Views and Reviews: Essays in appreciation: Literature

by William Ernest Henley

In Particular.

For the British essayists, they are more talked about than known. It is to be suspected that from the first their reputation has greatly exceeded their popularity; and of late years, in spite of the declamation of Macaulay and the very literary enthusiasm of the artist of Esmond and The Virginians, they have fallen further into the background, and are less

than ever studied with regard. In theory the age of Anne is still the Augustan age to us; but in theory only, and only to a certain extent. What attracts us is its outside. We are in love with its houses and its china and its costumes. We are not enamoured of it as it was but as it seems to Mr. Caldecott and Mr. Dobson and Miss Kate Greenaway. We care little for its comedy and nothing at all for its tragedy. Its verse is all that our own is not, and the same may be said of its prose and ours—of the prose of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith and the prose of Addison and Swift. Mr. Gladstone is not a bit like Bolingbroke, and between The Times and The Tatler, between The Spectator (Mr. Addison’s), and The Fortnightly Review, there is a difference of close upon two centuries and of a dozen revolutions—political, social, scientific, and æsthetic. We may babble as we please about the ‘sweetness’ of Steele and the ‘humour’ of Sir Roger de Coverley, but in our hearts we care for them a great deal less than we ought, and in fact Mr. Mudie’s subscribers do not hesitate to prefer the ‘sweetness’ of Mr. Black and the ‘humour’ of Mr. James Payn. Our love is not for the essentials of the time but only its accidents and oddities; and we express it in pictures and poems and fantasies in architecture, and the canonisation (in figures) of Chippendale and Sheraton. But it is questionable if we might not with advantage increase

our interest, and carry imitation a little deeper. The Essayists, for instance, are often dull, but they write like scholars and gentlemen. They refrain from personalities; they let scandal alone, nor ever condescend to eavesdropping; they never go out of their way in search of affectation or prurience or melancholy, but are content to be merely wise and cheerful and humane. Above all, they do their work as well as they can. They seem to write not for bread nor for a place in society but for the pleasure of writing, and of writing well. In these hysterical times life is so full, so much is asked and so much has to be given, that tranquil writing and careful workmanship are impossible. A certain poet has bewailed the change in a charming rondeau:—

‘More swiftly now the hours take flight!
What’s read at morn is dead at night;
Scant space have we for art’s delays,
Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,
We may not work—ah! would we might,
With slower pen!’

It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. The trick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an excellence that is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for the exhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass without notice if we do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, and the world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson’s little sheaf of Eighteenth Century Essays might

be regarded as a protest against the necessity and the submission. It proves that ’tis possible to be eloquent without adjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you need not necessarily be extravagant and conceited; that without being maudlin and sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and that once upon a time a writer could prove himself a humourist without feeling it incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding.

BOSWELL

His Destiny.

It has been Boswell’s fate to be universally read and almost as universally despised. What he suffered at the hands of Croker and Macaulay is typical of his fortune. In character, in politics, in attainments, in capacity, the two were poles apart; but they were agreed in this: that Boswell must be castigated and contemned, and that they were the men to do it. Croker’s achievement, consider it how you will, remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothing in the Life but a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need of annotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell’s text and interlarded it with scraps of his own and other people’s; he pegged into it a sophisticated version of the Tour; and he overwhelmed his amazing compound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub, scold, ‘improve,’ and insult his author at every turn. What came of it one knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and good literature, made Boswell’s quarrel his own, and the expiation was as bitter as the offence was wanton and scandalous.