johnson could have enjoyed the luxury of speaking in this light and airy and debonair way of English grammar in his day, and that Lindley Murray could have matured his awful Grammar in so few years afterwards? Recollect there were not forty years between the lexicographer and the grammarian. Could not Lindley Murray have left the unfortunate English language alone? Johnson says no one need bother about syntax, and Cobbett says no one need bother about prosody. Thus we have only orthography and etymology to look after, when in comes Murray and spoils all! It is doubtful if the language will ever recover the interference of that Yankee merchant who invented syntax and made the life of dull school boys and girls a path of thorns and agony.

An allegory is a fable for fools of larger growth. I am writing in an off-hand way, and I will not pause to examine the question nicely; but is there any such thing as a successful allegory? I have no experience of one. I seem to hear a loud shout of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Well, I never could read the book through, and I have tried at least twenty times. I have put the reading of that book before myself in the most solemn manner. I have told myself over and over again that I ought to read it as an educational exercise. In vain. How any man with imagination can bear the book I do not know. Bunyan had inexhaustible invention, but no imagination. He saw a reason for things, not the things themselves. No creation of the imagination can lack consequence or verisimilitude. On almost every page of the Progress there is violation of sequence, outrage against verisimilitude. Christian has a great burden on his back and is in rags. He cannot remove the burden. (Why?) He is put to bed (with the burden on his back), then he is troubled in his mind (the burden is forgotten, and the vision altered completely and fatally); again we are reminded that he has the burden on his back when he tells Evangelist of it. Why can he not loose the burden on his back? How is it secured so that he cannot remove it? He cannot see a wicket gate across a very wide field, but he sees a shining light (where?), and then he begins to run (burden and all) away from his wife and children (which is immoral and abhorrent to the laws of God and man). For the mere selfish ease of his body he deserts his wife and children, who must be left miserably poor, for is he not in rags? The neighbours come out and mock at him for running across a field. Why? How do they know why he runs, and what neighbours are there to come out and mock at one when one is running across a large field? The Slough of Despond is in this field (for he has not passed through the wicket gate), and he does not seem to know of the Slough, or think of avoiding it. Fancy any man not knowing of such a filthy hole within a field of his home! How is it that Pliable and Obstinate have no burdens on their backs? It is not the will of the King that the Slough should be dangerous to wayfarers: this surely is blasphemy. The whole thing is grotesquely absurd and impossible to imagine. There is no sobriety in it, no sobriety of keeping in it; and no matter how wild the effort or vision of imagination may be there must always be sobriety of keeping in it or it is delirium not imagination, disease not inspiration. As far as I can see there is no trace of imagination, or even fancy, in the Pilgrim’s Progress. The story never happened at all. It is a horrible attempt to tinkerise the Bible.

One of the things I cannot understand about Macaulay is that he stands by Bunyan’s silly book. Macaulay was a man of vast reading and acquirements and of common-sense tastes. He was not a poet, but he was very nearly one, and ought to have responded in sympathy with poets. In politics he belonged to that most melancholy of all sects, the Whigs, and it may be that the spirit of political compromise to which he had familiarised himself in public life had slipped unknown to him into his literary briefs. Anyway, he himself says that the Pilgrim’s Progress is the only book which was promoted from the kitchen to the drawing-room. There is no difficulty in accounting for the fact that the book was popular among scullions and cooks, but how it ever gained currency among people of moderate education and taste cannot be explained. It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of tenderness – tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises; but I never yet knew any one with even fancy who, meeting it for the first time after the dawn of adolescence, could even endure it.

It is like celebrating one’s own apotheosis to drop Bunyan and take up Spenser. Here we share the air with an immortal god and not a bilious enthusiast. When I have laid aside the Spelling-Book and the Pilgrim’s Progress, and opened the Faerie Queen, I feel as though the leaden clouds of the north had rolled away, disclosing the blue of Ægean skies; as though for squalid porridge and buttermilk had been substituted ambrosia and nectar; as though for fallow and stubble had drifted under my feet soft meadow-grass dense with flowers; as though the moist and clayey crags had changed into purple hills, the green-mantled pools to azure lakes, the narrow waters of a stagnant mere to the free imperial waves and tides of the ocean. It is better than escaping out of an East-end slum into the green lanes and roads of Warwickshire.

And yet, melancholy truth! the Faerie Queen is most unpopular and most unreadable. It has with justice, I think, been said that of ten thousand people who begin the Faerie Queen, not ten read half way through it, and only one arrives at the end. I find by a mark in my copy that I have got a good deal more than half through it, but that I have not reached the last line of this most colossal fragment of a poem. What a mercy the rest of it was drowned in the Irish sea! My Faerie Queen occupies 792 pages of five stanzas to the page; that is, between thirty-five and thirty-six thousand verses, two hundred and sixty to seventy thousand words, or equal in length to a couple of ordinary three-volume novels! And still it is unperfite! I find that although I have owned the book for twenty years, I have got no further than page 472, so that I have read only three-fifths of the fragment of this stupendous poem.

It is not the length alone that defeats the reader. In all the field of English verse there is no poem of great length that comes upon the mind with more full and easy flow. The stanza after a long while becomes, no doubt, monotonous, but it is the monotony of a vast and freightful river that moves majestically, bearing interminable argosies of infinite beauty and variety and significance. After one hundred pages one might put down the book, wearied by the melodious monotony of the imperial chords. I have never been able to read anything like a hundred, anything like fifty pages at a time. I think I have rarely exceeded as many stanzas. Spenser is the poets’ poet, and the Faerie Queen the poets’ poem, and yet even the poets cannot read it freely and fully, as one reads Milton or Shakespeare or Shelley or Keats or the readable parts of Coleridge, all of whom are poets’ poets also.

The allegory bars the way. One reads on smoothly and joyously about a wood or a nymph, or a knight or a lady, or a castle or a dragon, and is half drunk on the wealthy poet’s mead (is not Spenser the wealthiest of English poets?), when suddenly Dan Allegory comes along and assures you that it is not a wood or a nymph, or a knight or lady, or a castle or dragon, but a virtue or a vice posing in property clothes; that in fact things are not what they seem, but visions are about. Cobbett intended his fables for little children, and Bunyan his allegory for the company of the stewpans, but Spenser’s story is for the ears of ladies and of knights; why then does he try to spoon-feed them with virtuous sentiment? There is not, as far as I know, a trace of dyspepsia in all the Faerie Queen, and yet he has sicklied it over “with the pale cast of thought.” In this Vale of Tears there are quite as many virtuous persons as any reasonable man can desire. Why should our poets – those rare and exquisite manifestations of our possibilities – turn themselves into moralists, who are, bless you, as common as grocers, as plentiful as mediocrity. In fact, nine-tenths of the civilised race of man are moralists. But poets ought not to be theorists. They are not sent to us for the purpose of converting us, but for the purpose of delighting us. They ought to be catholic and pagan. They are among the settled property of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds, and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never grow less or fade away or change. They have nothing to do with dynasties or creeds or codes of manners. They are apart from all bias and strife. The will of Heaven itself is against poets preaching, for no poet has ever written hymns that were not a burden upon his reputation as a singer, and did not weigh him to the ground, compared with his flight when free and catholic and pagan.

After entertaining the nightmares of dulness born of Cobbett and Bunyan, how one’s shoulders swing back, one’s chest opens, and one’s breath comes with large and ample coolness and joy as one reads —

“The ioyous day gan early to appeare;
And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed
Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare
With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red:
Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed
About her eares, when Una her did marke
Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred,
From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke;
With mery note her lowd salutes the mountain larke.”

Or again here —

“Then forth he called that his daughter fayre,
The fairest Un’, his onely daughter deare,
His onely daughter and his onely hayre;
Who forth proceeding with sad sober cheare,
As bright as doth the morning starre appeare
Out of the east with flaming lockes bedight,
To tell that dawning day is drawing neare
And to the world does bring long wished light:
So fair and fresh that lady shewd herselfe in sight.”

Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find that Una is not a mortal or a spirit even – but Truth! An abstraction! A whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist’s heated and disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth, but all the worthy essayists of England in the “spacious days of Queen Elizabeth,” put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.

There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser. The fact is, all the Faerie Queen ought to be quoted except the blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a hundred passages at least, some of them running through pages. In no other poem – except Shelley’s Alastor– do I notice such grievous, continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever knight of Gloriana’s trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome often. But who can resist this? —

“ – And, when she spake,
Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,
And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.
…
Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even browes.”

I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem to melt together of their own propinquity.

Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day —

“Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse.”

As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify one’s memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying something about the Spelling-Book and the Pilgrim’s Progress, I had the copies within arm’s length, for I did not know either well enough to trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser – to have it nigh. My copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It seems to me I shall never again look into the Spelling-Book or the Pilgrim’s Progress. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted reading of the Faerie Queen at page 473. My intellect is too weak and my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser’s verse. So much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.