THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ESSAYS IN LITTLE BY THE SAME AUTHOR. HELEN OF TROY, $1.50 BALLADES AND VERSES VAIN, . . . 1.50 LETTERS TO DEAD AUTHORS, . . 1.00 THE MARK OF CAIN. PAPER, 25 CENTS ; CLOTH, .75 A >c ESSAYS IN LITTLE BY ANDREW LANG WITH PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1891 Presa of J. J. Little & Co. Antor Place, New York College Library p/v PREFACE. the following essays, five are new, and were written for this volume. They are the paper on Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the "Letter to a Young Journalist," the study of Mr. Kipling, the note on Homer, and "The Last Fashionable Novel." The article on the author of " Oh, no ! we never mention Her," appeared in the New York Sun, and was suggested by Mr. Dana, the editor of that journal. The papers on Thackeray and Dickens were pub- lished in Good Words, that on Dumas appeared in Scribner's Magazine, that on M. Theodore de Banville in Tile New Quarterly Review. The other essays were originally written for a newspaper " Syndicate." They have been re-cast, augmented, and, to a great extent, re-written. A. L. 1115875 CONTENTS. FAG* ALEXANDRE DUMAS I MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS 24 THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY 36 THEODORE DE BANVILLE 51 HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK . . . .77 THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL 93 THACKERAY 103 DICKENS Il8 ADVENTURES OF BUCCANEERS 132 THE SAGAS . 141 CHARLES KINGSLEY 153 CHARLES LEVER : HIS BOOKS, ADVENTURES AND MIS- FORTUNES 160 THE POEMS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT 171 JOHN BUNYAN 182 LETTER TO A YOUNG JOURNALIST 191 MR. KIPLING'S STORIES 198 ALEXANDRE DUMAS. A LEXANDRE DUMAS is a writer, and his life is a /A. topic, of which his devotees never weary. Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough wherein to tire of them. The long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum, in Addison the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for half a century and a courtship for two hundred years, might have sufficed for an exhaustive study of Dumas. No such study have I to offer, in the brief seasons of our perishable days. I own that I have not read, and do not, in the circumstances, expect to read, all of Dumas, nor even the greater part of his thousand volumes. We only dip a cup in that sparkling sprirg, and drink, and go on, we cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the well itself. It is but a word of gratitude and delight that we can say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an am of friendship that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even still more widely circulated than they are ; that the young should read them, and learn frankness, kindness, generosity should esteem the tender heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of dreams, that is what we desire. Dumas said of himself (" Me'moires," v. 13) that when W. L.-I. 2 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. he was young he tried several times to read forbidden books books that are sold sous le manteau. But he never got farther than the tenth page, in the ' scrofulous French novel On gray paper with blunt type j" he never made his way so far as " the woful sixteenth print." " I had, thank God, a natural sentiment of delicacy ; and thus, out of my six hundred volumes (in 1852) there are not four which the most scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter." Much later, in 1864, when the Censure threat- ened one of his plays, he wrote to the Emperor : " Of my twelve hundred volumes there is not one which a girl in our most modest quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, may not be allowed to read." The mothers of the Faubourg, and mothers in general, may not take Dumas exactly at his word. There is a passage, for example, in the story of Miladi (" Les Trois Mousquetaires ") which a parent or guardian may well think undesirable reading for youth. But compare it with the original passage in the " Mdmoires " of D'Artagnan ! It has passed through a medium, as Dumas himself declared, of natural delicacy and good taste. His enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters, owes absolutely nothing to prurience or curiosity. The air which he breathes is a healthy air, is the open air ; and that by his own choice, for he had every temptation to seek another kind of vogue, and every opportunity. Two anecdotes are told of Dumas' books, one by M. Edmond About, the other by his own son, which show, in brief space, why this novelist is so beloved, and why he deserves our affection and esteem. M. Villaud, a railway ALEXANDER DUMAS. 3 engineer who had lived much in Italy, Russia, and Spain, was the person whose enthusiasm finally secured a statue .for Dumas. He felt so much gratitude to the unknown friend of lonely nights in long exiles, that he could not be happy till his gratitude found a permanent expression. On returning to France he went to consult M. Victor Borie, who told him this tale about George Sand. M. Borie chanced to visit the famous novelist just before her death, and found Dumas' novel, " Les Quarante Cinq " (one of the cycle about the Valois kings) lying on her table. He expressed his wonder that she was reading it for the first time. " For the first time ! why, this is the fifth or sixth time I have read ' Les Quarante Cinq,' and the others. When I am ill, anxious, melancholy, tired, discouraged, nothing helps me against moral or physical troubles like a book of Dumas." Again, M. About says that M. Sarcey was in the same class at school with a little Spanish boy. The child was homesick ; he could not eat, he could not sleep ; he was almost in a decline. " You want to see your mother?" said young Sarcey. " No : she is dead." "Your father, then?" " No : he used to beat me." " Your brothers and sisters ?" " I have none." " Then why are you so eager to be back in Spain ? " " To finish a book I began in the holidays." " And what was its name ? " " ' Los Tres Mosqueteros ' I " He was homesick for " The Three Musketeers," and they cured him easily. 4 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. That is what Dumas does. He gives courage and life to old age, he charms away the half-conscious nostalgic, the Ifeimweh, of childhood. We are all homesick, in the dark days and black towns, for the land of blue skies and brave adventures in forests, and in lonely inns, on the battle-field, in the prison, on the desert isle. And then Dumas comes, and, like Argive Helen, in Homer, he casts a drug into the wine, the drug nepenthe, " that puts all evil out of mind." Does any one suppose that when George Sand was old and tired, and near her death, she would have found this anodyne, and this stimulant, in the novels of M. Tolstoi, M. Dostoiefsky, M. Zola, or any of the " scientific " observers whom we are actually requested to hail as the masters of a new art, the art of the future ? Would they make her laugh, as Chicot does ? make her forget, as Porthos, Athos, and Aramis do? take her away from the heavy, familiar time, as the enchanter Dumas takes us No ; let it be enough for these new authors to be industrious, keen, accurate, predeux, pitiful, charitable, veracious ; but give us high spirits now and then, a light heart, a sharp sword, a fair wench, a good horse, or even that old Gascon rouncy of D'Artagnan's. Like the good Lord James Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with Chicot, than listen to the starved- mouse squeak in the bouge of Therese Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an hour for him, and others like him ; but they are not, if you please, to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the praise ; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time into tedium, and the laurels of Scott and Dumas into crowns of nettles. ALEXANDRE DUMAS. 5 There is no complete life of Alexandre Dumas. The age has not produced the intellectual athlete who can gird him- self up for that labour. One of the worst books that ever was written, if it can be said to be written, is, I think, the English attempt at a biography of Dumas. Style, grammar, taste, feeling, are all bad. The author does not so much write a life as draw up an indictment. The spirit of his work is grudging, sneering, contemptuous, and pitifully peddling. The great charge is that Dumas was a humbug, that he was not the author of his own books, that his books were written by " collaborators " above all, by M. Maquet. There is no doubt that Dumas had a regular system of collaboration, which he never concealed. But whereas Dumas could turn out books that live, whoever his assist- ants were, could any of his assistants write books that live, without Dumas ? One might as well call any barrister in good practice a thief and an impostor because he has juniors to " devil " for him, as make charges of this kind against Dumas. He once asked his son to help him ; the younger Alexandre declined. " It is worth a thousand a year, and you have only to make objections," the sire urged ; but the son was not to be tempted. Some excellent novelists of to-day would be much better if they employed a friend to make objections. But, as a rule, the colloborator did much more. Dumas' method, apparently, was first to talk the subject over with his aide-de-camp. This is an excellent practice, as ideas are knocked out, like sparks (an elderly illustration!), by the contact of minds. Then the young man probably made researches, put a rough sketch on paper, and supplied Dumas, as it were, with his "brief." Then Dumas took the "brief" and wrote the 6 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. novel. He gave it life, he gave it the spark (Tetincelle) and the story lived and moved. It is true that he " took his own where he found it," like Mo lere, and that he took a good deal. In the gallery of an old country-house, on a wet day, I came once on the " Me"moires " of D'Artagnan, where they had lain since the family bought them in Queen Anne's time. There were our old friends the Musketeers, and there were many of their adventures, told at great length and breadth. But how much more vivacious they are in Dumas ! M. About repeats a story of Dumas and his ways of work. He met the great man at Marseilles, where, indeed, Alexandre chanced to be " on with the new love " before being completely " off with the old." Dumas picked up M. About, literally lifted him in his embrace, and carried him off to see a play which he had written in three days. The play was a success ; the supper was prolonged till three in the morning ; M. About was almost asleep as he walked home, but Dumas was as fresh as if he had just got out of bed. " Go to sleep, old man," he said : " I, who am only fifty-five, have three feuilktons to write, which must be posted to-morrow. If I have time I shall knock up a little piece for Montigny the idea is running in my head." So next morning M. About saw the \hxzzfeuilletons made up for the post, and another packet addressed to M. Montigny : it was the play D Invita- tion a la Valse, a chef-d'oeuvre ! Well, the material had been prepared for Dumas. M. About saw one of his novels at Marseilles in the chrysalis. It was a stout copy-book full of paper, composed by a practised hand, on the master's design. Dumas copied out each little leaf on a big leaf of paper, en y semant t esprit a pleines mains. This was his method. ALEXANDRE DUMAS. ^ As a rule, in collaboration, one man does the work while the other looks on. Is it likely that Dumas looked on? That was not the manner of Dumas. " Mirecourt and others," M. About says, " have wept crocodile tears for the collaborators, the victims of his glory and his talent. But it is difficult to lament over the survivors (1884). The master neither took their money for they are rich, nor their fame for they are celebrated, nor their merit for they had and still have plenty. And they never bewailed their fate : the reverse! The proudest congratulate themselves on having been at so good a school ; and M. Auguste Maquet, the chief of them, speaks with real reverence and affection of his great friend." And M. About writes " as one who had taken the master red-hanled, and in the act of col- laboration." Dumas has a curious note on collaboration in his " Souvenirs Dramatiques." Of the two men at work together, " one is always the dupe, and he is the man of talent." There is no biography of Dumas, but the small change of a biography exists in abundance. There are the many volumes of his " Memoires," there are all the tomes he wrote on hir travels and adventures in Africa, Spain, Italy, Kussia ; the book he wrote on his beasts ; the romance of Ange Pitou, partly autobiographical ; and there are plenty of little studies by people who knew him. As to his " Memoires," as to all he wrote about himself, of course his imagination entered into the narrative. Like Scott, when he had a good story he liked to dress it up with a cocked hat and a sword. Did he perform all those astonish- ing and innumerable feats of strength, skill, courage, address, in revolutions, in voyages, in love, in war, in cookery ? The 8 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. narrative need not be taken " at the foot of the letter " \ great as was his force and his courage, his fancy was greater still. There is no room for a biography of him here. His descent was noble on one side, with or without the bend sinister, which he said he would never have disclaimed, had it been his, but which he did not happen tc inherit. On the other side he may have descended from kings ; but, as in the case of " The Fair Cub. .," he must have added, "African, unfortunately." Did his father perform these mythical feats of strength ? did he lift up a horse between his legs, while clutching a rafter with his hands? did he throw his regiment before him over a wall, as Guy Heavi- stone threw the mare which refused the leap (" Me"moires," i. 122)? No doubt Dumas believed what he heard about this ancestor in whom, perhaps, one may see a hint of the giant Porthos. In the Revolution and in the wars his father won the name of Monsieur de 1'Humanite". because he made a bonfire of a guillotine ; and of Horatius Codes, because he held a pass as bravely as the Roman " in the brave days .of old." This was a father to be proud of; and pluck, tenderness, generosity, strength, remained the favourite virtues of Dumas. These he preached and practised. They say he was generous before he was just ; it is to be feared this was true, but he gave even more freely than he received. A regiment of seedy people sponged on him always ; he could not listen to a tale of misery but he gave what he had, and sometimes left himself short of a dinner. He could not even turn a dog out of doors. At his Abbotsford, " Monte Cristo r the gates were open to everybody but bailiffs. His dog asked other dogs to come ALEXANDRE DUMAS. 9 and stay : twelve came, making thirteen in all. The old butler wanted to turn them adrift, and Dumas consented, and repented. "Michel," he said, "there are some expenses which a man's social position and the character which he has had the ill-luck to receive from heaven force upon him. I don't believe these dogs ruin me. Let them bide ! But, in the interests of their own good luck, see they are not thirteen, an unfortunate number ! " " Monsieur, I'll drive one of them away." " No, no, Michel ; let a fourteenth come. These dogs cost me some three pounds a month," said Dumas. "A dinner to five or six friends would cost thrice as much, and, when they went home, they would say my wine was good, but certainly that my books were bad." In this fashion Dumas fared royally "to the dogs," and his Abbotsford ruined him as certainly as that other unhappy palace ruined Sir Walter. He, too, had his miscellaneous kennel; he, too, gave while he had anything to give, and, when he had nothing else, gave the work of his pen. Dumas tells how his big dog Mouton once flew at him and bit one of his hands, while the other held the throat of the brute. " Luckily my hand, though small, is powerful ; what it once holds it holds long money excepted." He could not " haud a guid grip o' the gear." Neither Scott nor Dumas could shut his ears to a prayer or his pockets to a beggar, or his doors on whoever knocked at them. " I might at least have asked him to dinner," Scott was heard murmuring, when some insufferable bore at last left Abbotsford, after wasting his time and nearly wearing io ESSAYS IN LITTLE. out his patience. Neither man preached socialism ; both practised it on the Aristotelian principle : the goods of friends are common, and men are our friends. The death of Dumas' father, while the son was a child, left Madame Dumas in great poverty at Villers Cotterets. Dumas' education was sadly to seek. Like most children destined to be bookish, he taught himself to read very young : in Buffon, the Bible, and books of mythology. He knew all about Jupiter like David Copperfield's Tom Jones, " a child's Jupiter, an innocent creature " all about every god, goddess, fawn, dryad, nymph and he never forgot this useful information. Dear Lempriere, thou art superseded ; but how much more delightful thou art than the fastidious Smith or the learned Preller ! Dumas had one volume of the " Arabian Nights," with Aladdin's lamp therein, the sacred lamp which he was to keep burning with a flame so brilliant and so steady. It is pleasant to know that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved Virgil. "Little as is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil: his tenderness for exiles, his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of an unknown God, have always moved me ; the melody of his verses charmed me most, and they lull me still between asleep and awake." School days did not last long : Madame Dumas got a little post a licence to sell tobacco and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary's office, like his great Scotch forerunner. He was ignorant of his vocation for the stage Racine and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously till he saw Hamlet: Hamlet diluted by Ducis. He had never heard of Shakespeare, but here was something he could appreciate. Here was "a profound ALEXANDER DUMAS. II impression, full of inexplicable emotion, vague desires, fleeting lights, that, so far, lit up only a chaos." Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the trans- lation of Biirger's " Lenore." Here, again, he encounters Scott ; but Scott translated the ballad, and Dumas failed. Les mortes vont vite t the same refrain woke poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman. " Ha ! ha ! the Dead can ride w ith speed : Dost fear to ride with me ? " So Dumas' literary career began with a defeat, but it was always a beginning. He had just failed with " Lenore," when Leuven asked him to collaborate in a play. He was utterly ignorant, he says ; he had not succeeded in gallant efforts to read through " Gil Bias " and " Don Quixote." " To my shame," he writes, " the man has not been more fortunate with those masterpieces than the boy" He had not yet heard of Scott, Cooper, Goethe; he had heard of Shakespeare only as a barbarian. Other plays the boy wrote failures, of course and then Dumas poached his way to Paris, shooting partridges on the road, and paying the hotel expenses by his success in the chase. He was introduced to the great Talma : what a moment for Talma, had he known it ! He saw the theatres. He went home, but returned to Paris, drew a small prize in a lottery, and sat next a gentleman at the play, a gentleman who read the rarest of Elzevirs, " Le Pastissier Francais," and gave him a little lecture on Elzevirs in general. Soon this gentleman began to hiss the piece, and was turned out. He was Charles Nodier, and one of the anonymous authors of the play he was hissing ! I own that this amusing chapter lacks verisimilitude. It reads as 12 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. if Dumas had chanced to " get up " the subject of Elzevirs, and had fashioned his new knowledge ^into a little story. He could make a story out of anything he "turned all to favour and to prettiness." Could I translate the whole passage, and print it here, it would be longer than this article ; but, ah, how much more entertaining ! For whatever Dumas did he did with such life, spirit, wit, he told it with such vivacity, that his whole career is one long romance of the highest quality. Lassagne told him he he must read must read Goethe, Scott, Cooper, Froissart, Joinville, Brantome. He read them to some purpose. He entered the service of the Due d'Orle'ans as a clerk, for he wrote a clear hand, and, happily, wrote at astonishing speed. He is said to have written a short play in a cottage where he went to rest for an hour or two after shooting all the morning. The practice in a notary's office stood him, as it stood Scott, in good stead. When a dog bit his hand he managed to write a volume without using his thumb. I have tried it, but forbear in mercy to the printers. He performed wild feats of rapid caligraphy when a clerk under the Due d'Orleans, and he wrote his plays in one "hand," his novels in another. The "hand" used in his dramas he acquired when, in days of poverty, he used to write in bed. To this habit he also attributed the brutalite of his earlier pieces, but there seems to be no good reason why a man should write like a brute because it is in bed that he writes. In those days of small things he fought his first duel, and made a study of Fear and Courage. His earliest impulse was to rush at danger ; if he had to wait, he felt his courage oozing out at the tips of his fingers, like Bob ALEXANDER DUMAS. 13 Acres, but in the moment of peril he was himself again. In dreams he was a coward, because, as he argues, the natural man is a poltroon, and conscience, honour, all the spiritual and commanding part of our nature, goes to sleep in dreams. The animal terror asserts itself unchecked. It is a theory not without exceptions. In dreams one has plenty of conscience (at least that is my experience), though it usually takes the form of remorse. And in dreams one often affronts dangers which, in waking hours, one might probably avoid if one could. Dumas' first play, an unimportant vaudeville, was acted in 1825. His first novels were also published then; he took part of the risk, and only four copies were sold. He afterward used the ideas in more mature works, as Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu employed three or four times (with perfect candour and fairness) the most curious incident in "Uncle Silas." Like Mr. Arthur Pendennis, Dumas at this time wrote poetry " up to " pictures and illustrations. It is easy, but seldom lucrative work. He translated a play of Schiller's into French verse, chiefly to gain command of that vehicle, for his heart was fixed on dramatic success. Then came the visit of Kean and other English actors to Paris. He saw the true Hamlet, and, for the first time on any stage, " the play of real passions." Emulation woke in him : a casual work of ait led him to the story of Christina of Sweden, he wrote his play Christine (afterward recon- structed) ; he read it to Baron Taylor, who applauded ; the Come'die Franchise accepted it, but a series of intrigues disappointed him, after all. His energy at this moment was extraordinary, for he was very poor, his mother had a 14 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. stroke of paralysis, his bureau was always bullying and interfering with him. But nothing could snub this " force of nature," and he immediately produced his Henri Trois, the first romantic drama of France. This had an instant and noisy success, and the first night of the play he spent at the theatre, and at the bedside of his unconscious mother. The poor lady could not even understand whence the flowers came that he laid on her couch, the flowers thrown to the young man yesterday unknown, and to-day the most famous of contemporary names. All this tale of triumph, checkered by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the vigour and wit of his novels. He is his own hero, and loses nothing in the process ; but the other characters Taylor, Nodier, the Due d'Orleans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials all live like the best of the persons in his tales. They call Dumas vain : he had reason to be vain, and no candid or generous reader will be shocked by his pleasant, frank, and artless enjoyment of himself and of his adventures. Oddly enough, they are small-minded and small-hearted people who are most shocked by what they call " vanity " in the great. Dumas' delight in himself and his doings is only the flower of his vigorous existence, and in his " Memoires," at least, it is as happy and encouraging as his laugh, or the laugh of Porthos ; it is a kind of radiance, in which others, too, may bask and enjoy themselves. And yet it is resented by tiny scribblers, frozen in their own chill self-conceit. There is nothing incredible (if modern researches are accurate) in the stories he tells of his own success in Hypnotism, as it is called now, Mesmerism or Magnetism as it was called then. Who was likely to possess these ALEX ANDRE DUMAS. 15 powers, if not this good-humoured natural force ? "I believe that, by aid of magnetism, a bad man might do much mischief. I doubt whether, by help of magnetism, a good man can do the slightest good," he says, probably with perfect justice. His dramatic success fired Victor Hugo, and very pleasant it is to read Dumas' warm-hearted praise of that great poet. Dumas had no jealousy no more than Scott. As he believed in no success without talent, so he disbelieved in genius which wins no success. " Je ne crois pas au talent ignore", au ge"nie inconnu, moi." Genius he saluted wherever he met it, but was incredulous about invisible and inaudible genius ; and I own to sharing his scepticism. People who complain of Dumas' vanity may be requested to observe that he seems just as " vain " of Hugo's successes, or of Scribe's, as of his own, and just as much delighted by them. He was now struck, as he walked on the boulevard one day, by the first idea of Antony an idea which, to be fair, seems rather absurd than tragic, to some tastes. " A lover, caught with a married woman, kills her to save her character, and dies on the scaffold." Here is indeed a part to tear a cat in I The performances of M. Dumas during the Revolution of 1830, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of Alexandre the Great? But they were not literary ex- cellences which he then displayed, and we may leave this king-maker to hover, " like an eagle, above the storms of anarchy." Even to sketch his later biography is beyond our province. In 1830 he had forty years to run, and he filled the cup of 16 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. the Hours to the brim with activity and adventure. His career was one of unparalleled production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles, and other intervals of repose. The tales he tells of his prowess in 1830, and with Garibaldi, seem credible to me, and are borne out, so far, by the narrative of M. Maxime Ducamp, who met him at Naples, in the Garibaldian camp. Like Mr. Jingle, in " Pickwick," he "banged the field-piece, twanged the lyre," and was potting at the foes of the republic with a double-barrelled gun, when he was not composing plays, romances, memoirs, criticisms. He has told the tale of his adventures with the Come'die Frangaise, where the actors laughed at his Antony, and where Madame Mars and he quarrelled and made it up again. His plays often won an extravagant success ; his novels his great novels, that is made all Europe his friend. He gained large sums of money, which flowed out of his fingers, though it is said by some that his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, was no more a palace than the villa which a retired tradesman builds to shelter his old age. But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He got into debt, fled to Belgium, returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind. In " Alexandre Dumas a la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this Micawber of newspapers. Everything went into it, good or bad, and the name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin. For Dumas, unluckily, was as prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no reputation could bear the drafts he made on his celebrity. His son says, in the preface to Le Fils Naturel : "Tragedy, dramas, history, romance, ALEXANDRE DUMAS. 17 comedy, travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the mould of your brain, and you peopled the world of fiction with new creations. The newspaper, the book, the theatre, burst asunder, too narrow for your puissant shoulders ; ycu fed France, Europe, America with your works ; you made the wealth of publishers, translators, plagiarists; printers and copyists toiled after you in vain. In the fever of production you did not always try and prove the metal which you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace whatever came to your hand. The fire made the selection : what was your own is bronze, what was not yours vanished in' smoke." The simile is noble and worthy of the Cyclopean crafts- man, Dumas. His great works endured; the plays which renewed the youth of the French stage, the novels which Thackeray loved to praise, these remain, and we trust they may always remain, to the delight of mankind and for the sorrow of prigs. So much has been written of Dumas' novels that criticism can hardly hope to say more that is both new and true about them. It is acknowledged that, in such a character as Henri III., Dumas made history live, as magically as Scott revived the past in his Louis XI., or Balfour of Burley. It is admitted that Dumas' good tales are told with a vigour and life which rejoice the heart; that his narrative is never dull, never stands still, but moves with a freedom of adventure which perhaps has no parallel. He may fall short of the humour, the kindly wisdom, the genial greatness of Sir Walter at his best, and he has not that supernatural touch, that tragic grandeur, which Scott inherits w. L.-I. 1 8 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. from Homer and from Shakespeare. In another Homeric quality, x^PM' as Homer himself calls it, in the " delight of battle " and the spirit of the fray, Scott and Dumas are alike masters. Their rights and the fights in the Icelandic sagas are the best that have ever been drawn by mortal man. W hen swords are aloft, in siege or on the greensward, or in the midnight chamber where an ambush is laid, Scott and Dumas are indeed themselves. The steel rings, the bucklers clash, the parry and lunge pass and answer too swift for the sight. If Dumas has not, as he certainly has not, the noble philosophy and kindly knowledge of the heart which are Scott's, he is far more swift, more witty, more diverting. He is not prolix, his style is not involved, his dialogue is as rapid and keen as an assault at arms. His favourite virtues and graces, we repeat it, are loyalty, friendship, gaiety, gene- rosity, courage, beauty, and strength. He is himself the friend of the big, stupid, excellent Porthos ; of Athos, the noble and melancholy swordsman of sorrow ; of D'Artagnan, the indomitable, the trusty, the inexhaustible in resource ; but his heart is never on the side of the shifty Aramis, with with all his beauty, dexterity, bravery, and brilliance. The brave Bussy, and the chivalrous, the doomed La Mole, are more dear to him ; and if he embellishes their characters, giving them charms and virtues that never were theirs, history loses nothing, and romance and we are the gainers. In all he does, at his best, as, in the " Chevalier d'Har- menthal," he has movement, kindness, courage, and gaiety. His philosophy of life is that old philosophy of the sagas and of Homer. Let us enjoy the movement of the fray, the faces of fair women, the taste of good wine ; let us welcome life like a mistress, let us welcome ALEXANDER DUMAS. 19 death like a friend, and with a jest if death comes with honour. Dumas is no pessimist. "Heaven has made but one drama for man the world," he writes, " and during these three thousand years mankind has been hissing it." It is certain that, if a moral censorship could have prevented it this great drama of mortal passions would never have been licensed at all, never performed. But Dumas, for one, will not hiss it, but applauds with all his might a charmed spectator, a fortunate actor in the eternal piece, where all the men and women are only players. You hear his manly laughter, you hear his mighty hands approving, you see the tears he sheds when he had " slain Porthos " great tears like those of PantagiueL His may not be the best, nor the ultimate philosophy, but it is a philosophy, and one of which we may some day feel the want. I read the stilted criticisms, the pedantic carpings of some modern men who cannot write their own language, and I gather that Dumas is out of date. There is a new philosophy of doubts and delicacies, of dallyings and refinements, of half-hearted lookers-on, desiring and fearing some new order of the world. Dumas does not dally nor doubt : he takes his side, he rushes into the smoke, he strikes his foe; but there is never an unkind word on his lip, nor a grudging thought in his heart. It may be said that Dumas is not a master of words and phrases, that he is not a raffine of expression, nor a jeweller of style. "U hen I read the maunderings, the stilted and staggering sentences, the hesitating phrases, the far-sought and dear-bought and worthless word-juggles; the sham 20 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. % scientific verbiage, the native pedantries of many modern so-called "stylists," I rejoice that Dumas was not one of these. He told a plain tale, in the language suited to a plain tale, with abundance of wit and gaiety, as in the reflections of his Chicot, as in all his dialogues. But he did not gnaw the end of his pen in search of some word that nobody had ever used in this or that connection before. The right word came to him, tre simple straightforward phrase. Epithet-hunting may be a pretty spcrt, and the bag of the epithet-hunter may contain some agreeable epigrams and rare specimens of style ; but a plain tale of adventure, of love and war, needs none of this industry, and is even spoiled by inopportune diligence. Speed, directness, lucidity are the characteristics of Dumas' style, and they are exactly the characteristics which his novels required. Scott often failed, his most loyal admirers may admit, in these essentials ; but it is rarely that Dumas fails, when he is himself and at his best. In spite of his heedless education, Dumas had true critical qualities, and most admired the best things. We have already seen how he writes about Shakespeare, Virgil, Goethe, Scott. But it may be less familiarly known that this burly man-of-all-work, ignorant as he was cf Greek, had a true and keen appreciation of Homer. Dumas declares that he only thrice criticised his contemporaries in an unfavourable sense, and as one wishful to find fault. The victims were Casimir Delavigne, Scribe, and Ponsard. On each occasion Dumas declares that, after reflecting, he saw that he was moved by a little personal pique, not by a disinterested love of art. He makes his confession with a ALEXANDER DUMAS. 21 rare nobility of candour ; and yet his review of Ponsard is worthy of him. M. Ponsard, who, like Dumas, was no scholar, wrote a play styled Ufysse, and borrowed from the Odyssey. Dumas follows Ponsard, Odyssey in hand, and while he proves that the dramatist failed to understand Homer, proves that he himself was, in essentials, a capable Homeric critic. Dumas understands that far-off heroic age. He lives in its life and sympathises with its temper. Homer and he are congenial ; across the great gulf of time they exchange smiles and a salute. " Oh ! ancient Homer, dear and good and noble, I am minded now and again to leave all and translate thee I, who have never a word of Greek so empty and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in verse or in prose." How Dumas came to divine Homer, as it were, through a language he knew not, who shall say ? He did divine him by a natural sympathy of excellence, and his chapters on the " Ulysse " of Ponsard are worth a wilderness of notes by learned and most un-Homeric men. For, indeed, who can be less like the heroic minstrel than the academic philo- logist ? This universality deserves note. The Homeric student who takes up a volume of Dumas at random finds that he is not only Homeric naturally, but that he really knows his Homer. What did he not know ? His rapidity in reading must have been as remarkable as his pace with the pen. As M. Blaze de Bury says : " Instinct, experience, memory were all his ; he sees at a glance, he compares in a flash, he understands without conscious effort, he forgets nothing that he has read." The past and present are photographed 23 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. imperishably on his brain, he knows the manners of all ages and all countries, the names of all the arms that men have used, all the garments they have worn, all the dishes they have tasted, all the terms of all professions, from swordsmanship to coach-building. Other authors have to wait, and hunt for facts ; nothing stops Dumas : he knows and remembers everything. Hence his rapidity, his facility, his positive delight in labour : hence it came that he might be heard, like Dickens, laughing while he worked. This is rather a eulogy than a criticism of Dumas. His faults are on the surface, visible to all men. He was not only rapid, he was hasty, he was inconsistent ; his need of money as well as his love of work made him put his hand to dozens of perishable things. A beginner, entering the forest of Dumas' books, may fail to see the trees for the wood. He may be counselled to select first the cycle of d'Artagnan the " Musketeers," " Twenty Years After," and the " Vicomte de Bragelonne." Mr. Stevenson's delightful essay on the last may have sent many readers to it; I confess to preferring the youth of the " Musketeers " to their old age. Then there is the cycle of the Valois, whereof the " Dame de Monsereau " is the best perhaps the best thing Dumas ever wrote. The " Tulipe Noire " is a novel girls may read, as Thackeray said, with confidence. The "Chevalier d'Harmenthal " is nearly (not quite) as good as " Quentin Durward." " Monte Cristo " has the best beginning and loses itself in the sands. The novels on the Revolution are not among the most alluring : the famed device " L. P. D." (lilia pedibus destrue) has the bad luck to suggest " London Parcels Delivery." That is an ALEXANDER DUMAS. 23 accident, but the Revolution is in itself too terrible and pitiful, and too near us (on both sides !) for fiction. On Dumas' faults it has been no pleasure to dwell. In a recent work I find the Jesuit Le Moyne quoted, saying about Charles V. : " What need that future ages should be made acquainted so religious an Emperor was not always chaste ! " The same reticence allures one in regard to so delightful an author as Dumas. He who had enriched so many died poor; he who had told of conquering France, died during the Terrible Year. But he could forgive, could appreciate, the valour of an enemy. Of the Scotch at Waterloo he writes : " It was not enough to kill them : we had to push them down." Dead, they still stood " shoulder to shoulder." In the same generous temper an English cavalry officer wrote home, after Waterloo, that he would gladly have given the rest of his life to have served, on that day, in our infantry or in the French cavalry. These are the spirits that warm the heart, that make us all friends ; and to the great, the brave, the generous Dumas we cry, across the years and across the tomb, our Ave atque vale! MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS. T)ERHAPS the first quality in Mr. Stevenson's works, -L now so many and so various, which strikes a reader, is the buoyancy, the survival of the child in him. He has told the world often, in prose and verse, how vivid are his memories of his own infancy. This retention of childish recollections he shares, no doubt, with other people of genius : for example, with George Sand, whose legend of her own infancy is much more entertaining, and perhaps will endure longer, than her novels. Her youth, like Scott's and like Mr. Stevenson's, was passed all in fantasy : in playing at being some one else, in the invention of imaginary characters, who were living to her, in the fabrication of endless unwritten romances. Many persons, who do not astonish the world by their genius, have lived thus in their earliest youth. But, at a given moment, the fancy dies out of them : this often befalls imaginative boys in their first year at school. " Many are called, few chosen " ; but it may be said with probable truth, that there has never been a man of genius in letters, whose boyhood was not thus fantastic, " an isle of dreams." We know how Scott and De Quincey inhabited airy castles ; and Gillies tells us, though Lockhart does not, that Scott, in manhood, was occasionally so lost MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS. 25 in thought, that he knew not where he was nor what he was doing. The peculiarity of Mr. Stevenson is not only to have been a fantastic child, and to retain, in maturity, that fantasy ripened into imagination : he has also kept up the habit of dramatising everything, of playing, half con- sciously, many parts, of making the world " an unsubstantial fairy place." This turn of mind it is that causes his work occasionally to seem somewhat freakish. Thus, in the fogs and horrors of London, he plays at being an Arabian tale-teller, and his "New Arabian Nights" are a new kind of romanticism Oriental, freakish, like the work of a changeling. Indeed, this curious genius, springing from a family of Scottish engineers, resembles nothing so much as one of the fairy children, whom the ladies of Queen Proser- pina's court used to leave in the cradles of Border keeps or of peasants' cottages. Of the Scot he has little but the power of touching us with a sense of the supernatural, and a decided habit of moralising ; for no Scot of genius has been more austere with Robert Burns. On the other hand, one element of Mr. Stevenson's ethical disquisitions is derived from his dramatic habit. His optimism, his gay courage, his habit of accepting the world as very well worth living in and looking at, persuaded one of his critics that he was a hard-hearted young athlete of iron frame. Now, of the athlete he has nothing but his love of the open air : it is the eternal child that drives him to seek adventures and to sojourn among beach-combers and savages. Thus, an admiring but far from optimistic critic may doubt whether Mr. Stevenson's content with the world is not "only his fun," as I^mb said of Coleridge's 26 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. preaching; whether he is but playing at being the happy warrior in life ; whether he is not acting that part, himself to himself. At least, it is a part fortunately conceived and admirably sustained: a difficult part too, whereas that of the pessimist is as easy as whining. Mr. Stevenson's work has been very much written about, as it has engaged and delighted readers of every age, station, and character. Boys, of course, have been specially addressed in the books of adventure, children in "A Child's Garden of Verse," young men and maidens in " Virginibus Puerisque," all ages in all the curiously varied series of volumes. "Kidnapped" was one of the last books which the late Lord Iddesleigh read ; and I trust there is no harm in mentioning the pleasure which Mr. Matthew Arnold took in the same story. Critics of every sort have been kind to' Mr. Stevenson, in spite of the fact that the few who first became acquainted with his genius praised it with all the warmth of which they were masters. Thus he has become a kind of classic in his own day, for an undisputed reputation makes a classic while it lasts. But was ever so much fame won by writings which might be called scrappy and desultory by the advocatus diabolil It is a most miscellaneous literary baggage that Mr. Stevenson carries. First, a few magazine articles; then two little books of sentimental journeyings, which convince the reader that Mr. Stevenson is as good company to himself as his books are to others. Then came a volume or two of essays, literary and social, on books and life. By this time there could be no doubt that Mr. Stevenson had a style of his own, modelled to some extent on the essayists MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS. 27 of the last century, but with touches of Thackeray ; with original breaks and turns, with a delicate freakishness, in short, and a determined love of saying things as the newspapers do not say them. All this work undoubtedly smelt a trifle of the lamp, and was therefore dear to some and an offence to others. For my part, I had delighted in the essays, from the first that appeared in Mac- millan's Magazine, shortly after the Franco-German war. In this little study, "Ordered South," Mr. Stevenson was employing himself in extracting all the melancholy pleasure which the Riviera can give to a wearied body and a mind resisting the clouds of early malady. " Alas, the worn and broken hoard, How can it bear the painter's dye ! The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply ! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill, And Araby's or Eden's bowers Were barren as this moorland hill," wrote Scott, in an hour of malady and depression. But this was not the spirit of " Ordered South " : the younger soul rose against the tyranny of the body; and that familiar glamour which, in illness, robs Tintoretto of his glow, did not spoil the midland sea to Mr. Stevenson. His gallant and cheery stoicism were already with him ; and so perfect, if a trifle overstudied, was his style, that one already foresaw a new and charming essayist. But none of those early works, nor the delightful book on Edinburgh, prophesied of the story teller. Mr. Stevenson's first published tales, the " New Arabian Nights," originally appeared in a quaintly edited weekly paper, which nobody 28 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. read, or nobody but the writers in its columns. They welcomed the strange romances with rejoicings : but perhaps there was only one of them who foresaw that Mr. Stevenson's forte was to be fiction, not essay writing ; that he was to appeal with success to the large public, and not to the tiny circle who surround the essayist. It did not seem likely that our incalculable public would make themselves at home in those fantastic purlieus which Mr. Stevenson's fancy discovered near the Strand. The impossible Young Man with the Cream Tarts, the ghastly revels of the Suicide Club, the Oriental caprices of the Hansom Cabs who could foresee that the public would taste them ! It is true that Mr. .Stevenson's imagination made the President of the Club, and the cowardly member, Mr. Malthus, as real as hey were terrible. His romance always goes hand in hand with reality; and Mr. Malthus is as much an actual m n of skin and bone, as Silas Lapham is a man of flesh and blood. The world saw this, and applauded the " Noctes of Prince Floristan," in a fairy London. Yet, excellent and unique as these things were, Mr. Stevenson had not yet " found himself." It would be more true to say that he had only discovered outlying skirts of his dominions. Has he ever hit on the road to the capital yet? and will he ever enter it laurelled, and in triumph? That is precisely what one may doubt, not as without hope. He is always making discoveries in his realm ; it is less certain that he will enter its chief city in state. His next work was rather in the nature of annexa- tion and invasion than a settling of his own realms. " Prince Otto " is not, to my mind, a ruler in his proper soil. The provinces of George Sand and of Mr. George MR. STEVENSON'S WORKS. 29 Meredith have been taken captive. "Prince Otto" is fantastic indeed, but neither the fantasy nor the style is quite Mr. Stevenson's. There are excellent passages, and the Scotch soldier of fortune is welcome, and the ladies abound in subtlety and wit. But the book, at least to myself, seems an extremaly elaborate and skilful / and the 62 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. pierrots. The people at whom M. De Banville laughed are dead and forgotten. There was a certain M. Paul Limayrac of those days, who barked at the heels of Balzac, and othei great men, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In his honour De Banville wrote a song which parodied all popular aspirations to be a flower. M. Limayrac was supposed to have become a blossom : " Sur les coteaux et dans les landes Vo'tigeant comme un oiseleur Buloz en ferait des guirlandes Si Limayrac devenait fleur I" There is more of high spirits than of wit in the lyric, which became as popular as our modern invocation of Jingo, the god of battles. It chanced one night that M. Limayrac appeared at a masked ball in the opera-house. He was recognised by some one in the crowd. The turbulent waltz stood still, the music was silent, and the dancers of every hue howled at the critic " Si Paul Limayrac devenait fleur ! " Fancy a British reviewer, known as such to the British public, and imagine that public taking a lively interest in the feuds of men of letters ! Paris, to be sure, was more or less of a university town thirty years ago, and the students were certain to be largely represented at the ball. The " Odes Funambulesques " contain many examples of M. De Banville's skill in reviving old forms of verse triolets, rondeaux, chants royaux, and ballades. Most of these were composed for the special annoyance of M. Buloz, M. Limayrac, and a M. Jacquot who called himself De Mirecourt. The rondeaux are full of puns in the refrain : " Houssaye ou c'est ; lyre, 1'ire, lire," and so on, not very THEODORE DE BANVILLE. 63 exhilarating. The pan toum, where lines recur.alternately, was borrowed from the distant Malay; but primitive pantoums, in which the last two lines of each stanza are the first two of the next, occur in old French folk-song. The popular trick of repetition, affording a rest to the memory of the singer, is perhaps the origin of all refrains. De Banville's later satires are directed against permanent objects of human indignation the little French debauchee, the hypocritical friend of reaction, the bloodthirsty chauviniste. Tired of the flashy luxury of the Empire, his memory goes back to his youth " Lorsque la levre de 1'aurore Baisait nos yeux souleves, Et que nous n'etions pas encore La France des petits creves." The poem " Et Tartufe " prolongs the note of a satire always popular in France the satire of Scarron, Moliere, La Bruyere, against the clerical curse of the nation. The Roman Question was Tartufe's stronghold at the moment. " French interests " demanded that Italy should be headless. " Et Tartufe ? II nous dit entre deux oremus Que pour tout bon Fran9ais I'empire est a Rome, Et qu'ayant pour aieux Romulus et Remus Nous tetterons la louve a jamais le pauvre homme." The new Tartufe worships St. Chassepot, who once, it will not be forgotten, " wrought miracles " ; but he has his doubts as to the morality of explosive bullets. The nymph of modern warfare is addressed as she hovers above the Geneva Convention, " Quoi, nymphe du canon raye, Tu montres ces pudeurs risibles Et ce petit air eflraye Devant les balles exploisiblcs?" 64 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. De Banville was for long almost alone among poets in his freedom from Weltschmerz, from regret and desire for worlds lost or impossible. In the later and stupider corruption of the Empire, sadness and anger began to vex even his careless muse. She had piped in her time to much wild dancing, but could not sing to a waltz of mushroom speculators and decorated capitalists. " Le Sang de la Coupe" contains a very powerful poem, " The Curse of Venus," pronounced on Paris, the city of pleasure, which has become the city of greed. This verse is appropriate i to our own commercial enterprise : "Vends les bois ou dormaient Viviane et Merlin ! L'Aigle de mont n'est fait que pour ta gibecierej La neige vierge est la pour fournir ta glaciere ; Le torrent qui bond it sur le roc sybillin, Et vole, diamant, neige, ecume et poussiere, N'est plus bon qu'a tourner tes meules de moulin 1" In the burning indignation of this poem, M. De Banville reaches his highest mark of attainment. " Les Exile's " is scarcely less impressive. The outcast gods of Hellas, wandering in a forest of ancient Gaul, remind one at once of the fallen deities of Heine, the decrepit Olympians of Bruno, and the large utterance of Keats's " Hyperion." Among great exiles, Victor Hugo, " le pere la-bas dans File," is not forgotten : " Et toi qui 1'accueillis, sol libre et verdoyant, Qui prodigues les fleurs sur tes coteaux fertiles, Et qui sembles sourire a 1'ocean bruyant, Sois benie, ile verte, entre toutes les iles." The hoarsest note of M. De Banville's lyre is that discordant one struck in the " Idylles Prussiennes." One would not linger over poetry or prose composed during the THEODORE DE BANVILLE. 65 siege, in hours of shame and impotent scorn. The poet sings how the sword, the flashing Durehdal, is rusted and broken, how victory is to him " , . . qui se cela Dans un trou, sous la terre noire." He can spare a tender lyric to the memory of a Prussian officer, a lad of eighteen, shot dead through a volume of Pindar which he carried in his tunic. It is impossible to leave the poet of gaiety and good- humour in the mood of the prisoner in besieged Paris. His "Trente Six Ballades Joyeuses" make a far more pleasant subject for a last word. There is scarcely a more delightful little volume in the French language than this collection of verses in the most difficult of forms, which pour forth, with absolute ease and fluency, notes of mirth, banter, joy in the spring, in letters, art, and good- fellowship. '* L'oiselet retourne aux forets ; Je suis un poete lyrique," he cries, with a note like a bird's song. Among the thirty- six every one will have his favourites. We venture to translate the " Ballad de Banville " : "AUX ENFANTS PERDUS. "I know Cylhera long is desolaie ; I know the winds have stripped the garden green. Alas, my friends ! beneath the fierce sun's weight A barren reef lies where Love's flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen I So be it, for we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love's labyrinths beguile ; There let us land, there dream for evermore : ' It may be we shall touch the happy isle.' W, L.I. e 66 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. " The sea may be our sepulchre. If Fate, If tempests wreak their wrath on us, serene We watch the bolt of Heaven, and scorn the hate Of angry gods that smite us in their spleen. Perchance the jealous mists are but the screen That veils the fairy coast we would explore. Come, though the sea be vexed, and breakers roar, Come, for the breath of this old world is vile, Haste we, and toil, and faint not at the oar ; ' It may be we shall touch the happy isle.' **Grey serpents trail in temples desecrate Where Cypris smiled, the golden maid, the queen, And ruined is the palace of our state ; But happy loves flit round the mast, and keen The shrill wind sings the silken cords between. Heroes are we, with wearied hearts and sore, Whose flower is faded and whose locks are hoar. Haste, ye light skiffs, where myrtle thickets smile J Love's panthers sleep 'mid roses, as of yore : ' It may be we shall touch the happy isle.' ENVOI. " Sad eyes ! the blue sea laughs, as heretofore. Ah, singing birds, your happy music pour ; Ah, poets, leave the sordid earth awhile ; Flit to these ancient gods we still adore : ' It may be we shall touch the happy isle.' " Alas ! the mists that veil the shore of our Cythera are not the summer haze of Watteau, but the smoke and steam of a commercial time. It is as a lyric poet that we have studied M. De Banville. "Je ne m'entends qu'a la metrique," he says in his ballad on himself; but he can write prose when he pleases. It is in his drama of Gringoire acted at the Theatre Francois, and familiar in the version of Messrs. Pollock and Besant, that M. De Banville's prose shows to the best THEODORE DE BANVILLE. 67 advantage. Louis XI. is supping with his bourgeois friends and with the terrible Olivier le Daim. Two beautiful girls are of the company, friends of Pierre Gringoire, the strolling poet. Presently Gringoire himself appears. He is dying of hunger ; he does not recognise the king, and he is promised a good supper if he will recite the new satirical " Ballade des Pendus," which he has made at the monarch's expense. Hunger overcomes his timidity, and, addressing himself especially to the king, he enters on this goodly matter : " Where wide the forest boughs are spread, Where Flora wakes with sylph and fay, Are crowns and garlands of men dead, All golden in the morning gay ; Within this ancient garden grey Are clusters such as no man knows, Where Moor and Soldan bear the sway i 'Ihis is King Louis' orchard close I ' These wretched folk wave overhead, With such strange thoughts as none may say ; A moment still, then sudden sped, They swing in a ring and waste away. The morning smites them with her ray ; They toss with every breeze that Blows, They dance where fires of dawhing play : This is King Louis' orchard close I *' All hanged and dead, they've summoned (With Hell to aid, that hears them pray) New legions of an army dread, Now down the blue sky flames the day; The dew dies off ; the foul array Of obscene ravens gathers and goes, With wings that flap and beaks that flay i This is King Louis' orchard close / 68 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. ENVOI, ** Prince, where leaves murmur of the May, A tree of bitter clusters grows ; The bodies of men dead are they ! This is Kin% Louts' orchard dose ! Poor Gringoire has no sooner committed himself, than he is made to recognise the terrible king. He pleads that, if he must join the ghastly army of the dead, he ought, at least, to be allowed to finish his supper. This the king giants, and in the end, after Gringoire has won the heart of the heroine, he receives his life and a fair bride with a full dowry. Gringoire is a play very different from M. De Banville's other dramas, and it is not included in the pretty volume of " Comedies " which closes the Lemerre series of his poems. The poet has often declared, with an iteration which has been parodied by M. Richepin, that " comedy is the child of the ode," and that a drama without the " lyric " element is scarcely a drama at all. While comedy retains either the choral ode in its strict form, or its representative in the shape of lyric enthusiasm (le lyrisme), comedy is complete and living. Gringoire, to our mind, has plenty of lyric enthusiasm ; but M. De Banville seems to be of a different opinion. His republished " Comedies " are more remote from experience than Gringoire, his characters are ideal creatures, familiar types of the stage, like Scapin and "le beau Le"andre," or ethereal persons, or figures of old mythology, like Diana in Diane au Bois, and Deidamia in the piece which shows Achilles among women. M. De Banville's dramas have scarcely prose enough in them to suit the modern taste. They are masques for the delicate THEODORE DE BANVILLE. 69 diversion of an hour, and it is not in the nature of things that they should rival the success of blatant buffooneries. His earliest pieces Le Feuilleton tf Aristophane (acted at the Odeon, Dec. 26th, 1852), and Le Cousin du Rot (Odeon, April 4th, 1857) were written in collaboration with Philoxene Boyer, a generous but indiscreet patron of singers. " Dans les salons de Philoxene Nous etions quatre-vingt rimeurs," M. De Banville wrote, parodying the "quatre-vingt ramuers " of Victor Hugo. The memory of M. Boyer's enthusiasm for poetry and his amiable hospitality are not unlikely to survive both his compositions and those in which M. De Banville aided him. The latter poet began to walk alone as a playwright in Le Beau Leandre (Vaude- ville, 1856) a piece with scarcely more substance than the French scenes in the old Franco-Italian drama possess. We are taken into an impossible world of gay non-morality, where a wicked old bourgeois, Orgon, his daughter Colom- bine, a pretty flirt, and her lover Leandre, a light-hearted scamp, bustle through their little hour. Leandre, who has no notion of being married, says, "Le ciel n'est pas plus pur que mes intentions." And the artless Colombine replies, " Alors marions-nous ! " To marry Colombine without a dowry forms, as modern novelist says, " no part of Ltfandre's profligate scheme of pleasure." There is a sort of treble intrigue. Orgon wants to give away Colombine dowerless, Leandre to escape from the whole transaction, and Colombine to secure her dot and her husband. The strength of the piece is the brisk action in the scene when Le"andre protests that he can't rob Orgon of his only 70 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. daughter, and Orgon insists that he can refuse nothing except his ducats to so charming a son-in-law. The play is redeemed from sordidness by the costumes. Le"andre is dressed in the attire of Watteau's " LTndifferent " in the Louvre, and wears a diamond-hilted sword. The lady who plays the part of Colombine may select (delightful privilege !) the prettiest dress in Watteau's collection. This love of the glitter of the stage is very characteristic of De Banville. In his Deidamie (Odeon, Nov. i8th, 1876) the players who took the roles of Thetis, Achilles, Odysseus, Deidamia, and the rest, were accoutred in semi- barbaric raiment and armour of the period immediately preceding the Graeco-Phcenician (about the eighth century B.C.). Again we notice the touch of pedantry in the poet. As for the play, the sombre thread in it is lent by the certainty of Achilles' early death, the fate which drives him from Deidamie's arms, and from the sea king's isle to the leagues under the fatal walls of Ilion. Of comic effect there is plenty, for the sisters of Deidamie imitate all the acts by which Achilles is likely to betray himself grasp the sword among the insidious presents of Odysseus, when he seizes the spear, and drink each one of them a huge beaker of wine to the confusion of the Trojans.* On a Parisian audience the imitations of the tone of the Odyssey must have been thrown away. For example, here is a passage which is as near being Homeric as French verse can be. Deidamie is speaking in a melancholy mood : " Heureux les epoux rois assis dans leur maison, Qui voient tranquillement s'enfuir chaque saison * The subject has been much more gravely treated in Mr. Robert Bridges 's " Achilles in Scyros." THEODORE DE BANVILLE. 71 L'epoux tenant son sceptre, environne de gloire, Et 1'epouse filant sa quenouille d'ivo : re ! Mais le jeune heros que, la glaive a son franc I Court dans le noir combat, les mains teintes de sang, Laisse sa femme en pleurs dans sa haute demeure. " With the accustomed pedantry, M. De Banville, in the scene of the banquet, makes the cup-bearer go round dealing out a little wine, with which libation is made, and then the feast goes on in proper Homeric fashion. These over- wrought details are forgotten in the parting scenes, where D&damie takes what she knows to be her last farewell of Achilles, and girds him with his sword : "La lame de 1'epee, en sa forme divine Est pareille a la feuille austere du laurier!" Let it be noted that each of M. De Banville's more serious plays ends with the same scene, with slight differences. In Florise (never put on the stage) the wandering actress of Hardy's troupe leaves her lover, the young noble, and the shelter of his castle, to follow where art and her genius beckon her. In Diane au Bois the goddess " that leads the precise life " turns her back on Eros, who has subdued even her, and passes from the scene as she waves her hand in sign of a farewell ineffably mournful. Nearer tragedy than this M. De Banville does not care to go ; and if there is any deeper tragedy in scenes of blood and in stages strewn wiih corpses, from that he abstains. His Florise is perhaps too long, perhaps too learned ; and certainly we are asked to believe too much when a kind of ethereal ised Consuelo is set before us as the/r/wa donna of old Hardy's troupe : " Mais Florise n'est pas une femme. Je suis L'harmonieuse voix que berce vos ennuis ; 72 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. Je suis la lyre aux sons divers que le p">ete Fait reformer et qui sans lui serait muette Une comedienne en fi ^. Je ne suis pas Une femme." An actress who was not a woman had little to do in the company of Scarron's Angdlique and Mademoiselle de 1'Estoile. Florise, in short, is somewhat too allegorical and haughty a creature ; \\ hile Colombine and Nerine (Vaudeville, June 1864) are rather tricksy imps than women of flesh and blood. M. De Banville's stage, on the whole, is one of glitter and fantasy ; yet he is too much a Greek for the age that appreciates " la belle He"lene," too much a lyric dramatist to please the contemporaries of Sardou ; he lends too much sentiment and dainty refinement to characters as flimsy as those of Offenbach's drama. Like other French poets, M. De Banville has occasionally deigned to write fiuilletons and criticisms. Not many of these scattered leaves are collected, but one volume, " La Mer de Nice" (Poulet-Malassis et De Broise, Paris, 1861), may be read with pleasure even by jealous admirers of Gautier's success as a chronicler of the impressions made by southern scenery. To De Banville (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far from Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the roses, the palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds of maiden-hair fern, his mind travels back wistfully 'to the city of his love. " I am, I have always been, one of those devotees of Paris who visit Greece only when they gaze on the face, so fair and so terrible, of the twice-victorious Venus of the Louvre. One of those obstinate adorers of my town am I, who will THEODORE DE BANVILLE. 73 never see Italy, save in the glass that reflects the tawny hair of Titian's Violante, or in that dread isle of Alcinous where Lionardo shows you the mountain peaks that waver in the blue behind the mysterious Monna Lisa. But the Faculty of Physicians, which has, I own, the right to be sceptical, does not believe that neuralgia can be healed by the high sun which Titian and Veronese have fixed on the canvas. To me the Faculty prescribes the real sun of nature and of life ; and here am I, condemned to learn in suffering all that passes in the mind of a poet of Paris exiled from that blessed place where he finds the Cyclades and the islands blossoming, the vale of Avalon, and all the heavenly homes of the fairies of experience and desire." Nice is Tomi to this Ovid, but he makes the best of it, and sends to the editor of the Moniteur letters much more diverting than the "Tristia." To tell the truth, he never overcomes his amizement at being out of Paris streets, and in a glade of the lower Alps he loves to be reminded of his dear city of pleasure. Only under the olives of Monaco, those solemn and ancient trees, he feels what surely all men feel who walk at sunset through their shadow the memory of a mysterious twilight of agony in an olive garden. " Et ceux-ci, les pales oliviers, n'est-ce pas de ces heures de"sole"es ou, comme torture supreme, le Sauveur acceptait en son ame l'irre"parable misere du doute, n'est-ce pas alors qu'il ont appris de lui a courber le front sous le poids impe"rieux des souvenirs ? " The pages which M. De Banville consecrates to the Villa Sardou, where Rachel died, may disenchant, perhaps, some readers of Mr. Matthew Arnold's sonnet. The scene of 74 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. Rachel's death has been spoiled by " improvements " in too theatrical taste. All these notes, however, were made many years ago ; and visitors of the Riviera, though they will find the little book charming where it speaks of seas and hills, will learn that France has greatly changed the city which she has annexed. As a practical man and a Parisian, De Banville has printed (pp. 179-81) a recipe for the concoction of the Marseilles dish, bouillabaisse, the mess that Thackeray's bal'ad made so famous. It takes genius, however, to cook bouillabaisse ; and, to parody what De Banville says about his own recipe for making a mechanical " ballade," " en employment ce moyen, on est stir de faire une mauvaise, irre'me'diablement mauvaise bouillabaisse." The poet adds the remark that " une bouillabaisse reussie vaut un sonnet sans defaut." There remains one field of M. De Banville's activity to be shortly described. Of his " Emaux Parisiens," short studies of celebrated writers, we need say no more than that they are written in careful prose. M. De Banville is not only a poet, but in his " Petit Traite" de Poe"sie Franchise " (Bibliotheque de 1'Echo de la Sorbonne, s.d.) a teacher of the mechanical part of poetry. He does not, of course, advance a paradox like that of Baudelaire, "that poetry can be taught in thirty lessons." He merely in- structs his pupil in the material part the scansion, metres, and so on of French poetry. In this little work he intro- duces these "traditional forms of verse," which once caused some talk in England : the rondel, rondeau, ballade, vilianelle, and chant royal. It may be worth while to quote his testimony as to the merit of these modes of expression. "This cluster of forms is one of our most THEODORE DE BANVILLE. ' 75 precious treasures, for each of them forms a rhythmic whole, complete arid perfect, while at the same time they all possess the fresh and unconscious grace which marks the productions of primitive times." Now, there is some truth in this criticism ; for it is a mark of man's early ingenuity, in many arts, to seek complexity (where you would expect simplicity), and yet to lend to that complexity an infantine naturalness. One can see this phenomenon in early decorative art, and in early law and custom, and even in the complicated structure of primitive languages. Now, just as early, and even savage, races are our masters in the decorative use of colour and of carving, so the nameless master-singers of ancient France may be our teachers in decorative poetry, the poetry some call vers de socicte. Whether it is possible to go beyond this, and adapt the old French forms to serious modern poetry, it is not for any one but time to decide. In this matter, as in greater affairs, securus judicat orbis terrarum. For my own part I scarcely believe that the revival would serve the nobler ends of English poetry. Now let us listen again to M. De Banville. " In the rondel, as in the rondeau and the ballade, all the art is to bring in the refrain without effort, naturally, gaily, and each time with novel effect and with fresh light cast on the central idea." Now, you can teach no one to do that, and M. De Banville never pretends to give any recipes for cooking rondels or ballades worth reading. " Without poetic vision all is mere marquetery and cabinetmaker's work: that is, so far as poetry is concerned nothing." It is because he was a poet, not a mere craftsman, that Villon " was and remains the king, the absolute master, of ballad- 76 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. land." About the rondeau, M. De Banville avers that it possesses " nimble movement, speed, grace, lightness of touch, and, as it were, an ancient fragrance of the soil, that must charm all who love our country and our country's poetry, in its every age." As for the villanelle, M. De Banville declares that it is the fairest jewel in the casket of the muse Erato ; while the chant royal is a kind of fossil poem, a relic of an age when kings and allegories -flourished. " The kings and the gods are dead," like Pan ; or at least we no longer find them able, by touch royal or divine, to reanimate the magnificent chant royal. This is M. De Banville's apology in pro lyr& sud, that light lyre of many tones, in whose jingle the eternal note of modern sadness is heard so rarely. If he has a lesson to teach English versifiers, surely it is a lesson of gaiety. They are only too fond of rue and rosemary, and now and then prefer the cypress to the bay. M. De Banville's muse is content to wear roses in her locks, and perhaps may retain, for many years, a laurel leaf from the ancient laurel tree which once sheltered the poet at Turbia. HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. THE Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France, and in America. The speech of the earliest democracies is not democratic enough for modern anarchy. There is nothing to be gained, it is said, by a knowledge of Greek. We have not to fight the battle of life with Hellenic waiters ; and, even if we had, Romaic, or modern Greek, is much more easily learned than the old classical tongue. The reason of this comparative ease will be plain to any one who, retaining a vague memory of his Greek grammar, takes up a modern Greek news- paper. He will find that the idioms of the modern news- paper are the idioms of all newspapers, that the grammar is the grammar of modern languages, that the opinions are expressed in barbarous translations of barbarous French and English journalistic cliches or commonplaces. This ugly and undignified mixture of the ancient Greek characters, and of ancient Greek words with modern grammar and idioms, and stereotyped phrases, is extremely distasteful to- the scholar. Modern Greek, as it is at present printed, is not the natural spoken language of the peasants. You can read a Greek leading article, though you can hardly make sense of a Greek rural ballad. The peasant speech is a thing of slow development ; there is a basis of ancient Greek in it, 78 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. with large elements of Slavonic, Turkish, Italian, and other imposed or imported languages. Modern literary Greek is a hybrid of revived classical words, blended with the idioms of the speeches which have arisen since the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, thanks to the modern and familiar element in it, modern Greek " as she is writ " is much more easily learned than ancient Greek. Conse- quently, if any one has need for the speech in business or travel, he can acquire as much of it as most of us have of French, with considerable ease. People there- fore argue that ancient Greek is particularly superfluous in schools. Why waste time on it, they ask, which could be expended on science, on modern languages, or any other branch of education ? There is a great deal of justice in this position. The generation of men who are now middle- aged bestowed much time and labour on Greek; and in what, it may be asked; are they better for it ? Very few of them "keep up their Greek." Say, for example, that one was in a form with fifty boys who began the study, it is odds against five of the survivors still reading Greek books. The worldly advantages of the study are slight : it may lead three of the fifty to a good degree, and one to a fellowship; but good degrees may be taken in other subjects, and fellowships may be abolished, or " nationalised," with all other forms of property. Then, why maintain Greek in schools ? Only a very minute percentage of the boys who are tormented with it really learn it. Only a still smaller percentage can read it after they are thirty. Only one or two gain any material advantage by it. In very truth, most minds are not framed by nature to excel and to delight in literature, HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. .79 and only to such minds and to schoolmasters is Greek valuable. This is the case against Greek put as powerfully as one can state it. On the other side, we may say, though the remark may seem absurd at first sight, that to have mastered Greek, even if you forget it, is not to have wasted time. It really is an educational and mental discipline. The study is so severe that it needs the earnest application of the mind. The study is averse to indolent intellectual ways ; it will not put up with a " there or thereabouts," any more than mathematical ideas admit of being made to seem " extremely plausible." He who writes, and who may venture to offer himself as an example, is naturally of a most slovenly and slatternly mental habit. It is his con- stant temptation to " scamp " every kind of work, and to say " it will do well enough." He hates taking trouble and verifying references. And he can honestly confess that nothing in his experience has so helped, in a certain degree, to counteract those tendencies as the labour of thoroughly learning certain Greek texts the dramatists, Thucydides, some of the books of Aristotle. Experience has satisfied him that Greek is of real educational value, and, apart from the acknowledged and unsurpassed merit of its literature, is a severe and logical training of the mind. ' The mental constitution is strengthened and braced by the labour, even if the language is forgotten in later life. It is manifest, however, that this part of education is not foi everybody. The real educational problem is to dis- cover what boys Greek will be good for, and what boys will only waste time and dawdle over it. Certainly to men of a literary turn (a very minute percentage), Greek is of an 8o . ESSAYS IN LITTLE. inestimable value. Great poets, even, may be ignorant of it, as Shakespeare probably was, as Keats and Scott certainly were, as Alexandre Dumas was. But Dumas regretted his ignorance; Scott regretted it. We know not how much Scott's admitted laxity of style and hurried careless habit might have been modified by a knowledge of Greek; how much of grace, permanence, and generally of art, his genius might have gained from the language and literature of Hellas. The most Homeric of modern men could not read Homer. As for Keats, he was born.a Greek, it has been said ; but had he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably, would have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not certain, for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain ; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them. However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school what boys are worth instructing in the Greek language. Now, of their worthi- ness, of their chances of success in the study, Homer seems the best touchstone ; and he is certainly the most attractive guide to the study. At present boys are introduced to the language of the Muses by pedantically written grammars, full of the queerest and most arid metaphysical and philological verbiage. The very English in which these deplorable books are composed may be scientific, may be comprehensible by and useful to philologists, but is utterly heart-breaking to boys. HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. 81 Philology might be made fascinating ; the history of a word, and of the processes by which its different forms, in different senses, were developed, might be made as interest- ing as any other story of events. But grammar is not taught thus : boys are introduced to a jargon about matters meaningless, and they are naturally as much enchanted as if they were listening to a ckimcera bombinans in vacua. The g ammar, to them, is a mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense. They have to learn the buzz by rote ; and a pleasant process that is a seductive initiation into the mysteries. When they struggle so far as to be allowed to try to read a piece of Greek prose, they are only like the Marchioness in her experience of beer : she once had a sip of it. Ten lines of Xenophon, narrating how he marched so many parasangs and took breakfast, do not amount to more than a very unrefreshing sip of Greek. Nobody even tells the boys who Xenophon was, what he did there, and what it was all about. Nobody gives a brief and interesting sketch of the great march, of its history and objects. The boys straggle along with Xenophon, knowing p^t whence or whither : " They stray through a desolate region, And often are faint on the march." One by one they fall out of the ranks ; they mutiny against Xenophon ; they murmur against that commander ; they desert his flag. They determine that anything is better than Greek, that nothing can be worse than Greek, and they move the tender hearts of their parents. They are put to learn German ; which they do not learn, unluckily, but which they find it comparatively easy to shirk. In brief, they leave school without having learned anything whatever. 82 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. Up to a certain age my experiences at school were pre- cisely those which I have described. Our grammar was not so philological, abstruse and arid as the instruments of torture employed at present. But I hated Greek with a deadly and sickening hatred ; I hated it like a bully and a thief of time. The verbs in p,i completed my intellectual discomfiture, and Xenophon routed me with horrible carnage. I could have run away to sea, but for a strong impression that a life on the ocean wave " did not set my genius," as Alan Breck says. Then we began to read Homer; and from the very first words, in which the Muse is asked to sing the wrath of Achilles, Peleus' son, my mind was altered, and I was the devoted friend of Greek. Here was some- thing worth reading about ; here one knew where one was ; here was the music of words, here were poetry, pleasure, and life. We fortunately had a teacher (Dr. Hodson) who was not wildly enthusiastic about grammar. He would set us long pieces of the Iliad or Odyssey to learn, and, when the day's task was done, would make us read on, adventuring ourselves in " the unseen," and construing as gallantly as we might, without grammar or dictionary. On the following day we surveyed more carefully the ground we had pioneered or skirmished over, and then advanced again. Thus, to change the metaphor, we took Homer in large draughts, not in sips : in sips no epic can be enjoyed. We now revelled in Homer like Keats in Spenser, like young horses let loose in a pasture. The result was not the making of many accurate scholars, though a few were made ; others got nothing better than enjoyment in their work, and the firm belief, opposed to that of most schoolboys, that the ancients did not write nonsense. To love Homer, as HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. 83 Steele said about loving a fair lady of quality, " is a liberal education/' Judging from this example, I venture very humbly to think that any one who, even at the age of Cato, wants to learn Greek, should begin where Greek literature, where all profane literature begins with Homer himself. It was thus, not with grammars in vacua, that the great scholars of the Renaissance began. It was thus that Ascham and Rabelais began, by jumping into Greek and splashing about till they learned to swim. First, of course, a person must learn the Greek characters. Then his or her tutor may make him read a dozen lines of Homer, marking the cadence, the surge and thunder of the hexameters a music which, like that of the Sirens, few can hear without being lured to the seas and isles of song. Then the tutor might translate a passage of moving interest, like Priam's appeal to Achilles ; first, of course, explaining the situation. Then the teacher might go over some lines, minutely pointing out how the Greek words are etymologically connected with many words in English. Next, he might take a substantive and a veib, showing roughly how their inflections arose and were developed, and how they retain forms in Homer which do not occur in later Greek. There is no reason why even this part of the lesson should be uninteresting. By this time a pupil would know, more or less, where he was, what Greek is, and what the Homeric poems are like. He might thus believe from the first that there are good reasons for knowing Greek; that it is the key to many worlds of life, of action, of beauty, of contemplation, of knowledge. Then, rfter a few more exercises in Homer, the grammar being judiciously worked in along with the literature of the epic, 84 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. a teacher might discern whether it was worth while for his pupils to continue in the study of Greek. Homer would be their guide into the " realms of gold." It is clear enough that Homer is the best guide. His is the oldest extant Greek, his matter is the most various and delightful, and most appeals to the young, who are wearied by scraps of Xenophon, and who cannot be expected to understand the Tragedians. But Homer is a poet for all ages, all races, and all moods. To the Greeks the epics were not only the best of romances, the richest of poetry ; not only their oldest documents about their own history, they were also their Bible, their treasury of religious tradi- tions and moral teaching. With the Bible and Shakespeare, the Homeric poems are the best training for life. There is no good quality that they lack : manliness, courage, rever- ence for old age and for the hospitable hearth ; justice, piety, pity, a brave attitude towards life and death, are all conspicuous in Homer. He has to write of battles; and he delights in the joy of battle, and in all the movement of war. Yet he delights not less, but more, in peace : in prosperous cities, hearths secure, in the tender beauty of children, in the love of wedded wives, in the frank nobility of maidens, in the beauty of earth and sky and sea, and seaward murmuring river, in sun and snow, frost and mist and rain, in the whispered talk of boy and girl beneath oak and pine tree. Living in an age where every man was a warrior, where every city might know the worst of sack and fire, where the noblest ladies might be led away for slaves, to light the fire and make the bed of a foreign master, Homer inevitably regards life as a battle. To each man on earth comes " the HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. 85 wicked day of destiny," as Malory unconsciously translates it, and each man must face it as hardily as he may. Homer encourages them by all the maxims of chivalry and honour. His heart is with the brave of either side with Glaucus and Sarpedon of Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patroclus. " Ah, friend," cries Sarpedon, " if once escaped from this battle we were for ever to be ageless and immortal, neither would I myself fight now in the fore- most ranks, nor would I urge thee into the wars that give renown ; but now for assuredly ten thousand fates of death on every side beset us, and these may no man shun, nor none avoid forward now let us go, whether we are to give glory or to win it ! " And forth they go, to give and take renown and death, all the shields and helms of Lycia shining behind them, through the dust of battle, the singing of the arrows, the hurtling of spears, the rain of stones from the Locrian slings. And shields are smitten, and chariot- horses run wild with no man to drive them, and Sarpedon drags down a portion of the Achaean battlement, and Aias leaps into the trench with his deadly spear, and the whole battle shifts and shines beneath the sun. Yet he who sings of the war, and sees it with his sightless eyes, sees also the Trojan women working at the loom, cheating their anxious hearts with broidery work of gold and scarlet, or raising the song to Athene, or heating the bath for Hector, who never again may pass within the gates of Troy. He sees the poor weav- ing woman, weighing the wool, that she may not defraud her employers, and yet may win bread for her children. He sees the children, the golden head of Astyanax, his shrinking from the splendour of the hero's helm. He sees the child Odysseus, going with his father through the 86 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. orchard, and choosing out some apple trees " for his very own." It is in the mouth of the ruthless Achilles, the fatal, the fated, the swift-footed hero with the hands of death, that Homer places the tenderest of his similes. "Wherefore weepest thou, Patroclus, like a fond little maid, that runs by her mother's side, praying her mother to take her up, snatching at her gown, and hindering her as she walks, and tearfully looking at her till her mother takes her up ? like her, Patroclus, dost thou softly weep." This is what Chesterfield calls " the porter-like language of Homer's heroes." Such are the moods of Homer, so full of love of life and all things living, so rich in all human sympathies, so readily moved when the great hound Argus welcomes his master, whom none knew after twenty years, but the hound knew him, and died in that welcome. With all this love of the real, which makes him dwell so fondly on every detail of armour, of implement, of art ; on the divers-coloured gold-work of the shield, on the making of tires for chariot-wheels, on the forging of iron, on the rose-tinted ivory of the Sidonians, on cooking and eating and sacrificing, on pet dogs, on wasps and their ways, on fishing, on the boar hunt, on scenes in baths where fair maidens lave water over the heroes, on undis- covered isles with good harbours and rich land, on ploughing, mowing, and sowing, on the furniture of houses, on the golden vases wherein the white dust of the dead is laid, with all this delight in the real, Homer is the most romantic of poets. He walks with the surest foot in the darkling realm of dread Persephone, beneath the poplars on the solemn last beach of Ocean. He has heard the Siren's music, and the song of Circe, chanting as she walks HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. 87 to and fro, casting the golden shuttle through the loom of gold. He enters the cave of the Man Eater ; he knows the unsunned land of the Cimmerians; in the summer of the North he has looked, from the fiord of the Laestrygons, on the Midnight Sun. He has dwelt on the floating isle of /Eolus, with its wall of bronze unbroken, and has sailed on those Phaeacian barks that need no help of helm or oar, that fear no stress either of wind or tide, that come and go and return obedient to a thought and silent as a dream. He has seen the four maidens of Circe, daughters of wells and woods, and of sacred streams. He is the second-sighted man, and beholds the shroud that wraps the living who are doomed, and the mystic dripping from the walls of blood yet unshed. He has walked in the garden closes of rhaeacia, and looked on the face of gods who fare thither, and watch the weaving of the dance. He has eaten the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, and from the hand of Helen he brings us that Egyptian nepenthe which puts all sorrow out of mind. His real world is as real as that in Henry V., his enchanted isles are charmed with the magic of the Tempest. His young wooers are as insolent as Claudio, as flushed with youth ; his beggar-men are brethren of Edie Ochiltree ; his Nausicaa is sister to Rosalind, with a different charm of stately purity in love. His enchantresses hold us yet with their sorceries; his Helen is very Beauty: she has all the sweetness of ideal womanhood, and her repentance is without remorse. His Achilles is youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful, splendid, and sad, ardent and loving, and conscious of its doom. Homer, in truth, is to be matched only with Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare he has not the occasional wilfulness, freakish- 88 SSAyS IN LITTLE. ness, and modish obscurity. He is a poet all of gold, universal as humanity, simple as childhood, musical now as the flow of his own rivers, now as the heavy plunging wave of his own Ocean. Such, then, as far as weak words can speak of him, is the first and greatest of poets. This is he whom English boys are to be ignorant of, if Greek be ousted from our schools, or are to know only in the distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose translation. Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to Homer. English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests the various flow of the hexameter. Translators who employ verse give us a feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded to their own style. Translators who employ prose "tell the story without the song," but, at least, they add no twopenny " beauties " and cheap conceits of their own. I venture to offer a few examples of original translation, in which the mannerisms of poets who have, or have not, translated Homer, are parodied, and, of course (except in the case of Pope), exaggerated. The passage is the speech of the Second-sighted Man, before the slaying of the wooers in the hall : " Ah! wretched men, what ill is this ye suffer ? In night are swathed your heads, your faces, your knees ; and the voice of wailing is kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the walls, and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of shadows, and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward below the darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist sweeps up over all" So much for Homer. The first attempt at metrical HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. 89 translation here given is meant to be in the manner of Pope : " Caitiffs ! " he cried, " what heaven-directed blight Involves each countenance with clouds of night ! What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews ! Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze ? The court is thronged with ghosts that 'neath the gloom Seek Pluto's realm, and Dis's awful doom ; In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his he id, And sable mist creeps upward fiom the dead." This appears pretty bad, and nearly as un-Homeric as a translation could possibly be. But Pope, aided by Broome and Fenton, managed to be much less Homeric, much more absurd, and infinitely more " classical " in the sense in which Pope is classical : " O race to death devote ! with Stygian shade Each destined peer impending fates invade ; With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned ; With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round : Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts, To people Orcus and the burning coasts ! Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll, But universal night usurps the pole." Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from his matchless original ? " Wretches ! " cries Theoclymenus, the seer ; and that becomes, " O race to death devote ! " " Your heads are swathed in night," turns into " With Stygian shade each destined peer " (peer is good !) " impending fates invade," where Homer says nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and " the burning coasts" are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader ; is it the sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what ? 90 ESS A YS IN LITTLE. The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is "What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews !" This is, if possible, more classical than Pope's own "With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned." But Pope nobly revindirates his unparalleled power of trans- lating funnily, when, in place of " the walls drip with blood," he writes " With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round." Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what of that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add that the ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts do gibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton, Broome, and Co., make them howl. No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet, may be left unsigned "Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your sin Sweeps like a shroud o'er the faces and limbs that were gladsome therein ; And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are wet, And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the gateway are met, Ghosts in the court and the gateway are ga hered, Hell opens her lips, And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of eclipse." The next is longer and slower : the poet has a difficulty in telling his story : "Wretches," he cried, "what doom is this? what night Clings like a face cloth to the face of each, Sweeps like a shroud o'er knees and head ? for lo ! HOMER AND THE STUDY OF GREEK. 91 The windy wail of death is up, and tears On every cheek are wet ; each shining wall And beauteous interspace of beam and beam Weeps tears of blood, and shadows in the door Flicker, and fill the portals and the court Shadows of men that hellwards yearn and now The sun himself hath perished out of heaven, And all the land is darkened with a mist." That could never be mistaken for a version by the Laureate, as perhaps any contemporary hack's works might have been taken for Pope's. The difficulty, perhaps, lies here: any one knows where to have Pope, any one knows that he will evade the mot propre, though the precise evasion he may select is hard to guess. But the Laureate would keep close to his text, and yet would write like himself, very beauti- fully, but not with an Homeric swiftness and strength. Who is to imitate him ? As to Mr. William Morris, he might be fabled to render *A SeiAot " niddering wights," but beyond that, conjecture is baffled.* Or is this the kind of thing ? " Niddering wights, what a bane do ye bear, for your knees in the night, And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows not delight Rings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the walls, Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow- wights walk in the halls. Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the lift Shudders, and over the midgarth and swan's bath the cloud-shadows drift." It may be argued that, though this is perhaps a transla- tion, it is not English, never was, and never will be. But it is quite as like Homer as the performance of Pope. Such as these, or not so very much better than these as * Conjecture may cease, as Mr. Morris has translated the Odyssey. 92 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. might be wished, are our efforts to translate Homer. From Chapman to Avia, or Mr. William Morris, they are all emi- nently conscientious, and erroneous, and futile. Chapman makes Homer a fanciful, euphuistic, obscure, and garrulous Elizabethan, but Chapman has fire. Pope makes him a wit, spirited, occasionally noble, full of points, and epigrams, and queer rococo conventionalisms. Cowper makes him slow, lumbering, a Milton without the music. Maginn makes him pipe an Irish jig : " Scarcely had she begun to wash When she was aware of the grisly gash ! * Lord Derby makes him respectable and ponderous. Lord Tennyson makes him not less, but certainly not more, than Tennysonian. Homer, in the Laureate's few fragments of experiment, is still a poet, but he is not Homer. Mr. Morris, and Avia, make him Icelandic, and archaistic, and hard to scan, though vigorous in his fetters for all that. Bohn makes him a crib ; and of other translators in prose it has been said, with a humour which one of them appreciates, that they render Homer into a likeness of the Book of Mormon. Homer is untranslatable. None of us can bend the bow of Eurytus, and make the bow-string " ring sweetly at the touch, like the swallow's song." The adventure is never to be achieved ; and, if Greek is to be dismissed from education, not the least of the sorrows that will ensue is English ignorance of Homer. THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL. * I ^HE editor of a great American newspaper once offered jL the author of these lines a commission to explore a lost country, the seat of a fallen and forgotten civilisation. It was not in Yucatan, or Central Africa, or Thibet, or Kafiristan, this desolate region, once so popular, so gaudy, so much frequented and desired. It was only the fashion- able novels of the Forties, say from 1835 to 1850, that I was requested to examine and report upon. But I shrank from the colossal task. I am no Mr. Stanley; and the length, the difficulties, the arduousness of the labour appalled me. Besides, I do not know where that land lies, the land of the old Fashionable Novel, the Kor of which Thackeray's Lady Fanny Flummery is the Ayesha. What were the names of the old novels, and who were the authors, and in the circulating library of what undiscoverable watering-place are they to be found ? We have heard of Mrs. Gore, we have heard of Tremayne, and Emilia Wyndham, and the Bachelor of the Albany ; and many of us have read Pelham, or know him out of Carlyle's art, and those great curses which he spoke. But who was the original, or who were the originals, that sat for the portrait of the "Fashionable Authoress," Lady Fanny Flummery ? and of what work is Lords and Liveries a parody ? The author is also credited with Duk 'S and 94 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. Dejeuners, Marchionesses and Milliners, etc. Could any candidate in a literary examination name the prototypes? "Let mantua-makers puff her, but not men," says Thackeray, speaking of Lady Fanny Flummery, " and the Fashionable Authoress is no more. Blessed, blessed thought ! No more fiddle-faddle novels ! When will you arrive, O happy Golden Age ! " Well, it has arrived, though we are none the happier for all that. The Fashionable Novel has ceased to exist, and the place of the fashionable authoress knows her no more. Thackeray plainly detested Lady Fanny. He writes about her, her books, her critics, her successes, with a certain bitterness. Can it be possible that a world which rather neglected Barry Lyndon was devoted to Marchionesses and Milliners ? Lady Fanny is represented as having editors and reviewers at her feet ; she sits among the flowers, like the Sirens, and around her are the bones of critics corrupt in death. She is puffed for the sake of her bouquets, her dinners, her affabilities and condescensions. She gives a reviewer a great garnet pin, adorned wherewith he paces the town. Her adorers compare her to "him who sleeps by Avon." In one of Mr. Black's novels there is a lady of this kind, who captivates the tribe of " Log Rollers," as Mr. Black calls them. This lady appears to myself to be a quite impossible She. One has never met her with her wiles, nor come across her track, even, and seen the bodies and the bones of those who perished in puffing her. Some persons of rank and fashion have a taste for the society of some men of letters, but nothing in the way of literary puffery seems to come of it. Of course many critics like to give their friends and acquaintances an applausive hand, THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 95 and among their acquaintances may be ladies of fashion who write novels ; but we read nowhere such extraordinary adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady Fanny. The fashionable authoress is nearly extinct, though some persons write well albeit they are fashionable. The fashion- able novel is as dead as a door nail : Lothair was nearly the last of the species. There are novelists who write about " Society," to be sure, like Mr. Norris ; but their tone is quite different They do not speak as if Dukes and Earls were some strange superior kind of beings ; their manner is that of men accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing for readers who do not care whether the hero is a lord or a commoner. They are " at ease," though not terribly " in Zion." Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peer- age, but it cannot be said that he is always at ease in their society. He remembers that they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and suspicious and sarcastic, except, per- haps when he deals with a gentleman like Lord Kew. He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin des Plantes. He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the lion ; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a title. Mr. Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood. Mr. Trollope was not afraid of his Dukes : he thought none the worse of a man because he was the high and puissant prince of Omnium. As for most novelists, they no longer paint fashionable society with enthusiasm. Mr. Henry James has remarked that young British peers favour the word " beastly," a point which does not always impress itself into other people so keenly as into Mr. Henry James. In reading him you do not forget that his Tufts are Tufts. But then Tufts are really strange animals to the denizens of 96 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. the Great Republic. Perhaps the modern realism has made novelists desert the world where Dukes and Dowagers abound. Novelists do not know very much about it ; they are not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer to write about the manners which they know. A very good novel, in these strange ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but nobody writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it would not in the least resemble the old fashionable novel. Here a curious point arises. We have all studied the ingenious lady who calls herself Ouida. Now, is Ouida, or rather was Ouida in her early state sublime, the last of the old fashionable novelists, or did Thackeray unconsciously prophesy of her when he wrote his burlesque Lords and Liveries'? Think of the young earl of Bagnigge, "who was never heard to admire anything except &coulis de dindonneau a la St. Menehould, ... or the bouquet of a flask of Me'doc, of Carbonnell's best quality, or a goutte of Marasquin, from the cellars of Briggs and Hobson." We have met such young patricians in Under Two Flags and Jdalia. But then there is a difference : Ouida never tells us that her hero was " blest with a mother of excellent principles, who had imbued his young mind with that morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the world." But a hero of Ouida's might easily have had a father who " was struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy." The heroes themselves may have "looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence." They do say " Corpo di Haao" and the Duca de Monte- pulcianodoes reply, " E Mlissima certamente." And their creator might conceivably remark " Non cuivis contigit." But THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 97 Lady Fanny Flummery's ladies could not dress as Ouida's ladies do : they could not quote Petronius Arbiter ; they had never heard of Suetonius. No age reproduces itself. There is much of our old fashionable authoress in Ouida's earlier tales ; there is plenty of the Peerage, plenty of queer French in old novels and Latin yet more queer ; but where is the elan which takes archaeology with a rush, which sticks at no adventure, however nobly incredible ? where is the pathos, the simplicity, the purple splendour of Ouida's manner, or manners? No, the spirit of the world, mirroring itself in the minds of individuals, simpered, and that simper was Lady Fanny Flummery. But it did many things more portentous than simpering, when it reflected itself in Ouida. Is it that we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admir- ingly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise ? Is it that Thackeray has converted us ? In part, surely, we are just as snobbish as ever, though the gods of our adoration totter to their fall, and "a hideous hum " from the mob outside thrills through the temples. In fiction, on the other hand, the world of fashion is " played out." Nobody cares to read or write about the dear duchess. If a peer comes into a novel he comes in, not as a coroneted curiosity, but as a man, just as if he were a dentist, or a stockbroker. His rank is an accident ; it used to be the essence of his luminous apparition. I scarce remember a lord in all the many works of Mr. Besant, nor do they people the romances of Mr. Black. Mr. Kipling does not deal in them, nor Mr. George Meredith much ; Mr. Haggard hardly gets beyond a baronet, and he wears chain mail in Central Africa, and tools with an axe. Mrs. Oliphant has a Scotch peer, but he is less interesting and W . L.-I. - 98 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. prominent than his family ghost No, we have only Ouida left, and Mr. Norris who writes about people of fashion, indeed, but who has nothing in him of the old fashionable novelist. Is it to a Republic, to France, that we must look for our fashionable novels to France and to America. Every third person in M. Guy de Maupassant's tales has a " de," and is a Marquis or a Vicomte. As for M. Paul Bourget, one really can be happy with him in the fearless old fashion. With him we meet Lord Henry Bohun, and M. De Casal (a Vicomte), and all the Marquises and Marquises ; and all the pale blue boudoirs, and sentimental Duchesses, whose hearts are only too good, and who get into the most complicated amorous scrapes. That young Republican, M. Bourget, sincerely loves a blason, a pedigree, diamonds, lace, silver dressing cases, silver baths, essences, pomatums, le grand luxe. So does Gyp : apart from her wit, Gyp is delightful to read, introducing us to the very best of bad company. Even M. Fortune du Boisgobey likes a Vicomte, and is partial to the noblesse, while M. Georges Ohnet is accused of entering the golden world of rank, like a man without a wedding garment, and of being lost and at sea among his aristocrats. They order these things better in France : they still appeal to the fine old natural taste for rank and luxury, splendour and refinement. What is Gyp but a Lady Fanny Flummery reussie, Lady Fanny with the trifling additional qualities of wit and daring? Observe her noble scorn of M. George Ohnet : it is a fashionable arrogance. To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fashion- able novel seems one of the most threatening signs of the THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 99 times. Even in France institutions are much more per- manent than here. In France they have fashionable novels, and very good novels too : no man of sense will deny that they are far better than our dilettantism of the slums, or our religious and social tracts in the disguise of romance. If there is no new tale of treasure and bandits and fights and lions handy, may I have a fashionable novel in French to fall back upon ! Even Count Tolstoi does not disdain the genre. There is some uncommonly high life in Anna Karenine. He adds a great deal of psychology, to be sure ; so does M. Paul Bourget. But he takes you among smart people, who have everything handsome about them titles, and lands, and rents. Is it not a hard thing that an honest British snob, if he wants to move in the highest circles of fiction, must turn to French novelists, or Russian, or American ? As to the American novels of the elite and the beau monde, their elegance is obscured to English eyes, because that which makes one New Yorker better than another, that which creates the Upper Ten Thousand (dear phrase !) of New York, is so inconspicuous. For example, the scientific inquirer may venture himself among the novels of two young American authors. Few English students make this voyage of exploration. But the romances of these ingenious writers are really, or really try to be, a kind of fashionable novels. It is a queer domain of fashion, to be sure, peopled by the strangest aborigines, who talk and are talked about in a language most interesting to the philologist. Here poor Lady Fanny Flummery would have been sadly to seek, for her charac- ters, though noble, were moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State. But these western fashionables too ESSAyS IN LITTLE. have morals and a lingo of their own, made in equal parts of the American idioms and of expressions transferred from the jargon of Decadence and the Parnassicuht Contem- porain. As one peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale to be told T/ie Last of the Fashionables, who died away, like the buffalo and the grisly bear, in some canon or forest of the Wild West. I think this distinguished being, Ultimus hominum venustwrum, will find the last remnants of the Gentlemanly Party in some Indian tribe, Apaches or Sioux. I see him raised to the rank of chief, and leading the red- skinned and painted cavaliers on the war-path against the Vulgarians of the ultimate Democracy. To depict this dandy chief would require the art at once of a Cooper and a Ouida. Let me attempt THE LAST FIGHT OF FOUR HAIR-BRUSHES. ***#* By this time the Sioux were flying in all directions, mowed down by the fire of Catling and Maxim guns. The scrub of Little Big Horn Creek was strewn with the bodies of writhing braves. On the livid and volcanic heights of Mount Buncombe, the painted tents were blazing merrily. But on a mound above the creek, an ancient fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian horsemen, might be observed, steady as rocks in the refluent tide of war. The fire from their Winchester repeaters blazed out like the streamers of the Northern Lights. Again and again the flower of the United States army had charged up the mound, only to recoil in flight, or to line the cliff with their corpses. The First Irish Cuirassiers had been annihilated : Parnell s own, alas ! in the heat of THE LAST FASHIONABLE NOVEL. 101 the combat had turned their fratricidal black-thorns on McCarthy's brigade, and these two gallant squadrons were mixed and broken, falling beneath the blows of brothers estranged. But at last the fire from the Redmen on the bluff slackened and grew silent. The ammunition was exhausted. There was a movement in the group of braves. Crazy Horse and Bald Coyote turned to Four Hair-Brushes, who sat his steed Atalanta, last winner of the last Grand National, with all the old careless elegance of the Row. "Four Hair-Brushes," said Crazy Horse (and a tear rolled down his painted cheek), " nought is left but flight." " Then fly," said Four Hair-Brushes, languidly, lighting a cigarette, which he took from a diamond-studded gold ttui, the gift of the Kaiser in old days. " Nay, not without the White Chief," said Bald Coyote ; and he seized the reins of Four Hair-Brushes, to lead him from that stricken field. " Vous etes trop vieux jeu, mon ami," murmured Four Hair-Brushes, "je ne suis ni Edouard II., ni Charles Edouard a Culloden. Quatre-brosses meurt, mais il ne se rend pas." The Indian released his hold, baffled by the erudition and the calm courage of his captain. " I make tracks," he said ; and, swinging round so that his horse concealed his body, he galloped down the bluff, and through the American cavalry, scattering death from the arrows which he loosed under his horse's neck. Four Hair-Brushes was alone. Unarmed, as ever, he sat, save for the hunting-whip in his right hand. 102 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. " Scalp him ! " yelled the Friendly Crows. "Nay, take him alive: a seemlier knight never backed steed ! " cried the gallant Americans. From their midst rode a courteous cavalier, Captain John Barry, the scholar, the hero of sword and pen. " Yield thee, Sir Knight ! " he said, doffing his kepi in martial courtesy. Four Hair-Brushes replied to his salute, and was opening his curved and delicate lips to speak, when a chance bullet struck him full in the breast. He threw up his arms, reeled, and fell. The gallant American, leaping from saddle to ground, rushed to raise his head. Through the war-paint he recognised him. " Great Heaven ! " he cried, " it is " " Hush ! " whispered Four Hair-Brushes, with a weary smile : " let Annesley de Vere of the Blues die unnamed. Tell them that I fell in harness." He did, indeed. Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found that Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the last of the Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Telliere. It was wet with his life-blood. " So dies," said Barry, " the last English gentleman." THACKERAY. " T THOUGHT how some people's towering intellects -L and splendid cultivated geniuses rise upon simple beautiful foundations hidden out of sight." Thus, in his Letters to Mrs. Brookfield, Mr. Thackeray wrote, after visit- ing the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, with its " charming, harmonious, powerful combination of arches and shafts, beautiful whichever way you see them developed, like a fine music." The simile applies to his own character and genius, to his own and perhaps to that of most great authors, whose works are our pleasure and comfort in this troublesome world. There are critics who profess a desire to hear nothing, or as little as may be, of the. lives of great artists, whether their, instrument of art was the pen, or the brush, or the chisel, or the strings and reeds of music. With those critics perhaps most of us agree, when we read books that gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. " Give us their poetry," we say, " and leave their characters alone : we do not want tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet ; we want to be happy with ' The Skylark ' or ' The Cloud.'" Possibly this instinct is correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like his poetry, was as " the life of winds and tides, ' whose genius, unlike the skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the 104 ESSAYS 7A r LITTLE, point of home. But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr. Thackeray says, a man's genius must be builded on the foundations of his character. Where that genius deals with the mingled stuff of human life sorrow, desire, love, hatred, kindness, meanness then the foundation of character is especially important. People are sometimes glad that we know so little of Shakespeare the man; yet who can doubt that a true revelation of his character would be not less worthy, noble and charming than the general effect of his poemsj* In him, it is certain, we should always find an example of nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, ' meteoric poets " like Byron. The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows, of Thackeray. It seems probable that a complete biography of Thacke- ray will never be written. It was his wish to live in his works alone : that wish his descendants respect ; and we must probably regard the Letters, to Mr. and Mrs. Brook- field as the last private and authentic record of the man which will be given, at least to this generation. In these Letters all sympathetic readers will find the man they have long known from his writings the man with a heart so tender that the world often drove him back into a bitter- ness of opposition, into an assumed hardness and defensive cynicism. There are readers so unluckily constituted that they can see nothing in Thackeray but this bitterness, this THACKERAY. 105 cruel sense of meanness and power of analysing shabby emotions, sneaking vanities, contemptible ambitions. All of us must often feel with regret that he allowed himself to be made too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so common in the world he knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and lashed them too complacently. One hopes never to read " Lovel the Widower " again, and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old Campaigner in " The Newcomes." They are terrible, but not more terrible than life. Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can let such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness, gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature. The Letters must open all eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome every prejudice. In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after affection, after love a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from his natural solace, from the centre of a home. " God took from me a lady dear," he says, in the most touching medley of doggerel and poetry, made " instead of writing my Punch this morning." Losing " a lady dear," he takes refuge as he may, he finds comfort as he can, in all the affections within his reach, in the society of an old college friend and of his wife, in the love of all children, beginning with his own ; in a generous liking for all good work and for all good fellows. Did any man of letters except Scott ever write of his rivals as Thackeray wrote of Dickens ? Artists are a jealous race. " Potter hates potter, and poet hates poet," as Hesiod said so long ago. This jealousy is not mere io6 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. envy, it is really a strong sense of how things ought to be done, in any art, touched with a natural preference for a man's own way of doing them. Now, what could be more unlike than the " ways " of Dickens and Thackeray ? The subjects chosen by these great authors are not more diverse than their styles. Thackeray writes like a scholar, not in the narrow sense, but rather as a student and a master of all the refinements and resources of language. Dickens copies the chaff of the street, or he roams into melodramatics, " drops into poetry " blank verse at least and touches all with peculiarities, we might say mannerisms, of his own. I have often thought, and even tried to act on the thought, that some amusing imaginary letters might be written, from characters of Dickens about characters of Thackeray, from characters of Thackeray about characters of Dickens. They might be supposed to meet each other in society, and describe each other. Can you not fancy Captain Costigan on Dick Swiveller, Blanche Amory on Agnes, Pen on David Copperfield, and that " tiger " Steerforth? What would the family solicitor of "The Newcomes " have to say of Mr. Tulkinghorn ? How would George Warrington appreciate Mr. Pickwick ? Yes, the two great novelists were as opposed as two men could be in manner, in style, in knowledge of books, and of the world. And yet how admirably Thackeray writes about Dickens, in his letters as in his books ! How he delights in him ! How manly is that emulation which enables an author to see all the points in his rival, and not to carp at them, but to praise, and be stimulated to keener effort ! Consider this passage. " Have you read Dickens ? O ! it is charming ! Brave Dickens ! It has some of his very THACKERAY. 107 prettiest touches those inimitable Dickens touches which make such a great man of him, and the reading of the book has done another author a great deal of good." Thackeray is just as generous, and perhaps more critical, in writing of Kingsley. " A fine, honest, go-a-head fellow, who charges a subject heartily, impetuously, with the greatest courage and simplicity ; but with narrow eyes (his are extraordinarily brave, blue and honest), and with little knowledge of the world, I think. But he is superior to us worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had some of his honest pluck." I have often wished that great authors, when their days of creation were over, when " their minds grow grey and bald," would condescend to tell us the history of their books. Sir Walter Scott did something of this kind in the prefaces to the last edition of the Waverley Novels published during his life. What can be more interesting than his account, in the introduction to the " Fortunes of Nigel," of how he worked, how he planned, and found all his plots and plans overridden by the demon at the end of his pen ! But Sir Walter was failing when he began those literary confessions ; good as they are, he came to them too late. Yet these are not confessions which an author can make early. The pagan Aztecs only confessed once in a lifetime in old age, when they had fewer temptations to fall to their old loves : then they made a clean breast of it once for all. So it might be with an author. While he is in his creative vigour, we want to hear about his fancied persons, about Pendennis, Beatrix, Becky, not about him- self, and how he invented them. But when he has passed his best, then it is he who becomes of interest ; it is about io8 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. himself that we wish him to speak, as far as he modestly may. Who would not give " Lovel the Widower " and " Philip " for some autobiographical and literary prefaces to the older novels ? They need not have been more egotistic than the " Roundabout Papers." They would have had far more charm. Some things cannot be confessed. We do not ask who was the original Sir Pitt Crawl ey, or the original Blanche Amory. But we might learn in what mood, in what circumstances the author wrote this passage or that. The Letters contain a few notes of this kind, a few literary confessions. We hear that Emmy Sedley was partly suggested by Mrs. Brookfield, partly by Thackeray's mother, much by his own wife. There scarce seems room for so many elements in. Emmy's personality. For some reason ladies love her not, nor do men adore her. I have been her faithful knight ever since I was ten years old and read " Vanity Fair " somewhat stealthily. Why does one like her except because she is such a thorough woman ? She is not clever, she is not very beautiful, she is unhappy, and she can be jealous. One pities her, and that is akin to a more tender sentiment ; one pities her while she sits in the corner, and Becky's green eyes flatter her oaf of a husband ; one pities .her in the poverty of her father's house, in the famous battle over Daffy's Elixir, in the separation from the younger George. You begin to wish some great joy to come to her : it does not come unalloyed ; you know that Dobbin had bad quarters of an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his tenderness for his own daughter. Yes, Emmy is more complex than she seems, and perhaps it needed three ladies to contribute the various elements THACKERAY. 109 of her person and her character. One of them, the jealous one, lent a touch to Helen Pendennis, to Laura, to Lady Castlewood. Probably this may be the reason why some persons dislike Thackeray so. His very best women are not angels.* Are the very best women angels ? It is a pious opinion that borders on heresy. When the Letters began to be written, in 1847, Thackeray had his worst years, in a worldly sense, behind him. They were past : the times when he wrote in Galignani for ten francs a day. Has any literary ghoul disinterred his old ten-franc articles in Galignani? The time of " Barry Lyndon," too, was over. He says nothing of that master- piece, and only a word about "The Great Hoggarty Diamond." " I have been re-reading it. Upon my word and honour, if it doesn't make you cry, I shall have a mean opinion of you. It was written at a time of great affliction, when my heart was very soft and humble. Amen. Ich habe auch viel geliebt." Of " Pendennis," as it goes on, he writes that it is " awfully stupid," which has not been the verdict of the ages. He picks up materials as he passes. He dines with some officers, and perhaps he stations them at Chatteris. He meets Miss G , and her converse suggests a love passage between Pen and Blanche. Why did he dislike fair women so? It runs all through his novels. Becky is fair. Blanche is fair. Outside the old yellow covers of " Pendennis," you see the blonde mermaid, " amusing, and clever, and depraved," dragging the lover to the sea, and the nut-brown maid holding him back. Angelina, of the " Rose and the Ring," is the Becky of * For Helen Pendennis, sec the "Letters," p. 97. no ESSAYS IN LITTLE. childhood ; she is fair, and the good Rosalba is brunc. In writing " Pendennis " he had a singular experience. He looked over his own "back numbers," and found "a passage which I had utterly forgotten as if I had never read or written it." In Lockhart's " Life of Scott," James Ballantyne says that " when the ' Bride of Lammermoor ' was first put into his hands in a complete shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained." That is to say, he remembered nothing of his own invention, though his memory of the traditional parts was as clear as ever. Ballantyne remarks, " The history of the human mind contains nothing more wonderful. ' The experience of Thackeray is a parallel to that of Scott. " Pendennis," it must be noted, was interrupted by a severe illness, and "The Bride of Lammermoor" was dictated by Sir Walter when in great physical pain. On one occasion Thackeray "lit upon a very stupid part of ' Pendennis,' I am sorry to say ; and yet how well written it is ! What a shame the author don't write a complete good story ! Will he die before doing so ? or come back from America and do it ? " Did he ever write " a complete, good story " ? Did any one ever do such a thing as write a three-volume novel, or a novel of equal length, which was " a complete, good story " ? -Probably not ; or if any mortal ever succeeded in the task, it was the great Alexander Dumas. "The Three Musketeers," I take leave to think, and "Twenty Years After," are complete good stories, good from beginning to end, stories from beginning to end without a break, with- out needless- episode. Perhaps one may say as much for " Old Mortality," and for " Quentin Durward." But Scott THACKERAY. in and Dumas were born story-tellers; narrative was the essence of their genius at its best ; the current of romance rolls fleetly on, bearing with it persons and events, mirroring scenes, but never ceasing to be the main thing the central interest. Perhaps narrative like this is the chief success of the novelist. He is triumphant when he carries us on, as Wolf, the famous critic, was carried on by the tide of the Iliad, "in that pure and rapid current of action." Nobody would claim this especial merit for Thackeray. He is one of the greatest of novelists ; he displays human nature and human conduct so that we forget ourselves in his persons, but he does not make us forget ourselves in their fortunes. Whether Clive does or does not marry Ethel, or Esmond, Beatrix, does not very greatly excite our curiosity. We cannot ring the bells for dive's second wedding as the villagers celebrated the bridal of Pamela. It is the development of character, it is the author's com- ments, it is his own personality and his unmatched and inimitable style, that win our admiration and affection. We can take up " Vanity Fair," or " Pendennis," or " The Newcomes," just where the book opens by chance, and read them with delight, as we may read Montaigne. When one says one can take up a book anywhere, it generally means that one can also lay it down anywhere. But it is not so with Thackeray. Whenever we meet him he holds us with his charm, his humour, his eloquence, his tender- ness. If he has not, in the highest degree, the narrative power, he does possess, in a degree perhaps beyond any other writer of English, that kind of poetic quality which is not incompatible with prose writing. A great deal has been said about prose poetry. As a 112 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. rule, it is very poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank verse ; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from modern masters of prose- poetry. They have never been poets. But the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true sense ; and so, upon occasions, was the prose of Thackeray. Some examples linger always in the memory, and dwell with their music in the hearing. One I have quoted else- where; the passage in "The Newcomes" where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of the Domestic Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he has lost. "And the past, and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks, for ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory those, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time and parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many years." "The great gulf of time, and parting, and grief," some of us are on the farther side of it, and our old selves, and our old happiness, and our old affections beyond, grow near, grow clear, now and then, at the sight of a face met by chance in the world, at the chance sound of a voice. Such are human fortunes, and human sorrows; not the worst, not the greatest, for these old loves do not die they live in exile, and are the better parts of our souls. Not the greatest, nor the worst of sorrows, for shame is worse, and hopeless hunger, and a life all of barren toil without dis- tractions, without joy, must be far worse. But of those myriad tragedies of the life of the poor, Thackeray does not write. How far he was aware of them, how deeply he THACKERAY. 113 felt them, we are not informed. His highest tragedy is that of the hunger of the heart; his most noble prose sounds in that meeting of Harry Esmond with Lady Castlewood, in the immortal speech which has the burden, " bringing your sheaves with you ! " All that scene appears to me no less unique, no less unsurpassable, no less perfect, than the " Ode to the Nightingale " of Keats, or the Lycidas of Milton. It were superfluous to linger over the humour of Thackeray. Only Shakespeare and Dickens have graced the language with so many happy memories of queer, pleasant people, with so many quaint phrases, each of which has a kind of freemasonry, and when uttered, or recalled, makes all friends of Thackeray into family friends of each other. The sayings of Mr. Harry Foker, of Captain Costigan, of Gumbo, are all like old dear family phrases, they live imperishable and always new, like the words of Sir John, the fat knight, or of Sancho Panza, or of Dick Swiveller, or that other Sancho, Sam W<;!ler. They have that Shake- spearian gift of being ever appropriate, and undyingly fresh. These are among the graces of Thackeray, these and that inimitable style, which always tempts and always baffles the admiring and despairing copyist. Where did he find the trick of it, of the words which are invariably the best words, and invariably fall exactly in the best places? " The best words in the best places," is part of Coleridge's definition of poetry ; it is also the essence of Thackeray's prose. In these Letters to Mrs. Brookfield the style is precisely the style of the novels and essays. The style, with Thackeray, was the man. He could not write other- wise. But probably, to the last, this perfection was not mechanical, was not attained without labour and care. In W. L.-I. 8 114 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. Dr. John Brown's works, in his essay on Thackeray, there is an example of a proof-sheet on which the master has made corrections, and those corrections bring the passage up to his accustomed level, to the originality of his rhythm. Here is the piece : " Another Finis, another slice of life which Tempus edax has devoured ! And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps, and then an end of Ends. F4^ie is-c^e? ar.d- Infinite beginning Oh, the troubles, the cares, the ennui, -the complicities::::, the repetitions, the old conversa- tions over and over again, and here and there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever-remem- bered ! " Ad t-ken A few chapters more, and then the last, and behold Finis itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning." " How like music this," writes Dr. John Brown " like one trying the same air in different ways, as it were, searching out and sounding all its depths ! " The words were almost the last that Thackeray wrote, perhaps the very last. They reply, as it were, to other words which he had written long before to Mrs. Brookfield. "I don't. pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young girl in her prime ; I pity those remaining. On her journey, if it pleases God to send her, depend on it there's no cause for grief, that's but an earthly condition. Out of our stormy life, and brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene climate. Can't you fancy sailing into the calm ? " Ah ! nowhere else shall we find the Golden Bride. " passionless bride, divine Tranquillity." THACKERAY. 115 As human nature persistently demands a moral, and, as, to say truth, Thackeray was constantly meeting the demand, what is the lesson of his life and his writings ? So people may ask, and yet how futile is the answer ! Life has a different meaning, a different riddle, a different reply for each of us. There is not one sphinx, but many sphinxes as many as there are women and men. We must all answer for ourselves. Pascal has one answer, " Believe ! " Moliere has another, " Observe ! " Thackeray's answer is, "Be good and enjoy!" but a melancholy enjoyment was his. Dr. John Brown says : " His persistent state, especially for the later half of his life, was profoundly morne, there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind. . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in the sceva indignatio of Swift ; acting on the kindly and sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness." A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love. " Ich habe auch viel geliebt," he says, and it is a hazardous kind of happiness that attends great affection. Your capital is always at the mercy of failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement. But he had so much love to give that he could not but trust those perilous investments. Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those. He did not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism, which he shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield. " Did you read the Spectator's sarcastic notice of ' Vanity Fair ' ? I don't think it is just, but think Kintoul (Rintoul ?) is a very honest man, and rather inclined n6 ESSAYS IN LITTLE. to deal severely with his private friends lest he should fall into the other extreme : to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean the other extreme, very well." That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms not to go declaring that a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your ballads, your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot people keep literature and liking apart ? Am I bound to think Jones a bad citizen, a bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry leaves me cold ? Need he regard me as a malevolent green-eyed monster, because I don't want to read him ? Thackeray was not always true in his later years to these excellent principles. He was troubled about trifles of criticisms and gossip, bagatelles not worth noticing, still less worth remembering and recording. Do not let us record them, then. We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a popularity like that of Dickens. If ever any man wrote for the people, it was Dickens. Where can we find such a benefactor, and who has lightened so many lives with 'such merriment as he ? But Thackeray wrote, like the mass of authors, for the lirerary class for all who have the sense of style, the delight in the best language. He will endure while English literature endures, while English civilisation lasts. We cannot expect all the world to share our affection for this humourist whose mirth springs from his melancholy. His religion, his education, his life in this unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion of the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches will always THACKERAY. 117 and inevitably misjudge him. Mais