FOOTNOTES:
[12] Page 37.
Eá lâ drihtenes þrym! eá lâ duguða helm!
eá lâ meotodes miht! eá lâ middaneard!
eá lâ däg leóhta! eá lâ dreám godes!
eá lâ engla þreát! eá lâ upheofon!
eá lâ þät ic eam ealles leás êcan dreámes,
þät ic mid handum ne mäg heofon geræcan
ne mid eágum ne môt up lôcian
ne hûru mid eárum ne sceal æfre gehêran
þære byrhtestan bêman stefne.
—Satan. edit. Grein, 164-172.
[14] Some Remarks on Lydgate. Gray, Aldine Ed. v. 292-321.
[15] That Lydgate's verse should occasionally be rough and halting is partly to be attributed to the wretched state in which his text has come down to us from the copyists, and partly to the arbitrary way in which he varies the accent. His heroic couplets in the Storie of Thebes are certainly very unmusical. For the whole question of his versification see Dr. Schick, Introduction to his edition of The Temple of Glas, pp. liv.-lxiii., and Schipper, Altenglische Metrik, 492-500. But neither of these scholars does justice to the exquisite music of his verse at its best.
[16] Page 474.
[17] Page 150.
[18] Page 63.
OUR LITERARY GUIDES
II. A SHORT HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE [19]
[19] A Short History of Modern English Literature. By Edmund Gosse. London, 1898.
The author of this work has plainly not pondered the advice of Horace, "Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam viribus." His ambitious purpose is "to give the reader, whether familiar with books or not, a feeling of the evolution of English Literature in the primary sense of the term," and he adds that "to do this without relation to particular authors and particular works seems to me impossible." This may be conceded; for, a feeling of the evolution of English or of any other literature, without reference to particular authors and particular books, would be analogous to the capacity for feeling without anything to feel. But, unfortunately, those of Mr. Gosse's readers who wish to have the feeling to which he refers will merely find the conditions without which, as he so justly observes, the said feeling is impossible. In other words, references, in the form of loose and desultory gossip, to particular authors and particular works chronologically arranged, are all that represent the "evolution" of which he is so anxious "to give a feeling."
Described simply, the work is an ordinary manual of English Literature in which, with Mr. Humphry Ward's English Poets, Sir Henry Craik's English Prose Writers, Chambers' Cyclopædia of English Literature, the Dictionary of National Biography, and the like before him, the writer tells again the not unfamiliar story of the course of our Literature from Chaucer to the present time. But Mr. Gosse is no mere compiler, and brings to his task certain qualifications of his own, a vague and inaccurate but extensive knowledge of our seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Belles Lettres; and here, as a rule, he can acquit himself creditably. Though far from a sound, he is a sympathetic critic; he has an agreeable but somewhat affected style, and can gossip pleasantly and plausibly about subjects which are within the range indicated. But at this point, as is painfully apparent, his qualifications for being an historian and critic of English Literature end. The moment he steps out of this area he is at the mercy of his handbooks; so completely at their mercy that he does not even know how to use them. And it is here that Mr. Gosse becomes so irritating, partly because of the sheer audacity with which mere inferences are substituted for facts and simple assumptions for deduced generalizations, and partly because of the habitual employment of phraseology so vague and indeterminate that it is difficult to submit what it conveys to positive test. These are serious charges to bring against any writer; and if they cannot be abundantly substantiated, a still more serious charge may justly be urged against the accuser.
To turn to the work. On page 85 Mr. Gosse favours us with the following account of the Faerie Queene: "A certain grandeur which sustains the three great Cantos of Truth, Temperance, and Chastity fades away as we proceed.... The structure of it is loose and incoherent when we compare it with the epic grandeur of the masterpieces of Ariosto and Tasso." It would be difficult to match this; every word which is not a blunder is an absurdity. Where are "the three great Cantos"? Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the poem is divided into books, each book containing twelve Cantos? Assuming, however, that he has confounded books with Cantos, where is the great book dealing with 'Truth'? As he places it before 'Temperance,' we presume that he means the first book and that he has confounded 'Truth' with 'Holiness.' This is pretty well, to begin with. Where, we next ask in amazement, is the 'grandeur' which sustains the prolix farrago of the third book, and which 'fades away' as we proceed to the only book which almost rivals the first and second, the fifth, and the sublimest portion of the whole work, the superb Cantos which represent all that remains of the seventh? What, we gasp, is the meaning of the 'epic grandeur' of Ariosto? and "the loose and incoherent structure" of the Faerie Queene when compared with that of the Orlando Furioso? Could any poem be more loose and incoherent in structure than the Orlando, or any term be less appropriate to its tone and style than 'grandeur'? On page 80 he actually tells us that Fox's well-known Book of Martyrs was written in Latin and translated by John Day, and that it is John Day's translation of the Latin original which represents that work, confounding Fox's Commentarii Rerum in Ecclesiâ gestarum, etc., printed at Basil with the Acts and Monuments of the Church, and making John Day, the publisher of it, the translator of it into English! And this is his account of one of the most celebrated works in our language. Of Swift's Sentiments of a Church of England Man, we have the following account: "That such a tract as the Sentiments of a Church of England Man, with its gusts of irony, its white heat of preposterous moderation, led on towards Junius is obvious." This is an excellent example of the confidence which may be placed in Mr. Gosse's assertions. Of this pamphlet, it may be sufficient to say that there is not a single touch of irony or satire in it; that it stands almost alone among Swift's tracts for its perfectly temperate and logical tone; it is a calm appeal to pure reason. There is the same audacity of assertion in classing Feltham's Resolves with Hall's and Overbury's Character Sketches, and Earle's Microcosmogonie as "a typical example" of "a curious school of comic or ironic portraiture, partly ethical and partly dramatic." In 1625, we are told that Bacon completed the Sylva Sylvarum. If Mr. Gosse knew anything of Bacon's philosophical writings, he would have known that the Sylva Sylvarum never was and never could have been completed, for it was in itself a fragment—a mere collection of materials to be incorporated in the Phœnomena Universi, a work which was to have been six times larger than Pliny's Natural History. In giving an account of Tillotson, he speaks of "the serene and insinuating periods" of the elegant latitudinarian who "was assiduous in saying what he had to say in the most graceful and intelligible manner possible." A more perfect description of the very opposite of Tillotson's style could hardly be given. Those who are acquainted with Fuller's writings will be equally surprised to find him classed with Jeremy Taylor and Henry More, and to learn that his style is 'florid and involved,' distinguished by its 'long-windedness' and 'exuberance.' Has Mr. Gosse no apprehension of his readers turning to the originals and testing his statements? We have another of these bold assertions in the account of Lydgate, derived, we suspect, from a hasty generalization from a remark made about him in Mr. Ward's British Poets. "Lydgate," says Mr. Gosse, "had a most defective ear; his verses are not to be scanned. His ear was bad and tuneless." Any one who has read Lydgate knows that, if we except his heroic couplets, a more musical poet is not to be found in the fifteenth century, or, indeed, in our language; the softness and smoothness of his verse, wherever he writes in stanzas, as he generally does, is indeed his chief characteristic. These remarks are minor illustrations of an accomplishment in which Mr. Gosse has no rival.
The Euphuists of the sixteenth century drew, for purposes of simile and illustration, on a fabulous natural history which assumed the existence of certain animals, herbs, and minerals, and of certain properties and qualities possessed by them. This gave great point and picturesqueness to their style, and though it was certainly misleading and occasionally perplexing to those who went to them for natural history, it had a most charming and imposing effect. Mr. Gosse seems to have imported a similar fiction into criticism. Of this we have a most amusing illustration on page 155. Speaking of Herrick Mr. Gosse remarks, "In the midst of these extravagances, like Meleager winding his pure white violets"—the Italics are ours—"into the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism, we find Robert Herrick." Meleager's Anthology is not extant, but the dedication is, and from that dedication we know exactly from what poets it was compiled. It ranged from about B.C. 700 till towards the close of the Alexandrian Age, for, with the exception of Antipater of Sidon, it is very doubtful whether he inserted any epigrams by his contemporaries, but he admitted a hundred and thirty-one of his own. In other words his collection comprised epigrams composed by the masters preceding the Alexandrian Age from Archilochus downwards, and by those who, during that age and afterwards, cultivated with scrupulous care the simplicity and purity of the early models. Indeed, the poets represented in his Anthology are, with one exception, the artists of Greek epigram in its purest, simplest, and chastest form. That one exception is himself. In him are first apparent the dulcia vitia of the Decadence; he is full of dainty subtleties, he is almost more Oriental than Greek, his style is luscious, elaborate and florid. Such, then, was the composition of "the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism," and such the nature of the "pure white violets" wound into it by Meleager. It is amusing to trace Mr. Gosse's rodomontade to its source. In the well-known dedication to which we have referred, Meleager prettily compares the various poets, from whose works he selects, to flowers, speaking modestly of his own contributions as "early white violets." To critics like Mr. Gosse the rest is easy. Meleager, he no doubt argued, was an excellent poet; he belonged to a late age: 'Euphuism'—a delightfully vague term, is likely to characterise a late age; a poet who compares his verses to white violets had evidently a taste for simplicity, and presumably, therefore, was no Euphuist; a gaudy garland is an excellent set off for pure white violets. And so, to the great perplexity of scholars, but to the great satisfaction of those who enjoy a pretty sentence, Meleager will continue "to wind his pure white violets into the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism."
We have a similar illustration of the same thing in Mr. Gosse's account of Shaftesbury. We are told that he "was perhaps the greatest literary force between Dryden and Swift"; that "he deserves remembrance as the first who really broke down the barrier which excluded England from taking her proper place in the civilization of literary Europe"; that "he set an example for the kind of prose which was to mark the central years of the century"; that "his style glitters and rings, and ... yet so curious that one marvels that it should have fallen completely into neglect"; that "he was the first Englishman who developed theories of formal virtue, who attempted to harmonize the beautiful with the true and the good"; that the modern attitude of mind seems to meet us first in the graceful cosmopolitan writings of Shaftesbury; that "without a Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a Pater." Such amazing nonsense almost confounds refutation by its sheer absurdity.
With regard to the first statement, it may be sufficient to say that between the period of Dryden's literary activity and the publication of Swift's Battle of the Books and Tale of a Tub were flourishing Hobbes, Izaak Walton, Bunyan, Temple, and Locke; that between the publication of the Tale of a Tub and of Shaftesbury's collected writings were flourishing Addison, Steele, De Foe, Arbuthnot, Berkeley. With regard to the second statement, it would be interesting to know how a writer who had been preceded by Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, could be described as a writer who had been the first "to break down the barrier which excluded England from taking her proper place in the civilization of literary Europe." The truth is, that Shaftesbury exercised no influence at all on Continental Literature until long after our Literature had generally become influential in France. Equally absurd and baseless is the remark that he "set an example of the kind of prose that was to mark the central years of the century." Whose prose was affected by him? Bolingbroke's? or Fielding's? or Richardson's? or Middleton's? or Johnson's? or Goldsmith's? or Hume's? or Hawkesworth's? or Sterne's? or Smollett's? or Chesterfield's? that of the writers in the Monthly Review? or in the Adventurer? or in the World? or in the Connoisseur? To say of Shaftesbury's style that "it glitters and rings," is to say what betrays utter ignorance of its characteristics. As a rule, it is diffuse, involved, and cumbrous, affected, but with an affectation which sedulously aims at the very opposite effects of "glittering and ringing." When he is eloquent, as in the Moralists, he imitates the style of Plato; his vice is florid verbosity; it may be doubted whether a single sentence could be found to which Mr. Gosse's description would be applicable. If, it may be added, his style had "fallen completely into neglect," it is somewhat surprising that "he should set an example for the kind of prose which was to mark the central years of the century." When we are told that he was "the first Englishman who attempted to harmonize the beautiful with the true and the good," we ask in amazement whether Mr. Gosse has ever inspected the Hymns of Spenser and the writings of the Cambridge Platonists; and when he tells us that without a Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a Pater, we would suggest to him that both Ruskin and Pater were perhaps not ignorant of the Platonic Dialogues. In the account given of Spenser, a poem is attributed to him which he never wrote. "In one of his early pieces, The Oak and The Briar, went far," etc., the oak and the briar is simply an episode in the second eclogue of the Shepherd's Calendar. Mr. Gosse, probably finding it quoted in some book of selections, has jumped to the conclusion that it is a separate poem. Of Mr. Gosse's qualifications for dealing with Spenser, we have, by the way, an excellent example in the following remark: "Spenser, although he boasted of his classical acquirements, was singularly little affected by Greek or even Latin ideas." Spenser's Hymns in honour of Love and in Honour of Beauty are simply saturated with Platonism, being indeed directly derived from the Phædrus and the Symposium, numberless passages from which are interwoven with the poems. The whole scheme of the Faerie Queene was suggested by, and based on, Aristotle's Ethics with elaborate particularity, Arthur, in his relation to the several knights, corresponding to the virtue μεγαλοψυχια in its relation to the other virtues. The conclusion of the tenth canto of the first book is simply an allegorical presentation of the relation of the βιος θεωρητικος to practical life. The "Castle of Medina" in the second book is a minutely technical exposition of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, modified by the Platonic theory of morals: the three mothers being the λογιστικη, the επιθυμητικη, and θυμητικη, the three daughters, Elissa, Perissa, and Medina, being respectively the Aristotelian ελλειψις, the ὑπερβολη and the μεσοτης. In fact, the whole passage is simply an allegory of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. The whole of the ninth canto of the second book is founded on the famous passage in the Timæus describing the anatomy of man. In truth the poem teems with references to Plato and Aristotle, and with passages imitated from the Greek poets, as every scholar knows. And this is a poet "singularly little affected by Greek ideas!"
The same astonishing ignorance is displayed in a remark about Milton. We are told that in his youth he was "slightly subjected to influence from Spenser." If Mr. Gosse had any adequate acquaintance with Milton and Spenser, he would have known that Spenser was to Milton almost what Homer was to Virgil, that Spenser's influence simply pervades his poems, not his youthful poems only, but Paradise Lost and even Paradise Regained. On page 194 we find this sentence: "From 1660 onwards ... what France originally, and then England, chose was the imitatio veterum, the Literature in prose and verse which seemed most closely to copy the models of Latin style. Aristotle and Horace were taken, not merely as patterns, but as arbiters." It would be very interesting to know what English author took Aristotle as a pattern for style. Is Mr. Gosse acquainted with the characteristics of Aristotle's style? Should he ever become so, he will probably have some sense of the immeasurable absurdity of asserting that our prose writers from 1660 onwards took that style for their model. On a par with this is the assertion that up to 1605 Bacon had mainly issued his works in "Ciceronian Latin." Is Mr. Gosse aware of the meaning of "Ciceronian Latin"? Very "Ciceronian" indeed is Bacon's Latinity, and particularly that of the Meditationes Sacræ, the only work published in Latin by Bacon up to 1605! It is scarcely necessary to say, in passing, that such works as Bacon had published up to 1605 were, with the one exception referred to, all in English. Nothing, it may be added, is so annoying in this book as its slushy dilettantism. Mr. Gosse appears to be incapable of accuracy and precision. Thus he tells us that Chaucer's expedition to Italy in 1372 was "the first of several Italian expeditions." Chaucer, so far as is known, visited Italy, after this, exactly once. Again, he tells us that the Complaint of Mars and the Parliament of Fowls are interesting as showing that Chaucer had completely abandoned his imitation of French models. Chaucer wrote several poems in the pure French style, and based on French models, after the date of these poems. Such would be the Rondel Merciless Beauty suggested by Williamme d'Amiens, the Compleynt of Venus, partly adapted and partly translated from three Ballades by Sir Otes de Graunson, and the Compleynt to his Empty Purse, modelled on a Ballade by Eustache Deschamps, while French influence continued to modify his work throughout. On page 238 we are told that Thomson revived the Spenserian stanza; it had been revived by Pope, Prior, Shenstone, and Akenside. On page 151 we are informed that the first instalment of Clarendon's History remained unprinted till 1752, and the rest of it till 1759. If Mr. Gosse knew anything about one of the most remarkable controversies of the eighteenth century, he would have known that the greater part of it was printed and published between 1702 and 1704, and frequently reprinted between 1704 and 1731.
There is not a chapter in the book which does not teem with errors. Trissino's Sofonisba was not the only work in which blank verse had attained any prominence in Italy about 1515; it had been employed in works equally prominent, by Rucellai in his Rosmunda, and in his Oreste, as well as in his didactic poem L'Api, and by Alamanni in his Antigone, all of which were composed within a few years of that date. On page 120 we are told that Davies was the first to employ, on a long flight, the heroic quatrain; it had been employed by Spenser in a poem extending to nearly a thousand lines. Nor was Surrey's essay in terza rima "the earliest in the language." Chaucer made the same experiment, though a little irregularly, in the Compleynt to his Lady. We are told on page 79 that Gascoigne was "the first translator of Greek tragedy." Gascoigne never translated a line from the Greek. His Jocasta, to which presumably the reference is made, is simply an adaptation of Ludovico Dolce's Giocasta. On page 25 we are informed that "Gower's French verse has mainly disappeared." Gower is not known to have written anything in French except the Ballades and the Speculum Meditantis, both of which are extant, as it is inexcusable in any historian of English Literature not to know. The account given on page 25 of the Confessio Amantis shows that Mr. Gosse is very imperfectly acquainted with what he so fluently criticises, or he would have been aware that the seventh book is purely episodical and has nothing whatever to do with "The lover's symptoms and experience." In the account of Pope we are informed that "Boileau discouraged love poetry and Pope did not seriously attempt it." Pope is the author of the most famous love poem in the eighteenth century, Eloisa to Abelard, to say nothing of the Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady, of the beautiful hymn to Love in the second chorus in the tragedy of Brutus, and the exquisite fragment supposed to have been addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. "The satires of Pope," he continues, "would not have been written but for those of his French predecessor." Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the satires of Pope are modelled on the Satires and Epistles of Horace, that they owe absolutely nothing to Boileau, not even the hint for applying Roman satire to modern times, as he had precedents in his own countrymen Dryden and Rochester?
Mr. Gosse's criticism is often very amusing, as here, speaking of Gibbon: "Perhaps he leaned on the strength of his style too much, and sacrificed the abstract to the concrete." Of all historians who have ever lived, Gibbon is the most "abstract" and has most sacrificed the "concrete" to the "abstract," as every student of history knows. On a par with this is the prodigious statement (p. 291) that there is "an absence of emotional imagination" in Burke! That excellent man, Mr. Pecksniff, was, we are told, in the habit of using any word that occurred to him as having a fine sound and rounding a sentence well, without much care for its meaning; "and this," says his biographer "he did so boldly and in such an imposing manner that he would sometimes stagger the wisest people and make them gasp again." This is precisely Mr. Gosse's method. About the propriety of his epithets and statements, so long as they sound well, he never troubles himself; sometimes they are so vague as to mean anything, as often they have no meaning at all, as here: "His [that is Shelley's] style, carefully considered, is seen to rest on a basis built about 1760, from which it is every moment springing and sparkling, like a fountain, in columns of ebullient lyricism." Could pure nonsense go further? We have another illustration of the same audacity of absurd assertion on page 260. We are there informed—Mr. Gosse is speaking of our prose literature about the centre of the eighteenth century—that "Philosophy by this time had become detached from belles lettres; it was now quite indifferent to those who practised it, whether their sentences were harmonious or no.... Philosophy in fact quitted literature." If there was any period in our prose literature when philosophy was in the closest alliance with belles lettres, and was most studious of the graces of style, it was between about 1750 and 1771. In those years appeared Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, one of the most eloquent philosophical treatises ever written, Burke's Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, Tucker's Light of Nature Pursued, Beattie's Essay on Truth, to say nothing of Hume's Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, his Political Discourses, and his Natural History of Religion, all of them works pre-eminently distinguished by the graces of style, while so far from philosophy quitting belles lettres, it was during these years that the foundations of philosophical criticism were laid by Burke, Harris, Hurd, Kames, and others. Mr. Gosse appears to have forgotten that he had himself told us (p. 205) that Shaftesbury's style set the example of the prose which was to mark the central years of the century! Thus again Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is "an entertaining neurotic compendium"; Bacon's Essays are "often mere notations ... enlarged in many cases merely to receive the impressions of a Machiavellian ingenuity." Shelley's Triumph of Life is "a noble but vague gnomic poem, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are summed up and sometimes excelled." Keats' "great odes are Titanic and Titianic." On page 284 we are informed that for fifteen years after the close of 1800 "poetry may be said to have been stationary in England." When we remember that within these years appeared the best of Wordsworth's poems, the best of Coleridge's, the best of Scott's, the best of Crabbe's, the first two cantos of Childe Harold, the best of Campbell's, the best of Moore's, and of Southey's—we wonder what can be meant, till we read on to find that it was "on the contrary extremely active." But "its activity took the form of the gradual acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expulsion of the old classic taste, and the multiplication of examples of what had once for all been supremely accomplished in the hollows of the Quantocks." In other words, its activity took the form of its activity, and its activity led to its becoming stationary. Mr. Gosse is sometimes solemnly oracular, as here: "It is a sentimental error to suppose that the winds of God blow only through the green tree; it is sometimes the dry tree which is peculiarly favourable to their passage." It is not sometimes, we submit, but always that the dry tree will be most propitious to their passage. But we like Mr. Gosse best when he is eloquent, as here: "In the chapel of Milton's brain, entirely devoted though it was to a Biblical form of worship, there were flutes and trumpets to accompany one vast commanding organ." No wonder poor Milton suffered, as we know he did suffer, from insomnia!
The statement that "so miserable is the poverty of the first half of the seventeenth century, when we have mentioned Pecock and Capgrave, there is no other prose writer to be named," is bad enough. But to sum up Pecock's work with the remark, "the matter is paradoxical and casuistical reasoning on controversial points, in which he secures the sympathy neither of the new thought nor the old," is to demonstrate that Mr. Gosse knows nothing whatever about it. The Repressor is in many important respects one of the most remarkable works in our early prose Literature. It would be interesting to know what is the meaning of the following: "The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone in a sort of underwood of Theophrastian character sketches." Does Mr. Gosse suppose that English prose Literature in and about 1637 is represented by Hall's Characters of Vices and Virtues, by Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters, and by Earle's Microcosmographie, which appeared respectively, not in and about 1637, but in 1608, in 1614, and in 1628? If this was the underwood in which Chillingworth's work stood, it stood also in a dense forest represented by some of the most celebrated prose writings of the seventeenth century, such as the greater part of the writings of Bacon and of Raleigh, the Anatomy of Melancholy, Selden's Titles of Honour and Mare Clausum, Lord Herbert of Cherbury's De Veritate, Feltham's Resolves, the best of Hall's writings, Purchas' Pilgrims, Barclay's Argenis, the Histories of Speed, Stowe, Hayward, and Raleigh, Heylin's Microcosmus, Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, and the famous sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, all of which appeared between 1608 and 1637. These are the sort of remarks in which Mr. Gosse habitually indulges. We have another example in the following: "Shelley's attitude to style is in the main retrograde," a generalization based on the fact that he was no admirer of "the arabesque of the cockney school." But were Shelley's chief contemporaries admirers of the arabesque of the cockney school, or were they affected by it? Was Wordsworth, was Coleridge, or Southey, or Byron, or Crabbe, or Campbell, or Landor?—a question which Mr. Gosse probably never stopped to ask himself. On a par with this is the absurd assertion that "English poetry was born again during the autumn months of 1797." The appearance of the Lyrical Ballads did not make, but mark, an era in our poetry. The revolution of which they were the expression had been maturing, as surely but distinctly as the social and political revolution marked by the assembly of the States-General ten years before. There was hardly a note struck in the Lyrical Ballads which had not been struck in our poetry between 1740 and the date of their appearance.
To call this compilation a History of Modern English Literature is ludicrous. Mr. Gosse has no conception even of the eras into which our Literature naturally falls, or of the movements which in each of those eras defined themselves. Nothing could be more misleading and inadequate than the accounts given of the historians, theologians, philosophers, and critics, many of whom—nay, whole schools of whom—are not noticed at all. Sidney's epoch-marking little treatise is dismissed in four unmeaning lines as "an urbane and eloquent essay, which labours under but one disadvantage, namely, that when it was composed in 1581 there was scarcely any poesy in England to be defended. This was posthumously printed in 1595." Ben Jonson's not less remarkable Discoveries are not even mentioned. How writers like Bacon, Hooker, Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley fare we have not space to illustrate. Mr. Gosse, indeed, judging by his excursions into the realms of theology and philosophy, has certainly been wise to assign more space to The Flower and the Leaf than is assigned to Hobbes, Barrow, Butler, and Paley put together. We have by no means exhausted the list of blunders and absurdities to be found in this book; but we have, we fear, exhausted the patience of our readers, and we must bring our examination of it to a close.
The melancholy thing about all this is the perfect impunity with which such works as these can be given to the public. We have not the smallest doubt that this book has been extolled to the skies in reviews which have not detected a single error in it, and which have accepted its generalizations and its criticisms with unquestioning credulity; and we have as little doubt that those scholars who have discerned its defects and absurdities have chosen, from motives possibly of kindness, possibly of prudence, and possibly in mere contempt, to maintain silence about them. Had it appeared twenty years ago, it would instantly have been exposed and exploded, indeed no writer would have dared to insult serious readers by such a publication. What every reader has a right to demand from those who take upon themselves to instruct him are sincerity, industry, and competence; and what no critic has a right to condone is ostentatious indifference on the part of an author to the responsibilities incurred by him in undertaking to teach the public.
The sooner Mr. Gosse, and writers like Mr. Gosse, come to understand that, however ingeniously expressed, reckless generalizations, random assertions and the specious semblance of knowledge, erudition, and authority may pass current for a time, but are certain at last to be detected and exposed, the better for themselves and the better for their readers. If, too, they wish justice to be done to the accomplishments which they really possess, they will do well to remember what is implied in the proverb Ne sutor ultra crepidam, and what the Germans mean by Vermessenheit.
LOG-ROLLING AND EDUCATION
We see no objection to Mutual Admiration Societies; they are institutions which afford much pleasure, and can, as a rule, do little harm. If vanity be a foible, it is a foible well worth cherishing, and will be treated tenderly even by a philosopher. For, of all the illusions which give a zest to life, the illusions created by this flattering passion are the most delightful and inspiring. They are so easily evoked; they respond with such impartial obsequiousness to the call of the humblest magician. He has but to speak the word—and they are made; to command—and they are created. A becomes what B and C pronounce him to be, and what A and C have done for B, that will B and A do in turn for C. It is a delicious occupation, no doubt, a feast for each, in which no crude surfeit reigns, where, in Bacon's phrase, satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable; it is like the herbage in the Paradise of the Spanish poet, "quanto mas se goza mas renace,"—the more we enjoy it the more it grows. It is an old game—"Vetus fabula per novos histriones":—
"'Twas, 'Sir, your law,' and 'Sir, your eloquence,'
'Yours Cowper's manner and yours Talbot's sense';
Thus we dispose of all poetic merit:
Yours Milton's genius and mine Homer's spirit.
Walk with respect behind, while we at ease
Weave laurel crowns and take what name we please.
'My dear Tibullus!' if that will not do,
Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you."
And there is this advantage. If a sufficient number of magicians can, or will, combine, these illusions may not only serve each magician for life, but become, for a time, simply indistinguishable from realities. Now, as we said before, we see no great harm in this. It is, to say the least, a very amiable and brotherly employment; and were it quite disinterested and honest, it would be closely allied with that virtue which St. Paul exalts above all virtues. But everything has or ought to have its limits. When Boswell attempted to defend certain Methodists who had been expelled from the University of Oxford, Johnson retorted that the University was perfectly right—"They were examined, and found to be mighty ignorant fellows." "But," said Boswell, "was it not hard to expel them? for I am told they were good beings." "I believe," replied the sage, "that they might be good beings, but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out of a garden."
To our certain knowledge many of those who owe their reputation to the art to which we are referring are good beings, and we have little doubt that most of those who are least scrupulous in practising it are good beings also. Indeed it may be conceded at once that there is always a strong presumption that members of Mutual Admiration Societies belong to this class. On the reciprocity of essentially Christian virtues their very existence depends. Whatever may be thought of their heads, their hearts are pretty sure to be in the right place. They may, it is true, act more in the spirit of the precept that we should do unto others as we would they should do unto us than in that of the precept which pronounces that it is more blessed to give than to receive. This, however, is a trifle—one of those distinctions without differences which are so common in Christian ethics. But for ourselves we must, as we have said before, discriminate. To the cow in the field we have no objection; it is of the cow in the garden that we complain.
To drop metaphor: there are certain spheres of literary activity in which the circulation of mutual puffery by this clique or by that clique can do comparatively little harm to any one or to anything. There are some subjects on which every reader is not only perfectly competent to form his own judgment, but is pretty certain to do so. He may amuse himself by seeing what the critics have to say, and he may be induced by them in the first instance to turn to the book which is in question, but he is practically unaffected by any opinions unless they happen to coincide with his own. Such is the case with books of travel, with novels, and, as a rule, with poetry. Here the arts of the log-roller are as harmless as the frolics of whales with tubs. No one takes what he sees seriously except those who are engaged in the pastime. If Mr. A cannot give the general public what it appreciates, nothing that Mr. B can say will cajole that public into believing that it has what it has not. Mr. C and Mr. D may vociferate, till they are hoarse, that "Mr. E is the subtlest and most discriminating critic that the English-speaking world has ever known"; but if Mr. E's eulogies of Mr. C's verses and of Mr. D's novels are not corroborated by the general reader's independent judgment, the fame of Messrs. C and D will not extend beyond their clique. If in poetry or prose fiction trash succeeds, as it undoubtedly does, it succeeds not because of the skill with which it has been puffed, though this may be a factor in its success, but because it hits the popular taste. The public is seldom deceived except when it wishes to be deceived. Log-rolling has much to answer for: it loads our bookstalls with nonsense and rubbish, it impedes the production of sound literature, it degrades the standard of taste, it degrades the standard of aim and attainment, and indirectly it is in every way mischievous to literature. But we very much question whether in the case of publications which appeal directly to general readers, and are within the scope of their judgments, the fortune of a book is in any way affected by the arts of the log-roller. Amusement mingled with impatience is probably the prevailing sentiment when Mr. C and Mr. D are loud in each other's praises. We remember the amœbæan strains of Hayley and Miss Seward in Porson's epigram:—
Miss Seward: Tuneful poet, Britain's glory;
Mr. Hayley, that is you.
Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, you carry all before you;
Trust me, Lichfield Swan, you do.
Miss Seward: Ode, didactic, epic, sonnet;
Mr. Hayley, you're divine.
Mr. Hayley: Ma'am, I'll take my oath upon it,
You yourself are all the nine.
Or, in a less good-natured mood, we may perhaps recall with a certain satisfaction Pope's cruel but pathetic picture of the minor log-rollers of his day:—
Next plunged a feeble but a desperate pack,
With each a sickly brother at his back.
Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood,
Then numbered with the puppies in the mud.
But there are certain subjects and certain spheres in which the arts of the log-roller, if equally contemptible, are not quite so harmless.
During the last fifteen years the Press has been teeming with books designed to circulate among readers who are seriously interested in belles lettres and criticism. Some of them have appeared as volumes in a series, some as independent monographs and manuals, and some in the humbler forms of editorial introductions and notes. Among them may be found works of really distinguished scholars, and works in every way worthy of such scholars; and it is no doubt works like these which have given credit and authority generally to publications of this kind. The popularity of these productions has been extraordinary, and their manufacture has become one of the most lucrative of hackney employments. Nor is this all. Their professed purpose is the dissemination of serious instruction, is to become text-books in literary history and in literary criticism; and, as text-books on those subjects, they have made their way, or are making their way, not merely into our public libraries, but also into the libraries of nearly every educational institute in England. Indeed it would not be too much to say that if, among general readers, about eighty in every hundred derive almost all they know about English literature, both historically and critically, from these volumes, in our schools and colleges, the average number of those whose studies are and ought to be independent of them is yearly diminishing. It is of these text-books and of the responsibilities incurred by those who produce and circulate them that we wish to speak.
We have already commented on the distinction which must be drawn between what is best and what is inferior in the publications to which we have been referring; and, in truth, the difference is one not of degree but in kind. As our desire is, in Swift's phrase, to lash the vice but spare the name, we shall not specify the works which we have selected as typical of log-rolling in relation to education. Till we saw them we had no conception of the lengths to which this sort of thing has run. Ostensibly the works before us are critical and biographical monographs designed to become text-books for students of English literature; they may be more correctly described as complete epitomes of the art of puffery. The writers begin by assuming that the objects of their ludicrous adulation—who are, like themselves, contributors of the average order to current periodicals, and the authors of monographs similar to their own—are by general consent critics of classical authority. The most deferential references are made to them in almost every page. Now it is "Goethe and Mr. So-and-so have observed," or "Coleridge has remarked, but Mr. So-and-so is inclined to think," etc. Sometimes it assumes the form of a sort of awful reverence, as "Mr. So-and-so is a little uncertain, but surely he more than hints," or "Mr. So-and-so, as we all know, was once of opinion, though he has recently found reason to alter," etc. We saw not long ago in the notes to a certain edition of a classical author: "Socrates and Mr. X—— of Trinity have observed," etc. Occasionally this homage expresses itself—and this is more serious—in the form of long extracts from Mr. So-and-so's writings. Nothing is more common in works like these than to find critics and writers of classical authority either completely ignored, or, if cited at all, cited only in the connection which we have indicated. That the gentlemen who are the subjects of this grotesque flattery either have paid or will pay their friends in kind may, of course, be taken for granted. Thus one factitious reputation builds up another, and one bad book ushers in twenty which are worse.
Macaulay has an amusing passage in which he has collected the names of those who, according to Horace Walpole, were "the first writers" in England in 1753. It might have been expected that Hume, Fielding, Dr. Johnson, Richardson, Smollett, Collins, and Gray would at least have had a place among them. Not at all. They were Lord Bath, Mr. W. Whithed, Sir Charles Williams, Mr. Soame Jenyngs, Mr. Cambridge, and Mr. Coventry; in other words, a clique of politicians and men of fashion of the very titles of whose writings even a reader tolerably well read in the literature of those times might excusably be ignorant. We are not exaggerating when we say that this system of strenuous and well-directed mutual puffery is, in our own time, leading to similarly perverted conceptions about the relative position of those who owe their celebrity to these ignoble arts and those on whose fame Time's test has set its seal, not merely on the part of the general public, but on the part of those who are responsible for the books introduced into schools and educational institutes. We will give an illustration.
At a meeting held not long ago, for the purpose of prescribing books for a Reading Society, the choice lay between some of Johnson's Lives, Select Essays by Sainte Beuve, and Select Essays by Matthew Arnold on the one hand, and on the other certain books typical of the literature of which we have been speaking. The debate which ensued was very amusing. A member of the committee, a gentleman of conservative temper, strongly urged the claims of Johnson, Sainte Beuve, and Arnold, on the ground that it was the duty of the Society to encourage the study of what was excellent and of classical quality, especially in criticism; that it was not merely the information contained in a book which had to be considered, but the style, the tone, the touch; that the monographs proposed as an alternative could scarcely be regarded as of the first order, either in expression or in matter, for he had observed, though he had only glanced at them, several solecisms in grammar and several inaccuracies of statement; and he concluded by adding that other writings of these particular authors with which he happened to be more familiar had not prejudiced him in their favour. Upon that, another member of the council, who had been busily conning the Press notices inserted in the monographs in question, pleaded their claim to preference. "Dr. Johnson," he remarked, "was no doubt a great man in his day, but his day had long been over; no one read him now. Sainte Beuve and Matthew Arnold might be classical and all that, but they were not up to date." He could not talk as an expert on literary matters, and therefore he would not contradict what the former speaker had said, "but there could be no doubt that Messrs. So-and-so," the authors of the monographs in question, "were very big men—bigger men, I should think (glancing at the Press notices in his hand), than Sainte Beuve and Matthew Arnold. At any rate, everybody has heard of them; and," he continued, "listen to this." He then proceeded to read out some of the notices, adding that it was difficult, if he might say so without offence, to reconcile what his friend, the preceding speaker, had said with what was said in these notices. He was a little staggered—for, though a simple, he was a shrewd man—when the very remarkable similarity between Mr. A's eulogies of Mr. B and Mr. B's eulogies of Mr. A was pointed out to him, and when, in reference to anonymous testimony, he was reminded that one voice may have many echoes. It was generally felt, more especially as Mr. A or Mr. B had, we believe, more than one acquaintance among the committee, that the debate was taking rather an embarrassing turn. The question was then put to the vote, and the monographs were carried by a majority of three to one.
What occurred at this meeting is occurring every day, variously modified, wherever the choice of books is in question, whether in public libraries or in educational institutions. A literature, the sole credentials of which are derived from those who produce and circulate it, is gradually superseding that of our classics. We seem in truth to be losing all sense of the essential distinction between the writings of the average man of letters and those of the masters.
OUR LITERARY GUIDES
III. BOOKS WORTH READING [20]
[20] Books Worth Reading. A Plea for the Best and an Essay towards Selection, with Short Introductions. By Frank W. Raffety, London.
Were it not for its melancholy significance, this would be one of the most amusing books which it has ever been our fortune to meet with. Of Mr. Frank W. Raffety we have not the honour to know anything, except what we have gathered from this little volume and from its title-page. But he must be a singularly interesting gentleman. His enthusiasm for books, his portentous ignorance of them; his strenuous desire to improve the popular taste by pleading for the best, his instinctive tendency to make in all cases for the worst; his sublime intolerance of everything in literature which falls short of excellence, his more than sublime indifference to the commonest rules of grammar and syntax in expressing that intolerance; the naïveté, the frankness, the recklessness with which he displays his incompetence for the task which he has undertaken—in these qualifications and accomplishments Mr. Raffety is not perhaps alone, but he has certainly no superior.
Mr. Raffety aspires to guide his readers through the chief literatures of the world. Now the task of a reviewer, who has a conscience, is not always a cheerful one, and we confess that, when we had generally surveyed Mr. Raffety's work, we resolved to amuse ourselves by trying to discover of which of the literatures, to which Mr. Raffety constitutes himself a guide, Mr. Raffety is probably most ignorant. It is a nice point. Let our readers judge. We will begin with Mr. Raffety and the Classics. Of Theognis, the most voluminous of the Greek Gnomic poets, it is said that "only a few sentences"—Mr. Raffety is presumably under the impression that Theognis wrote in prose—"quoted in the works of Plato and others survive." "The Greek Anthology," we are astounded to learn, "is by Lord Neaves" and "is one of the best volumes in the A.C.E.R. series." What Mr. Raffety no doubt means is, that Lord Neaves is the author of a monograph on the Greek anthology, as he certainly was. With regard to Herodotus, Mr. Raffety has evidently got some information not generally accessible. His History, we are told, "is a great prose epic.... The second book is of the most interest. In other works are the histories of Crœsus, Cyrus," etc. It would be interesting to know what other works besides his History Herodotus has left. Of the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus Mr. Raffety gives the following interesting account. It contains, he says, "the story of Prometheus and his defiance of Jupiter, who condemned him to be bound to a rock, where he died rather than yield." We exhort Mr. Raffety, before his work passes into a second edition, to consult his Classical Dictionary.
Of the translations recommended by Mr. Raffety we should very much like to get a sight of the translation of Pindar by Calverley, of the joint translation of the same classic by Messrs. E. Myers and A. Lang, and of the joint translation of Thucydides "by Jowett and Rev. H. Dale, 2 vols." Of Herodotus, of Æschylus, of Sophocles, of Pindar, of Polybius, of Demosthenes, what are, by general consent, esteemed the best translations are not so much as mentioned. Latin literature fares even worse in the hands of our guide. Mr. Raffety appears to know no more about Catullus than that he was a writer of epigrams. Such trifles as the Attis, the Peleus and Thetis, the Julia and Manlius marriage song, the Coma Berenices, the love lyrics and threnodies he does not condescend to notice. In "guiding" his readers to translations of Lucretius and Juvenal, Munro's version of the first in prose and Gifford's version of the second in verse—which Conington pronounced to be the best version of any Roman classic in our language—are not so much as referred to. Nor, again, in the case of Plautus and Terence, are the excellent versions of Thornton and Coleman noticed. Tacitus, who is oddly described as "the foremost man of the day," an estimate which might have pleased but which would certainly have surprised him, chronicled, we are told, "the foundation of the Christian religion." Mr. Raffety's assurance on this point will probably disappoint inquisitive readers. Equally surprising are the portions of the work dealing with the modern literatures. In the course of these we learn that "the Nibelungen Lied is the oldest drama in Europe"; that the Areopagitica and the Defence of the People of England are Milton's best prose writings—Mr. Raffety apparently not being aware that the second work is in Latin, and that if he means the first Defence, it is anything but one of the best of Milton's writings. We are also informed that Dryden was most valuable as a translator from the Greek and Latin; Dryden's versions from the Greek begin and end with paraphrases of four Idylls of Theocritus, the first book of the Iliad and the parting of Hector and Andromache from the sixth, and are notoriously the very worst things he ever did.
Sometimes Mr. Raffety fairly takes our breath away, as when he informs us that Gray's tomb can be seen in the little churchyard of Stoke Pogis "with the Elegy written upon it." Can Mr. Raffety be acquainted with the length of the Elegy and with the proportions of a tombstone? Chaucer, we are informed, wrote some poems in Italian. We should very much like to see them, and so probably would Professor Skeat, for they appear to have escaped the notice of all Chaucer's editors. Swift's Tale of a Tub was written, we are told, "against the teaching of Hobbes!"
It is indeed impossible to open this book anywhere without alighting on some most discreditable blunder or absurdity. Thus we are informed that Macaulay's essay on Burleigh treats of the time of James I.—Burleigh, as we need hardly say, dying nearly five years before James came to the throne, and Macaulay's essay having no reference at all to James I.'s time. "There is," says Mr. Raffety, "no more stirring lyric than The Cotter's Saturday Night," a remark which shows that Mr. Raffety does not know what a lyric poem is. But to look for blunders in Mr. Raffety's pages would be to look for leaves in a summer forest. His critical remarks and biographical notes are truly delightful. We wish we had space to quote some of them. Of their general quality the following profound remark is a fair specimen:—"Dante requires study, and an endeavour after appreciation." Mr. Raffety is always anxious to conduct his readers by short cuts and to save them trouble. Macaulay's Essays, for example, should be read before his History; "they will be more easily tackled," he says, "than the History in the first instance." But on the subject of Gibbon Mr. Raffety is adamant, being fully of the late Professor Freeman's opinion—"Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read." How Gibbon is to be read, or why Gibbon is to be read, or in what edition he should be read, Mr. Raffety does not explain.
Now, what possible end can be served by books like these, except to misguide and misinform? Here is a writer, who certainly leaves us with the impression that he cannot read the Greek and Latin classics in the original, setting up as a director of classical study, and pronouncing ex cathedrâ on the merits of translations of these classics. His knowledge of the modern literature is, as is abundantly manifest, though we have neither space nor patience to illustrate, equally insufficient and unsubstantial, and yet he undertakes to initiate and guide the inexperienced in these studies. This book is presented to the public in a most attractive form, being excellently printed on excellent paper, and will naturally be taken seriously by those to whom it appeals. It is for this reason that we also have felt it our duty to take it seriously. And, as we believe that every bad book stands in the way of a good one, we can promise Mr. Raffety, and writers like Mr. Raffety, that we shall continue to take them seriously.
THE NEW CRITICISM [21]
[21] Retrospective Reviews. A Literary Log. By Richard Le Gallienne. 2 vols.
Nearly two thousand years ago Horace observed that, though every calling presupposed some qualification in those who followed it, and a man who knew nothing of marine affairs would not undertake to manage a ship, or a man who knew nothing of drugs to compound prescriptions, yet everybody fancied himself competent to commence poet. Qualified or unqualified, at it we all go, he complains, and scribble verses. But times have changed, and those who in Horace's day were the pests of poetry, with which they could amuse themselves without mischief, have now become the pests of another kind of literature in which their diversions are not quite so harmless. Where the poetaster once stood the criticaster now stands. The transformation of the one pest into the other, where they do not, as they often do, become both, is easily accounted for, and as Dr. Johnson has so excellently explained it, we cannot do better than transcribe his words. "Criticism," says the Doctor, "is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may by mere labour be attained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others, and he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant may yet support his vanity by the name of critic." But criticasters and their patrons have improved on this—for "he whom nature has made weak and idleness keeps ignorant" may, in our time, not merely support his vanity, but support himself.
Till we inspected the volumes before us, we had really no conception of the pass to which things have now come in so-called criticism. The writer sits in judgment on most of the authors who have, during recent years, been before the public. He passes sentence not merely on current novelists, poets, and essayists, but on some of our classics, and on books like the late Mr. Pater's Lectures on Plato and Platonism and Dr. Wharton's edition of Sappho. To any acquaintance with the principles of criticism, to any conception of criticism in relation to principles, to any learning, to any scholarship, to any knowledge of the history of literature and of the masterpieces of literature, either in our own language or in other languages, he has not the smallest pretension. Nor does he allow this to be gathered simply from the work itself, where it is, needless to say, abundantly apparent, but with a naïveté and impudence which are at once ludicrous and exasperating he glories in his ignorance. Literature and its interpretation are to him what the Bible and its interpretation were to the ranting sectaries of Dryden's satire. In its explanation knowledge and learning were folly, nothing was needed but "grace."
"No measure ta'en from knowledge, all from grace,
Study and pains were now no more their care,
Texts were explained by fasting and by prayer."
So to our critic knowledge and learning are of equal unimportance—nay, equally contemptible—and all that is needed to take the measure of Plato and Wordsworth is, in his own words, "the capacity for appreciation." With this very slender outfit he sits down to the work of criticism, to enlighten the world de omni scibili in literature, from the lyrics of Sappho, "the singer, a single petal of whose rose is more than the whole rose-garden of later women singers," to "the statesmanlike reach and grasp" of Mr. E. Gosse's essays.
To discuss seriously the opinions or impressions of a writer of this kind would be as absurd as to attempt to fight gnats with a sword, and we shall merely content ourselves with transcribing, without comment, a few of the aphorisms with which these volumes are studded. "Criticism is the art of praise." "Shakespeare is the greatest English poet, not because he created Hamlet and Lear, but because he could write that speech about Perdita's flowers and Claudio's speech on death in Measure for Measure." "The perfection of prose is the essay, of poetry the lyric, and the most beautiful book is that which contains the most beautiful words." These specimens will probably suffice. Mr. Le Gallienne is also of opinion that "culture is mainly a matter of temperament"—that "a man is born cultured," that mere education and study are to such a one not simply superfluities, but impertinences. "What matters it," he eloquently asks, "that one does not remember or even has never read great writers? Our one concern is to possess an organization open to great and refined impressions." A paltry scholar, for example, may be able to construe Sappho, but it is only "an organization open to great and refined impressions" which can discern (in a crib) "the pathos of eternity in some twenty words" of "this passionate singer of Lesbos." Plato may be studied by poor pedants, but to an organization of this kind the binding of a volume is sufficient enlightenment; "to merely hold in the hand and turn over its pages is a counsel in style," for do not "the temperate beauty, the dry beauty beloved of Plato, find expression in the sweet and stately volume itself" [he is "reviewing" the late Mr. Pater's lectures on Plato], "with its smooth night-blue binding, its rose-leaf yellow pages, its soft and yet grave type"? The value of Mr. Le Gallienne's judgments, of his praise, and of his censure, which, ludicrous to relate, are quoted by some publishers as recommendations, or "opinions of the press," may be estimated by these dicta, and by this theory of a critical education.
Macaulay somewhere speaks of a certain nondescript broth which, in some Continental inns, was kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, on every dish as it came up to table. The writer of these essays appears, metaphorically speaking, to be provided with a similar abomination. Whatever be his theme, poem, essay, novel, picture, he contrives to serve it up with the same condiment, a sickly and nauseous compound of preciosity and sentimentalism.
The melancholy thing about all this is the profound unconsciousness on the part of the author of these volumes that he is exciting ridicule; that he is, in Shakespeare's phrase, making himself a motley to the view. But there are considerations more melancholy still. We should not have noticed these volumes had they not been representative and typical of a school of so-called critics which is becoming more and more prominent. Incredible as it may seem, there are certain sections of literary society and of the general public which take Mr. Le Gallienne and his dicta quite seriously, and to which the prodigious nonsense in these volumes does not present itself as absurdity, but as the articles of a creed. These essays have, moreover, appeared in publications the names of some of which carry authority. It is, therefore, high time that some stand should be made, some protest entered against writings which cannot fail to corrupt popular taste and to degrade the standard of popular literature. Of one thing we are very certain, that no self-respecting literary journal which undertook to review these volumes could allow them to pass without denunciation.
Of Mr. Le Gallienne we know nothing personally. He is, if we are rightly informed, still a young man, and we would in all kindness exhort him to turn the abilities which he undoubtedly possesses to better account. There is much in these essays which shows that he was intended for something better than to further the decadence. If, instead of sneering at scholars, affecting to despise learning and study, indulging in silly paradoxes, tinsel epigrams, and absurd generalisations, he would read and think, and endeavour to do justice to himself and to his opportunities, he might, we make no doubt, obtain an honourable reputation. There is much which is attractive in his work, and in the personality reflected in it. He is not a charlatan, for though he is ignorant, he is honest. Genial and sympathetic, he has much real critical insight, and, in going through his volumes, we have noted many remarks which were both sound and fine. At its best his style is excellent,—clear, lively, and engaging. Let him cease to play the buffoon, which can only end in his gaining the applause of mere fools and the contempt of every one else.
THE GENTLE ART OF SELF-ADVERTISEMENT
The illustrious Barnum once observed that, if a man's capital consisted of a shilling, one penny of that shilling should be spent in purchasing something, and the remaining eleven-pence should be invested in advertising what was purchased. There was, perhaps, a touch of exaggeration in that great man's remark, but it was founded on a profound knowledge both of human nature and of the world. Intrinsically nothing is valuable; things are what we make or imagine them. Even the diamond, as a costly commodity, exists on suffrage. If a man cannot persuade his fellow-creatures that he has genius, talent, learning, "'twere all alike as if he had them not." What Persius asks with a sneer, "Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?"—is your knowledge nothing, unless some one else know that you are knowing?—a wiser man would ask in all seriousness. Shakespeare was never nearer the truth than when he wrote—
"No man is the lord of anything,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicates his parts to others;
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in the applause
Where they are extended."
And never was a man more mistaken than the old preacher who said to his congregation, "If you have a talent in your napkin, you should take care not to hide it; but if you have no talent, but only a napkin, you should not so flourish your napkin as to create the impression that it is full of talents." Why, this is just what nine men in ten who court fame have to do. Nature is kind, but seldom profuse. If she really endows a man with what, if trumpeted, would make him famous, the odds are she couples with her gifts pride, modesty, or self-respect, which, to say the least, heavily handicap him in the race for reputation. When she does not endow with the reality, she compensates by bestowing the power of acquiring the credit for it. She is, as a rule, much too thrifty to heap on the same man the keen pleasures of genuine enthusiasm and the sweets of popular applause. An impartial mother, she loves all her children, and divides her favours equally between shams and true men. This Churchill marks in his brutal way; speaking of a certain contemporary, he describes him as endowed with
"That low cunning which in fools supplies,
And amply too, the place of being wise,
Which Nature, kind, indulgent parent, gave
To qualify the blockhead for a knave."
But our business is not with knaves and blockheads, but with "gentler cattle," and the quotation demands an apology.
The importance of the art of self-advertisement, as must be abundantly clear from the preceding remarks, can scarcely be overestimated. Though it is perhaps still in its infancy, its progress during the last few years has been most encouraging. The old coarse methods so familiar to us in the past, and still successfully practised in the present—we mean mutual admiration cliques, log-rolling, and what is vulgarly known as "pulling the strings"—have been greatly improved upon and refined. Bentley's famous remark when, explaining how it was that he took to commentating, he said, that as he despaired of standing on his own legs in the Temple of Fame, he got on to the shoulders of the Ancients, appears to have suggested one of the most ingenious of modern expedients. This consists of "getting up" a memorial to some distinguished man—a statue, it may be, or modest bust. Some labour, some ability, and some learning are involved in the more cumbrous device of Bentley. But here all is simple and very easy. You are on the shoulders of your great man at a bound, and stand side by side with him in a trice. There is nothing which redounds to his credit which does not redound to your own. As the Red Indian is under the impression that in possessing himself of a scalp he possesses himself of the virtues belonging to the former owner of the scalp, so this tribute of enthusiastic admiration quietly assumes, without trouble, all that enthusiastic admiration naturally implies. Is the object of your homage a poet, a critic, a scholar, the very fact that you pay him homage is, in itself, testimony of your own right to one or other of these honourable titles. If, moreover it should happen that you know very little about the writings of the author whom you have elected to honour, this is of no consequence; for of all the disguises which ignorance can assume, "enthusiasm" is the most effective. Nor are these the only advantages of this particular method of getting reputation. The collection of subscriptions and the formation of a committee bring you into contact, or may, if judiciously managed, bring you into contact with all your distinguished contemporaries; and we know what the proverb says—"Noscitur a sociis"—a man is what his companions are.
But nothing is more effectual, for purposes of self-advertisement, than a device which has lately been practised with signal success. This consists of scraping up an acquaintance with some person, whose name is not unknown to the public,—even a second-rate novelist will do—and waiting till he dies. As there is a tide in the affairs of men, so, as we all know, there is a moment at the demise of literary men when the voracity of public curiosity knows neither distinction nor satiety. This is the moment for the self-advertiser to nick; this is the time for him to float, with his defunct friend, on the lips of men. He will find readers for anything he may choose to print—that letter with its exquisite compliments, that conversation in which his poor attainments were so generously over-estimated, or the importance of his slight literary services so much exaggerated. Of course, the value of such advertisements will be in proportion to the eminence of the subject of the reminiscences—and happy, thrice happy, those who were able to turn men like Darwin, Tennyson, and Browning to this account; their reputation may be regarded as made. But it is not always necessary to wait till great men die, though it is an experiment too bold and perilous for most aspirants to make this sort of capital out of them while they are still alive. Still audentes fortuna juvat, and it has been done. A certain minor poet published in an American magazine, not many years ago, an article entitled "A Day with Lord Tennyson," in which he represented the Laureate as turning the conversation on his (the minor bard's) poetry. We are told how the great man, after fervently reiterating a stanza of that minor bard which pleased him, requested his son to take it down in writing; how that son, though the day was cold and blowy, took it down; how Tennyson grasped, at parting, his brother poet's hand, and begged in transport that he would "come again and come often." He came, we believe, no more. But what of that? He had accomplished a feat so simple and yet so original that it may fairly be questioned whether what Mr. Burnum used to call his masterpiece was in any way comparable to it. To interview a great man, even on an assumption of equality, is, as we all know, a comparatively easy matter, but to turn the conversation of the great man into a seasonable puff of yourself requires a combination of qualities not often united in a single person. The worst of feats like these is that they must have a tendency to make great men a little shy of encouraging the acquaintance of those to whom they can be so useful. But simplicity, as Thucydides remarks, is one of the chief ingredients of greatness, and it is a quality very difficult to wear out.
If Tennyson's interviewer has ever had a rival in the important art which has been discussed—for the benefit of youthful ambition—in this article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author both in verse and prose; but his merits were not appreciated by an ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted, therefore, to the following exquisitely ingenious device. He published a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitled Gems from English Literature, thus arranged: Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor, Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching himself regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the poets—Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman's expedient—it may be judiciously modified—to the notice of all who are unable to distinguish fame from notoriety.
R. L. STEVENSON'S LETTERS [22]
[22] The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols.
The late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of early youth his surroundings appear to have been most uncongenial; he was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude. In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor; his apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of Nature's favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did into contact with all phases of humanity and with all parts of the world, was of course in many respects favourable to his work, but it had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for reflection; it imported a certain feverishness into his energy, and rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these circumstances Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising. "He stands," says his friend Professor Colvin, "as the writer who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms—the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure, memoirs; nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten." With some reservation this may be conceded, and this is as far as eulogy can legitimately be stretched.
But, unhappily, some of Stevenson's admirers have made themselves and their idol ridiculous, by raising him to a position his claims to which are preposterous. If he be measured with his contemporaries the comparison will generally be in his favour—he certainly did best what hundreds can do well. His essays have distinction and excellence; his novels, travels, and short tales, though scarcely entitled to the praise of originality, as they strike no new notes and are mere variants of the work of Scott, Kingston, Ballantyne, De Quincey and Poe, bear the impress of genius as distinguished from mere talent, and reflect a very charming personality; his verse, too, is pleasing and skilful. But when we are told that he will stand the third in a trio with Burns and Scott, and when we have to listen to serious appeals to Edinburgh to raise a statue to him beside the author of Marmion and the Waverley Novels, all who truly appreciate his work may well tremble for the reaction which is certain to succeed such extravagant overestimation. The truth is that poor Stevenson, himself one of the simplest, sincerest and most modest of men, got involved with a clique who may be described as manufacturers of factitious reputations,—the circulators of a false currency in criticism. In these days of appeals to the masses it is as easy to write up the sort of works which are addressed to them—popular essays, tales and novels—as it is to write up the commodities of quack doctors and the shares of bogus companies. The production of popular literature is now a trade, and in some cases this kind of puffery is the work of deliberate fraud, originating from various motives. In many cases it simply springs from ignorance and critical incompetence, current criticism being, to a considerable extent, in the hands of very young men who, having neither the requisite knowledge nor the proper training, are unable to judge a writer comparatively. In other cases it is to be attributed to good nature and the tendency in the genial appreciation of real merit to indulge in extravagant expression. But the result is the same. A reputation, so grotesquely out of proportion to what is really merited that sober people are inclined to suspect that all is imposture, is gradually inflated. Eulogy kindles eulogy; hyperbole is heaped on hyperbole; a ludicrous importance is attached to every trifle which falls, or which ever has fallen, from this Press-created Fetish. While he is alive he is encouraged, or rather importuned, to force his power of production to keep pace with the demand for everything bearing his signature; when he is dead the very refuse of his study finds eager publishers.
This kind of thing has obviously many advantages, which are by no means confined to the object of the idolatry itself. In the first place it means business; it is the creation of a goose which can lay golden eggs, and it is, in the second place, a creation which reflects no little glory on the creators. Is it nothing to be the satellites of so radiant a luminary? When the familiar correspondence of the great man is printed, will not what he was pleased to say, with all the friendly license of private intercourse, in the way of compliment and eulogy, be proclaimed from the house-tops?
All this is exactly what has happened in the case of poor Stevenson. No man ever took more justly his own measure, or would have been more annoyed at the preposterous eulogies of which he has been made the subject, on the part of interested or ill-judging friends. We wonder what he would himself have said, could he have seen the letters before us described, as they were described in one of the current Reviews, as "the most exhaustive and distinguished literary correspondence which England has ever seen." We entirely absolve Professor Colvin from any suspicion of being actuated by unworthy motives in publishing them. It is abundantly clear that he has not published them to puff himself, that his labour has been a labour of love, and that he believed himself to be piously fulfilling a duty to his friend. But they ought never to have been given to the world. More than two-thirds have nothing whatever to justify their appearance in print, and merely show, what will surprise those who knew Stevenson by his literary writings, how vapid, vulgar and commonplace he could be. In their slangy familiarity and careless spontaneity they remind us of Byron's, but what a contrast do these trivial and too often insipid tattlings present to Byron's brilliance and point, his wit, his piquancy, his insight into life and men! Only here and there, in a touch of description, or in a casual reflection, do we find anything to distinguish them from the myriads of letters which are interchanged between young men every day in the year. Their one attraction lies in the glimpses they reveal of Stevenson's own charming personality, his kindliness, his sympathy, his great modesty, his manliness, his transparent truthfulness and honesty. It is amusing to watch him with one of his correspondents who was evidently endeavouring to establish a mutual exchange of flattery. The urbane skill with which this gentleman's persistently fulsome compliments are either fenced or waived aside, the ironical delicacy with which, when a return is extorted, they are repaid, in a measure strictly adjusted to desert and yet certain not to disappoint expectant vanity, are quite exquisite. "The suns go swiftly out," he writes to him, referring to the death of Tennyson and Browning and others, "and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms." The indignant letter to the New York Tribune, in defence of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of Stevenson's fictions, well deserves placing on permanent record, as an illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends.
We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson's reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment.
LITERARY ICONOCLASM [23]
[23] The Authorship of the Kingis Quair. A New Criticism by J. T. T. Brown.
Among the worthies of the fifteenth century there is no more interesting and picturesque figure than the Poet-King of Scotland, James I. Long before the poem on which his fame rests was given to the world, tradition had assigned him a high place among native makers, and his countrymen had been proud to add to the names of Dunbar and Douglas, of Henryson and Lyndsay, the name of the best of their kings. Great was their joy, therefore, when, in 1783, William Tytler gave public proof that the good King's title to the laurel was no mere title by courtesy, but that he had been the author of a poem which could fairly be regarded as one of the gems of Scottish literature. There cannot, in truth, be two opinions about the Kingis Quair. It is a poem of singular charm and beauty, and, though it is modelled closely on certain of Chaucer's minor poems, and is in other respects largely indebted to them, it is no servile imitation; it bears the impress of original genius, not so much in details and incident as in tone, colour, and touch; it is a brilliant and most memorable achievement, and Rossetti hardly exaggerates when he describes it as
"More sweet than ever a poet's heart
Gave yet to the English tongue."
For more than a hundred years it has been the delight of all who care for the poetry of the past, and the story it tells, and tells so pathetically, is now among the "consecrated legends" which every one cherishes. "The best poet among kings, and the best king among poets," the name of the author of the Kingis Quair heads the list of royal authors. The stanza which he employed, though invented or adopted by Chaucer, takes its title from the King, and "the rime royal" will be in perpetual evidence of his services to poetry, as the University of St. Andrews will be of his services to learning and education. No generation has passed, from Sir Walter Scott to Mrs. Browning, and from Mrs. Browning to Gabriel Rossetti, which has not been lavish of honour and homage to him.
But, it seems, we have all been under a delusion. Our simple ancestors believed that James was the author of Peebles to the Play and Christ's Kirk on the Green; but Peebles to the Play and Christ's Kirk on the Green "are now"—Mr. J. T. T. Brown is speaking—"relegated to the anonymous poetry of the sixteenth century, inexorably deposed by the internal evidence"; and Mr. Brown aspires to send the Kingis Quair the same way. His fell purpose is "to deprive James of his singing garment, and reduce him to the humbler rank of a King of Scots." There is something almost terrible in the exultation with which Mr. Brown assumes that—the King's claim to every other poem attributed to him having been completely demolished—it only remains to deprive him of the Kingis Quair, to make his poetical bankruptcy complete. And to the demolition of the King's claim to the "Quair" Mr. Brown ruthlessly proceeds. Now we have no intention of entering into the question of the authenticity of the minor poems to which Mr. Brown refers; but we shall certainly break a lance with this destructive critic in defence of James's claim to the Kingis Quair.
Mr. Brown contends, first, that there is no satisfactory external evidence in favour of the King's authorship of the poem; and, secondly, that the internal evidence is almost conclusive against him. What are the facts? In the Bodleian Library is a MS. the date of which is uncertain, but it cannot be assigned to an earlier period than 1488. This MS. contains certain poems of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and others, together with the Kingis Quair. Of the Kingis Quair it is, so far as is known, the only MS., and to it alone we owe the preservation of the poem. Both title and colophon assign the work to James I., the words being: "Heireefter followis the quair Maid be King James of Scotland ye first, callit ye Kingis quair, and Maid quhen his Ma. wes in Ingland," the colophon running, "Explicit, &c., &c., quod Jacobus primus scotorum rex Illustrissimus." This is surely precise enough; but Mr. Brown insists that the statement carries very little weight, being no more than the ipse dixit of not merely an irresponsible, but of an unusually reckless copyist. The recklessness of this copyist Mr. Brown deduces from the fact that, of ten poems attributed to Chaucer in the same MS., five undoubtedly do not belong to him. On this we shall only remark that it would be interesting to know whether these poems have been attributed to Chaucer in other MSS. In any case, Mr. Brown must surely know that it is a very different thing for a copyist to miss-assign a few short poems and to make a statement so explicit as the statement here made with regard to the Kingis Quair. He must either have been guilty of deliberate fraud—and what right have we to assume this?—or he must have been misled, an hypothesis which is equally unwarrantable, unless it be adequately supported. And how does Mr. Brown proceed to support it? He contends that we have no satisfactory evidence from other sources that James was the author of the poem. Walter Bower, the one contemporary historian, though he gives in his Scotichronicon an elaborate account of the King's accomplishments, is silent, Mr. Brown triumphantly observes, about his poetry. This may be conceded. But Weldon is equally silent about the poetry of James VI., and Buchanan about the poetry of Mary. And what says the next historian, John Major? "In the vernacular"—we give the passage in Mr. Brown's own version—"he was a most skilful composer.... He wrote a clever little book about the Queen before he took her to wife and while he was a prisoner," a plain reference to the Kingis Quair. Testimony to his poetical ability is also given by Hector Boyes in his History of Scotland, "In linguâ vernaculâ tam ornata faciebat carmina, ut poetam natum credidisses." So say John Bellenden, John Leslie, and George Buchanan. Of these witnesses Mr. Brown coolly observes that they carry little or no weight, because they only echo each other and Major. Major, Mr. Brown insists, is "the sole authority for the ascription to James of the vernacular poems." Certainly fame in the face of such critics as Mr. Brown is held on a very precarious tenure. Dunbar, in his Lament of the Makaris, enumerates, continues our critic, twenty-one Scottish poets, but passes James over in silence, therefore James's title to being a poet was unknown to him. Possibly; but that Dunbar's list was not meant to be exhaustive is proved by the fact that he makes no mention of a poet, and of a considerable poet, who must have been well known to him, Thomas of Ercildoune. Nothing can be more misleading than deductions like these. Ovid has given us an elaborate catalogue of the poets of his time, but makes no mention of Manilius. Heywood and Taylor have given elaborate catalogues of the contemporary Elizabethan dramatists and make no mention of Cyril Tourneur. Addison has given us an account of the principal English poets, and makes no mention of Shakespeare. If Dante's and Chaucer's acquaintance with their distinguished brethren is to be estimated by those whom they noticed, it must have been far more limited than we know it, by other evidence, to have been. Lyndsay, again, is cited as testimony of ignorance of James's title to rank among poets; but in the list, in which he is silent about James, he is silent about poets so famous as Barbour, Blind Harry, Wyntown, Kennedy, and Douglas.
Mr. Brown next proceeds to the question of internal evidence. He cannot understand how it could come to pass, that a Scotchman, who left his native country when he was under twelve years of age, and who was educated by English tutors in England, should, after eighteen years of exile, employ "the Lowland Scottish dialect." This is surely not very difficult to explain. Nothing so much endears his country to a man as exile, and nothing is more cherished by a patriot than his native language. Ten years' exile among the Getæ did not corrupt the Latinity of Ovid, and more than twenty years' exile did not impair the purity of Thucydides' Attic. The King may have had English tutors, but Wyntown distinctly tells us that he was allowed to retain, as his companions, four of his countrymen. When he served in France he had a Scottish bodyguard. The document in the King's own handwriting, printed by Chalmers, proves that in 1412 he was conversant with the Lowland dialect. In all probability, therefore, he carefully cherished his native language. The consensus of tradition places it beyond all doubt that he composed poetry in the vernacular, and as he wrote the Kingis Quair when he knew that he was about to return to Scotland as its king, it was surely the most natural thing in the world that he should compose a poem which told the story of himself and his young bride, whom he was introducing to his subjects as their queen, in the language of the country. But, says Mr. Brown, it is the Lowland dialect, with inflexions peculiar to Midland English, with many Chaucerian inflections engrafted on it. And what more natural? The Midland dialect was the dialect of his English teachers. The poems of Chaucer he probably had by heart.
Mr. Brown's object in all this is to relegate the Kingis Quair to that group of poems which are represented by the Romaunt of the Rose, The Court of Love, and Lancelot of the Lak, which appeared late in the fifteenth century, and in which all these peculiarities are very pronounced. Into philological details we have not space to enter, but this we will say. We will admit that ane before a consonant, the past participle in yt or it, the pronouns thaire and thame, the plural form quhilkis, the employment of the verb to do in the emphatic conjugation and the like, are peculiarities which belong to a period not earlier than about 1440, and that all these peculiarities are to be found in the poem. But, we contend that these are just as likely to be due to the transcriber as they are to the author. Nothing was so common with copyists as to import into their texts the peculiarities of their own dialects, indeed it was habitual with them. Thus Hampole's Pricke of Conscience was greatly altered by southern scribes. Thus, in the Bannatyne MS., Chaucer's minor poems were similarly altered by northern scribes. It is, in truth, the very height of rashness to dispute the genuineness of an original, in consequence of the presence of peculiarities which might quite well have been imported into it by a copyist. The resemblances between this poem and the Court of Love are, we admit, not likely to have been mere coincidences, and we are quite ready to admit that the Court of Love in the form in which we have it now, must be assigned to a much later date, more than a century later, than the date (1423) assigned to the Kingis Quair. But this is certain—that many, and very many, of the resemblances between the two poems are to be attributed to the fact that the writers were saturated with the influence of Chaucer, and delighted in imitating and recalling his poetry. If, again, it be assumed that one poem was the exemplar of the other, this is indisputable, that the Court of Love was modelled on the Kingis Quair, and not the Kingis Quair on the Court of Love. For, setting aside peculiarities which may be assigned to transcribers, there can be little doubt that the Court of Love belongs to the sixteenth century at the very earliest, while Mr. Brown himself admits that the MS. of the Kingis Quair may be approximately fixed at 1488.
Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than Mr. Brown's attempt to show that the poem breaks down in autobiographical details, and that it derives these details from Wyntown's Chronicle. James does not mention the exact year in which he was taken prisoner. He tells us that he commenced his voyage when the sun had begun to drive his course upward in the sign of Aries, that is, on or about the 12th of March—and that he had not far passed the state of innocence, "bot nere about the nowmer of zeris thre"—in other words, that he was about ten years of age. Hereupon Mr. Brown, assuming that Wyntown gives the date of the King's birth correctly, proceeds to point out that the King was not at this time "about ten," but that he was about eleven and a half; and then asks triumphantly whether James would have been likely to forget his own age. Again, he contends that the King's capture could not have taken place in March, because it is highly probable that at the end of February, or at the beginning of March, the King was in the Tower. For the fact that he was in the Tower at that date there is not an iota of proof, or even of tolerably satisfactory presumptive evidence. How the author of the Kingis Quair could have been indebted to Wyntown's Chronicle for the autobiographical details it is, indeed, difficult to see. The poem gives March as the date of the capture; the Chronicle gives April. According to the poem, the King's age at the time of his capture was about ten; according to the Chronicle, about eleven and a half. The Chronicle gives the year of the capture; the poem does not. The Chronicle gives details not to be found in the poem; the poem details not to be found in the Chronicle. Mr. Brown has no authority whatever for asserting that Book IX. chap. xxv. of the Chronicle was certainly written years before James returned to Scotland. All we know about the Chronicle is that it was finished between the 3rd of September, 1420, and the return of James in April, 1424.
Mr. Brown must forgive us for expressing regret that he should have wasted so much time and learning, in attempting to support a paradox which can only serve to perplex and mislead. Scholars, especially in these days, would do well to remember, that nothing can justify destructive criticism but a conscientious desire, on the part of those who apply it, to correct error and to discover truth. And they would also do well to ponder over Bacon's weighty words: "Like as many substances in Nature which are solid do putrify and corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and, as I may term them, vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter nor goodness of substance."
WILLIAM DUNBAR [24]
[24] William Dunbar. By Oliphant Smeaton. Edinburgh: Oliphant.
Boswell tells us that he once offered to teach Dr. Johnson the Scotch dialect, that the sage might enjoy the beauties of a certain Scotch pastoral poem, and received for his reply, "No, sir; I will not learn it. You shall retain your superiority by my not knowing it." It would not be true to say that Dr. Johnson's indifference to the Scotch language and to Scotch poetry has been shared by all cultivated Englishmen, but it has certainly been shared by a very large majority in every generation. The superb merit of many of the Scotch ballads, the lyrics of Burns and the novels of Scott have practically done little to diminish this majority and to induce English readers to acquire the knowledge which Dr. Johnson disdained. Nine Englishmen out of ten read Burns, either with an eye uneasily fishing the glossary at the bottom of the page, or ad sensum, that is, in contented ignorance of about three words in every nine. And this is, perhaps, all that can reasonably be expected of the Southerner. Life is short; the world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion and Scotch manners is not, as Matthew Arnold observed, a lovely one, and the time which such an accomplishment would require would be far more profitably spent in acquiring, say, the language of Dante and Ariosto, or even the language of the Romancero General and of Cervantes. A modern reader may stumble, with more or less intelligence, through a poem of Burns, catching the general sense, enjoying the lilt, and even appreciating the niceties of rhythm. But this is not the case with the Scotch of the fifteenth century—the golden age of the vernacular poetry, the age when poets were writing thus:—
"Catyvis, wrechis, and ockeraris,
Hud-pykis, hurdaris, and gadderaris,
All with that warlo went;
Out of thair throttis thay schot on udder
Hett moltin gold, me thocht, a fudder
As fyre-flawcht, maist fervent,
Ay as thay tumit them of schot,
Feyndis fild thame new up to the thrott
With gold of allkin prent."
The usual consequences have been the result of this ignorance. The Scotch have had it all their own way in estimating the merits of their vernacular classics, [and the few outsiders, whether] English or German, who have made the Scotch language and literature a special subject of study, have very naturally not been willing to underestimate the value of what it has cost them labour to acquire, and so have supported the exaggerated estimates of the Scotch themselves. What Voltaire so absurdly said of Dante, that his reputation was safe because no intelligent people read him, is literally true of such poets as Henryson, Douglas, and Dunbar. We simply take them on trust, and, as with most other things which are taken on trust, we seldom trouble ourselves about the titles and guarantees. It may be accepted as an uncontrolled truth that the world is always right, and very exactly right, in the long run. That mysterious tribunal which, resolved into the individuals which compose it, seems resolved into every conceivable source of ignorance, error, and folly, is ultimately infallible. There are no mismeasurements in the reputation of authors with whom readers of every class have been familiar for a hundred years. But, in the case of minor writers who appeal only to a minority, critical literature is the record of the most preposterous estimates. The history of the building up of these pseudo-reputations is generally the same in all cases. First we have the obiter dictum of some famous man whose opinion naturally carries authority, uttered, it may be, carelessly in conversation, or committed, without deliberation, to paper, in a letter or occasional trifle. Then comes some little man, who takes up in deadly seriousness what the great man has said, and out comes, it may be, an essay or article. This wakes up some dreary pedant, who follows with an "edition" or "Study," which naturally elicits from some kindred spirit a sympathetic review. Thus the ball is set rolling, or, to change the figure, bray swells bray, echo answers to echo, and the thing is done. Meanwhile, all that is of real interest and importance in the author thus resuscitated is lost sight of; in advocating his factitious claims to attention his real claims are ignored. For the true point of view is substituted a false, and the whole focus of criticism, so to speak, is deranged. The first requisite in estimating the work and relative position of a particular author is the last thing which these enthusiasts seem to consider, that is, the application of standards and touchstones derived not simply from the study of the author himself, but from acquaintance with the principles of criticism, and with what is excellent in universal literature.
All this has been illustrated in the case of the poet who is the subject of the volume before us. As Mr. Ruskin has pronounced Aurora Leigh to be the greatest poem of this century, so Sir Walter Scott, who has, by the way, been singularly unjust to Lydgate and Hawes, pronounced Dunbar to be "a poet unrivalled by any that Scotland has ever produced." a reckless judgment which he could never have expressed deliberately. Ellis followed suit, and in Ellis' notice Dunbar is "the greatest poet Scotland has produced." These judgments have, in effect, been reverberated by successive writers and editors. In due time, some fourteen years ago, appeared the inevitable German monograph, "William Dunbar: sein Leben und seine Gedichte," by Dr. J. Schipper, to whom Mr. Oliphant Smeaton appropriately and reverently inscribes the present monograph.
In Mr. Oliphant Smeaton's work Dunbar assumes the proportions which might be expected—he is a "mighty genius." "The peer, if not in a few qualities, the superior of Chaucer and Spenser. By the indefeasible passport of the supreme genius he has an indisputable title to the apostolic succession of British poetry to that place between Chaucer and Spenser, that place which can only be claimed by one whose genius was co-ordinate with theirs." As probably eight out of every ten of Mr. Smeaton's readers will know nothing more of Dunbar than what Mr. Smeaton chooses to tell them, and as we, considering the space at our disposal, cannot refute him by a detailed examination of Dunbar's works, it is fortunate that he has given us a succinct illustration of the value of his critical judgment. The following are four typical stanzas of a poem which Mr. Smeaton ranks with Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais; we give them as Mr. Smeaton gives them, modernised:—
"I that in health was and gladness
Am troubled now with great sickness.
Enfeebled with infirmity,
Timor mortis conturbat me.
"Our pleasure here is all vain glory,
This false world is but transitory,
The flesh is brittle, the fiend is slee,
Timor mortis conturbat me.
"The state of man doth change and vary,
Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary
Now dancing merry, now like to dee,
Timor mortis conturbat me.
"No state on earth here stands sicker,
As with the wind waves the wicker,
So waves this world's vanity,
Timor mortis conturbat me."
As the following is pronounced to be one of the finest stanzas Dunbar ever penned, it is interesting as illustrating what is, in Mr. Smeaton's opinion, the best work of this rival of Chaucer and Spenser:—
"Have mercy, love, have mercy, lady bright;
What have I wrought against your womankeid,
That you should murder me a sackless wight,
Trespassing on you nor in word nor deed?
That ye consent thereto, O God forbid;
Leave cruelty and save your man for shame,
Or through the world quite losëd is your name."
It may be added that what are by far the finest passages in Dunbar's poems are passed unnoticed and unquoted by Mr. Smeaton. Indeed, his acquaintance with Dunbar, or, at all events, his taste in selection, is exactly on a par with that of Ned Softley's with Waller. "As that admirable writer has the best and worst verses among our English poets, Ned," says Addison, "has got all the bad ones by heart, which he repeats upon occasion to show his reading." Should Mr. Smeaton ever meet his idol in Hades, we would in all kindness advise him to avoid an encounter; let him remember that the fulsome eulogy is his own, but that the verses quoted are the poet's. Attempted murder—so the irate shade might argue—is less serious than compulsory suicide.
Dunbar was undoubtedly a man of genius, but a reference to the poets who immediately preceded him will make large deductions from the praises lavished on him by his eulogists. He struck no new notes. The Thistle and the Rose and The Golden Terge are mere echoes of Chaucer and Lydgate, and, in some degree, of the author of The King's Quair, and are indeed full of plagiarisms from them. The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins is probably little more than a faithful description of a popular mummery. His moral and religious poems had their prototypes, even in Scotland, in such poets as Johnston and Henryson. His most remarkable characteristic is his versatility, which ranges from the composition of such poems as The Merle and the Nightingale to the Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, from such lyrics as the Meditation in Winter to such lyrics as the Plea for Pity. Mr. Smeaton calls him "a giant in an age of pigmies." The author or authoress of The Flower and the Leaf was infinitely superior to him in point of style, Henryson was infinitely superior to him in originality, and Gavin Douglas at least his equal in power of expression and in description.
Let us do Dunbar the justice which Mr. Smeaton has not done him, and take him at his very best. Here is part of a picture of a May morning,—
"For mirth of May, wyth skippis and wyth hoppis
The birdis sang upon the tender croppis,
With curiouse notis, as Venus Chapell clerkis.
The rosis yong, new spreding of their knoppis,
War powderit brycht with hevinly beriall droppis;
Throu bemes rede, birnyng as ruby sperkis,
The skyes rang for schoutyng of the larkis."
This is brilliant and picturesque rhetoric touched into poetry by the "Venus Chapell clerkis," and the magical note in the last line; so too the touch in The Golden Terge, likening the faery ship to "blossom upon the spray." But in his allegorical poem he is too fond of the "quainte enamalit termes," and his verse has a certain metallic ring. It will be admitted, we suppose, that the best of his moral poems would be The Merle and the Nightingale and "Be Merrie Man"; but the utmost which can be said for them is, that the philosophy is excellent and its expression adequate; that is, that they have little to distinguish them from hundreds of other poems of the same class.
In speaking of Dunbar's satires, Mr. Smeaton indulges himself in the following nonsense, "From the genial, jesting, and ironical incongruities of Horace and Persius we are introduced at once into the bitter, vitriolic scourgings of Juvenal," and in the following rhodomontade, telling us that they unite "the natural directness of Hall, the subtle depth of Donne, the delicate humour of Breton, the sturdy vigour of Dryden, the scalding, vitriolic bitterness of Swift, the pungency of Churchill, the rural smack of Gay, united to an approach at least to the artistic perfection of Pope." Stuff like this and indiscriminate eulogy are, no doubt, much easier to produce than an estimate of a writer's historical position and importance. Of the relation of Dunbar to his predecessors and contemporaries in England and Scotland, of his prototypes and models in French and Provençal literature, of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised on subsequent poetry, and especially on Spenser, Mr. Smeaton has nothing to say. It never seems to occur to him that his hero, like every one else, must have had his limitations, that "the many-sidedness of that genius which has a ring"—the metaphors are not ours, but Mr. Smeaton's—"almost Shakespearian, about it," could hardly have been distinguished by uniformity of excellence; that "that painter of contemporary manners, who had all the vividness of a Callot, united to the broad humour of a Teniers and the minute touch of a Meissonier," who "reflected in his verse the most delicate nuances, as well as the most startling colours of the age wherein he lived," must have had degrees in success.
We have singled out this volume for special notice, not because of any intrinsic title it possesses to serious attention, but because it is typical of a species of literature which is rapidly becoming one of the pests of our time. While every encouragement should be given to sober, judicious, and competent reviews of our older writers, every discouragement should be given, out of respect to the dead, as well as in the interests of the living, to such books as the present. For they are as mischievous as they are ridiculous. They misinform; they mislead; they corrupt, or tend to corrupt, taste. After laying down a volume like this we feel, and we expect Dunbar would have felt, that there is something much more formidable than the old horror, "the candid friend," even that indicated by Tacitus—pessimum inimicorum genus—laudantes.
A GALLOP THROUGH ENGLISH LITERATURE [25]
[25] A Literary History of the English People from the Origins to the Renaissance. By J. J. Jusserand.
There is a breeziness and hilarity, a gay irresponsibility and abandon, about M. Jusserand which is perfectly delightful. He is the very Autolycus of History and Criticism. What more sober students, who have some conscience to trouble them, are "toiling all their lives to find" appears to be his as a sort of natural right. The fertility of his genius is such, that it seems to blossom spontaneously into erudition. Like the lilies he toils not, but unlike the lilies he spins, and very pretty gossamer too. It is impossible to take him seriously.
The truth is that M. Jusserand belongs to a class of writers which, thanks to indulgent publishers, a more indulgent public, and most indulgent reviewers, is just now greatly in the ascendant. "Encyclopædical heads," who took all knowledge for their province, probably died with Bacon, but encyclopædical heads who take all Literature or all History for their province appear to be as common as the "excellence" which, in opposition to Matthew Arnold's opinion, the American lady maintained was so abundant on both sides of the Atlantic. These are the gentlemen who complacently sit down "to edit the Literatures of the world," or "to trace the development of the human race, from its picturesque cradle in the valleys of Central Asia, to its infinite ramifications in our own day"—within "the moderate compass of an octavo volume."
M. Jusserand's first feat is to dispose of some six centuries in ninety-three pages, in a narrative which simply tells over again, though certainly after a more jaunty fashion, what Ten Brink, Henry Morley, and others have told much more seriously, and, we may add, much more effectively. The Norman Conquest and an account of the Anglo-Norman literature occupy about a hundred and ten pages, while some eighty pages more, dealing with the fusion of the races and the gradual evolution of the English people and language, bring us to Chaucer. It might have been expected that M. Jusserand would have justified his survey of a period so often reviewed before, either by tracing, with more fulness and precision than his predecessors, the successive stages in the development of our nationality and its expression in literature, or by adding to our knowledge of the characteristics and peculiarities of the literature itself. He has done neither. He has, on the contrary, obscured the first by the constant introduction of irrelevant matter, and he has apparently no notion of the relative importance of the authors on whose works he dilates or touches. Thus Richard Rolle of Hampole fills more space than Layamon, whose work is despatched in a page! Thus two lines in a note suffice for the Ormulum, two lines for Mannyng's Handlyng of Synne, a singularly interesting and significant work, ten lines for Robert of Gloucester, who is rather perplexingly described as "a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay," while four pages are accorded to Tristan and five to the Roman du Renart. How the Latin Chroniclers fare may be judged from the fact that a little more than a page serves for Geoffrey of Monmouth, a line for Ordericus Vitalis, and two for Giraldus Cambrensis. In the chapter on Chaucer M. Jusserand does more justice to his subject, and it is to be regretted for his own sake that he has not confined himself to such essays. He is never safe except when he is on the beaten path. Nothing could be more inadequate than the section on Gower. It certainly indicates that M. Jusserand is not very familiar with the Confessio Amantis. Not one word is said about the remarkable prologue, and to dismiss such a work in less than three pages, observing that "it contains a hundred and twelve short stories, two or three of which are very well told, one, the adventure of Florent, being, perhaps, related even better than in Chaucer," is not quite what we should expect in a work purporting to narrate the "literary history of the English people." M. Jusserand has not even taken the trouble to keep pace with modern investigation in his subject, but actually tells us that Gower's Speculum Meditantis is lost! If Gower's writings are not of much intrinsic value, they are of immense importance from an historical point of view. John de Trevisa, a most important name in the history of English prose, is despatched in eight lines of mere bibliographical information, without a word being said about his great services to our literature, and without any reference being made either to the remarkable preface to his great work, or to his version of the Dialogue attributed to Occam.
The only satisfactory chapter in the book is the chapter dealing with Langland and his works; but it is certainly surprising that no account should be given of the very remarkable anonymous poem entitled Piers Ploughman's Crede. Again, whole departments of literature, such as the Metrical Romances, the Laies, Fabliaux, early lyrics and ballads, are most inadequately treated, some of the most memorable and typical being not even specified. Surely Minot was not a man to be dismissed, with a flippant joke, in half a page, or King Horn and Havelok poems to be relegated to passing reference in a note.
But it is in dealing with the literature of the fifteenth century that M. Jusserand's superficiality and, to put it plainly, incompetence for his ambitious task become most deplorably apparent. In treating the earlier periods he had trustworthy guides even in common manuals, and he could not go far wrong in accepting their generalizations and statements. Books easily attainable, and indeed in everybody's hands, could enable him to dance airily through the Anglo-Saxon literature and through the period between Layamon and Chaucer. No one can now very well go wrong in Chaucer and his contemporaries, who has at his side some half-dozen works which any library can supply. But it is otherwise with the literature of the fifteenth century. Here, as every one who happens to have paid particular attention to it knows, popular manuals and histories are most misleading guides. Deterred, no doubt, by the prolixity of the poetry and by the comparatively uninteresting nature of the prose literature, modern historians and critics have contented themselves with accepting the verdicts of Warton and his followers, who probably had as little patience as themselves; and so a kind of conventional estimate has been formed, which appears and reappears in every manual and handbook. We turned, therefore, with much curiosity to this portion of M. Jusserand's work. We had, we own, our suspicions about his first-hand knowledge of the literature through which he glided so easily in the earlier portions of his book, and here, we thought, would be the crucial test of his pretension to original scholarship. Would he do voluminous Lydgate the justice which, as the specialist knows, has so long been withheld from him? Would he point out the strong human interest of Hoccleve; the great historical interest of Hardyng; the power and beauty of the ballads; or, if he included Hawes within the century, would he show what a singularly interesting poem, intrinsically and historically, the Pastime of Pleasure really is? If, again, he included the Scotch poets, how would he deal with the problems presented by Huchown? Would he accord the proper tribute to the genius of Dunbar; would he estimate what poetry owes respectively to James I., Henry the Minstrel, Robert Henryson, and Gavin Douglas? In our prose literature, would he comment on the great importance of Pecock's memorable work, of Fortescue's two treatises, of the Paston Letters, of Caxton's various publications? How would he deal with the one "classical" work of the century, Malory's Morte d'Arthur?
Now, of Lydgate, "to enumerate whose pieces," says Warton, "would be to write the catalogue of a little library," it is not too much to say that he was one of the most richly gifted of our old poets, that as a descriptive poet he stands almost on the level of Chaucer, that his pictures of Nature are among the gems of their kind, that his pathos is often exquisite, "touching," as Gray said of him, "the very heartstrings of compassion with so masterly a hand as to merit a place among the greatest of poets." His humour is often delightful, and his pictures of contemporary life, such as his London Lickpenny and his Prologue to the Storie of Thebes, are as vivid as Chaucer's. In versatility he has no rival among his predecessors and contemporaries. Gray notices that, at times, he approaches sublimity. His style often is beautiful,—fluent, copious, and at its best eminently musical. The influence which he exercised on subsequent English and Scotch literature would alone entitle him to a prominent position in any history of English poetry. But the handbooks think otherwise, and he occupies just three pages in M. Jusserand's work, the only estimate of his work being confined to the assertion that "he was a worthy man if ever there was one, industrious and prolific," etc., and the only criticism is the remark that his "prosody was rather lax." And this is how poor Lydgate fares at our historian's hands. To Hoccleve are assigned just one page and a few lines. Hardyng figures only in the bibliography at the bottom of a page. The ballads are despatched in fifteen lines. Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, memorable alike both for the preciseness with which it marks the transition from the poetry of mediævalism to that of the Renaissance, for its probable influence on Spenser, and for its intrinsic charm, its pathos, its picturesqueness, and its sweet and plaintive music, is curtly dismissed, as the handbooks dismiss it, as "an allegory of unendurable dulness." If M. Jusserand would throw aside the manuals and turn to the original, he would probably see reason to modify his verdict. Our author's breathless gallop through the Scotch poets, to whom he allots nine pages, can only be regarded with silent astonishment by readers who happen to known anything about those most remarkable men. Huchown is not so much as mentioned. The amazing nonsense which he writes in summing up Dunbar, we will transcribe, ut ex uno discas omnia:
"Dunbar, with never-flagging spirit, attempts every style.... His flowers are too flowery, his odours too fragrant; by moments it is no longer a delight, but almost a pain. It is not sufficient that his birds should sing; they must sing among perfumes, and these perfumes are coloured."
Has M. Jusserand ever read The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, and the minor poems of Dunbar? If he has, would he pronounce that these "flowers" are "too flowery"—these "odours" "too fragrant," or would he feel the absurdity of generalizing on ludicrously insufficient knowledge? His verdicts on the other Scotch poets are marked by the same superficiality, and we regret to add flippancy. To class Henryson among poets whose style is "florid" and whose roses are "splendid but too full-blown" is to show that M. Jusserand knows as little about him as he seems to know about Dunbar. In all Henryson's poems there are only three short passages which could by any possibility be described as florid. The prose of the fifteenth century fares even worse at his hands. Capgrave is mentioned only in the bibliography! Of the interest and importance of Pecock, historically and intrinsically, he appears to have no conception; on the real significance of the Repressor he never even touches, and how indeed could he in the less than one page which is assigned to one of the most remarkable writers in the fifteenth century? A page suffices for the Paston Letters, and four lines for Malory's Morte d'Arthur!
Now we would ask M. Jusserand, in all seriousness, what possible end can be served by a book of this kind, except the encouragement of everything that is detestable to the real scholar: superficiality, want of thoroughness, and false assumption, and what is more, the public dissemination of error, and of crude and misleading judgments. Such a work as the present, the soundness and trustworthiness of which ninety-nine readers in every hundred must necessarily take for granted, can only be justified when it proceeds from one who is a master of his immense subject, from one whose generalizations are based on amply sufficient knowledge, whose suppressions and omissions spring neither from carelessness nor from ignorance, but from discrimination, and in whose statements and judgments implicit reliance can be placed. To none of these qualifications has M. Jusserand the smallest pretension.
We have no wish to seem discourteous to M. Jusserand or to say anything which can cause him annoyance, but it is no more than simple duty in any critic with a becoming sense of responsibility to discountenance in every way the production of such books as these. They are not only mischievous in themselves, but they form precedents for books which are more mischievous still. We like M. Jusserand's enthusiasm, but we would exhort him to reduce the flatulent dimensions, which his ambition has here so unhappily assumed, to that more tempered ambition which gave us the monographs on Piers Ploughman and on the Tudor novelists.
DE QUINCEY AND HIS FRIENDS [26]
[26] Personal Recollections, Souvenirs, and Anecdotes of Thomas De Quincey and his Friends and Associates. Written and collected by James Hogg.
To a thoughtful reader there is, perhaps, no sadder spectacle than those sixteen volumes which represent all that remains to us of Thomas De Quincey. What superb powers, what noble and manifold gifts, what capacity for invaluable and imperishable achievements had Nature lavished on this extraordinary man! Metaphysics might for all time have been a debtor to that vigorous, acute, and subtle intellect, at once so speculative and logical, so inquisitive and discriminating. Æsthetic criticism might have found in him a second Lessing, and literary criticism a superior Sainte-Beuve. For, in addition to all that would have enabled him to excel in abstract thought, he had—and in ample measure—the qualities which make men consummate critics: rare power of analysis, the nicest perception, sensibility, sympathy, good taste, good sense, immense erudition. He might have contributed masterpieces to Theology, to History, to Economic Science. But they know not his name. He has set his seal on nothing but on English style. About a hundred and fifty articles contributed to magazines and encyclopædias, some of them of a high order of literary merit, many of them simply worthless, the majority of them containing what is inferior so disproportionately in excess of what is valuable that they may be likened to dustbins, with jewels here and there glittering among the rubbish;—this is what represents him. It is as a master of style, by virtue of what he accomplished as a rhetorician and prose poet only, that he will live. But this, comparatively scanty as it is, is of pre-eminent, of unique value, and will suffice to secure him a place for ever among the classics of English prose. He has also another claim, if not to our reverence, at least to our curious attention and interest,—and that attention and interest he can scarcely fail to excite in every generation,—his autobiographical writings give us a picture, and that with fascinating power, of one of the most extraordinary personalities on record.
Indiscriminating admiration is among the most pleasing traits of youth, but in men of mature years it loses its attractiveness. When it is no longer the effervescence of juvenile enthusiasm for which all make allowance, it becomes, like the levities of boyhood affected in middle life, merely vapid folly. In relation to its object it not only defeats its own ends, but is apt to make recipient and donor alike ridiculous. Nor is this all. By some curious law of association which we cannot pretend to explain, its almost inevitable ally is dulness, and dulness of a peculiarly wearisome and exasperating kind. During the last few years these peculiarities have become so alarmingly epidemic that it really seems high time to form, on the principle of Mr. Morris's Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, a Society for the Preservation of Literary Reputations. When those "of whom to be dispraised were no small praise" take to eulogy and editing, an unhappy Classic may well look to his true friends. It is nothing less than appalling to behold the mountains of rubbish now gradually accumulating over the work—the real work—of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; rubbish of their own, rescued with cruel industry from the oblivion to which they would themselves have consigned it, rubbish of their commentators and editors, dulness and inanity unutterable. "What, sir," asked an Eton boy of Foote, "was the best thing you ever said?" "Well," was the reply, "I once saw a chimney-sweep on a high prancing, high-mettled horse. 'There,' said I, 'goes [Warburton on Shakespeare.'"] But it is not in the Warburtons, not in the chimney-sweepers, that the mischief lies; it is in those who may be called the scavengers and sextons of literature, in those who, utterly unable to discern between what is precious and what is worthless in a man's work, thrust all, without distinction, into prominence, and thus not only enable an author to "write himself down," but, by their indiscriminating eulogies, assist him in his suicide. The subtlest form, indeed, which detraction can assume is over-praise, for a man is thus forced to give the lie to his own reputation.
No one, perhaps, has suffered so much from ill-judging admirers as De Quincey. If ever an author needed a judicious adviser, when preparing his works for publication in a permanent form, and a judicious editor, when the time had come for that final edition on which his title to future fame should rest, it was the English opium-eater. But, unhappily, he had no such adviser in his lifetime, and he has had no such editor since. He consequently reprinted much which ought never to have been reprinted at all, and he omitted to reprint some things which would have done honour to him. His besetting faults, even in his vigour, were loquacity and silliness, a habit of "drawing out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument"—a tendency to peddle and dawdle, as well as to indulge in a sort of pleasantry, so attenuated as to border closely on inanity. As he grew older these habits became more confirmed. His puerility and garrulousness in his later writings are often intolerable. But this was not the worst. In revising some of his earlier papers, and particularly the Confessions, he not only imported into them tiresome irrelevancies and superfluities, but, in emending, ruined the glorious passages on which his fame as a rhetorician and prose poet rests; such has been the fate, among others, of the exquisite description of the powers of opium,—the superb passage beginning, "The town of L.. represented the earth with its sorrows and its graves,"[27] and of the dreams in the second part of the Confessions, particularly of the sublime one beginning, "The dream commenced with a music."[28]
Mr. James Hogg tells us that his design in publishing the present volume was that he might "place a stone upon the cairn of the man" who had treated him "with an almost paternal tenderness." We sincerely sympathize with Mr. Hogg's pious intention, but we submit that the truest kindness which he, or any other admirer of De Quincey could do him, would be not to augment but to lighten the cairn which indiscreet admirers are so industriously piling over him. To change the figure, the best service which could be rendered to De Quincey would be to relieve him of his superfluous baggage, not to add to it. His fame would stand much higher, if his sixteen volumes were vigorously weeded; if the sweepings and refuse of his study, so injudiciously given to the world by Dr. Japp and Mr. Hogg, were given instead to the flames; and if reminiscents and biographers would only leave him to tell, in his own fashion, his own story, especially as it is one of those stories the interest of which depends purely on the telling. We have already expressed our sympathy with Mr. Hogg's pious intention. It only remains for us to express our regret that Mr. Hogg's piety should have taken the form of the most barefaced piece of book-making which we ever remember to have met with. Addison, if we are not mistaken, somewhere describes a man to whom a single volume afforded all the amusement and variety of a whole library, for, by the time he had arrived at the middle, he had completely forgotten the beginning, and when he arrived at the end, he had completely forgotten the whole. Mr. Hogg appears to proceed on the assumption that it is pretty much the same with the public and its memory, that its capacity for amusement is permanent, but that its recollection of what has amused it is so treacherous, that repetition will be sure to have all the attraction of novelty. This is, no doubt, unhappily true. But it is a truth which no critic has a right to concede.
All that is of interest in this volume is little more than the literal reproduction, in another shape, of material embodied in a Life of De Quincey, published by Dr. Alexander Japp, under the pseudonym of H. A. Page, in 1877. Its exact composition is as follows. Eliminating the preface and the index, the book consists of 359 pages. Of these, seventy consist of a dreary réchauffé by Dr. Japp himself of his own Life of De Quincey, and of the additional information contained in his edition of the Posthumous Works. Next comes a series of reminiscences, extracted from Dr. Japp's Life, from Dr. Garnett's edition of the Confessions, from the Quarterly Review, and from other sources all equally accessible. Then Mr. Hogg himself opens fire with Days and Nights with De Quincey. An essay—"On the supposed Scriptural Expression for Eternity"—excellently illustrating De Quincey in his senility, is reprinted, with awe-struck admiration, from the American edition of his works.
For the purpose, presumably, of adding to the bulk of the book, Moir's ballad, De Quincey's Revenge, is included, though its sole connection with De Quincey is, that it deals with a legend concerning the possible ancestors of a possible branch of his possible family. Then we have one of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson LL.D.'s Outcast Essays, "On the genius of De Quincey," the reason for the hospitable entertainment of the outcast being by no means apparent. Among other dreary trifles is a reprint of a Latin theme, one of De Quincey's college exercises. As Mr. Hogg has chosen to reprint and translate this, it would have been as well to print and translate it correctly. "Quæ ansibus obstant" should, of course, have been "ausibus," and "oculi perstringuntur" cannot possibly mean "are spellbound," but "are dazzled."
The republication of these pieces was, we repeat, a great mistake, another lamentable illustration of the cruel wrong which officious and ill-judging admirers may inflict on a writer's reputation. Talleyrand once observed that, a wise man would be safer with a foolish than with a clever wife, for a foolish wife could only compromise herself, but a clever wife might compromise her husband. Substituting 'unambitious' for 'foolish' and 'ambitious' for 'clever,' we are very much inclined to apply the same remark to a great writer and his friends. It requires a Johnson to support a Boswell, and a Goethe to support an Eckermann.