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MODERN DIGITAL
AND ANALOG
COMMUNICATION
SYSTEMS
viii CONTENTS

3 ANALYSIS AND TRANSMISSION

OF SIGNALS 91
3.1 APERIODIC SIGNAL REPRESENTATION BY FOURIER INTEGRAL 91
3.2 TRANSFORMS OF SOME USEFUL FUNCTIONS 99
3.3 SOME PROPERTIES OF THE FOURIER TRANSFORM 106
3.4 SIGNAL TRANSMISSION THROUGH A LINEAR SYSTEM 123
3.5 IDEAL VERSUS PRACTICAL FILTERS 129
3.6 SIGNAL DISTORTION OVER A COMMUNICATION
CHANNEL 133
3.7 SIGNAL ENERGY AND ENERGY SPECTRAL DENSITY 139
3.8 SIGNAL POWER AND POWER SPECTRAL DENSITY 148
3.9 NUMERICAL COMPUTATION OF FOURIER TRANSFORM:
THE DFT 155
3.10 MATLAB EXERCISES 160

4 AMPLITUDE MODULATIONS
AND DEMODULATIONS 178
4.1 BASEBAND VERSUS CARRIER COMMUNICATIONS 178
4.2 DOUBLE-SIDEBAND AMPLITUDE MODULATION 180
4.3 AMPLITUDE MODULATION (AM) 190
4.4 BANDWIDTH-EFFICIENT AMPLITUDE MODULATIONS 197
4.5 AMPLITUDE MODULATIONS: VESTIGIAL SIDEBAND (VSB) 206
4.6 LOCAL CARRIER SYNCHRONIZATION 210
4.7 FREQUENCY DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (FDM) 211
4.8 PHASE-LOCKED LOOP AND APPLICATIONS 212
4.9 NTSC TELEVISION BROADCASTING SYSTEM 220
4.10 MATLAB EXERCISES 230

5 ANGLE MODULATION
AND DEMODULATION
5.1 NONLINEAR MODULATION 252
252

5.2 BANDWIDTH OF ANGLE-MODULATED WAVES 259

 Contents ix

5.3 GENERATING FM WAVES 272

5.4 DEMODULATION OF FM SIGNALS 281
5.5 EFFECTS OF NONLINEAR DISTORTION AND INTERFERENCE 284
5.6 SUPERHETERODYNE ANALOG AM/FM RECEIVERS 289
5.7 FM BROADCASTING SYSTEM 291
5.8 MATLAB EXERCISES 292

6 SAMPLING AND ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL

CONVERSION 302
6.1 SAMPLING THEOREM 302
6.2 PULSE CODE MODULATION (PCM) 319
6.3 DIGITAL TELEPHONY: PCM IN T1 CARRIER SYSTEMS 332
6.4 DIGITAL MULTIPLEXING 336
6.5 DIFFERENTIAL PULSE CODE MODULATION (DPCM) 341
6.6 ADAPTIVE DIFFERENTIAL PCM (ADPCM) 345
6.7 DELTA MODULATION 346
6.8 VOCODERS AND VIDEO COMPRESSION 351
6.9 MATLAB EXERCISES 361

7 PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL DATA

TRANSMISSION 377
7.1 DIGITAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS 377
7.2 LINE CODING 380
7.3 PULSE SHAPING 394
7.4 SCRAMBLING 406
7.5 DIGITAL RECEIVERS AND REGENERATIVE REPEATERS 409
7.6 EYE DIAGRAMS: AN IMPORTANT TOOL 417
7.7 PAM: M -ARY BASEBAND SIGNALING FOR HIGHER
DATA RATE 420
7.8 DIGITAL CARRIER SYSTEMS 423
7.9 M -ARY DIGITAL CARRIER MODULATION 431
7.10 MATLAB EXERCISES 437
x CONTENTS

8 FUNDAMENTALS OF PROBABILITY
THEORY 447
8.1 CONCEPT OF PROBABILITY 447
8.2 RANDOM VARIABLES 462
8.3 STATISTICAL AVERAGES (MEANS) 481
8.4 CORRELATION 490
8.5 LINEAR MEAN SQUARE ESTIMATION 494
8.6 SUM OF RANDOM VARIABLES 497
8.7 CENTRAL LIMIT THEOREM 500

9 RANDOM PROCESSES AND SPECTRAL

ANALYSIS 511
9.1 FROM RANDOM VARIABLE TO RANDOM PROCESS 511
9.2 CLASSIFICATION OF RANDOM PROCESSES 516
9.3 POWER SPECTRAL DENSITY 520
9.4 MULTIPLE RANDOM PROCESSES 534
9.5 TRANSMISSION OF RANDOM PROCESSES THROUGH LINEAR
SYSTEMS 535
9.6 APPLICATION: OPTIMUM FILTERING (WIENER-HOPF FILTER) 539
9.7 APPLICATION: PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF BASEBAND ANALOG
SYSTEMS 542
9.8 APPLICATION: OPTIMUM PREEMPHASIS-DEEMPHASIS
SYSTEMS 544
9.9 BANDPASS RANDOM PROCESSES 547

10 PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF MODULATED

COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
UNDER NOISE 564
10.1 ANALYTICAL FIGURE OF MERIT 564
10.2 AMPLITUDE-MODULATED SYSTEMS 565
 Contents xi

10.3 ANGLE-MODULATED SYSTEMS 574

10.4 PULSE-MODULATED SYSTEMS 591

11 PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL

COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS 605
11.1 OPTIMUM LINEAR DETECTOR FOR BINARY POLAR
SIGNALING 605
11.2 GENERAL BINARY SIGNALING 611
11.3 COHERENT RECEIVERS FOR DIGITAL CARRIER
MODULATIONS 619
11.4 SIGNAL SPACE ANALYSIS OF OPTIMUM DETECTION 624
11.5 VECTOR DECOMPOSITION OF WHITE NOISE RANDOM
PROCESSES 629
11.6 OPTIMUM RECEIVER FOR WHITE GAUSSIAN NOISE
CHANNELS 635
11.7 GENERAL EXPRESSION FOR ERROR PROBABILITY OF OPTIMUM
RECEIVERS 660
11.8 EQUIVALENT SIGNAL SETS 668
11.9 NONWHITE (COLORED) CHANNEL NOISE 676
11.10 OTHER USEFUL PERFORMANCE CRITERIA 677
11.11 NONCOHERENT DETECTION 680
11.12 MATLAB EXERCISES 688

12 SPREAD SPECTRUM
COMMUNICATIONS
12.1
714
FREQUENCY HOPPING SPREAD SPECTRUM (FHSS)
SYSTEMS 714
12.2 MULTIPLE FHSS USER SYSTEMS AND PERFORMANCE 718
12.3 APPLICATIONS OF FHSS 721
12.4 DIRECT SEQUENCE SPREAD SPECTRUM 724
12.5 RESILIENT FEATURES OF DSSS 728
xii CONTENTS

12.6 CODE DIVISION MULTIPLE-ACCESS (CDMA) OF DSSS 730

12.7 MULTIUSER DETECTION (MUD) 737
12.8 MODERN PRACTICAL DSSS CDMA SYSTEMS 743
12.9 MATLAB EXERCISES 751

13 DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS UNDER

LINEARLY DISTORTIVE CHANNELS 767
13.1 LINEAR DISTORTIONS OF WIRELESS MULTIPATH CHANNELS 767
13.2 RECEIVER CHANNEL EQUALIZATION 771
13.3 LINEAR T -SPACED EQUALIZATION (TSE) 777
13.4 LINEAR FRACTIONALLY SPACED EQUALIZERS (FSE) 785
13.5 CHANNEL ESTIMATION 789
13.6 DECISION FEEDBACK EQUALIZER 790
13.7 OFDM (MULTICARRIER) COMMUNICATIONS 793
13.8 DISCRETE MULTITONE (DMT) MODULATIONS 803
13.9 REAL-LIFE APPLICATIONS Of OFDM AND DMT 808
13.10 BLIND EQUALIZATION AND IDENTIFICATION 812
13.11 TIME-VARYING CHANNEL DISTORTIONS DUE TO MOBILITY 813
13.12 MATLAB EXERCISES 816

14 INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION
THEORY 836
14.1 MEASURE OF INFORMATION 836
14.2 SOURCE ENCODING 841
14.3 ERROR-FREE COMMUNICATION OVER A NOISY CHANNEL 847
14.4 CHANNEL CAPACITY OF A DISCRETE MEMORYLESS
CHANNEL 850
14.5 CHANNEL CAPACITY OF A CONTINUOUS MEMORYLESS
CHANNEL 858
14.6 PRACTICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS IN LIGHT OF SHANNON'S
EQUATION 875
 Contents xiii

14.7 FREQUENCY-SELECTIVE CHANNEL CAPACITY 880

14.8 MULTIPLE-INPUT–MULTIPLE-OUTPUT COMMUNICATION
SYSTEMS 884
14.9 MATLAB EXERCISES 893

15 ERROR CORRECTING CODES

15.1
15.2
OVERVIEW 907
REDUNDANCY FOR ERROR CORRECTION 908
907

15.3 LINEAR BLOCK CODES 911

15.4 CYCLIC CODES 918
15.5 THE EFFECTS OF ERROR CORRECTION 927
15.6 CONVOLUTIONAL CODES 932
15.7 TRELLIS DIAGRAM OF BLOCK CODES 942
15.8 CODE COMBINING AND INTERLEAVING 944
15.9 SOFT DECODING 946
15.10 SOFT-OUTPUT VITERBI ALGORITHM (SOVA) 949
15.11 TURBO CODES 951
15.12 LOW-DENSITY PARITY CHECK (LDPC) CODES 959
15.13 MATLAB EXERCISES 966

A ORTHOGONALITY OF SOME SIGNAL SETS 978

A.1 ORTHOGONALITY OF THE TRIGONOMETRIC AND

EXPONENTIAL SIGNAL SET 978
A.2 ORTHOGONALITY OF THE EXPONENTIAL
SIGNAL SET 979

B CAUCHY-SCHWARZ INEQUALITY 980

C GRAM-SCHMIDT ORTHOGONALIZATION OF A
VECTOR SET 982
xiv CONTENTS

D BASIC MATRIX PROPERTIES

AND OPERATIONS 985

D.1 NOTATIONS 985

D.2 MATRIX PRODUCT AND PROPERTIES 986
D.3 IDENTITY AND DIAGONAL MATRICES 987
D.4 DETERMINANT OF SQUARE MATRICES 987
D.5 TRACE 988
D.6 EIGENDECOMPOSITION 988
D.7 SPECIAL HERMITIAN SQUARE MATRICES 989

E MISCELLANEOUS 990

E.1 L'HÔPITAL'S RULE 990

E.2 TAYLOR AND MACLAURIN SERIES 990
E.3 POWER SERIES 990
E.4 SUMS 991
E.5 COMPLEX NUMBERS 991
E.6 TRIGONOMETRIC IDENTITIES 991
E.7 INDEFINITE INTEGRALS 992

INDEX 995
PREFACE
T he chief objective of the fourth edition is to respond to the tremendous amount of tech-
nological progress in communication systems we have witnessed over the decade since
the third edition was published. At the same time, newer software and teaching tools have
also become available, making it much easier to provide solid and illustrative examples as
well as more experimental opportunities for students. In this new edition, major changes are
implemented to incorporate recent technological advances of telecommunications. To captivate
students’ attention and make it easier for students to relate the course materials to their daily
experience with communication tools, we will provide relevant information on the operation
and features of cellular systems, wireless local area networks (LANs), and wire-line (digital
subscriber loop or DSL) internet services, among others.

Major Revision
A number of critical changes are motivated by the need to emphasize the fundamentals of
digital communication systems that have permeated our daily lives. Specifically, in light of the
widespread applications of new technologies such as spread spectrum and orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM), we present two new chapters: Chapter 12 on spread spectrum
communications and Chapter 13 on frequency-selective channels and OFDM systems. As
practical examples of such systems, we provide a basic introduction of current wireless commu-
nication standards including cellular systems and IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n wireless LAN systems.
In addition, we summarize the latest in DSL modem technology and services. At the funda-
mental level, information theory and coding have also been transformed by several important
new progresses. In this edition, we include the basic principles of multiple-input–multiple-
output (MIMO) technology, which has just begun to see broad commercial applications. We
also cover several notable breakthroughs in error correction coding, including soft decoding,
turbo codes, and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes.
To enhance the learning experience and to give students opportunities for computer-based
experimental practices, relevant MATLAB examples and exercises have been provided in
chapters that can be enhanced by these hands-on experiments.

Organization
With respect to organization, we begin the fourth edition with a traditional review of signal and
system fundamentals before proceeding to the core communication topics of analog modulation
and digital pulse-coded modulation. We then present the fundamental tools of probability theory
and random processes to be used in the design and analysis of digital communications in the rest
of this text. After the fundamentals of digital communication systems have been covered, the
last two chapters provide an overview of information theory and the fundamentals of forward
error correction codes.

xv
xvi PREFACE

Ideally, the communications subjects germane to this text should be covered in two
courses: one on the basic operations of communication systems and one on the analysis of
modern communication systems under noise and other distortions. The former relies heav-
ily on deterministic analytical tools such as Fourier series, the Fourier transform, and the
sampling theorem, while the latter relies on tools from probability and random processes to
tackle the unpredictability of message signals and noises. In today’s academic environment,
however, with so many competing courses, it may be difficult to squeeze two basic courses
on communications into a typical electrical engineering curriculum. Some universities do
require a course in probability and random processes as a prerequisite. In that case, it is pos-
sible to cover both areas reasonably well in a one-semester course. This book is designed for
adoption in both cases. It can be used as a one-semester course in which the deterministic
aspects of communication systems are emphasized with little consideration of the effects of
noise and interference. It can also be used for a course that deals with both the deterministic
and the probabilistic aspects of communication systems. The book is self-contained, since
it provides all the necessary background in probabilities and random processes. As stated
earlier, however, if both deterministic and probabilistic aspects of communications are to be
covered in one semester, it is highly desirable for students to have a good background in
probabilities.
Chapter 1 introduces a panoramic view of communication systems. Important concepts of
communication theory are explained qualitatively in a heuristic way. This attracts the students
to the topics of communications. With this momentum, students are motivated to study the
tools of signal analysis in Chapters 2 and 3, which encourage them to see a signal as a vector,
and to think of the Fourier spectrum as a way of representing a signal in terms of its vector
components. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss amplitude (linear) and angle (nonlinear) modulations,
respectively. Many instructors feel that in this digital age, modulation should be deemphasized
with a minimal presence. We hold the view that modulation is not so much a method of com-
munication as a basic tool of signal processing; it will always be needed, not only in the area
of communication (digital or analog), but also in many other areas of electrical engineering.
Hence, neglecting modulation may prove to be rather shortsighted. Chapter 6 serves as the
fundamental link between analog-and-digital communications by describing the process of
analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). It provides the details of sampling, pulse code modula-
tion (including DPCM), delta modulation, speech coding (vocoder), image/video coding, and
compression. Chapter 7 discusses the principles and techniques used in digital modulations. It
introduces the concept of channel distortion and presents equalization as an effective means
of compensating for distortion.
Chapters 8 and 9 provide the essential background on theories of probability and random
processes, which comprise the second tool required for the study of communication systems.
Every attempt is made to motivate students and to elevate their interest through these chapters
by providing applications to communications problems wherever possible. Chapters 10 and
11 present the analysis of analog and digital communication systems in the presence of noise.
Optimum signal detection in digital communication is thoroughly presented in Chapter 11.
Chapter 12 focuses on spread spectrum communications. Chapter 13 presents various practical
techniques that can be used to combat practical channel distortions. This chapter will capture
both channel equalization and the broadly applied technology of OFDM. Chapter 14 provides
an overview of information theory. Finally, the principle and key practical aspects of error
control coding are given in Chapter 15.
One of the aims of writing this book has been to make learning a pleasant or at least a less
intimidating experience for students by presenting the subject in a clear, understandable, and
logically organized manner. Every effort has been made to deliver an insight—rather than just
an understanding—as well as heuristic explanations of theoretical results wherever possible.
 Preface xvii

Many examples are provided for further clarification of abstract results. Even a partial success
in achieving this stated goal would make all our efforts worthwhile.

A Whole New World

There have been a number of major technology developments since the publication of the third
edition in 1998. First of all, the cellular telephone has deeply penetrated the daily lives of urban
and suburban households in most developed and even developing nations. In 1998 there were
very few students with beepers and cellphones in the classrooms. Now, nearly every college
student has a cellphone. Second, in 1998 most of the household internet connections were
linked via low-speed (of approximately 28.8 kbit/s) voice modems. Today, a majority of our
students are connected to cyberspace through high speed DSL or cable services. In addition,
wireless LAN has turned esoteric terms such as IEEE 802.11 into household names. Most
students in the classroom have explored these technologies to some extent.
Vast technological advances have produced a new generation of students extremely inter-
ested in learning about the new technologies and their implementations. These students are
eager to understand how and where they may be able to make contributions in the future. Such
strong motivation must be encouraged and taken advantage of. This new edition will enable
instructors either to cover the topics themselves or to assign reading materials that will allow
the students to acquire relevant information. The new edition achieves these goals by stressing
the digital aspects of the text and by incorporating the most commonly known wireless and
wire-line digital technologies.

Course Adoption
With a combined teaching experience of over 50 years, we have taught communication classes
under both quarter and semester systems in several major universities. On the other hand, the
students’ personal experiences with communication systems have continuously been multiply-
ing, from a simple radio set in the 1960s, to the turn of the twenty-first century, with its easy
access to wireless LAN, cellular devices, satellite radio, and home internet services. Hence,
more and more students are interested in learning how familiar electronic gadgets work. With
this important need and our past experiences in mind, we revised the fourth edition of this
text to fit well within several different curriculum configurations. In all cases, basic coverage
should teach the fundamentals of analog and digital communications (Chapters 1–7).

One-Semester Course (without strong probability background)

In many existing curricula, undergraduate students are not exposed to simple probability tools
until they begin to take communications. This occurs often because the students were required
to take an introductory statistical course disconnected from engineering science. This text is
well suited to students of such a background. The first seven chapters form a comprehensive
coverage of modern digital and analog communication systems for average ECE undergraduate
students. Such a course can be taught within one semester (40–45 instructional hours). Under
the premise that each student has built a solid background in Fourier analysis via a prerequisite
class on signals and systems, most of the first three chapters can be treated as a review in a
single week. The rest of the semester can be fully devoted to teaching Chapters 4 to 7, with
partial coverage on the practical systems of Chapters 12 and 13 to enhance students interest.

One-Semester Course (with a strong probability background)

For curricula that have strengthened the background coverage of probability theory, a much
more extensive coverage of digital communications can be achieved within one semester.
A rigorous probability class can be taught within the context of signal and system analysis
xviii PREFACE

(cf. Cooper and McGillem, Probabilistic Methods of Signal and System Analysis, Oxford
University Press, 1999, ISBN: 0195123549). For this scenario, in addition to Chapters 1 to 7,
Chapter 11 and part of Chapter 13 on equalization can also be taught in one semester, provided
the students have a solid probability background that permits the coverage of Chapter 8 and
Chapter 9 in a few hours. Students completing this course would be well prepared to enter the
telecommunications industry or to continue in a program of graduate studies.

Two-Semester Series (without a separate probability course)

The entire text can be thoroughly covered in two semesters for a curriculum that does not
have any prior probability course. In other words, for a two-course series, the goal is to teach
both communication systems and fundamentals of probabilities. In an era of many competing
courses in the ECE curriculum, it is hard to set aside two semester courses for communications
alone. On the other hand, most universities do have a probability course that is separately
taught by nonengineering professors. In this scenario it would be desirable to fold probability
theory into the two communication courses. Thus, for two semester courses, the coverage can
be as follows:

•
1st semester: Chapters 1–7 (Signals and Communication Systems)
•
2nd semester: Chapters 8–13 (Modern Digital Communication Systems)

One-Quarter Course (with a strong probability background)

In a quarter system, students must have prior exposure to probability and statistics at a rigorous
level (cf. Cooper and McGillem, Probabilistic Methods of Signal and System Analysis, Oxford
University Press, 1999, ISBN: 0195123549). They must also have solid knowledge of Fourier
analysis. Within a quarter, the class can teach the basics of analog and digital communication
systems (Chapters 3–7), analysis of digital communication systems (Chapter 11), and spread
spectrum communications (Chapter 12).

One-Quarter Course (without a strong probability background)

In the rare case of students who come in without much probability knowledge, it is important to
impart basic knowledge of communication systems. It is wise not to attempt to analyze digital
communication systems. Instead, the basic coverage without prior knowledge of probability
can be achieved by teaching the operations of analog and digital systems (Chapters 1–7) and
a high-level discussion of spread spectrum wireless systems (Chapter 12).

Two-Quarter Series (with basic probability background)

Unlike a one-quarter course, a two-quarter series can be well designed to teach most of the
important materials on communication systems and their analysis. The entire text can be
extensively taught in two quarters for a curriculum that has some preliminary coverage of
Fourier analysis and probabilities. Essentially using Chapters 1 to 3 and Chapter 8 as partly
new and partly review, the coverage can be as follows:

•
1st quarter: Chapters 1–10 (Communication Systems and Analysis)
•
2nd quarter: Chapters 11–15 (Digital Communication Systems)

MATLAB and Laboratory Experience

Since many universities no longer have hardware communication laboratories, MATLAB based
communication system exercises will be made available to enhance the learning experience.
 Preface xix

Students will be able to design systems and modify their parameters to evaluate the overall
effects on the performance of communication systems through computer displays and bit error
rate measurement. The students will acquire first-hand knowledge of how to design and perform
simulations of communication systems.

Acknowledgments
First, the authors would like to thank all the students they have had over the years. This edition
would not have been possible without much feedback from, and many discussions with, our
students. The authors thank all the reviewers for providing invaluable inputs to improve the
text. Finally, the authors also wish to thank Professor Norman Morrison, University of Cape
Town, for suggesting a new problem P8-2.3 in this edition.

B.P. Lathi
Zhi Ding
This page intentionally left blank
 1 INTRODUCTION

O
ver the past decade, the rapid expansion of digital communication technologies has
been simply astounding. Internet, a word and concept once familiar only to technolo-
gists and the scientific community, has permeated every aspect of people’s daily lives.
It is quite difficult to find any individual in a modern society that has not been touched by new
communication technologies ranging from cellular phones to Bluetooth. This book examines
the basic principles of communication by electric signals. Before modern times, messages
were carried by runners, carrier pigeons, lights, and fires. These schemes were adequate for the
distances and “data rates” of the age. In most parts of the world, these modes of communication
have been superseded by electrical communication systems,∗ which can transmit signals over
much longer distances (even to distant planets and galaxies) and at the speed of light.
Electrical communication is dependable and economical; communication technologies
improve productivity and energy conservation. Increasingly, business meetings are conducted
through teleconferences, saving the time and energy formerly expended on travel. Ubiqui-
tous communication allows real-time management and coordination of project participants
from around the globe. E-mail is rapidly replacing the more costly and slower “snail mails.”
E-commerce has also drastically reduced some costs and delays associated with marketing,
while customers are also much better informed about new products and product information.
Traditional media outlets such as television, radio, and newspapers have been rapidly evolving
in the past few years to cope with, and better utilize, the new communication and networking
technologies. The goal of this textbook is to provide the fundamental technical knowledge
needed by next-generation communication engineers and technologists for designing even
better communication systems of the future.

1.1 COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Figure 1.1 presents three typical communication systems: a wire-line telephone–cellular phone
connection, a TV broadcasting system, and a wireless computer network. Because of the
numerous examples of communication systems in existence, it would be unwise to attempt
to study the details of all kinds of communication systems in this book. Instead, the most
efficient and effective way to learn about communication is by studying the major func-
tional blocks common to practically all communication systems. This way, students are not

∗ With the exception of the postal service.

1
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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In these two and many other instances we see an unerring
psychology in Emily Brontë. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling,
as Charlotte Brontë realised, was not his love for Catherine, which
was "a sentiment fierce and inhuman," but his "half-confessed
regard for Hareton Earnshaw—the young man whom he has ruined."
Seldom has the spirit of a place brooded over a book as does the
spirit of the moors over Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë's
descriptions of scenery are as famous as those of Thomas Hardy:
they are even less laboured.
"Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow
of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet
substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which
drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf.
At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a
great thaw or a season of steady rain."
Exactitude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of passions
and emotions.
Her faults are as glaring as her virtues. Probably there has never
been a worse-constructed tale. It has to be read many times before
one can grasp its great qualities. There is scene within scene, tale
within tale of extraordinary intricacy. It is hard enough to remember
who is speaking; it is trebly hard to remember who everyone is. But
her genius is so all-powerful that once you are gripped by the story
you simply don't notice the clumsiness or the creaking of the
machinery.
Of a piece with her genius is her style. It is perfect in its simplicity,
strength and beauty, very different from that of Charlotte with her
"peruse" and "indite." Nor does Emily's dramatic instinct ever fail
her: her scenes of passion follow nature and always ring true.
The picture we get of her personality from Mrs Gaskell's Life of
Charlotte Brontë, the tall, the strong, the unconquerable, the lover of
the moors and the lover of animals, makes her stand out from that
book as of a heroic, lovable but altogether mysterious type.
It is to M. Maeterlinck, however, that we owe the last word on Emily
herself. To him she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul,
independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the
insignificance of all "experience" as compared with the spirit.
"Not a single event," he writes, "ever paused as it passed by her
threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her
heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision
and detail. We say that nothing ever happened, but did not all things
really happen to her much more directly and tangibly than with most
of us, seeing that everything that took place about her, everything
that she saw or heard was transformed within her into thoughts and
feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of life?...
"If to her there came nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow,
passion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when
emotion has faded away."
And what, you may well ask, has Emily's personality got to do with
us who are concentrating our attention on Wuthering Heights? Let
Swinburne supply the answer:
"The book is what it is because the author was what she was; this is
the main and central fact to be remembered. Circumstances have
modified the details; they have not implanted the conception.... The
love which devours life itself, which devastates the present and
desolates the future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing
less pure in it than flame or sunlight. And this passionate and ardent
chastity is utterly and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious.
Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly
absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple
and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion
of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the
splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. Then, as on
issuing sometimes from the tumult of charging waters, he finds, with
something of wonder, how absolutely pure and sweet was the
element of living storm with which his own nature has been for a
while made one; not a grain in it of soiling sand, not a waif of
clogging weed."
We read Wuthering Heights then for its exquisite purity of
description:—"The snow has quite gone down here, darling, and I
only see two white spots on the whole range of moors: the sky is
blue, and the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are all
brim full"—the perfection of her style. "If she be cold, I'll think it is
this north wind that chills me, and if she be motionless, it is sleep,"
and "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my
heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers," the stark-naked
grandeur of its genius.
"Wuthering Heights," says Charlotte Brontë, "was hewn in a wild
workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary
found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw
how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister;
a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He
wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his
meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and
there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock: in
the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost
beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss
clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance,
grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."
 III
CHARLES LAMB
Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should
one prefer a Corona cigar to a "gasper," a turkey to tripe, a magnum
of Mumm to a quart of "swipes," crêpe de Chine and georgette to
ninon, Gerald du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban
pantomime, Titian to Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a "reach-me-
down"?
It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a
question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees
it. We are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross
familiarity with the commonplace and the vulgar to "see" in the true
sense of the word.
There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an
introduction between our insignificant selves and some genius who
has the power to translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny
imagination.
Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for
one most important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony
to frighten us away; of all great writers he is the most human and
the most lovable. Begin by listening to his preface prefixed to The
Last Essay of Elia. There you will hear from his own lips the kind of
writing he undertakes to give you—"a sort of unlicked, incondite
things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes
and phrases."
Of himself we read with a grin of delight that "he never cared for the
society of what are called good people" ... that "he herded always,
while it was possible, with people younger than himself" ... that "his
manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man.
The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders."
He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a
like fame.
He was certainly not of the "unco' guid," which may have accounted
partially for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences.
As a writer he matters just in so far as he felt "the difference of
mankind—to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye
upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or
distaste.... I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices ... the
veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies."
The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a
lover of life he was:
"I am not content to pass away 'like a weaver's shuttle.' Those
metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of
mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears
human life to eternity, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.
I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the
unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets. I
would set up my tabernacles here. I am content to stand still, at the
age to which I am arrived.... I do not want ... to drop, like mellow
fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of
mine ... puzzles and discomposes me ... a new state of being
staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and
summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious
juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and
candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and
jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with Life?"
If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful
piece of English prose in existence, you must be a little less than
human yourself. So you ask me again why you should read Lamb,
and I answer: (1) because he has always something to say and
conveys his thought "without smothering it in blankets"; (2) because
in antique fancy, quip, oddity, whimsical jest, humour, wit and irony,
rare gifts all, he is a supreme master; (3) because his limitations and
tragedies were, like ours, many, but his courage in facing them,
unlike ours, was cheerful and invincible; the best dramatic and
literary critic of his time, he yet had no ear for music ("to read a
book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter"). He was
prevented from becoming an actor by an impediment in his speech;
drink went to his head at once and he was fond of it; himself the
shining example of the sanity of true genius, his sister killed her
father in a mad frenzy; holding women in reverence more than any
man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his choice; designed by nature
to be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was denied a university
education and condemned to thirty-six years of drudgery in a city
office ... the list of Life's little ironies in his case can be piled
mountain high, but the supreme irony is that this sufferer at the
hands of the malignant fates is our greatest humorist; and (4)
because he takes the homely and familiar for his subjects and sheds
fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most soured
among us reconsider life and its possibilities.
 IV
JAMES BOSWELL
Boswell is essentially a book for the pocket, to be opened at random
while waiting for a train or a doctor or a dentist; busy men of affairs
like Lord Rosebery have recognised it as the finest "night-cap" in the
world. It is the fallacy of thinking that "skipping" is the sign of a
shallow mind that has led to the avoidance of what is really the most
absorbing study in the world, the revelation of the lives and
characters of men of fame. And of all subjects for biography Dr
Johnson stands easily first, because he embodies all the essential
features of the English character; we see in him "our own magnified
and glorified selves."
Furthermore, he has a genius for his biographer; as Sir Walter
Raleigh says: "The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and
Johnson to Boswell is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good
fortune in literary history."
It is mainly by his conversations that his character is depicted, and it
is worth remembering that his mots are famous not only for their
good sense and sound judgment, but for their freshness and
unexpectedness.
"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself
into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of
being drowned ... a man in jail has more room, better food, and
commonly better company." "Men know that women are an
overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most
ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of
women knowing as much as themselves." "Even ill-assorted
marriages are preferable to cheerless celibacy." "Sir, a woman's
preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done
well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." "A peace will
equally leave the warrior and relater of wars destitute of
employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from
streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets
filled with scribblers accustomed to lie." "I am always for getting a
boy forward with his learning ... I would let him at first read any
English book ... because you have done a great deal when you have
brought him to have entertainment from a book." "Sir, young men
have more virtue than old men; they have more wit and humour and
knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so good
scholars."
Once started it is exceedingly difficult to avoid quoting extensively.
One feels in all that he says that Dr Johnson had at any rate cleared
his mind of cant and proved to the hilt the truth of his aphorisms.
You will have noticed how clear-cut and simple they are, clothed in
language poles removed from that which tradition has chosen to
associate with the "sesquipedalian lexicographer." What sanity of
outlook and healthiness of mind is expressed in such a robust
sentence as "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth,
and every other man has a right to knock him down for it"; or,
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." What joy we feel
in the thought that to appreciate such talk as his we need not be
literary: it is enough to be English. "Books without the knowledge of
life are useless; or what should books teach but the art of living?"
We can trust a man who talks like that.
But it is not only for his superb common sense that we love Dr
Johnson; it is for the complete portrait of a complex character, rich in
virtue, human in its failings and limitations, that we owe Boswell an
unpayable debt of gratitude. "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the
fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is
better known to us than any other man in history." How well do we
all recall that exquisite summing up of Macaulay. No novelist would
dare to give us so paradoxical a picture. Here is a man full of
reverence and piety who yet touches the posts as he walks to avert
evil; a man notorious for his brusquerie and lack of manners, who
describes himself as "well-bred to a degree of needless scrupulosity,"
and of whom Goldsmith said that he had nothing of the bear but his
skin; a man far more apprehensive of death than most of us, who
yet took the knife out of the surgeon's hands in order to operate on
himself; afflicted by terrible diseases, he was yet one of the most
jovial and sociable men of his age; by nature sluggish and averse
from work, he yet did more actual drudgery than any ten ordinary
mortals.
Practically starving himself, he yet clothed, housed and fed a
multitude of ingrates; the great literary dictator of his time, he failed
almost entirely to appreciate poetry, and (most paradoxical of all)
the great giant of letters of the eighteenth century he has yet left
practically nothing that the ordinary man ever reads. "This is the
greatness of Johnson, that he is greater than his works. He thought
of himself as a man, not as an author ... duties and friendships and
charities were more to him than fame and honour." But the wise
man will not be content with the greatness of the man; "the reader
who desires to have Johnson to himself for an hour, with no
interpreter, cannot do better than turn to the notes on Shakespeare.
They are written informally and fluently; they are packed full of
observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that they are all too
few."
It is hard to imagine that anyone who has read the noble preface to
the Dictionary, the illuminating preface to and notes on
Shakespeare, the thrilling Life of Richard Savage, and a selection of
the sage essays in The Rambler and The Idler should rest content
until he had read Johnson from end to end. This, then, is why one
should read Boswell; you will get a full-length picture of the typical
Englishman at his greatest, a lesson on the art of life, and an
appetite to read the works of one of the sanest, "all-round" writers
who ever lived.
 V
WILLIAM HAZLITT
"I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the
wisest and finest spirits breathing.... I think I shall go to my grave
without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion,"
writes Charles Lamb to Robert Southey, but "I wish he would not
quarrel with the world at the rate he does."
We read Lamb and Johnson and Pepys for their lovableness; we read
Hazlitt for his intensity of passion, his vigorous hate, his sense of
glorious enjoyment, his unstudied ease of manner, his healthy
attitude to literature, his enduring freshness and his stimulating
criticism.
There is little in his life history to endear him to us; he was
unfortunate in his relations with the three women who came into his
life: "I have wanted one thing only to make me completely happy,
but lacking that I lack all"; he was an impossible friend; he even
managed to quarrel with Lamb, and though he was an acute and
brilliant lecturer, there was little sympathy between him and his
audience. The early part of the nineteenth century was the worst
possible time for a shy, over-sensitive and easily irritated writer to
work in; the obscenities of the Blackwood's Magazine clique have left
an ineradicable stain—but when they speak of Hazlitt "as rather an
ulcer than a man," even after this lapse of time our gorge rises; one
ceases to wonder at the vitriolic bitterness which he wastes on his
enemies.
We read and admire Hazlitt because they never brought him to his
knees; he was a born fighter, a true adventurer; he neither asked
nor gave quarter.
Most of us have wondered why a nation so sports-mad as we are
should have been content for so long with such inept accounts of
mighty conflicts by field and river as we get in our newspapers.
Bernard Shaw did his best to portray a boxing contest, but Hazlitt
alone among writers has succeeded in expounding the philosophy of
sport and making us live through every moment of a bygone fight as
if we had actually witnessed it:
"Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full
in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or
forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell
back, throwing his hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the
sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he
fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His
face was like a human skull, a death's head spouting blood. The
eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the
mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a
preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in
Dante's Inferno."
It is worthy of notice that he dedicates this description to the ladies:
"nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of
the brave."
Hazlitt is pre-eminently a fresh-air man. His essay On Going a
Journey, as R. L. Stevenson said, "is so good that there should be a
tax levied on all who have not read it." "Give me the clear blue sky
over my head" (what joy it gives one merely to transcribe the well-
known words), "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road
before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to
thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy." He brings just this
naïve, fresh-air, healthy enthusiasm into all his critical work, and it is
this quality that calls forth that noble panegyric of Professor
Saintsbury which shows once and for all the reason for reading
Hazlitt:
"To anyone who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to
anyone who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for
himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is
not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language ... he is
the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet."
That this is a bare statement of truth can be seen in the opening
lecture on the English poets:
"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It
relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human
mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for
nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and
intelligible shape can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal
language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a
contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for
anything else ... it is not a branch of authorship: it is 'the stuff of
which our life is made.'"
These are brave words and, as we should expect from so alert a
pugilist, straight from the shoulder.
His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays is studded with gems of
criticism. "It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespeare's heroines that
they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure
abstractions of the affections." He is the least derivative of all critics
and quotes from one authority alone, himself: hence his conclusions
are not those of the academic professors, and it delights our hearts
to listen to him trouncing Henry V., that false idol of the mob, and
extolling Falstaff at his royal master's expense: "Falstaff is the better
man of the two."
And so you again ask me in one sentence why we should read
Hazlitt and the answer is, in the words of George Sampson: "A
fondness for Hazlitt is a fondness for health in literature" ... and
there is room for health in the literature of to-day.
"Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like
Hazlitt."
If you want to prove this, turn again to The Ignorance of the
Learned. If only we could write like that!
 VI
SAMUEL PEPYS
All girls in their teens and most boys keep what they call a diary, just
as most undergraduates and all young unmarried women write what
they imagine to be a novel: the value of each of these forms of
expression would be considerably enhanced if the writers of either
took any pains to learn the technique of their art. Of the ideal diarist
two things are pre-eminently required: an all-round interest in life
and a complete self-candour which is poles removed from the
anæmic sickness of self-love and an effective antidote against it. No
one should dare to keep a diary before reading Pepys from end to
end, and few people will dare to do so after reading him.
The question is not why we should read Pepys, but why we cannot
help reading Pepys. The answer is simple: No novelist would have
the audacity to ask us to believe in a hero who was at the same time
Secretary to the Admiralty, regenerator of the navy, Master of the
Trinity House, master of a city company, Member of Parliament,
President of the Royal Society, the friend and counsellor of kings and
princes, and yet spent his spare time "picking up" girls in church or
behind the counter, making love to his own maids and actresses,
hiding his gold in the garden and digging it up again, expressing
"mighty content" at the spectacle of men being hanged, drawn and
quartered, alternately sulking with his wife and soothing her
suspicions about his amours, continually making oaths not to get
drunk and breaking them, gloating over his clothes like a peacock,
lamenting every expense in the way of entertainment like a miser,
frightened to death by fear of ghosts, burglars and the plague,
chronicling the details of every delectable dinner that he ate, and
every delectable wench that he saw or kissed—in short, expressing
all the undignified weaknesses our flesh is heir to.
"No man," says the philosopher, "was ever written down but by
himself."
Certainly no man ever wrote himself "down" more honestly than
Pepys. Arnold Bennett was only speaking the bare truth when he
said that none of us would ever have the pluck to lock ourselves in a
room and commit to paper exactly what we have said or done or felt
during the whole of one day, even if we knew that no eyes but our
own should ever scan the page and that the manuscript should be
burnt as soon as it was written. Compromise is an essential
concomitant of civilisation: perfect sincerity even with ourselves is
impossible. This explains at once the irresistible fascination of Pepys:
here is a man who has actually achieved the impossible. Nine-tenths
of our staple food in conversation is gossip, not only in suburban
drawing-rooms and London clubs, but in every department of life.
Scandal-mongering is as much a part and parcel of our life as it was
in Lady Sneerwell's day.
These peeps behind the scenes in a man's private life make us much
more lenient in our judgment of our own peccadilloes: thousands of
men have, we feel, acted as he did and we have done, but only
Pepys has had the temerity to confess: there is no entertainment so
diverting as that of watching a man give himself away. Pepys does it
on every page with an unconscious humour which adds a
thousandfold to our enjoyment:
"To the Strand, to my booksellers, and there bought an idle,
rogueish French book, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding
the buying of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have
read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor
among them, to disgrace them if it should be found." ... "This day,
not for want, but for good husbandry, I sent my father, by his desire,
six pair of my old shoes, which fit him, and are good."
"To St Dunstan's church where ... I stood by a pretty, modest maid,
whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got
further and further from me; and at last, I could perceive her to take
pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again—
which, seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And
then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid, in a pew close to me,
and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which
she suffered a little, and then withdrew."
Pretty good, this, for the Secretary to the Admiralty! We feel
ourselves mighty superior fellows when we read confessions like
this, don't we?
"My wife being dressed this day in fair hair, did make me so mad,
that I spoke not one word to her, though I was ready to burst with
anger ... in my way home discovered my trouble to my wife,
swearing several times, which I pray God forgive me for, and
bending my fist, that I would not endure it. She, poor wretch, was
surprised with it, and made me no answer all the way home; but
there we parted, and I to the office late, and then home, and
without supper to bed, vexed ... up (next day) and by-and-by down
comes my wife ... she promising to wear white locks no more in my
sight, which I, like a severe fool, thinking not enough, begun to
except against, and made her fly out to very high terms and cry, and
in her heat, told me of (my) keeping company with Mrs Knipp (the
actress), saying, that if I would never see her more—of whom she
hath more reason to suspect than I had heretofore of Pembleton—
she would never wear white locks more. This vexed me ... but to
think never to see this woman—at least, to have her here more; and
so all very good friends as ever."
"'And so to bed,' writes Mr Secretary Pepys a hundred times in his
diary, and we may be sure that each time he joined Mrs Pepys
beneath the coverlet he felt that the moment which marked the end
of his wonderful day was one deserving careful record." So writes
"W. N. P. Barbellion," the only modern diarist possessed in any
degree of Pepys' complete self-candour, and, it is worthy of notice,
the passage occurs in a book called Enjoying Life.
 VII
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Because he always wrote prose like an artist Walter Savage Landor is
worthy to be read at all times and in all moods.

"And through the trumpet of a child of Rome

Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece."

We all know what Swinburne thought about him: the trouble has
been that so few people have taken any pains to go further and
rediscover this great, imaginative artist for themselves. He is one of
those unfortunates whose work we agree to take as read. If we only
had a half his feeling for the value and weight of words the English
tongue would be ten times richer than it is to-day, richer in harmony,
richer in preciseness, richer in simplicity. He had a very definite
sense of a writer's duty: "I hate false words, and seek with care,
difficulty and moroseness those that fit the thing." Surely when we
find a man with so wide a range of thought, so filled with
imagination, so much in love with heroism, beauty and freedom,
with a prose style that is, of its kind, unrivalled, it is incumbent upon
us to sink our prejudice against the classical and do the little extra
work which is essential to a true appreciation of that salutary, clear-
cut, highly disciplined art. His appeal is to the few who can enjoy the
best literature for itself, but there is no reason why this circle should
not be far wider than it is.
In his determination not to say anything superfluous he did at times
fall into obscurity, but we forgive that in Browning: it is certainly not
an all-obtrusive fault in Landor, especially in that later work of his,
the Imaginary Conversations, on which his reputation now rests.
Whether in those short and stirring scenes of emotion and action, or
in the long and quiet ones of discussion and reflection, he shows an
admirable insight into character, a fine dignity and urbanity, a
mastery over delicate aphorisms on human nature, and a range of
interest running from the earliest times to his own era. Take a few of
the titles at random if you wish to gauge his range: "Peleus and
Thetis," "Leofric and Godiva," "Mahomet and Sergius," "Filippo Lippi
and Pope Eugenius IV.," "Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn," "Peter the
Great and Alexis," "The Dream of Boccaccio," "The Dream of
Petrarca."
Who is there among the narrators of old-time legends capable of
charming us so much as the man who makes the slave-girl Rhodopè
begin her life story thus:
"Never shall I forget the morning when my father, sitting in the
coolest part of the house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a
chlamys of scarlet cloth fringed with silver. He watched the merchant
out of the door, and then looked wistfully into the corn-chest. I, who
thought there was something worth seeing, looked in also, and,
finding it empty, expressed my disappointment, not thinking,
however, about the corn. A faint and transient smile came over his
countenance at the sight of mine. He unfolded the chlamys,
stretched it out with both hands before me, and then cast it over my
shoulders. I looked down on the glittering fringe and screamed with
joy. He then went out; I know not what flowers he gathered, but he
gathered many; and some he placed in my bosom, and some in my
hair...."
Godiva's one poignant cry to herself, "I hope they will not crowd
about me so to-morrow," strikes a more effective note than the
whole of Tennyson's poem on the same subject. Filippo Lippi's
peerless description of his adventures in Barbary in the service of
the corsair Abdul, where he met Almeida of the hazel eyes, Almeida,
"cool, smooth and firm as a nectarine gathered before sunrise," is
too well known to be quoted here, but is one of the first to be read
by those who would see Landor in his natural element of beauty.
"The clematis overtopped the lemon and orange trees ... white
pigeons, and others in colour like the dawn of day ..."—this passage
in particular is a masterpiece of descriptive writing. Not easily does
one forget the pathetic figure of the discarded Anne Boleyn
confronted in prison by her drunken husband. "Love your Elizabeth,
my honoured Lord, and God bless you! She will soon forget to call
me; do not chide her; think how young she is. Could I, could I kiss
her, but once again! It would comfort my heart—or break it."
His sense of the dramatic is nowhere better shown than in that
dialogue, though Spenser's announcement of his terrible loss to
Essex goes near to equal it in pathos as does the appearance of
Fiammetta to Boccaccio in his dream.
But to prove how absolutely the classical spirit can bring perfection
to our native language what need is there of quoting more than this:
"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went
before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late;
better than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under
us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present
while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a
note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past, and
what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the
grave: there are no voices, O Rhodopè, that are not soon mute,
however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of
passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last."
The white heat of austere, restrained passion is here, it is the
sublimation of the Latin model. This surely is English as we would
have her written, that which is rightly said and therefore sounds
rightly. This is one of those certain occasions on which prose can
bear a great deal of poetry: indeed there is more real poetry latent
in the cadences of this paragraph than in many so-called poems of
to-day.
Sir Sidney Colvin happily contrasts Landor's twilight with that more
famous one of Keats:
"Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is
left discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers
under them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the
shells in our path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus."
"The presence of the twilight and its spell," he very justly comments,
"are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in
the work of Keats, only they are felt and realised in a widely
different manner."
This difference is simply that which lies between the romantic and
the classical. Landor will never trust himself to go beyond a bare
statement of fact, but beauty is no less implicit in the architecture of
straight lines than in the architecture of adornments and
embellishments. His aphorisms have passed into our common
speech and men call up many beautifully coined phrases from the
depths of their consciousness about life and death, forgetful of their
source, which are attributable to Landor.
"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice,
and protracts our sufferings"; "Goodness does not more certainly
make men happy than happiness makes them good"; "Those who
are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite
satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world"; "We often hear that
such or such a thing 'is not worth an old song.' Alas! how very few
things are! What precious recollections do some of them awaken!
What pleasurable tears do they excite? They purify the stream of
life; they can delay it on its shelves and rapids; they can turn it back
again to the soft moss amidst which its sources issue."
"Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flamed by heat, or violence,
or accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted
after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do
we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state.
Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again;
precious ones never."
Reading exquisite thoughts like these clothed in such a perfectly firm
manner, we are led to think of the values of phrases and words
which, like many of our blessings, lie unrecognised.
"How carelessly, for example, do we say, 'I am delighted to hear
from you.' No other language has this beautiful expression, which,
like some of the most lovely flowers, loses its charm for want of
close inspection."
The classical method, you will notice again, of getting close to the
object and keeping one's eyes on it, not moving away to such a
distance that all the beauty lies in the vagueness and mystery of the
scene. Just as in his dramatic and narrative conversations he springs
easily from age to age, shedding a flood of new light on historical
episodes, so in his reflective and discursive notes he touches on
every topic of human interest, religion, fame, death, love, manners,
society, politics, literature; as a critic he moves easily, with felicity of
expression and breadth of survey, "the herald of the gods," with a
sure sense of what is required of him.
"A perfect piece of criticism must exhibit where a work is good or
bad; why it is good or bad; in what degree it is good or bad; must
also demonstrate in what manner and to what extent the same ideas
or reflections have come to others, and if they be clothed in poetry,
why, by an apparently slight variation, what in one author is
mediocrity, in another is excellence."
"To be useful to as many as possible is the especial duty of a critic,
and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision. He
walks in a garden which is not his own; and he neither must gather
the blossoms to embellish his discourse, nor break the branches to
display his strength. Rather let him point to what is out of order, and
help to raise what is lying on the ground."
"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times, he is
certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding."
"To constitute a great writer the qualities are, adequate expression
of just sentiments, plainness without vulgarity, elevation without
pomp, sedateness without austerity, alertness without impetuosity."
As we should expect, he lays most stress upon the virtues of
moderation and composure. "Whoever has the power of creating has
likewise the inferior power of keeping his creations in order. The best
poets are the most impressive, because their steps are regular; for
without regularity there is neither strength nor state. Look at
Sophocles, look at Æschylus, look at Homer."
"There are four things requisite to constitute might, majesty and
dominion in a poet: these are creativeness, constructiveness, the
sublime, the pathetic. A poet of the first order must have formed, or
taken to himself and modified, some great subject. He must be
creative and constructive."
"It is only the wretchedest of poets that wish all they ever wrote to
be remembered: some of the best would be willing to lose the
most."
When he descends to the particular we find the same strong, sane,
comprehensive attitude of criticism. What could be better than his
note on Addison?
"I have always been an admirer of Addison, and the oftener I read
him, I mean his prose, the more he pleases me. Perhaps it is not so
much his style, which, however, is easy and graceful and
harmonious, as the sweet temperature of thought in which we
always find him, and the attractive countenance, if you will allow me
the expression, with which he meets me upon every occasion. It is
very remarkable, and therefore I stopped to notice it, that not only
what little strength he had, but even all his grace and ease, forsake
him when he ventures into poetry."
He defends the use of idiom ("Every good writer has much idiom; it
is the life and spirit of language") and attacks the use of quotation:
"Before I let fall a quotation I must be taken by surprise. I seldom
do it in conversation, seldomer in composition; for it mars the
beauty and unity of style; especially when it invades it from a foreign
tongue. A quoter is either ostentatious of his acquirements, or
doubtful of his cause. And, moreover, he never walks gracefully who
leans upon the shoulder of another, however gracefully that other
may walk."
Of his verse epigrams all the world knows Rose Aylmer and most
people his of himself:

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

It would be hard to improve upon the accuracy of that description or

the artistry with which it is expressed.
"I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests
few and select."
It is with the object of enticing you to join that group of eclectics
that I have attempted to show you what manner of man he is who
invites you to his table. The conversation will be rich, the viands
delicious to an Epicurean palate, but if you have no taste and your
talk is vulgar you will only be bored.
 VIII
JOHN DONNE
Readers of Rupert Brooke will almost certainly have made the
acquaintance of Donne the poet, admirers of Mr Logan Pearsall
Smith will with equal certainty have dipped into the excellent
selections which that versatile writer has made of Dr Donne's
sermons.
But to search for a reason why everyone should read Donne we
need go no further than George Saintsbury's words:
"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the
ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the
alternations not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and
laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly
enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and
hardly any writer like Donne."
Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton,
who wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues
us from the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience
of the intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic
echo to-day in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about
medicine, law, astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he
joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever
adventuring in science, in love and in travel. At the age of forty-two,
poverty-stricken and a failure, he took Orders and became one of
the greatest preachers we have ever had. He poured his whole soul
into his sermons, and held his congregations spellbound with his
gorgeous prose, "perhaps never equalled for the beauty of its
rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence of its diction": he dwelt
mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he knew a good deal from
experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity. Listen to this on
Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the beautifull Queenes
of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six,
some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in respect of this
Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before the Law given
by Moses, and the two thousand yeares of Law.... In all this six
thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde, ... in
this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to
strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal
confession (rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe
in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither,
and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise
of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I
talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees
bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels
should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot
tell; Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when
I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures,
a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in
mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a
Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So certainely is
there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world."
"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind,
his Sermons would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints
since the days of the Apostles."
If only more sermons contained such human touches as the
following, the modern church-goers would be more plentiful:—
"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am
at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S.
Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to
you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is
likely you will say to one another, when I have done, you are not all
here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are
thinking that you have heard a better sermon somewhere else, of
this text before."
But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and
impassioned imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge
any passage in the whole range of English prose:
"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to
tell me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it
distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou
wouldest not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will
trouble thine eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-
winde hath blowne the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and
the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard,
who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This
is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this
the Plebeian bran...."
But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote

"Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought,"

the Donne of

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,

Who died before the God of Love was born,"

of

"I wonder by my troth what thou and I

Did till we loved?"

of the
"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to
sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.
Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the
universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He
was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in
his work. He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

"Whoever loves, if he do not propose

The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

He is brutal:

"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."

He is inconstant:

"I can love any, so she be not true."

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

"Though she were true when you met her,

And last till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three."

His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought

That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."

Or again:
"And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand
The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."

In his Elegies he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full

detail, satirically, sensually. In Jealousy we are given an exact picture
of the deformed husband who,

"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,

Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"

—so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another
house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat
of jealousy."
In The Perfume we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie
still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her
daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try
her longings: we see

"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man
That oft names God in oaths, and only then."

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her
"hydroptic father catechized."
There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled To his
Mistress Going to Bed, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely
quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

"There is no penance due to innocence."

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of
love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an
abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.
In The Ecstasy we see him crying out against passionate friendship:

"But O alas, so long, so far,

Our bodies why do we forbear?"
and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:

"So must pure lovers' souls descend

T'affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book."

And in The Anniversary he retracts all that he had once said about
inconstancy:

"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we

Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we, where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain;
Let us live nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."

There are few lovelier lyrics than Break of Day:

"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;

The light that shines comes from thine eyes;
The day breaks not, it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.
Stay, or else my joys will die
And perish in their infancy."

Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light
than The Dream:

"Dear love, for nothing less than thee

Would I have broke this happy dream;
 It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

As lightning, or a taper's light,

Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;
Yet I thought thee
—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight;
But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane, to think thee anything but thee."
There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and
extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his
faults lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but
they are worth searching for.
And yet—a word of warning—let George Saintsbury give it: "No one
who thinks Don Quixote a merely funny book, no one who sees in
Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek
versification ... need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."
We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep and
subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his anti-
sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage of
his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the
gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for
his modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy
thinking: he frees us from illusion.
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