Letters on Literature

by Andrew Lang

That is poetry deserving of a place among the rarest things in the Anthology. It is a sorrow to me that I cannot quite place Praed with Prior in my affections. With all his gaiety and wit, he wearies one at last with that clever, punning antithesis. I don’t want to know how

“Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry”—

and I prefer his sombre “Red Fisherman,” the idea of which is borrowed, wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian.

Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comes nearer Prior in breadth of humour and in unaffected tenderness. Who can equal that song, “Once you come to Forty Year,” or the lines on the Venice Love-lamp, or the “Cane-bottomed Chair”? Of living English writers of verse in the “familiar style,” as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender and not untouched with melancholy, as in “The Portrait of a Lady,” and Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the “Song of Four Seasons” and “The Dead Letter.” He has ingenuity, pathos, mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic of poets, is “conveniently learned.”

Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the “Heathen Chinee,” as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte’s poems have never (at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed. Mr. Lowell has written (“The Biglow Papers” apart) but little in this vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written much with perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of vers de société, my dear Gifted, goes a long way, as you will think, if ever you sit down steadily to read right through any collection of poems in this manner. So do not add too rapidly to your own store; let them be “few, but roses” all of them.

RICHARDSON

By Mrs. Andrew Lang.

Dear Miss Somerville,—I was much interested in your fruitless struggle to read “Sir Charles Grandison,”—the book whose separate numbers were awaited with such impatience by Richardson’s endless lady friends and correspondents, and even by the rakish world—even by Colley Cibber himself. I sympathize entirely with your estimate of its dulness; yet, dull as it is, it is worth wading through to understand the kind of literature which could flutter the dove-cotes of the last century in a generation earlier than the one that was moved to tears by the wearisome dramas of Hannah More.

There is only one character in the whole of “Sir Charles Grandison” where Richardson is in the least like himself—in the least like the Richardson of “Pamela” and “Clarissa.” This character is Miss Charlotte Grandison, the sister of Sir Charles, and later (after many vicissitudes) the wife of Lord G. Miss Grandison’s conduct falls infinitely beneath the high standard attained to by the rest of Sir Charles’s chosen friends. She is petulant and loves to tease; is uncertain of what she wants; she is lively and sarcastic, and, worse than all, abandons the rounded periods of her brother and Miss Byron for free, not to say slang, expressions. “Hang ceremony!” she often exclaims, with much reason, while “What a deuce!” is her favourite expletive.

The conscientious reader heaves a sigh of relief when this young lady and her many indiscretions appear on the scene; when Miss Grandison, like Nature, “takes the pen from Richardson and writes for him.” But I gather that you, my dear Miss Somerville, never got far enough to make her acquaintance, and therefore are still ignorant of the singular qualities of her brother, Sir Charles—Richardson’s idea of a perfect man, for both brother and sister are introduced at almost the same moment.