St. Simeon Stylites.

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erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross; but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired without descending from his column.

account.

Successive crowds of pilgrims from Gaul and India saluted the Divine pillar of Simeon; the tribes of Saracens disputed in arms the honour of his benediction; the queens of Arabia and Persia gratefully confessed his supernatural virtue; and the angelic Hermit was consulted by the younger Theodosius in the most important concerns of the Church and State. The remains were transported from the mountain of Telenissa, by a solemn procession of the patriarch, the master-general of the East, six bishops, twenty-one counts or tribunes, and six thousand soldiers; and Antioch revered his bones as her glorious ornament and impregnable defence.”

Such was the man whose feelings, intentions, hopes,whose theory of life and general conception of duty and destiny, Tennyson undertakes to express in Simeon's own words as he stands or crouches on his pillar. In the spirit of earnest sympathy, not without a trace of reverence, does the poet enter on his task, not permitting himself a touch of grotesquerie, and not in the least inclined, as Gibbon slyly is, to poke fun at Simeon. He at once penetrates to the centre of his hero's scheme of things by grasping his conception of himself as a sinner. These are the opening lines, the speaker being Simeon :

Altho' I be the basest of mankind,

From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,

I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold

Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn and sob,

Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.

The man, remember, had gone in for saintship at thirteen years of age. I am not aware that it has ever been suggested that, before then, he had committed any serious offence. A good-for-nothing shepherd I can well imagine him to have been, but that would not strike him as a sin. The probability, the practical certainty, is that Simeon's sin, as is usual in similar cases, was almost entirely a thing of the imagination, and that there was no definite form of sin, whether of wrong-doing to mankind, wrong-doing to himself, or wrong-doing, in the shape of hatred or indifference, to God,-under one or other of which heads all sin that is not mere fantastic imagining must come, of which he could be accused. But you will find that nearly the whole of the false or foolish religiosity in the world—the religiosity that is the shame of religion, pure and undefiled, and that corrupts the best into the worse attribute of man-depends upon a preposterously exaggerated conception of sin. The self-degradation of false humility lies close to spiritual pride, and there is exquisite psychological truth in Tennyson's representation of Simeon, for all his sense of the tons of sin that weigh him down, as reckoning up the claims he has to Divine consideration.

Bethink Thee, Lord, while Thou and all the saints
Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth

House in the shade of comfortable roofs,

Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food,
And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls,
I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,

To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints;

Or in the night, after a little sleep,

I wake the chill stars sparkle; I am wet

With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost.

I wear an undress'd goatskin on my back;

St. Simeon Stylites.

A grazing iron collar grinds my neck;
And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross,

And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die :

O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin.

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After every paroxysm of self-accusation, the sweet and subtle strain of self-laudation is heard.

I, Simeon of the pillar, by surname
Stylites among men; I, Simeon,

The watcher on the column till the end;
I, Simeon, whose brain the sunshine bakes;
I, whose bald brows in silent hours become
Unnaturally hoar with rime, do now
From my high nest of penance here proclaim
That Pontius and Iscariot by my side
Show'd like fair seraphs. On the coals I lay,
A vessel full of sin; all hell beneath
Made me boil over.

Nevertheless

That time is at the doors

When you may worship me without reproach;
For I will leave my relics in your land.
And you may carve a shrine about my dust,
And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones,

When I am gather'd to the glorious saints.

It may seem unreasonable, when we consider how much Tennyson has given us in this poem, to suggest that he might have achieved still more if he had endeavoured to realise for us Simeon's connection with the life of his time -to enable us to comprehend a state of society in which the Emperor Theodosius could come to consult this religious maniac on the concerns of Church and State. It was religion of Simeon's kind that brought destruction upon Eastern Christendom. A strong superstition is safer for nations than an infantile religion, and the warrior saints that issued from the Arabian desert trampled into the dust those babyish idolaters that knelt round shrines like Simeon's. Of no creed ever known among men is it so imperiously necessary as it is of Christianity to ask, of what sort is your Christianity? Simeon of the pillar, Oliver Cromwell, John

Howard, Dominic the Inquisitor, were all sincere Christians. But a babyish Christianity is the most dangerous of all, and the sturdy atheists that now jostle us on the streets of every city will do to us as Mahomet and his friends did to the worshippers of Simeon Stylites, if the God we reverence is one who sets great store by our genuflexions, and is immensely interested in what we have for dinner on Friday.

I

CHAPTER IX.

IN MEMORIAM.

HAVE just glanced over something I wrote about In Memoriam in 1856, which, as it has been long out of print, as I agree with every word of it, and it strikes me as prettier than what I write now, I shall take the liberty to insert here, if only by way of introduction to further remarks:"The greatest poem, all things considered, that Tennyson ever wrote is In Memoriam. In it the purely æsthetic enthusiasm of the London School has given place to, or rather has obtained a new and grander vitality in, the enthusiasm of life and action. The name of the poem indicates one of the most difficult efforts which can be made in literature. It aims at embalming a private sorrow for everlasting remembrance, at rendering a personal grief generally and immortally interesting. The set eye and marble brow of stoicism would cast back human sympathy; the broken accents and convulsive weeping of individual affliction would awaken no nobler emotion than mere pity; it was sorrow in a calm and stately attitude, sorrow robed in angel-like beauty, though retaining a look of earnest, endless sadness, that would draw generation after generation to the house of mourning. No poet, save one possessed not only of commanding genius, but of peculiar qualifications for the task, could have attempted to delineate a sorrow like this. The genius of Tennyson found in the