It is the saddest of things that we lose our early enthusiasms.

Let us hope that the present war will be a successful “Crusade” and that the Turks will disappear from the land which is sacred to the memory of our Lord.

Compare Shakespeare’s sonnet LXXI:

These verses are by a South Australian writer. “Forget me when I die” is an unpleasing sentiment; yet in “When I am dead, my dearest,” Christina Rossetti says:

As regards the latter poem, the curious fact is that it is read as an exquisite piece of music, and not for any poetic thought it contains. If it has any coherent meaning, it is that the speaker is indifferent whether or not “her dearest” will remember her or she will remember him. Yet the haunting music of the lines has made it a favourite poem, and it finds a place in all the leading anthologies. Christina Rossetti is by no means a great poet. (Mr. Gosse’s estimate in the Britannica is exaggerated), but she had a wonderful gift of language and metre. Take, for example, the pretty lilt contained in the simplest words in “Maiden-Song”:

Written of the poet’s child Catherine, who died in 1812 at three years of age, and of whom Wordsworth had also written, “Loving she is, and tractable, though wild.” Forty years after the death of this child and her brother, who died about the same time, the poet spoke of them to Aubrey de Vere with the same acute sense of bereavement as if they had only recently died.

His faith.—Wallenstein, the great German soldier and statesman (1583-1634) believed in astrology.

The “intelligible forms of ancient poets” and “fair humanities of old religion” are the gods and inferior divinities that please our fancy. Thus the Greeks peopled the heavens (not very distant heavens to them) with their gods who visited earth and mingled with men. There were also the lesser deities, as the Hours and the Graces; and also the Nymphs—the Nereïds, Naiads, Orcades and Dryads—who inhabited seas, springs, rivers, and trees respectively. The Nymphs would correspond somewhat to the elves, gnomes and fairies of Northern religions.

Coleridge’s translation of “Wallenstein” (of which “The Piccolomini” is a portion) is considered a masterpiece. Schiller was fortunate in having a finer poet than himself to translate his drama. In the above passage Coleridge greatly improved on the original; the seven splendid lines beginning “The intelligible forms of ancient poets” are his and not Schiller’s; and, therefore, this passage may fairly be ascribed to him as author.

The sea typifies the wider, nobler life of the soul.

This famous saying is quoted in French literature as though Molière had said, “I admit plagiarism, but I so improve what I borrow from others that it becomes my own” (see Larousse, under “Bien”).

It is, however, an interesting question whether this was the true meaning intended by Molière.

The story is told by Grimarest, the first biographer of the great dramatist. In 1671 Molière produced Les Fourberies de Scapin, in which he had inserted two scenes taken from Le Pedant Joué, of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655). (They are the amusing scenes where Geronte repeatedly says, Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère, “What the deuce was he doing in that Turkish galley?”) Grimarest says that Cyrano had used in these scenes what he had overheard from Molière, and that the latter, when taxed with the plagiarism, replied, “Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve” (“I take back my property, wherever I find it”). That is to say, he definitely denied the plagiarism.

Voltaire, in a “Life of Molière,” makes a general assertion (not referring specially to this incident) that all Grimarest’s stories are false. This must, of course, be far too sweeping an assertion, and Grimarest is in fact quoted as an authority. Voltaire himself (1694-1778) uses the saying in the sense given by Grimarest (La Pucelle, Chant III.):

(“These breeches are mine, and I shall take what was mine wherever I find it.”) Agnès Sorel had been captured dressed as a man and wearing the garment in question, which had been previously stolen from the speaker.

It seems to me that Grimarest’s story must be accepted, that Molière claimed the scenes as originally his and denied plagiarism. There is no evidence to the contrary, and the saying is given its obvious meaning. (It is word for word as in the Digest, Ubi rem meam invenio, ibi vindico, “Where I find my own property, I appropriate it.”) But the question then arises, Why should so commonplace a statement have attained such notoriety?

The explanation seems simple. Molière had many jealous and bitter enemies, who laid every charge they could against him. He was well known to have borrowed ideas, characters and scenes in all directions—and his enemies constantly and persistently attacked him on this ground. Then came his most glaring plagiarism from a comparatively recent play, written by a man whose dare-devil exploits had made him a perfect hero of romance. Molière’s story that Cyrano had previously stolen the scenes from him would not been have accepted for a moment. Cyrano had never been known to plagiarize, nor would it have been natural for a man of his character to do anything clandestine. Also Molière would have had nothing to support his statement—and Cyrano was not alive to contradict him. The conclusion, therefore, seems to be that the dramatist’s statement was received in Paris with such incredulity, indignation, and ridicule that it became a byword.

But if this is so, why have the words been given an entirely fictitious meaning? The answer seems to lie in the fact that as Molière’s great genius became realized the desire arose to remove a blemish from his character. His is the greatest name in French literature, and almost anything would be excused in him. (We ourselves pass lightly over plagiarisms by Shakespeare.) Also, whether morally justified or not, Molière enriched the world’s literature by his borrowings. It was, therefore, no serious matter to Frenchmen that he should have borrowed from Cyrano, but it was a distinct blemish on his character that he should have denied the fact and also slandered a dead man. Ordinarily, in such a case, the story is ignored and forgotten, just as the one improper act of Sir Walter Scott, his borrowing from Coleridge of the “Christabel” metre, is usually ignored or slurred over. But the saying had become rooted in literature and this course was not practicable. However, there is little that enthusiasm cannot accomplish by some means or other, and the object in this instance has been achieved by reversing the meaning of Molière’s words. If this conjecture is correct, it is an illustration of what has occurred on a far greater scale in connection with the Greeks (see Index of Subjects).

As regards the meaning now given to the saying, Seneca claimed the same right to borrow at will. Quidquid bene dictum est ab ullo, meum est (Ep. XVI). After advising his reader to consider the Epistle carefully and see what value it had for him, he says, “You need not be surprised if I am still free with other people’s property. But why do I say ‘other people’s property’? Whatever has been well said by anyone belongs to me.”[13]

So also the late Samuel Butler said, “Appropriate things are meant to be appropriated.”

These are true stories but localized—another injustice to Ireland!

Reason needs to be given its old pronunciation, “raison” (or raisin) in order to understand Falstaff’s pun.

Rogers mentions some remarkable facts about the clairvoyant, Alexis, and ends with this convincing argument. Apart from clairvoyance (of which I know nothing), Rogers would no doubt have made a similar reply if some prophet had foretold that men would one day communicate with each other by wireless telegraphy; and the same effective argument is to-day opposed by many to the evidence that the dead communicate with the living.

I might follow the eight preceding quotations (which illustrate “the art of reasoning”) with the well-known story of Charles Lamb, who, when blamed for coming late to the office, excused himself on the ground that he always left early. (He also said, “A man could not have too little to do and too much time to do it in.”) There is also the reply of Lord Rothschild, when the cabman told him that his son paid better fares than he did, “Yes, but He has a rich father, and I haven’t.”

All attempts to define poetic imagination, to determine its scope or prescribe its limits, leave us cold and unsatisfied, for the simple reason that its variety and range are unlimited. The aesthetic, moral and spiritual faculties are all in essence identical, so that no definition of the aesthetic can exclude the spiritual, and art and poetry spring from the same root as religion. They all have what Wordsworth calls the “Spirit of Paradise.”[14] Imagination[15] in its larger sense includes all those higher faculties of man, all that lifts him above his material existence. The “True Romance” in this fine poem is imagination in this complete sense. By our lower perceptive faculties we see the world of Nature in its material form; by our higher powers we apprehend its aesthetic, moral and spiritual beauty. (Man with his consciousness, will, reason, and also his higher imaginative faculties, is as much part of Nature as any star or clod, crystal or gas, fly or flower.) Hence imagination gives us the vision of glory in earth and sky, the sense of wonder and worship, the emotions of sympathy and love; it teaches us duty and self sacrifice; it awakens in us a sense of the mystery of birth, life and death, directing our thoughts from the finite and material world to the infinite realm of the spiritual.

Verse 4, lines 5, 6. Our faculties develop, and we realize, for example, the beauty of Nature which was not apparent to the Greeks of Plato’s time (see p. 379; see also p. 283). Verse 9, l. 5, 6. Imagination teaches us heroism. In the italicized verses, “our war” is, of course, the strife of our material existence: we can face with courage the mischances of life, seeing that “My Lady Romance,” the soul which is our higher nature, must persist through life and after death. (“Barrière,” barrier.)