the instrument indeed of creating the earth, and of
governing it when created, but whose power was
altogether limited by the matter with which he
had to struggle in the task. We remember a striking
picture, drawn by one of these wild speculators,
which represents the demiurgos as sitting in despair
in the dust, and crying out the creative words in
Genesis, " Let Light be," not with the fiat of a
divine will, but in the despairing shriek of entreaty
to a superior power. In this conception of the
Gnostics the Manager of the earth and of nature
was in no sense infinite, — but a finite though
powerful angel, unequal to prevent evil from
creeping into his universe at every pore; and they
proceeded to show how it might be subsequently
removed thence by emanations and manifestations
of the superior divinities above him. It is the first
part only of this grotesque conception which has
been taken up in these strange " Papers of a Suicide."
It is apparently taken up, we will not say with any
serious intent to press it upon the world as true,
but with a kind of reckless pleasure in throwing
out a new suggestion that may swell the chaos of
conflicting irreligions, and that the writer perhaps
seriously thinks has as good a title to acceptance
as any other. At all events, his view is urged with
137
" THE SPECTATOR "
passion and vehemence, and hideous as it is, it does
suggest a question of much interest on which it
may be worth while to say a few words, — namely,
why it is that in an age of rehgious anarchy hke
ours these old Gnostic dreams of deputy-gods,
limited deities but half equal to their work, have
so entirely vanished, and left no intermediate
speculation in the great chasm between the most
reverent Theism and blank Atheism. Of the latter
there is only too much; yet the marks of personality
and design written upon the universe do not dis-
appear when spiritual worship dies out of the heart,
and it seems on the first glance strange that men
who cannot perceive the divine love, should at
once cast away with their belief in that, their belief
in a personal power altogether. The imaginary
suicide discriminates between the two, and in a
passage of curious bitterness revives the old Gnostic
theory:
But man cannot avoid hasty generalisations, and
Religion is but one of them, after all. Man cannot
suspend his opinion of the Designer, and passes from
the Supreme Evil of the savage to the Supreme
Good of the Jew and the Christian. What if God be
as ignorant of the future as ourselves? What if he
sits in stupefaction at the flame of life which He has
kindled ? . . . Let me speak of God as I think I
liave found liim. Let me say, for once, what is in
the hearts of many. I find, then, a Designer wondrous
-powerful, but not omnipotent. I find him more
successful in dealing with matter than with life; more
successful with life than with mind. I find his in-
capacity'- more visible as the scale of creation ascends,
until in man even the most religious mourns over the
138
AN ENGLISH GNOSTIC
failure. I deduce the conclusion that the maker of
the Universe can be no Supreme Being. He seems
to me One permitted to fashion the worlds out of a
substance given to Him as clay to a child, subject to
certain laws which He is incompetent to alter, and
which he, like man, can only guide by obeying. I
doubt if He foresaw the phenomena of life when he
arranged the systems of what we call the Universe.
I should feel sure of this were it settled that the earth
is the only inhabited planet. Such a being might
have power to interfere so that he did not disarrange
his own cosmos: he might be unable to make chaos
come again. His Maker may possibly call him to
account one day. Ourselves may be summoned to
a greater Bar than even Christians deem of, to bear
witness to the wrongs we have suffered at the hands
of God. I trace in ever^-thing the faults of One who
has attempted too much.
That is, in its vv^ay, startling enough, and yet v^^e
suppose no Western mind, at all events in Christian
ages, unless it be the vi^riter's, has ever even glanced
at such a view of the creator of our world; — nor,
indeed, anybody at all who has found a revelation
of any sort in the Old Testament, since the time
of the Syrian Gnostics. To suggest, as the supposed
suicide elsewhere does, that the Old Testament
contains an account of a real revelation from
Jehovah to the Jews, but from a Jehovah who, so
far from being omnipotent, was compelled from
inadequate power to break many of his covenants,
and then to find apologies in the conduct of his
people for going back from his promises, — carries
us off into the theosophic and daemonological dreams
of a vanished world. Why is this so? Why have
139
" THE SPECTATOR"
all intermediate speculations between a perfectly
wise and self-existent God, and pure Atheism
vanished so completely even from the fancies of
men ? Hume no doubt suggested that if God was
to be regarded only as the cause of the universe,
you must take Him to be a being of mixed good and
evil, mixed qualities of every kind, like the effect;
but though he threw out this paradox, he never
seriously proposed to any one to believe in an im-
perfect and hampered God. Even the coldest deist
is rather inclined in modern days to throw the
blame of seeming failures upon either the human
will or the human understanding, than to impute
them to radical deficiencies in the power or plan
of the Creator.
We ascribe the entire disappearance in modern
times of all mediate forms of belief between pure
theism and pure atheism in some slight degree to
the growth of that unity of science which shov/s
us that all matter is force, and that all forces are
regulated by a coherent plan and are identical in
essence. Thus we are driven to choose between
force as itself original, and force as issuing directly
from a living Will, the former being blank atheism,
the latter omnipotence, or at least so far omni-
potence that there are no conceivable external
forces to limit the power of Deity which are not
sprung from Himself. Thus much the growth of
science has done, — it has cleared away all such
intermediate conceptions as would attribute certain
powers, and deny others, to a subordinate deity like
140
AN ENGLISH GNOSTIC
the Gnostic demiurgos^ — for it obliges us to trace
back all powers to a well-spring of homogeneous
power, and so contributes greatly to do away with
all intermediate stages, all delegation, of the great
natural forces which lie around the human will.
But this scientific growth of evidence, which
sceptics are the first to admit, against any divided
reign in the realm of nature and of natural power,
would not necessarily exclude various inferences
amongst deists as to the moral nature of God, or
extinguish Hume's suggestion that to the cause of
a universe showing mixed good and evil it would
be only scientific to ascribe mixed good and evil
qualities. But here a very much more powerful
influence comes in. The Christian revelation,
especially the Incarnation, has almost forced men
to choose between two alternatives — to trace back
all power to a divine background of holiness and
love, — or to rest in power as itself final, and as
vouchsafing no self-justification to finite beings
of its righteousness. Until the world had its vision
of the Son of God actually putting off power out
of the depth of divine love in order to manifest that
love in shame and suffering, it was possible for the
human imagination to attribute all varieties or
shades of goodness to the ultimate ruler of the
universe without any feeling of moral contradiction.
But when once we had caught a glimpse of such
graduation in the divine nature as puts love and
righteousness infinitely beyond power, — the latter
being, as it were, an accident that could be put off,
141
" THE SPECTATOR "
the others an essence that followed even the divine
Son into human conditions of existence, — and when
once the thirst of man for God had been actually
satisfied in such a life as our Lord's, it became
impossible to play, as it were, with the attributes
of God, and vary them in imagination. Men felt
either that the very essence of God was love and
righteousness, and that His power, however great
the mystery of this unintelligible world, was the
mere arm of that love, and not His essence; or if
that faith was beyond their grasp, they gave up
altogether thinking of moral distinctions as ultimate
and infinite at all, and made no attempt to trace
a moral character in the unsearchable fountain of
existence. No mind which has ever leaped to the
conviction that ineffable purity and love is at the
origin of all things, could surrender it without
surrendering all belief in the ultimate character
of moral distinctions, without beginning to regard
good and evil, love and malice, as human accidents
which cannot properly be carried up to the source
of life at all. The perplexities still exist, — and have
been stated with horrid force of conception by this
modern Gnostic, — which once induced men to
attribute to the Creator mixed qualities and limited
power to carry those qualities into the work of
creation. But these intermediate modes of thought
between faith and atheism have been burned up
by the mere brightness of the Incarnation, There
is such an infinite difference between the spring
of the heart towards the God who was in Christ,
142
AN ENGLISH GNOSTIC
and towards any other conception man can make
for himself, that if, overpowered by intellectual
perplexities, you reject the one, there is no in-
clination left to subdivide the infinite distance
between the God incarnate in Christ, and the God
whose essence is power, on whom the mere deist
falls back. Of course we do not mean that all who
reject the Incarnation fall back on such a God, for
Christ has won over the greater part of our modern
Theism to that type which the surrender by Christ
of His power for the work of love first gave it. But
however men call themselves, the Christian re-
velation has really forced us into the alternative
between a worship of holiness and love as wielding
the divine power, and the exchange of all true,
worship for mere acquiescence in immutable decrees.^
Between these two extremes there is now no resting- -
place for the mind. An intermediate Gnosticism,,
such as the supposed suicide puts forth, could never
be possible again, unless Christ could be forgotten..
^43
ABOUT RYMER AND HIS " FCEDERA "
"The Athen^um," 1869
On what strange chances great results depend!
If Rymer's father had not been hanged, the world
would never have possessed Rymer's Fcedera.
Utilitarians would perhaps say that we should be
glad of what was suffered by the father at the
gallows, in proportion with what the son collected
and transcribed in the old Chapter-House at West-
minster. We are sorry for the sire; but our sym-
pathy is a little diminished by the fact that the son
seems to have borne his father's hanging with that
philosophy with which Rochefoucauld says every
man bears the calamities which fall on his friends
and neighbours.
Rymer and his Fcedera are known — or rather
Rymer's Fcedera is known — all over the civilised
world. There is not an historical writer in Europe
and America who has not to go often and drink
deeply at that fountain-head of history. There is
not an historical student in any part of the globe
who is not, in some way or other, interested in
this collection of documents. When the Fcedera
appeared, the Muse of History shook off her drow-
siness, tightened her sandals, drew her girdle closer,
144
RYMER AND HIS " FCEDERA"
and started on a new path. Since that period, the
goodly tomes in which the collection is printed
have been the treasures of all libraries; but little
or nothing has been known of the author. So far,
general readers whose languid eyes fall on the
words " Rymer: Fced..^'' at the tail of a note, know
nothing more of author or book than they saw in
those words themselves.
Now, Sir Thomas DufFus Hardy has come
forward to do what he has so often done before,
— to instruct and interest the public. On this
occasion, the subject is Rymer and the Fcedera.
Sir Thomas has just published the first volume of
a Syllabus (in English) of the Documents relating
to England and other Kingdoms contained in the
Collection known as " Rymer' s Fcedera." That is
to say, that every document in the original ponderous
collection is here described, as to its contents, in
a few clear and concise phrases. The gratitude
which the world owed to Rymer, or to Halifax and
Somers, with whom the idea of making such a
collection seems to have originated, will, in perhaps
greater measure, be paid to the Deputy-Keeper
of the Public Records. We say in greater measure,
because, when complete, the Syllabus will give
to every man the concentrated essence of the
original mass, and because Sir Thomas has added
an account of the author which, for the first time,
places him bodily, and full of quaint old life, in
presence of the reader.
We have said that Thomas Rymer's father,
I 145 L
"THE ATHEN^UM "
Ralph, was hanged. Ralph was a Yorkshire gentle-
man of some substance, and of such hot Republican
principles that confiscated Royalist estates fell to
him by way of encouragement. The Restoration
deprived him of what he had thus earned, and also
of nearly all that he had inherited; and this sent
Ralph Rymer and his eldest son Ralph, with the
swords and pistols that were left to them, into the
" Presbyterian rising " of 1663. It was all crushed
in one night, and among the many prisoners sen-
tenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, Ralph
Rymer was one. " Exequandus apud Leeds" or
elsewhere, was the euphuism then for putting a
man through that direful process. The eldest son,
accomplice of the father, was liberated from prison
only when death threatened to be his emancipator.
Thomas Rymer, the Foederalist, if we may so
call him, happened to have for schoolmaster one
Smelt, at Danby Wisk, who was what Sir Thomas
Hardy calls a " Loyalist," but what Parliament-
arians would have called a " Royalist." In the
hottest time of the Commonwealth he contrived
to teach his boys Royalistic principles, something
after the fashion of Bishop Dupanloup, of Orleans,
who, with the Emperor Louis Napoleon and the
Empress Eugenie in his mind, remarked how very
superior Pilate's wife was to Pilate!
Dealing in the above way with rebels and regi-
cides. Smelt's precepts seem to have had more
influence on Thomas Rymer's mind than his
father's principles and practice. He passed to
146
RYMER AND HIS " FCEDERA "
Cambridge, thence to Gray's Inn, and subsequently
into the world, as a poor, ill-fed, and worse paid
author. He is best remembered for his rhymed
tragedy, licensed in 1677, Edgar; or, the English
Monarch. It was avowedly written in support of
a system, for attempting to overthrow which the
author's father had been hanged, drawn and quar-
tered, and his family all but beggared. The play
pleased nobody; but Rymer was convinced that
the public lacked judgment. He failed even more
as a critic than as a writer. He could not even
happily imitate the ancients whom he praised. He
abused Fletcher, assailed Shakespeare as something
between a beast and a barbarian, and referred to
Milton as the author of a thing which some people
were pleased to call a poem ! Macaulay says Rymer
was " the worst critic that ever lived." What he
was as a dramatic author may be described in the
words of a piece which, not long before Rymer
wrote his Edgar^ had been played and damned, —
Arrowsmith's Reformation. " Does he ever write
himself? " asks one of the characters. " Yes, yes,"
is the reply; " but, as all your professed critics
do, damnably ill."
Nevertheless, the beggared Yorkshireman con-
tinued to ply his pen, eulogising crowned pates
and pelting the poets. He had touched everything
and had not adorned much, when, in 1692, he
succeeded Shadwell as Historiographer Royal.
Half-a-dozen years or so before, Rymer had criti-
cised even this official, asserting that he never wrote
147
" THE ATHEN^UM "
truth except by chance, and that the whole herd
of royal historigraphers were, in fact, little better
than asses, both ignorant and malicious. Eight
months later, Rymer was appointed to collect and
edit unpublished records, the collection which grew
into the shape and form in which we now have it
by the help of other editors. The publication served
many a purpose; among others, it buoyed difficult
straits for the safe passage of fresh navigators on
historical seas; and it illumined the waste of waters
over which old navigators of that sort had tossed
and tumbled, and had then scrambled shoreward
with small salvage of the precious freight of truth.
Rvmer was the new pilot and explorer. Fancy
the savage delight of the amiable creatures who
envied him his appointment, when they discovered
that the apparently most important document with
which he started was a forgery! If he had detected
and exposed it, the same men would probably have
tried to lessen the credit of the detection: perhaps
they would have faintly suggested the genuineness
of the paper itself.
Be this as it may, the Fcedera became the work,
delight and torture of Rymer's life. Hitherto, with
rare exceptions. Government had discouraged the
publication of any political or State records. Now,
a certain class of them were given up to Rymer to
print and spread abroad in ponderous volumes. It
turned the eyes of the historic world on him and
his labours. Scholars at home and abroad became
his friends and correspondents. His slip at starting
148
RYMER AND HIS " FCEDERA "
did not ruin him, as such a man's good-natured
friends would take care it should do now. Rymer's
love for his work grew with its progress. He lived
with his transcribers amid actual book-worms;
and shook them out with the dust in which they
lived and housed, from records which had not been
read since the clerks drew, and high-contracting
parties signed them. The explorer was ill paid,
grudgingly paid, sometimes not paid at all for his
work. Out of his small salary as Historiographer
he furnished the wages of his clerks and the cost of
his materials. He trusted to the honour of the
Government to reimburse him; but that honour
seems to have been of a very easy nature, sometimes
doling, at others denying. The whole history of
Rymer amid the records is a new and delightful
chapter in The Curiosities of Literature. When
this Herculean editor had put forth fifteen volumes,
and had collected materials for a sixteenth, he died
one December day in 17 13, in Arundel Street,
Strand, and three days after he was buried in the
Church of St. Clement Danes. His work was
continued by Saunderson. All readers who are
curious in the matter have now only to consult the
Syllabus^ with its at once masterly and amusing
Preface, by Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy. They will
there learn all that can now be known about Rymer
and his Foedera.
149
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
By Algernon Charles Swinburne
Walter Savage Landor, born at Warwick,
January 30th, 1775, died at Florence, September
17th, 1864. In the course of this long life he had
won for himself such a double crown of glory in
verse and in prose as has been worn by no other
Englishman but Milton, And with that special
object of his lifelong veneration he had likewise
in common other claims upon our reverence to
which no third competitor among English poets
can equally pretend. He had the same constancy
to the same principles, the same devotion to the
same ideal of civic and heroic life; the same love,
the same loyalty, the same wrath, scorn, and hatred,
for the same several objects respectively; the same
faith in the example and kinship to the spirit of
the republican Romans, the same natural enjoy-
ment and mastery of their tongue. Not accident
merely but attraction must in any case have drawn
them to enlist in the ranks and serve under the
standard of the ancient Latin army of patriots
and poets. But to Landor even more than to
Milton the service of the Roman Muse was a
natural and necessary expression of his genius, a
150
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
spontaneous and just direction of its full and exu-
berant forces. At the age of twenty he published
an eloquent vindication of her claims upon the
service and devotion of modern writers — the first
sketch or suggestion of a longer essay, to be pub-
lished in its final form just fifty-two years later.
In 1795 appeared in a small volume, "divided
into three books," The Poems of Walter Savage
Landor, and, in pamphlet form of nineteen pages,
an anonymous Moral Epistle, respectfully dedicated
to Earl Stanhope. No poet at the age of twenty
ever had more vigour of style and fluency of verse;
nor perhaps has any ever shown such masterly
command of epigram and satire, made vivid and
vital by the purest enthusiasm and most generous
indignation. Three years later appeared the first
edition of the first great work which was to inscribe
his name for ever among the great names in English
poetry. The second edition of Gebir appeared in
1803, with a text corrected of grave errors and
improved by magnificent additions. About the
same time the whole poem was also published in
a Latin form, which for might and melody of line,
for power and perfection of language, must always
dispute the palm of precedence with the English
version. In 1808, under an impulse not less heroic
than that which was afterwards to lead Byron to
a glorious death in redemption of Greece and his
own good fame, Landor, then aged thirty-three,
left England for Spain as a volunteer to serve in
the national army against Napoleon at the head
151
A. C. SWINBURNE
of a regiment raised and supported at his sole
expense. After some three months' campaigning
came the affair of Cintra and its disasters; " his
troop," in the words of his biographer, " dispersed
or melted away, and he came back to England in
as great a hurry as he had left it," but bringing
with him the honourable recollection of a brave
design unselfishly attempted, and the material in
his memory for the sublimest poem published in
our language between the last masterpiece of
Milton and the first masterpiece of Shelley — one
equally worthy to stand unchallenged beside either
for poetic perfection as well as moral majesty —
the lofty tragedy of Count 'Julian, which appeared
in 1 812, without the name of its author. No com-
parable work is to be found in English poetry
between the date of Samson Agonistes and the date
of Prometheus Unbound-., and with both these
great works it has some points of greatness in
common. The superhuman isolation of agony
and endurance which encircles and exalts the hero
is in each case expressed with equally appropriate
magnificence of effect. The style of Count Julian,
if somewhat deficient in dramatic ease and the
fluency of natural dialogue, has such might and
purity and majesty of speech as elsewhere we find
only in Milton so long and so steadily sustained.
In May 1 8 1 1 Landor had suddenly married
Miss Julia Thuillier, with whose looks he had
fallen in love at first sight in a ball-room at Bath;
and in June they settled for awhile at Llanthony
152
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Abbev in Wales, from whence he was worried in
three years' time by the combined vexation of
neighbours and tenants, lawyers and lords-Heuten-
ant; not before much toil and money had been
nobly wasted on attempts to improve the sterility
of the land, to relieve the wretchedness and raise
the condition of the peasantry. He left England
for France at first, but after a brief residence at
Tours took up his abode for three years at Como;
" and three more wandering years he passed,"
says his biographer, " between Pisa and Pistoja,
before he pitched his tent in Florence in 1821."
In 1824 appeared the first series of his Imaginary
Conversations; in 1826 "the second edition,
corrected and enlarged " : a supplementary third
volume was added in 1828; and in 1829 the second
series was given to the world. Not until 1846 was
a fresh instalment added, in the second volume of
his collected and selected works. During the
interval he had published his three other most
famous and greatest books in prose: The Citation
and Examination of William Shakespeare, 1834;
Pericles and Jspasia, 1836; The Pentameron, 1837.
To the last of these was originally appended The