Dr. Jessopp tells us very little is left of Roger North—his house has been pulled down, his trees pulled up, and his books dispersed. But his Lives of his three brothers, and now his own Autobiography, will keep his memory green. There is something about him one rather likes, though were we asked what it is, we should have no answer ready.
BOOKS OLD AND NEW.
Now that our century has entered upon its last decade, and draws near the hour which will despatch it to join its too frequently and most unjustly despised predecessor, it is pleasing to note how well it has learnt to play the old man’s part. One has only to compare the Edinburgh Review of, say, October, 1807, with its last number, to appreciate the change that has come over us. Cocksureness, once the badge of the tribe of critics, is banished to the schoolroom. The hearty hatreds of our early days would ill befit a death-bed. A keen critic has observed what a noisy place England used to be. Everybody cried out loud in the market-place, in the Senate-house, in the Law Courts, in the Reviews and Magazines. In the year 1845 the Times newspaper incurred the heavy and doubtless the just censure of the Oxford Union for its unprincipled tone as shown in its ‘violent attempts to foment agitation as well by inflammatory articles as by the artifices of correspondents.’ How different it now is! We all move about as it were in list slippers. Our watchword is ‘Hush!’ Dickens tells us how, at Hone’s funeral, Cruikshank, being annoyed at some of the observations of the officiating minister, whispered in Dickens’ ear as they both moved to kneel at prayer, ‘If this wasn’t a funeral I would punch his head.’ It was a commendable restraint. We are now, all of us, exercising it.
A gloomy view is being generally taken of our literary future in the next century. Poetry, it is pretty generally agreed, has died with Lord Tennyson. Who, it is said, can take any pride or pleasure in the nineties, whose memory can carry him back to the sixties? What days those were that gave us brand-new from the press ‘Philip’ and ‘The Four Georges,’ ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner,’ ‘Evan Harrington’ and ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ ‘Maud,’ ‘The Idylls of the King,’ and ‘Dramatis Personæ,’ Mr. Arnold’s New Poems, the ‘Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ,’ and ‘Verses on Various Occasions,’ four volumes of ‘Frederick the Great,’ and ‘The Origin of Species’! One wonders in the retrospect how human stupidity was proof against such an onslaught of wit, such a shower of golden fancies. Why did not Folly’s fortress fall? We know it did not, for it is standing yet. Nor has any particular halo gathered round the sixties—which, indeed, were no better than the fifties or the forties.
From what source, so ask ‘the frosty pows,’ are you who call yourselves ‘jolly candidates’ for 1900, going to get your supplies? Where are your markets? Who will crowd the theatre on your opening nights? What well-graced actors will then cross your stage? Your boys and girls will be well provided for, one can see that. Story-books and handbooks will jostle for supremacy; but your men and women, all a-hungered, how are you going to feed them and keep their tempers sweet? It is not a question of side dishes, but of joints. Sermons and sonnets, and even ‘clergy-poets,’ may be counted upon, but they will only affront the appetites they can never satisfy. What will be wanted are Sam Wellers, Captain Costigans, and Jane Eyres—poetry that lives, controversy that bites, speeches that stir the imagination.
Thus far the aged century. To argue with it would be absurd; to silence it cruel, and perhaps impossible. Greedy Time will soon do that.
But suppose it should turn out to be the fact that we are about to enter upon a period of well-cultivated mediocrity. What then? Centuries cannot be expected to go on repeating the symptoms of their predecessors. We have had no Burns. We cannot, therefore, expect to end with the beginnings of a Wordsworth and a Coleridge; there may likely be a lull. The lull may also be a relief. Of all odd crazes, the craze to be for ever reading new books is one of the oddest.