And these epithets "glad" and "grateful" occur to me as the only suitable terms to apply to you, most super-excellent Andrew; my good friend to whom I owe so much. I am glad and grateful to know that your "lang" personality is a familiar object at so many newspaper offices. I am delighted to feel that English literature would come to a dead halt without your pleasantly long finger to push it on. It rejoices my heart to realise what a power you are. I am lost in astonishment at the extraordinary collection of Lilliputian authors you have hatched by your incubating process. They are the prettiest little brood imaginable, and what is so charming about them is that they are all so tame and well-behaved that they will never fly. This is such a comfort. Just a little scurrying and flopping through the press-yard is all they are capable of, and quite enough too. Comfortable hencoop sanity in literature is the thing; we don't want any of Professor Lombroso's maniacs in the way of geniuses about. They are dangerous. They do strange things and break out in strange places, and often succeed in stopping all the world on its way to look at them. Nothing would alarm you so much, I assure you, my dear Andrew, as the involuntary hatching of a genius. In fact, I believe it would be all over with you. You could not survive.
But, thanks to a merciful Providence, you run no risk of this. The old hen Art is a savage bird and lays her eggs among wild thorns and bracken out in the open, where no man can find them to bring to you for the artificial bursting heat of a "boom." You only get the dwarf product of the domestic poultry of the press-yard. And these are easily incubated by your patent process—in fact, they almost hatch themselves, they are in such a hurry to chirp forth their claims to literary distinction. But being fragile of constitution they need constantly looking after, which I should imagine must be rather a bore. Relays of paragraph-men have to come and throw corn and savouries all the while lest your little chicks should die of inanition, they having no stamina in themselves. Some will die, some are dying, some are dead; yet weep not, gentle Incubator, for their fate. It better suits thy purpose that such should perish, so long as thou dost remain to hatch fresh fowl upon demand. The press-yard relies upon thee for its stock of guaranteed male birds—its gifted "virile" roosters, whose "cocksure" literary crowings may wake old Granny Journalism at stated hours from too-prolonged and loudly-snoring slumbers; but produce no hens, Andrew, for if thou dost, thou art a mistaken patent and workest by a wrong process! Continue in the path of wisdom, therefore, and faithfully incubate only masculine fledglings for the literary coops. More we do not expect of thee, save that thou continue to be the king of compilers and the enemy of blue stockings. For myself, personally speaking, admiring thee as I am fain to do, I naturally implore thee to go on in all the magazines and journals telling me the things I knew before—the old stories I read when I was a thoughtless child, the scraps of information familiar to me as copybook maxims, the ancient jokes at which my elders laughed, the snatches of French romance and fable I picked up casually at school. For being always a book-lover it is but natural I should have learned the things wherewith thou instructest the ignorant world; but thou shalt tell me of them again and yet again, good Andrew, and yet I will not murmur nor ask of thee one thought original. Aware of all thou canst say, I still entreat thee, say it! Say it (to quote the jovial old Saturday once more) in "little," that I may have it "lang."
And now, ever famous and beloved Andrew, I must for the moment take my leave of thee. The glory of thy reputation is as a band of light around the foggy isles of Britain, and that benighted Europe knows thee not at all is but a trifle to us, though a loss to Europe. When Hall Caine recently found out that he was not celebrated in Germany he wondered thereat and said the Germans had no taste for English literature. No—not though they are the finest Shakesperian scholars in the world and the most ardent lovers of Byron's poesy. "Benighted Fatherland!" inwardly moaned the writer of "Sagas"—"Benighted country that knoweth not my works! Benighted people that have never heard—ye gods, imagine it!—have never heard the name of Kipling!" Oh, dull, beer-drinking, Wagner-ridden disciples of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine! To be ignorant of Kipling! To be only capable of a bovine questioning stare at Caine! To be impervious to the electric name of Lang! To know nothing about the new "Thucydides," R. L. Stevenson! Heaven forgive them, for I cannot. I abjure the Rhineland till it has been to school with Lang's text-books under its arm. Drop Heine, ye besotted slaves of "lager-bier," and read Kipling. Try to read him, anyway. If you can't, my friend Andrew will show you how. Andrew will show you anything that can be shown in English journals and newspapers. But beyond these he cannot go. You must not expect him to expand farther. His incubating work belongs solely to the English Press Poultry-yard—his name, his power, his influence avail, alas! as Nothing, out in the wide, wide world!
XIX.
BYRON LOQUITUR.