more than one avenue of thought and finds he has been there, and has not lost himself.

But the virtue of the Pensées is that while they can be read for an object, they need not be. Certainly, even in their promiscuous state, they are one of the great arguments for religion; and those who read them so are reading them in the spirit of Pascal. Yet they have been a favourite with sceptics; even Voltaire, their greatest enemy, is horribly fascinated by them. As with so many books, half their spell lies in what is said by the way. It is in the unforeseen variety of the amazingly diverse treasures that are strewn in them, the pungent suddenness of a trait or reflection; and so we remember the restless humans who cannot stay quiet in a room, or the nose of Cleopatra, or the death of Cromwell. After all, a desultory reading of the Pensées is true to the form in which we have them. If the Apology of which they are the disjointed fragments had been written, it must have been a great book, and one of the very few of its kind which might be read for pleasure; but it would not be what this one is, a book that can be taken up and dropped at will; nor, in view of Pascal's classical restraint, would it so have given us the author's image. As it is, it seems the mirror of an individual, sincere, detached, and yet passionate. The curious feature of Pascal is that while he leaves most opposite impressions he can also give the sharpest sense of unity. It comes from the lucid indomitableness of mind and will which enabled him, despite a life cut short in middle age and broken by suffering, to scale one height after another. His desire to excel became a very piercing instrument, and even a virtue. His is among the rarest cases of a life of the mind and spirit lived at each point to the last intensity.

XXII

SPANISH AND ENGLISH BALLADS

ENGLAND and Spain are the two great Atlantic nations looking to the West. They have often and long been at variance with one another, and it would be hardly true to say that there has been any great exchange of ideas and sympathies between them. But many things in their history seem to indicate a sort of unconscious resemblance; they answer one another at a distance, as the cliffs of the Land's End and the Lizard may be thought to correspond with the strong headlands of Finisterre; as St. Michael of the Mount in Cornwall "looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold." Milton saw this; he is fond of the Atlantic; the island of Britain belongs to the Atlantic-" the Britannic Empire with all her daughter islands about her." But the ocean, in Milton's mind, would be wrongly disparaged if the share of Spain were ignored. The Spanish names in Lycidas prove this, and there are other evidences. Where you find "the steep Atlantic stream " in Comus, Milton wrote at first "Tartessian stream," from Tartessus-that is, Tharsis, a place in Spain. When he changed this, it was not from any prejudice against Spain, but (probably) because "steep Tartessian

stream" had too many s's in it, and certainly because the name was too particular, and apt to be not understood. He wrote instead of it the right name, Atlantic. This is a very fitting place to remember two Spanish poems of Atlantis-La Atlantida of the Catalan poet Jacinto Verdaguer, and the Atlantida Conquistada of my much honoured friend Leopoldo Diaz.

In the prose history of these coasts there are many resemblances between England and Spain. I think especially of the captains' reports about 1587 and 1588, collected and published in Duro's History of the Armada. The Spanish cruisers were too familiar, the English may think, with Mount's Bay and the Longships and the Scillys, but there is a great natural likeness between their stories and the narratives in HakluytHakluyt, whose debt to Spain has been so well estimated by Mr. Foster Watson in the English Historical Review. It is curious to think, too, of the poets who went voyaging. The Spanish poets were more thorough and went further than the English, who have no one on their side to match the heroic author of the Araucana, for the extent either of his travels or his poetry, “on that vast shore wash'd by the furthest sea "-though we remember Thomas Lodge and his Rosalind, Euphues' Golden Legacy, written at sea under Cavendish; while Donne's "Island Voyage Island Voyage" to the Azores with his poems of the Calm and the Storm might be compared with Lope de Vega's share in the Armada.

The Spanish and the English drama, the plays of Lope and Shakespeare, have often been compared, and affinities traced between them. Too much may be made of superficial resemblances. That the Spanish and the English theatre should in practice neglect the unities does not of itself make any essential likeness

between them. But the resemblances are there, often quaint and surprising, as when Spain and England suddenly at the same time discovered that quadrangular courtyards were obviously meant for theatricals. The history of the early extempore theatre in Spain and England is all one, in idea, and historians use the same language of each country, describing how the stage was rigged up on one side of the courtyard, how the windows on three sides overlooking the yard were made to serve as boxes, how the vulgar occupied the ground in the middle. It is amusing, again, to find the Spanish and the English playwrights in their blank verse agreeing to wind up their blank tirades with a final rhyming couplet. In spite of this and other coincidences the Spanish plays, with their predominant short verse in rhyme and assonance (blank verse only for occasional use), are not really very like the Elizabethan drama. What is really like is the careless, independent spirit that saved both Spanish and English from the tyranny of the Renaissance. Both Spain and England were deep in debt to Italy for instruction in poetry; but in drama, where the Italian authors had not so much to teach them, both Spain and England refused to accept the Italian authority. This refusal is not a mere negative objection to discipline; it is lively, original invention, springing free and reaching out for new worlds.

Occasionally something of a salute is offered from the one country to the other. We can hardly reckon Lope's attention to Francis Drake as of this sort. More encouraging is Cervantes in the Española inglesa, yet his respect for this country is not exaggerated or hyperbolical. Shakespeare, on the other side, is more appreciative, though he may be thought to have

dissembled his love in his specimen of a Spanish cavalier. At any rate, he knew something about him. Spain, for Shakespeare, was more real tham Bohemia or Illyria. His spelling shows this. Armado appears sometimes as Armatho. And Mr. Oman suggested many years ago that Moth, his page, is simply, Mozo. Don Adriano is introduced in a sonnet spoken by the King of Navarre. By the way, we may notice that this occasional use of sonnet in drama, frequent in Shakespeare's earlier plays, is another point of coincidence between Spanish and English fashions. The sonnet, says Lope in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, is useful to fill up pauses para los que aguardan. And the King of Navarre in Love's Labour's Lost speaks a sonnet and describes Don Adriano de Armado:

our court you know is haunted

With a refined traveller of Spain,

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One who the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish, like enchanting harmony;

A man of complements, whom right and wrong
Have chose as umpire of their mutiny
This child of fancy that Armado hight
For interim to our studies will relate

In high-born words the worth of many a knight
From tawny Spain lost in the world's debate.
How you delight, my lords, I know not, I,
But I protest I love to hear him lie,
And I will use him for my minstrelsy.

There is, of course, burlesque in this, but there is also a sense of the heroism and the chivalry of Spain. "The world's debate "-does this not mean the war of Christendom against the Infidel? Dr. Johnson thinks it does not refer to the Crusades particularly, but to the general tumult of the world. Dr. Johnson was