‘HOURS IN A LIBRARY.’
In the face of the proverb about the pavement of the way to hell, I am prepared to maintain that good intentions are better than bad, and that evil is the wretch who is not full of good intentions and holy plans at the beginning of each New Year. Time, like a fruitful plain, then lies stretched before you; the eye rests on tuneful groves, cool meadow-lands, and sedgy streams, whither you propose to wander, and where you promise yourself many happy, well-spent hours. I speak in metaphors, of course—pale-faced Londoner that I am—my meadows and streams are not marked upon the map: they are (coming at once to the point, for this is a generation which is only teased by allegory) the old books I mean to read over again during the good year of grace 1894. Yonder stately grove is Gibbon; that thicket, Hobbes; where the light glitters on the green surface (it is black mud below) is Sterne; healthful but penetrating winds stir Bishop Butler’s pages and make your naked soul shiver, as you become more and more convinced, the longer you read, that ‘someone has blundered,’ though whether it is you or your Maker remains, like everything else, unsolved. Each one of us must make out his own list. It were cruelty to prolong mine, though it is but begun.
As a grace before meat, or, if the simile be preferred, as the Zakuska or Vorschmack before dinner, let me urge upon all to read the three volumes, lately reissued and very considerably enlarged, called ‘Hours in a Library,’ by Mr. Leslie Stephen.
Mr. Stephen is a bracing writer. His criticisms are no sickly fruit of fond compliance with his authors. By no means are they this, but hence their charm. There is much pestilent trash now being talked about ‘Ministry of Books,’ and the ‘Sublimity of Art,’ and I know not what other fine phrases. It almost amounts to a religious service conducted before an altar of first editions. Mr. Stephen takes no part in such silly rites. He remains outside with a pail of cold water.
‘It sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally share that impression; and on the contrary have said a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of all ages, with the innuendo, to use the legal phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our teachers. “Are you not,” we observe, “exceedingly given to humbug?”’
Mr. Stephen has indeed, by way of preface to his own three volumes, collected a goodly number of these very fine things, but then he has, with grim humour, dubbed them ‘Opinions of Authors,’ thus reducing them to the familiar level of ‘Nothing like leather!’
But of course, though Mr. Leslie Stephen, like the wise man he is, occasionally hits his idol over the costard with a club just to preserve his own independence, he is and frankly owns himself to be a bookish man from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. He even confesses he loves the country best in books; but then it must be in real country-books and not in descriptive poetry, which, says he with Johnsonian calmness, is for the most part ‘intolerably dull.’
There is no better living representative of the great clan of sensible men and women who delight in reading for the pleasure it gives them than Mr. Stephen. If he is only pleased, it is quite shocking what he will put up with, and even loudly commend.
‘We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge in little asides to a reader. Why not?... I like to read about Tom Jones or Colonel Newcome; but I am also very glad when Fielding or Thackeray puts his puppets aside for the moment and talks to me in his own person. A child, it is true, dislikes to have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favourite Blunderbore. But the attempt to produce such illusions is really unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.’
Puppets indeed! It is evil and wicked treason against our Sovereign Lady, the Art we serve, to talk of puppets. The characters of our living Novelists live and move and have an independent being all their very own. They are clothed in flesh and blood. They talk and jostle one another. Where, we breathlessly inquire, do they do all or any of these fine things? Is it in the printed page? Alas! no. It is only in the minds of their Authors, whither we cannot follow them even if we would.
Mr. Stephen has great enthusiasm, which ought to reconcile us to his discriminating judgment and occasional easterly blast. Nobody loves a good book better than he. Whether his subject be Nathaniel Hawthorne or Daniel De Foe, it is handled cunningly, as by a man who knows. But his highest praise is his unbought verdict. He is his own man. He is dominated by no prevailing taste or fashion. Even his affection does not bias him. He yields to none in his admiration for the ‘good Sir Walter,’ yet he writes:
‘It is a question perhaps whether the firmer parts of Scott’s reputation will be sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of the rubbish.’
‘Rubbish.’ It is a harsh word, and might well make Dean Stanley and a bygone generation of worshippers and believers in the plenary inspiration of Scott stir uneasily in their graves. It grates upon my own ear. But if it is a true word, what then? Why even then it does not matter very much, for when Time, that old ravager, has done his very worst, there will be enough left of Sir Walter to carry down his name and fame to the remotest age. He cannot be ejected from his native land. Loch Katrine and Loch Leven are not exposed to criticism, and they will pull Sir Walter through.
Mr. Stephen has another recommendation. Every now and again he goes hopelessly wrong. This is most endearing. Must I give instances? If I must I will, but without further note or comment. He is wrong in his depreciation of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and wrong, amazingly wrong, in his unaccountable partiality for ‘Henrietta Temple.’
The author of ‘Hours in a Library’ belongs, it is hardly necessary to say, to the class of writers who use their steam for the purpose of going straight ahead. He is always greatly concerned with his subject. If he is out fox-hunting, he comes home with the brush, and not with a spray of blackberries; but if, on the other hand, he goes out blackberrying, he will return deeply dyed the true tint, and not dragging behind him a languishing coil of seaweed. Metaphors will, I know, ultimately be my ruin, but in the meantime I hope I make myself reasonably plain. In this honest characteristic Mr. Leslie Stephen resembles his distinguished brother, Sir James Stephen, who, in his admirable ‘Horæ Sabbaticæ’ (Macmillan, 3 vols.), may be discovered at any time tearing authors into little bits and stripping them of their fringe, and then presenting to you, in a few masterly pages, the marrow of their arguments and the pith of their position.
Much genuine merriment is, however, almost always to be extracted from writers of this kind. Mr. Leslie Stephen’s humour, none the worse for belonging to the sardonic species, is seldom absent from a page. It would be both pleasant and easy to collect a number of his epigrams, witty sayings, and humorous terms—but it is better to leave then where they are. The judicious will find them for themselves for many a long day to come. The sensible and truthful writers are the longest livers.